Greybeard

by Brian Wilson Aldiss

  “That Jingadangelow’s behind all this,” Charley said savagely. “He has these travelling people in the power of his hand, from what I’ve seen and heard. He’s a charlatan. You shouldn’t have had anything to do with him, Greybeard.”

  “Charlatans have their ambivalences,” Greybeard said, recognizing the preposterousness of the words as soon as they were out. Hurriedly, he said, “Where are Becky and Towin?”

  “They’re down by the river with Jeff now. We couldn’t find them first go off, then they turned up. They were busy celebrating.”

  As they came off the road and padded over soggy ground, they saw the trio huddled by the river bank near by the dinghy, carrying a couple of lanterns. They all stood together, not saying much. The celebration was over. Isaac padded unhappily in the mud, until Charley took pity on him and lifted him into his arms.

  “It would be best if we leave this place straight away,” Greybeard said, when examination proved that though the two boats were indeed all that was left to them, they were intact. “This is not the place for us, and I am ashamed of my part in this evening’s events.”

  “If you’d taken my advice, you’d never have left the boat in the first place,” Pitt said. “They’re just a lot of crooks here. It’s the loss of the sheep that grieves me.”

  “You could have stayed by the boat as you were told,” Greybeard pointed out sharply. Turning to the others, he said, “My feeling is that we’ll be better off on the river. It is a fine night, I have alcohol in my system to row off. By tomorrow, we can reach Oxford and get work and shelter there. It will be a very different place from what it was when Martha and I were last there, however many years ago that was. Do you all agree to leaving this thieves’ den now?”

  Towin coughed, shiffing his lantern from hand to hand. “Actually, me and the missus was thinking of staying here, like. We made some great friends, see, called Liz and Bob, and we thought we’d join forces with them — if you had no particular objection. We aren’t much set on this idea of going down the river, as you know.” In the moonlight, he smiled his injured wolf’s grin and shuffled his feet.

  “I need rest in my condition,” Becky said. She spoke more boldly than her husband, glaring at them through the sickly light. “I’ve had enough of being in that little leaking boat. We’d be better off with these friends of ours.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true, Becky,” Martha said.

  “Why, I should catch my death of cold in that boat, me in my condition. Tow agrees with me.”

  “He always has to,” Pitt observed. There was a silence as they stood together but separate in the dark. Much lay between them they could never express, currents of liking and resentment, affinity and aversion: vague but not the less strong for that.

  “All right, if you’ve decided, we’ll continue without you,” Greybeard said. “Watch your belongings, that’s all I say.”

  “We don’t like leaving you, Greybeard,” Towin said. “And you and Charley can keep that bit of money you owe me.”

  “It’s entirely your choice.”

  “That’s what I said,” Becky said. “We’re about old enough to take care of ourselves, I should reckon.”

  As they were shaking hands all round, bidding each other good-bye, Charley started to hop about and scold. “This fox has picked up all the fleas in Christendom. Isaac, you’re letting them loose on me, you villain!”

  Setting the fox down, he ordered it towards the water. The fox understood what was required of it. It moved backwards into the flood, slowly, slowly, brush first and then the rusty length of its body, and finally its head. Pitt held a lantern so that they could see it better.

  “What’s he doing? Is he going to drown himself?” Martha asked anxiously.

  “No, Martha, only humans take their own lives,” Charley said. “Animals have got more faith. Isaac knows fleas don’t like cold water. This is his way of getting rid of them. They climb right up his body on to his muzzle, see, to avoid a soaking. You watch him now.”

  Only part of the fox’s head was above the water. He sank down until his muzzle alone was showing. Then he ducked under completely. A circle of little fleas was left struggling on the surface. Isaac came up a yard away, bounded ashore, shook himself, and raced round in circles before returning to his master.

  “I never saw a smarter trick,” Towin said to Becky, nodding his head, as the others climbed into the boats. “It must be something like that that the world’s doing to human beings, when you work it out — shaking us off its snout.”

  “You’re taking a lot of rubbish, Towin Thomas,” she said.

  They stood waving as the boats moved slowly away, Towin with his cheeks screwed up to see the particular outline merge with the general gloom.

  “Well, there they go,” Charley said, pulling on his paddle. “She’s a sharp-tongued one, but I’m sorry to leave them in such a thieves’ den.”

  They were towing Jeff Pitt’s little boat, so that he could be in with them. He said, “Who’s the thieves? It might have been Jingadangelow’s men took our property. On the other hand, I reckon it might just as well have been old Towin. I never did trust him, crafty old blighter.”

  “Whoever it was, the Lord will provide for us,” Charley said. He bent his back and guided his paddle deeper into the sedgy waters.

  IV. Washington

  In the first dreary days at Sparcot, when the rabble cast up there were forming into a community and the disease-ridden summer broke into a rain-swept autumn, Charley Samuels had not realized for some while that he knew the big man with the high bald head and growing beard. It was a time when everyone was more alert for enemies than friends.

  Charley arrived at Sparcot some days after the Timberlanes, and in a dejected state of mind. His father had owned a small bookshop in a South Coast town. Ambrose Samuels was a man of glooms and tempers. When he was in his most smiling mood, he would read aloud to Mrs. Samuels, the boy Charley, and his two sisters, Ruth and Rachel. He read to them from the thousands of obsolete theological books with which the second floor of the old shop was stocked, or from the works of obsolete and morose poets which sold no better than the theology.

  Much of this dead stock thus inevitably passed into Charley’s mind. He could quote it at any later time of life, without knowing who wrote it or when, remembering only that it came from what his father had designated “a gilt-tooled thirty-two-mo” or a “tree’d calf octavo”.

  All men think all men mortal but themselves;

  Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate

  Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread.

  But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,

  Soon close; where passed the shaft, no trace is found.

  As from the wing no scar the sky retains;

  The parted wave no furrow from the keel;

  So dies in human hearts the thought of death.

  Even with the tender fear which Nature sheds

  O’er those we love, we drop it in their grave.

  It was a lie. When Charley was eleven, an alarming shock of fate set the thought of death in his heart for ever. In his eleventh year, came the radiation sickness — the result of that deliberate act men called The Accident. His father died of cancer a year later.

  The shop was sold. Mrs. Samuels took her children to live in her home town, where she got a secretarial post. Charley went to work when he was fifteen. His mother died three years later.

  He took a series of unskilled jobs while trying to act as father to his sisters. That had been in the late eighties and early nineteen-nineties. Compared with what was to come, it was — morally and economically — a fairly stable time. But work became harder to get. He saw his sisters established in good jobs while he was unemployed.

  It was the outbreak of war that had the final shaping of him. He was twenty-nine. This madness added to madness, as nations bled themselves fighting over the few children who survived, decided him that there had to be
something higher than man if all creation was not a mockery. Only in religion, it seemed to him, lay an antidote to despair. He had himself baptized into the Methodist church — a step that would have enraged his father.

  To avoid being called to fight in the war, Charley joined the Infantop Corps, a semi-international branch of Childsweep, dedicated to saving life rather than taking it. At once, he had been swept away from Rachel and Ruth and plunged into the thick of the global struggle. It was then he met Algy Timberlane.

  With the revolution and Britain’s retirement from the war in 2005, Charley returned to look after his sisters again. He found to his horror that Ruth and Rachel had taken to prostitution and were prospering. It was all done very discreetly, and they still worked in the afternoon at a nearby shop. Charley closed down part of his mind, settled in with them, and defended them where and when he could.

  He became the glorified chucker-out of their thriving establishment. For under the Coalition and later the United governments, hard times came with a vengeance. The world was crumbling into senescence and chaos. But what the sisters supplied remained a necessity. They flourished until the cholera stalked through England.

  Charley prised his sisters away from their stricken town and headed into the country with them. Rachel and Ruth did not protest; they had seen enough from their vantage point to scare them. A client dying on the stairs precipitated them into the little car Charley bought with his war savings.

  Outside the town, the car expired. They found a nylon stocking rammed into the oil sump. They began to walk, carrying their bundles on their backs on a road that led — though they did not know it — to Sparcot. Many other refugees went by that way.

  It was a gruesome exodus. Among the genuine travellers were bandits who set upon their fellows, cut their throats, and took their belongings. Another robber went that way; it crept through the blood, burst out on the brow, was interested only in taking life. It stole up on Ruth in the first night and on Rachel in the third, and left them face upwards in the mounds of humus over which Charley raised crosses made with sticks from the dusty hedgerows.

  When he limped into the doubtful shelter of Sparcot (helping a woman called Iris whom he would find strength to marry eighteen months later), Charley was a man turned in on himself. He had no wish to interest himself in the world again. In his wounded heart, the sudden dread had found a permanent billet.

  Both he and Timberlane had changed so much that it was not surprising recognition was only gradual. In that first Sparcot year of 2029, they had not seen each other for over a quarter of a century — since 2001, when the war still engulfed the world and they were both in the Infantop Corps. Then they had been operating overseas, combing the shattered valleys of Assam…

  Of their patrol, only two survived. Those two, as from old habit, walked in single file. The man in the rear, Corporal Samuels, carried a natterjack, the light nuclear gun, various packs filled with provisions, and a can of water. He moved somnambulistically, stumbling as they walked down the wooded hillside.

  Before him, a child’s head jogged, hanging upside down and regarding him with a sightless eye. The child’s left arm swung against the thigh of the man over whose broad back it lay. This was a boy child, a child of the Naga tribe, delicately built, shaven of head, and perhaps nine years old. He was unconscious; the flies that buzzed incessantly about his eyes and about the wound on his thigh did not trouble him.

  He was carried by Sergeant Timberlane, a bronzed young man of twenty-six. Timberlane wore a revolver, had various pieces of equipment strapped about him, and carried a tall stick with which he helped himself along as he followed the path leading down to the valley bottom.

  The dry season ruled Assam. The trees, which were no more than nine feet high, stood as if dead, their leaves limp. The river in the valley bottom had dried out, leaving a sandy chaung along which wheeled vehicles and GEM’s could move. The dust the vehicles had disturbed had settled on the trees on either side of the chaung, whitening them until they bore the appearance of a disused indoor television lot. The chaung itself dazzled in the bright sun.

  Where the trees ceased to grow, Timberlane stopped, hoisting the wounded child more firmly on to his shoulder. Charley bumped into him.

  “What’s the matter, Algy?”, he asked, coming back into weary wakefulness. As he spoke, he stared at the child’s head. Because it had been shaved, the hair showed only as fine bristles; little flies crawled like lice among the bristles. The boy’s eyes were as expressionless as jelly. Upside down, a human face is robbed of much of its meaning.

  “We’ve got visitors.” The tone of Timberlane’s voice brought Charley instantly back on to the alert. Before they went over the mountain, they had left their sectional hovercraft below a small cliff, hidden from the air under a camouflage net. Now a tracked ambulance of American design was parked below the cliff. Two figures stood beside it, while a third investigated the hovercraft.

  This tiny tableau, embalmed in sunlight, was broken by the sudden chatter of a machine-gun. Without thinking, Timberlane and Charley went flat on their stomachs. The Naga boy groaned as Timberlane rolled him aside and swept binoculars up to his eyes. He ranged his vision along the shabby hillside to their left, where the shots had come from. Crouching figures sprang into view, their khaki dark against dusty white shrubs, their outlines hardening as Timberlane got them in focus.

  “There they are!” Timberlane said. “Probably the same bastards we ran into on the other side of the hill. Get the natterjack up, Charley, and let’s settle them.”

  Beside him, Charley was already assembling their weapon. Down in the chaung, one of the three Americans had been hit by the first burst of machine-gun fire. He sprawled in the sand. Moving painfully, he pulled himself along into the shadow of the ambulance. His two companions were concealed behind bushes. Of a sudden, one of them burst from cover and ran towards the ambulance. The enemy gun opened up again. Dust flicked round the running figure. He swerved, tumbled head over heels, and pitched out of sight among the dusty foliage.

  “Here goes!” Charley muttered. The dust on his face, most of it turned into mud by sweat, crinkled as he slapped the barrel of the natterjack into place. He gritted his teeth and pulled the firing lever. A little nuclear shell went whistling over the scrubby hillside.

  “And another, fast as you can,” Timberlane muttered, kneeling over the natterjack and feeding in a magazine. Charley switched over to automatic, and kept the lever squeezed for a burst. The shells squeaked like bats as they headed for the target. On the hillside, little brown figures scampered for safety. Timberlane brought up his revolver and aimed at them, but the range was too great for accuracy.

  They lay and watched the pall of smoke settle across the slope. Someone out there was screaming. It looked as if only two of the enemy had escaped, beating a retreat over the brow of the hill.

  “Can we chance going down?” Charley asked. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. They’ll have had enough.” They dismantled the gun, shouldered up the child, and continued warily down the slope. As they approached the waiting vehicles, the surviving member of the ambush came to meet them. He was a willowy man of no more than thirty, with dark eyebrows that almost met in the middle and fair hair cropped close. He came forward with a pack of cigarettes extended towards them.

  “You boys came along in very good time. I’m obliged for the neat way you received my reception committee.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” Timberlane said, shaking the man’s hand and taking a cigarette. “We first got acquainted with that little section over the other side of the hill, at Mokachandpur, where they shot up the rest of our fellows. They’re very personal enemies. We were only too glad to have the chance of another pot at them.”

  “You’re English, I guess. I’m American, name Jack Pilbeam, Special Detachment attached to Fifth Corps. I was on my way through when we saw your craft and stopped to see if everything was okay.”

  They introduced thems
elves all round, and Timberlane laid the unconscious boy in the shade. Pilbeam beat the dust out of his uniform and went with Charley to look to his companions.

  For a moment Timberlane squatted by the boy, laying a leaf over his thigh wound, wiping the dust and tears from his face, brushing the flies away. He looked at the thin brown body, felt its pulse. The fold of his mouth grew ugly, and he seemed to stare through the fluttering rib cage, through the earth, into the bitter heart of life. He found no truth there, only what he recognized as an egotistical lie, born of his own heart: “I alone loved children dearly enough!”

  Aloud, he said — speaking mainly to himself — “There were three of them over the hill. The other two were a pair of girls, sisters. Pretty kids, wild as mountain goats, no abnormalities. Girls got killed when the shells were slinging about, blown to bits before our eyes.”

  “More are getting killed than saved,” Pilbeam said. He was kneeling by the crumpled figure in the shadow of the ambulance. “My two buddies are both done for — well, they weren’t really buddies. I’d only met the driver today, and Bill was just out from the States, like me. Guess that doesn’t make it hurt any less. This bastard war, why the hell do we fight when the world’s way down on its reservoir of human life already? Help me get ’em into the agony wagon, will you?”

  “We’ll do more than that,” Timberlane promised. “If you’re going back to Wokha, as I presume you must be, we’ll act as escort to each other, just in case there are any more of these happy fellows perched up on the ridges.”

  “Done. You’ve gotten yourself company, and don’t think I don’t need it. I’m still trembling like a leaf. Tonight you must come on over to the PX and we’ll drink to life together. Suit you, Sergeant?”

  As they loaded the two bodies, still warm, into the ambulance, Pilbeam lit himself another cigarette. He looked Timberlane in the eyes.