And when she does start off, another disaster befalls her. Her dark glasses are covered with fine droplets of rain. She keeps pushing them up onto her forehead and taking them off and wiping them uselessly on her sodden dress, but she won’t give them up entirely, clinging to them as some last tenuous link with normality. And while she is going along like this, alternately blinded and concentrating on wiping, she loses the conduits! It seems impossible; one moment they’re there and the next moment they’re not! She at once turns round and tries to retrace her steps through the undergrowth exactly. But the conduits have gone.
They must be only a few metres away from her, hidden behind the dense screen of vegetation. But in which direction? With panicky despair she casts back and forth through the trees. If she tries each direction in turn, she must find them. But she doesn’t. She tries to find her way back to the house. But all there is, whichever way she goes, is sodden green boughs which slap into her face and catch at her hair, and soaking undergrowth which engulfs her at times up to her chest.
She dares not stop to think out what she is going to do, because she knows that if she once stopped, the sheer futility of her efforts would overcome her and never let her move again. And indeed, when at last she trips on a creeper and falls heavily, she does not get up. She lies full length, her forehead resting on her arm, gazing at the vegetation a couple of inches in front of her eyes, which she has crushed in her fall.
It does not remain still, she notices. Little by little the wet leaves and tendrils make efforts to straighten themselves up again. She grows quite interested in the process. Millimetre by millimetre they move, in little jerks. For a long time nothing will happen, and you’d think they’d got as far as they could. Then, flick—another minute movement. There’s a moral here, she thinks, a real moral for someone in my position. And I’m going to ignore it. I’m down and I’m going to stay down. All right for the plants; they haven’t been walking for two days without food or drink. I have, and I’m beaten. At last I’m beaten.
And so she lies, while the plants beneath her straighten up and the rain above her beats down. Two dull papooms from above the clouds break the grey sky but scarcely interrupt her train of thought, which is to do with her childhood and Sulpice and her mother. A thin distant whine reinforces the drumming of the rain, coming and going in the wet air like the noise of an insect. It grows louder—loud enough for her to notice it through her thoughts. It sounds familiar—something she has heard on some occasion, certainly. Then it fades again and passes out of her mind. But back it comes, louder and louder. It seems to be coming from directly overhead. All at once she remembers: it’s the sound she heard the night she was set down in the palace garden and the day she went out of the airlock as a child, the sound of a travelling house!
Like the crushed plants, she raises herself jerk by jerk as successive thoughts about the situation galvanize her muscles. Louder and louder grows the complaining whine. And suddenly she sees it—the outline of a house, all right, black against the grey patches of sky between the trees! It is moving very slowly, just above the treetops. It is the Kind People, and they have come to save her.
On her feet at last, she waves both arms at the house. It will never see her through the trees! She opens her mouth to scream at it, but all that comes out is a strange inadequate croaking noise. She gasps in air and tries again.
But it’s impossible, because … For a moment she can’t even take in why it’s impossible. Some terrible unseen thing is covering her mouth! And something hard and irresistible is encircling her chest, dragging her arms down against her sides! Unable to move, she feels herself being swung vertiginously backwards and downwards.
The travelling house passes on and disappears from her field of vision. Short rasping breaths are drawn next to her ear.
The green men
There are a dozen men sitting around in a circle on the ground under the shelter of a tarpaulin slung between four trees. They are warming their hands at a fire made of sticks, and they all gaze silently at Uncumber when her captor throws her down on the ground at their feet. She gazes up at them in terror. At first she is not even entirely certain whether they are men or beasts. Their faces are covered with shaggy hair, and from the midst of it their naked eyes gleam out wolfishly. They are dressed in filthy tatters, and ancient rusted weapons lie on the ground beside them. But they have magnificent silver rings on their fingers and an extraordinary assortment of gadgets and ornaments on strings around their necks. They are eating—some of them proper pills, some of them the sort of heated organic mush which was served at the palace. They are eating it off richly coloured plates and out of elegant gold and silver pillboxes. Perhaps, thinks Uncumber, they are forest apes tricked out in rags they have found. But then the ape who dragged her here speaks.
“Elle appelait les flics,” he says, nodding at her. “Fallait la pincer, hein?”
Everyone looks at her and then turns towards one of the group, a man who, instead of sitting on the ground, is reclining on a folding bed. He is eating off a jewelled plate, shovelling the food into his mouth with the blade of a jackknife. He shrugs.
“Evidemment,” he says indistinctly, chewing.
“On ne veut pas trouver les cognes à deux pas d’ici,” argues her captor defensively. The man on the couch gazes unblinkingly and thoughtfully at Uncumber as he eats.
“Holovis …” says Uncumber hopefully. “Papoom … Nek taomoro Noli …”
“Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit?” demands the man on the couch.
The rest shrug. “J’sais pas,” they say, gazing at her as they eat, like their leader.
Involuntarily Uncumber finds herself looking not at the men but at the food on the plates and at the canvas-covered bottles which are tipped up in the air from time to time. She feels her tongue creeping like a dried-up slug over her cracked lips.
“T’as soif, quoi?” demands the leader. He throws her his bottle, and she gulps down every last drop of water from it without stopping. It tastes of earth and metal.
“Elle sait boire, quand même,” says the leader. He turns to someone on the far side of the fire and says, “Eh, Dino! Donne-lui que’que chose à manger!”
A plate of the organic slush is put in front of her. No one offers her any tools to eat it with, and without waiting to make inquiries she puts her face down into it and sucks the stuff up, with her nose and chin in it. When she has finished she wipes her face on her sleeve and shivers almost delectably.
“Une couverture pour la dame,” orders the leader, and one of the men throws her a blanket. She pulls it around her and huddles over the fire, gazing into the flames, dissolving with contentment and gratitude. The wild men around her are frightening, but without difficulty she obliterates them from her mind, conscious only of the flames and of the warmth and fullness.
She half-dozes. Around her the conversation buzzes agreeably on, like the bees on those summer holidays of childhood.
“Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire avec la môme, ah?”
“La tuer?”
“La tuer? Dieu t’envoie une fille, et tu n’peux trouver rien de plus amusant que d’la tuer? On va la garder, naturellement. Pas vrai, patron?”
She dozes on in the warmth. She wakes with a start when something hard hits her shoulder and the side of her head, but when she finds it is only the ground instantly falls asleep once more. At another point she is awakened by the noise of shouting and finds that it is coming from a face covered in red hair very close to hers. The owner of the red-haired face is trying to get under the blanket with her, and everyone else is laughing at his efforts. She gazes at him open-mouthed, too fuddled with weariness to know how to deal with the situation. But before she can do anything the butt end of a weapon is rammed sharply into the man’s chest, winding him and rolling him over onto his back. “Laisse-la!” growls the leader sourly, putting down his weapon and settling back to sleep on his cot.
But even this incident vanishes from her mind almost at once as she
dissolves back into sleep again, lulled by the patter of rain on the tarpaulin.
When she wakes the next time, the pattering has ceased—for two reasons, as she slowly works out: first, because the steady downpour from the sky has stopped and given place to an irregular heavy dripping from the trees; and second, because the tarpaulin has been taken down. It’s cold, too; the fire has been stamped out. She sits up and looks around her in alarm. The whole encampment has disappeared. The men are standing about, their belongings in bundles at their feet, talking and examining their weapons.
They’re going! But what are they going to do about her? Take her with them—perhaps kill her? She is suddenly terrified. Or are they going to leave her there? But that is a more frightening prospect still!
She catches the leader’s bare, indifferent eye. He motions to her to get up. One of the men takes her blanket, folds it, and crams it into one of the packs.
The leader jerks his head. Everyone swings his load onto his back, someone prods a weapon into Uncumber’s ribs, and they move off through the forest in single file, with Uncumber in the middle of the line. For a start every step she takes is almost unbearable, her joints are so stiff and her feet so blistered, but as time goes on the stiffness wears off and the blisters are trodden numb. She is very apprehensive, too, but not despairing, as she was the previous day; she is happier to be in the company of her potential executioners than on her own. And eventually her fear, like the blisters on her feet, becomes dulled simply by the passing of time.
They walk for about an hour, the men moving casually and noiselessly in spite of their burdens, Uncumber making more noise than all the rest of the party put together as she stumbles over roots and fallen branches. Once an unnoticed branch of thorns tears at her face, and she cries out, but the man in front of her turns round and hushes her with a look of such malevolence in his naked green eyes that thereafter she bites her discomfort back.
Suddenly the man in front stops; the whole line has stopped. The men squat down in absolute silence, while the leader goes on alone. Uncumber, squatting like the rest, stares down into the sodden mulch that forms the forest floor. Insects clamber over twigs and disappear into the secret places of the earth, just as they did on the shore near the palace. The universal kingdom of the insects is still with her. She feels comforted by it now, rather than disgusted.
Something horrible is about to happen, she knows.
The leader returns and nods briefly. Everyone gets to his feet and begins to move slowly forward through the trees again. They have reached some sort of building. It is the house, Uncumber sees with a shock, on whose door she first beat the previous night. Or so it seems to her. With such a featureless structure it’s difficult to be sure. Two of the men stand holding her, while the rest pull masks over their faces and climb onto the roof. They go straight to the airlock door. But they don’t waste their time knocking on it. They shine some sort of light at it, and it grows a black line from top to bottom and collapses effortlessly inwards.
Uncumber feels a curious mixture of disappointment and satisfaction at seeing the barrier on which she bruised her hands so vainly brushed aside like this. Already the men are crowding through the airlock after their leader. She knows they are going to hurt the people inside and is appalled to find that her feelings about this are as mixed as her feelings about the breaching of the door. She bites her lip, feeling sick, waiting to hear the blows and screams.
But none comes. A minute goes by, two minutes, a long time. Then, one by one, the men start to emerge. They are carrying cases full of pills of every description, fabric ripped off the upholstery, jewellery, pieces of electrical equipment—even a complete holovision chamber. Uncumber recognizes each item as it emerges; they are all exactly the same as the ones she remembers from her parents’ house.
She is sickened at being forced to look on helplessly while this act of desecration against her own people is carried out. But she is relieved that there are, after all, no signs of violence, and guilty that she expected them so readily.
Last of all to emerge is the leader. He is carrying an armful of ornaments in precious metals, and a human head, severed at the neck and bleeding down his trouser leg.
Uncumber’s stomach leaps within her, and she claps a hand over her mouth.
“Attention, les poulets!” shouts one of her guards at the top of his voice. Everyone stops and looks up. The familiar complaining whine is coming down from the treetops. The men throw down everything that encumbers them and disappear like smoke into the forest. The guards throw down Uncumber; the leader throws down the head. She and it gaze at each other on the ground.
Quasil quenquenya!
The Kind People from the travelling house spread out over the scene with great speed. A number of them, wearing helmets and masks and carrying various pieces of electrical equipment which clear a path for them through the undergrowth, go plunging into the forest after the raiders. One carefully picks up the severed head and places it inside a bag. Two more seize Uncumber.
“Oh!” she sobs. “It was horrible! Horrible!”
“Quasil quenquenya,” growls one of the men holding her.
“I didn’t know they were going to … I was lost and then they found me—”
“Quasil quenquenya!” shouts the Kind Man and hits Uncumber across the mouth with the back of his hand. The shock of pain and surprise silences her at once. For a moment the sheer incompatibility of the pain and the presence of her Kind rescuers prevents her from making any connection between the two. When she does, a baffling dismay fills her. Surely these people are here to protect her! She would like to feel her lips and teeth, to find out what damage has been done and where the wetness she can feel on her chin is coming from. But she can’t, because her hands are held behind her back.
She is taken into the house. It’s frightening inside—so like Uncumber’s own home, except that everything has been smashed and torn. Bare wires hang out of the walls. Hot coffee runs steaming out of an open tap. The body of an old woman is crumpled up against a broken holovision chamber, her dark glasses dangling from one earpiece. Uncumber thinks of her comfortably watching the holovision only the previous evening, while she knocked inaudibly on the airlock door. So that’s who it was inside—an old woman only a day away from what looks like final death. The other bodies in the house are mutilated to the point where it is impossible to imagine them alive.
The Kind People stroll about the house, yawning and whistling through their teeth, occasionally turning over a piece of wreckage with a casually inquiring foot. One of them, a paunchy man with a petulant set to his mouth, glances up at Uncumber.
“Esquamilya uquen?” he asks indifferently.
“Que usti querera unquendo,” replies the guard who hit her, shrugging his shoulders.
“I was lost in the forest,” says Uncumber quickly to the paunchy man, knowing they are talking about her. “I was found by the men—I was captured by them—I was—”
“Quasil quenquenya!” says the paunchy man sharply.
“I mean,” cries Uncumber desperately, “I’m nothing to do with them! And this Kind Man hit me—”
The paunchy Kind Man hits her too—another effortless, calm, professional blow across the mouth with the back of the hand. Tears of sheer pain run down her cheeks and mingle with the wetness round her mouth.
More people arrive—in white overalls and rubber boots this time, and carrying neat cases of instruments. They exchange jokes with the Kind Men, inspect the corpses, and shake their heads at the condition of them, compressing their lips disparagingly. The Kind People who ran into the forest return with a prisoner. It is the man who tried to get under the blanket with Uncumber, the man with red hair all over his face. That red hair is now sticky and shining with blood, which is running out of his mouth and nose and from a gash across his scalp. He seems indifferent to his condition—as indifferent as he is to the condition of the house.
The Kind People take Uncumber and
the redheaded man back with them in the travelling house. When it lands, she finds herself being taken down through an airlock into a large stationary house of some sort, and is put in a room by herself.
She looks round at this room incredulously, unable at first to take it all in. A holovision chamber, a couch, food and drink taps, pill dispensers … It’s a real room! She is back in the inside world again!
It seems impossible that she should have been restored to reality after the long nightmare outside—and restored to it by people who treated her so brutally. But here it all is again! She breathes the air. It’s clean and sweet, it’s warm but not too warm. She tries the taps. Real inside food runs out!
There are certain differences as compared with her room at home, it’s true. The walls and floor are hard instead of upholstered; the couch is upholstered instead of air-cushioned. And there is an armoured screen between her and the holovision chamber, which makes it impossible to get at the controls and either switch it off or change the channel.
Still, all these are details that can be looked into later. She peels off the torn and filthy remnants of the clothing that Noli gave her, washes her damaged mouth and takes a pill to control the pain, showers with such luxurious pleasure that tears start from her eyes and mingle with the spray. Then she gorges herself on the food from the taps and stretches herself on the couch.
The soothing abstract sounds and images in the holovision chamber wash over her, charming her to sleep. On the hard walls around the head of the couch she discovers there are all sorts of messages scratched—initials and dates, odd single words like questaya and mequiqui, and what appear to be verses. One verse, which seems curiously apt and plangent to her in her drowsy, charmed mood, reads:
Querin quo requi assandi,
Curaquod semnilo sas;
Ornu inpactot aquandi—
Nostraquon quamboni quas!
A Very Private Life Page 11