Greybeard

by Brian Wilson Aldiss

  “Looks as if the Bibles have a price tag,” Greybeard observed.

  A group of people on the steamer came forward and removed a section of rail; they lowered a small boat into the water, obviously with the intention of coming ashore. At the same time, a loud-hailer opened up with a preliminary rasp and began to address the women ashore.

  “Ladies of Wittenham Island, the Master calls you! He greets you and he will deign to see you. But this time he will not leave his holy vessel. If you want to speak with him, you’d better come aboard. We’re putting out a boat to ferry you and your gifts over. Remember, it costs only a dozen eggs to get you into his presence, and for a chicken you can have a word with him.”

  The rowing boat put out from the steamer and laboured towards the shore. Two women rowed it, bent double over the oars, coughing and gasping as if on the verge of thrombosis. They became less insubstantial as, emerging from the mist, they reached the bank and climbed ashore.

  Martha clutched Greybeard’s hand. “Do you recognize one of those women? The one spitting into the water now?”

  “It can’t be! It looks like old — what was her name?”

  “We left her at whatever that place was — Becky! It is, it’s Becky Thomas!” Martha hurried forward.

  The women of the island were jostling to get into the boat. Carried in their arms or in baskets were provisions, presumably offerings to lay before the Master. Becky stood to one side, watching the proceedings apathetically. She looked even dirtier than she had in her Sparcot days, and much older, though her body remained plump. Her cheeks were sunken and her nose sharp.

  Regarding her, Martha thought, “She’s of Algy’s and my parents’ generation. Amazing how some of them still survive, despite those gloomy predictions we used to hear about everyone dying young. Becky must be eighty-five if she’s a day.”

  Arid, stabbingly, “What’ll be left of the world if Algy and I ever reach that age?”

  As Martha approached her, Becky changed her position and stood with her hands on her hips. On one scrawny wrist, Martha noted, was strapped the battered old non-functioning watch that had once been Towin’s pride. Where was he?

  “Hello, Becky,” she said. “It’s a small wet world. Are you taking a summer cruise?”

  Becky showed little excitement at meeting up with Martha again, or at seeing Greybeard, Charley, and Pitt as they came over to speak to her.

  “I belong to the Master now,” she told them. “That’s why I’m privileged even at my age to bear one of the Second Generation children. I shall be delivered of it in the autumn.”

  Pitt cackled coarsely. “You was expecting when we left you at that fair place, however many years that was ago. Whatever happened to that kid? I reckon it was a phantom litter, wasn’t it? I always thought so at the time.”

  “I was married then, you coarse old brute, you are,” Becky said, “and the Master had not then taken on his Masterhood, so of course I had no issue. Only now I’ve seen the Light can I conceive. If you want children, Martha, you’d better bring a gift to the Master and see what he can do for you. He works miracles, he does.”

  “What’s happened to old Towin then, Becky?” Charley asked. “Isn’t he on the boat with you?”

  She wrinkled her face into a frown. “Old Towin Thomas was a sinful man, Charley Samuels, and I don’t think of him no more. He wouldn’t believe in the Master, or take the Master’s cures, and as a result, he died of a malignant cancer that wasted him away until he didn’t weigh above a stone and a half. Frankly, it was a blessing when he passed over. I’ve followed the Master ever since then. I’m now coming up for my two hundred and twenty-third birthday. I don’t look a day over a hundred, I reckon, do I?”

  Greybeard said, “That line sounds familiar. Do we know this Master of yours, then, Becky? It’s not Bunny Jingadangelow, is it?”

  “You were always free with your tongue, Greybeard,” Becky said. “You mind how you address him, because he doesn’t use that old name now.”

  “It sounds as though he still uses the old tricks, though,” Greybeard said, turning to Martha. “Let’s go aboard and see the old rascal.”

  “I’ve no wish to see him,” Martha said.

  “Well — look, we don’t want to be stuck here on this sea in this mist. We could be lost here till autumn comes, and by then we ought to be well on our way down river. Let’s go and see Jingadangelow and get him to give us a tow. It’s obvious that the captain of the ship must know his way about.”

  They did as he said, and ferried themselves out to the steamer in Pitt’s boat. They climbed aboard, although the deck was already crowded with the faithful and their offerings.

  Greybeard had to wait while the women from the island entered the Master’s cabin one by one to receive his blessing before he was allowed to enter. He was then shown in with some ceremoney.

  Bunny Jingadangelow sprawled in a deck chair, wrapped in the greasy equivalent of a Roman toga, a garment he evidently considered more fitting for his new calling than the antique collection of rabbit skins which had previously been his most notable garment. Round him — and now being carted away by an old man in shorts — were material tributes to his godly qualities, vegetables, lettuces with plushy fat hearts, ducks, fish, eggs, a fowl with its neck newly wrung.

  Jingadangelow himself still affected his curling moustache and sideburns. The rotundity that once afflicted only his chin now covered new territory; his body was corpulent, his face assumed the pasty and lop-sided podginess of a gibbous moon, and was of a hitherto unprecedented blandness — though it gathered a good percentage of its area into a scowl as Greybeard entered. Becky had evidently passed on the news of his visit.

  “I wanted to see you because I always thought you had a rare gift of insight,” Greybeard said.

  “That is perfectly true. It led me to divinity. But I assure you, Mr. Greybeard, since I gather that you still call yourself by that undistinguished sobriquet, that I have no intention of exchanging gossip about the past. I have outlived the past, as I intend to outlive the future.”

  “You are still in your old Eternal Life racket, I see, though the props are more elaborate.”

  “You observe this handbell? I have merely to ring it to have you removed from here. You must not insult me. I have achieved sanctity.” He rested a podgy hand on the table by his side, and pouted in discontent. “If you haven’t arrived to join my Second Generationists, just what do you want?”

  “Well, I thought — I came to see you about Becky Thomas and this pregnancy of hers. You’ve no—”

  “That’s what you told me last time we met, centuries ago. Becky’s no business of yours — she’s become one of the faithful since her husband died. You fancy yourself a bit as a leader of men, don’t you, without actually leading them?”

  “I don’t lead anyone, because I—”

  “Because you’re a sort of wanderer! What is your goal in life? You haven’t one! Throw in your lot with me, man, and live out your days in comfort. I don’t spend all my life tramping round this lake in a leaky boat. I’ve got a base at the south end called Hagbourne. Come there with me.”

  “And become a — whatever you call your followers, and make my wife become one? Not likely! We—”

  Jingadangelow raised his little bell and tinkled it. Two old women doddered in, both dressed in a parody of a toga, one of them run to a gross corpulence and with protruding eyes which took in only the Master.

  “Priestesses of the Second Generation,” Jingadangelow said, “tell me the objects of my coming.”

  With a singsong delivery, in which the thinner woman led by about half a sentence, they replied, “You came to replace the God that has deserted us; you came to replace the men who have left us; you came to replace the children that were denied us.”

  “There’s nothing physical in all this, you understand, Greybeard,” Jingadangelow said parenthetically.

  “You bring us hope where we had only ashes; you bring us l
ife where we had only sorrow; you bring us full wombs where we had only empty stomachs.”

  “You’ll agree the prose, in its pseudo-biblical way, is pretty telling.”

  “You make the unbelievers die from the land; you make the believers survive; and you will make the children of the believers into a Second Generation which shall refurnish the earth with people.”

  “Very good, priestesses. Your Master is pleased with you, and particularly with Sister Madge, who puts the thing over as if she believes what she’s saying. Now, girls, recite what you must do for all this to come to pass.”

  Again the two women assumed the recitative. “We must put away all sin in ourselves; we must put away all sin in others; we must honour and cherish the Master.”

  “That is what one may term the qualifying clause,” Jingadangelow said to Greybeard. “All right, priestesses, you may go now.”

  They fell to holding his hand and patting his head, begging to be allowed to stay, and mouthing pieces of jargon to him.

  “Confound it, girls, I’m in audience. Leave me alone!”

  They fled from his righteous wrath, and he said irritably to Greybeard as he shrugged himself about in his chair to get comfortable again, “That’s the penalty with having disciples — they get above themselves. Chanting all this repetitive stuff seems to go to female heads. Jesus knew a thing or two when He chose an all-male team, but somehow I seem to get along better with women.”

  Greybeard said, “You don’t appear totally submerged in your role, Jingadangelow.”

  “The role of a prophet is always a bit wearing. How many years have I kept this up? Centuries, and centuries to come yet! But I give ’em hope — that’s the great thing. Funny, eh, to give people something you don’t have yourself.”

  A knock came at the door, and a tatterdemalion man lost in a grey jersey announced that all the Wittenham women were safely ashore and the boat was ready to move on.

  “You and your party had better leave,” Jingadangelow told Greybeard. It was then that Greybeard asked for a tow. Irritably, Jingadangelow said it should be done, if they could be all ready to sail almost at once. He would tow them as far as Hagbourne in exchange for a certain levy of work from Pitt, Charley, and Greybeard. After some consultation, they agreed to this, and put together their belongings; most of these were stowed in the dinghy or Pitt’s boat, while the rest came with them on to the steamer, where they were allotted an area of deck space.

  By the time they were under way, the mist had cleared. The day remained brooding and heavy.

  Pitt and Charley became involved in a game of cards with two of the crew. Martha and Greybeard took a walk round the deck, which bore the scars of the seats on which holiday makers had once sat to view the old river. There were few people aboard: perhaps nine “priestesses” to minister to Jingadangelow’s wants, and a few crewmen. There was also a couple of idle gentlemen who lounged in the shade at the stern and did not speak. They were armed with revolvers, evidently to repel any attack that might be made on the boat, but Greybeard, disliking their looks, felt some relief that he had his rifle with him.

  As they were passing the saloon, the room curtained off for Jingadangelow’s use, its door opened, and the Master himself looked out. He greeted Martha ostentatiously.

  “Even a god needs a bit of fresh air,” he said. “It’s like an oven in my cabin. You look as lovely as ever, madam; the centuries have left not a footmark in their passage over your face. Talking of beauty, perhaps you’d care to step in here and have a look at something.”

  He motioned Martha and Greybeard into his cabin, and towards a door that stood at the other end of it. “You’re both infidels, of course, born infidels, I’d think, since it has always been a theory of mine that unbelievers are born whereas saints are made; but in the hope of converting you, perhaps you’d like to see one of my miracles?”

  “Are you still going in for castration?” Martha asked, standing where she was.

  “Heavens, no! Surely the transformation which I have undergone is sufficiently apparent to you, Mrs. Greybeard? Crude trickery has no part in my make-up. I want to show you a genuine sample of the Second Generation.” He lifted a drape from a window in the door, and motioned them to look through into the next room.

  Greybeard caught his breath. His senses rose up in him like music. On a bunk, a young girl was sleeping. She was naked, and a sheet had fallen back from her shoulders, revealing most of her body. It was smooth and browned, moulded most delicately. Her arms, folded under her, cradled her breasts; one knee was tucked up so that it almost touched her elbow, revealing the scut of pubic hair between her legs. She slept with her face into the pillow, her mouth open, her rich brown hair in disarray, scowling in her sleep. She might have been sixteen.

  Martha pulled the curtain down quietly over the glass panel and turned to Jingadangelow. “Then some women are still bearing… But this child belongs to none of those you have aboard?”

  “No, no, how right you are! This one is just a poor old prophet’s consolation, as you might say. Your husband looks moved. May I hope that after this evidence of my potentialities we may welcome him into the fold of the Second Generationists?”

  “You sly devil, Jingadangelow, what are you doing with this girl? She’s perfect — unlike those rather sad creatures we saw in Oxford. How did you get hold of her? Where does she come from?”

  “You realize you’re hardly entitled to cross-question me in this way? But I may as well tell you that I suspect that there are a lot more creatures as pretty as Chammoy — that’s her name — lurking up and down the country. You see I have something tangible to offer my followers! Now, why don’t the two of you throw in your lot with me?”

  “We are making a journey to the mouth of the river,” Martha said.

  He shook his head until his cheeks wobbled. “You are becoming the mouthpiece of your husband in your old age, Mrs. Greybeard. I thought when we met so many centuries ago that you had a mind of your own.”

  Greybeard grabbed the front of his toga. “Who’s that girl in there? If there are more children, then they must be saved and treated properly and helped — not used as whores for you! By God, Jingadangelow—”

  The Master staggered backwards, grasped his hand bell, rang it violently, and struck Greybeard over the side of the face with it.

  “You’re jealous, you dog, like all men!” he growled.

  Two priestesses came in at once, screamed at the sight of the scuffle, and made way for the two men who had been sitting at the stern of the ship. They seized Greybeard’s arms and held him.

  “Tie him up and throw him overboard!” Jingadangelow ordered, tottering back into his chair. He was panting heavily. “Let the pike have a go at him. Tie the woman up and leave her on deck. I will speak with her when we reach Hagbourne. Move!”

  “Stay where you are,” Pitt said from the door. He had an arrow notched at his bow and aimed at Jingadangelow. His two remaining teeth gleamed behind the feathered Right. Charley stood by him, watching the corridor with his knife in his hand. “If anyone moves out of turn, I’ll shoot your Master without one second’s hesitation.”

  “Get hold of their guns, Martha,” Pitt advised. “You okay, Greybeard? What do we do now?”

  Jingadangelow’s henchmen showed no disposition to fight. Greybeard took their two revolvers from Martha and put them into his pockets. He dabbed his cheek on his sleeve.

  “We’ve no quarrel with these people,” he said, “if they are prepared to let us alone. We will go on to Hagbourne and leave them there. It’s doubtful if we shall ever meet them again.”

  “Oh, you can’t let them go like that!” Pitt exclaimed. “Look what a chance you’re passing up. Here’s our opportunity to get hold of a perfectly good boat. We can ditch this mouldy crew at the nearest bit of bank. Power!”

  “We can’t do that, Jeff. We’re getting too old to turn pirate,” Martha said.

  “I felt the power coming back to me, just
as when I was a young man,” Pitt said, looking at no one.

  “Standing there with my bow, I suddenly knew I could kill a man again. Gor… It’s a miracle…”

  They looked at him without understanding.

  Greybeard said, “Let’s be practical. We could not manage this ship. Nor could we get it out of the Sea of Barks.”

  “Martha’s right,” Charley said. “We’ve no moral right to pinch their boat, scoundrels though they may be.”

  Jingadangelow straightened himself up and adjusted his toga. “If you’ve all finished arguing, kindly leave my cabin. I must remind you that this room is private and sacred. There will be no more trouble, I can assure you of that.”

  As they left, Martha saw a wild dark eye regarding them through a rent in the curtain over the far window.

  * * *

  When Hagbourne appeared late that afternoon, it emerged not out of the mist but from curtains of heavy rain, for the morning mist had been dispersed by a wind that brought showers with it. They died away as the steamer was secured along a stone quay, and the line of the Berkshire Downs rose behind the small town. The town Jingadangelow called his base appeared almost deserted. Only three ancient men were there to greet the steamer and help tie it up. The disembarkation that followed lent some life to the dreary scene.

  Greybeard’s party detached their own boats warily from the steamer’s crew. Jingadangelow did not give the appearance of a fighting man. What they did not expect was the appearance of Becky, who came up as they were loading their belongings into the dinghy.

  She set her head on one side and pointed her sharp nose up at Greybeard. “The Master sent me to speak with you. He says you owe him some labour for the privilege of the tow he gave you.”

  “We’d have done his work if he hadn’t attacked Greybeard,” Charley said. “That was attempted murder, that was. Those that worship false gods shall be damned for ever, Becky, so you better watch it.”