A slow boom answered, as though the whole hill were speaking, the million-year-old chalk answering her knock in tones almost too deep to hear. Each slap or rap produced the same bass reply. She got her fingers under the edge of the wood and it came up like a lid.
The hole in the center of the circle was black. It was a tunnel of night defying the gay sun. The palms of her hands went chilly as she clutched the brick rim and peered in. At first she could see nothing, but then there was a faint light, a circle of sky with a head and shoulders in the middle. The rough chalk walls dwindled down, becoming invisible in darkness before they reached the water. She dropped a stone but it fell crooked, clacking several times from wall to wall before the splash. She went to fetch Kewal.
He dropped three or four stones, with his other hand feeling his pulse. Even when the stones fell straight it seemed ages before the splash answered.
“About fifty feet to the water,” he said. “If we can get it up, and if the water is good, it means we can stay here for a while. The women say that Rani’s baby will be born in two or three days.”
They found a rope and bucket in the sheds, but it took a lot of trial and error and a lot of many-voiced arguments before the men rigged up a method of getting a bucket down all that distance and making it lie sideways when it reached the water, so that it filled, and then tilted upright when it was full. Hauling a full bucket up from fifty feet was tiring, too, but it was better than walking to Strake. And the water when it came was so sweet and clean that Cousin Punam decided it was safe to drink without boiling.
It was Gopal who found the corn. While Rani was in labor, three days later, the older children were shushed away. Nicky didn’t follow them up to the big barns because she felt uncomfortable there. She was looking, with little luck, for late wild strawberries in the matted grass on the banks of the lane when Gopal came hurrying past, his hands cupped close together as if he was trying to carry water. Nicky thought he’d caught a bird and ran to look.
“Nicky, you’re thick,” he said. “This is food. I climbed an iron ladder up one of those round towers and opened a lid at the top and it’s full of corn. There’s enough to feed us for a year. Look, it’s dry and good.”
He ran on to show his treasure to the menfolk, while Nicky returned to combing through the weeds for strawberries. She found no more of the little red globules of sweetness, but caught a grasshopper instead, let it tickle her prisoning palms for a moment, then held it free and watched it tense itself for its leap, and vanish.
The baby was born in a cow stall. It was a boy. That night the Sikhs held full council. It was just as noisy and muddled with cross talk as any of the ones they’d held on the road, but Nicky got the feeling that even in the middle of rowdy arguments they were being more serious, paying more attention to what the others said. From time to time they would ask her a question.
“We can’t use any of the tractors, can we, Nicky?”
She shook her head.
“But we can reap and plow and dig and plant by hand?”
“Oh yes.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with this wheat?”
“Wrong?” She looked through the gateway to where the beautiful tall blades waved, gray as fungus under the big moon, but already tinged with yellow by daylight as the year edged toward harvest.
“Oh yes,” said Mr. Surbans Singh, “this is a modern crossbred variety of wheat, and another of barley. The madness does not apply to them, you think?”
“Oh no!”
Another long fusillade of Punjabi followed. Then …
“Nicky, would the madness make the villagers come and destroy us if we were to set up a blacksmith’s shop?”
“What would you do?”
“Make and mend spades and sickles and plows and other tools.”
“I mean, how would you do it? What would you use?”
“We’d have to make charcoal first, which is done by burning wood very slowly under a mound of earth. Then we’d have to contrive a furnace, with bellows to keep the charcoal burning fiercely. And when the iron was red-hot we’d hammer it, and bend it with vises and pincers, and then temper it in water or oil.”
“Water,” said Nicky. “Where would you get the iron from?”
“There is plenty lying around the farm.”
“I think that would be all right. You could try, and I could always tell you if I thought it wasn’t. Why do you want to know?”
“First, because if we are to stay here we shall need hand tools. This farm is highly mechanized, which is no doubt why the farmer left; he felt he couldn’t work it without his tractors. But secondly, we shall need more to eat than wheat. We shall have to barter for meat and vegetables until we can produce our own. Some of us have seen smithwork done in India, in very primitive conditions; Mr. Jagindar Singh was a skilled metalworker in London, and two more of us have done similar work in factories and garages; so we think we can set up an efficient smithy. But perhaps the villagers will not have our advantages, so we shall be able to barter metalwork with them in exchange for the things we need.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Nicky, astonished again by the amount of sense that seemed to come out of all the clamor and repetition. “But do you think the villagers will actually trade with you? They didn’t look very friendly when we came through, and they haven’t come up here at all.”
“If we make something they need, they will trade with us,” said Uncle Jagindar somberly. “It does not matter how much they dislike us. We have found this in other times.”
The whole council muttered agreement. Kewal gave a sharp, snorting laugh which Nicky hadn’t heard before.
“We must be careful,” he said. “If we become too rich they will want to take our wealth away from us.”
“I expect there are quite a lot of robbers in England now,” said Nicky. “Like those ones we fought on the other side of Aldershot—men who’ve got no way of getting food except by robbing the ones who have.”
This set off another round of argument and discussion in Punjabi. The men seemed to become very excited; voices rose, eyes flashed, an insignificant uncle even beat his chest. Nicky edged back out of the circle to ask Gopal what they were talking about. He was allowed at the council, but he was thought too young to speak (Nicky wouldn’t have been listened to either if she hadn’t been the Sikhs’ canary).
Gopal laughed scornfully, but he looked as excited as the rest.
“They are going to make weapons,” he said. “Swords and spears and steel-tipped arrows. A Sikh should carry a real sword when times are dangerous. But I’ll tell you a joke—we Sikhs won most of our battles with guns; we used to run forward, fire a volley and then run back until we had time to reload. It doesn’t sound very brave, but all India feared us then. What’s the matter, Nicky? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. But they won’t make guns now; instead they’ll turn this farmyard into a fort which we can defend against the robbers.”
After that the council became less serious, dwindling into boastings and warlike imaginings. Gopal translated the louder bits.
“My Uncle Gurchuran says we must capture horses and turn ourselves into cavalry, and then we can protect the whole countryside for a fee. A protection racket. We often lived like that in the old days.… Mr. Parnad Singh says his father was Risaldar at an archery club in Simla, and he will teach us all to shoot. A risaldar is a sort of sergeant.… My Uncle Chacha is teasing him and Mr. Parnad Singh is angry.… My Uncle Jagindar is trying to smooth him down; he says it will be useful to have a good shot with a bow for hunting, and that Uncle Chacha must be careful what he says, because he is so fat that he’ll make an easy target. That’s unfair because Uncle Chacha is the quickest of them all, and the best fighter. You saw how he fought against those robbers. Now he’s pretending to be angry with Uncle Jagindar, but that doesn’t matter because it’s inside the family.… My grandmother is speaking. She says we must all be careful how we talk to one another, because we are in a danger
ous world and we can’t afford to have feuds with one another. My goodness, she says, we Sikhs are a quick-tempered people. She’s beginning to tell a story. She tells pretty good stories, for children and adults too.”
The council had fallen silent at the creak of the old woman’s voice. There had been a brief guffaw of laughter at her second sentence, but that was all. One of the men turned to glare at Gopal because his translation was spoiling the silence. He too stopped talking.
The story was not long, but the old woman told it with careful and elaborate gestures of the hands, as though she were the storyteller at some great court and had been sent for after supper to entertain the princes. Nicky could hear, even in the unknown language, that it was the story of a fierce quarrel between two proud men. She looked along the outer circle of children and saw Ajeet sitting entranced, mouth slightly parted and head craning forward as she listened and stared at the elaborate ceremony of the fluttering hands. Ajeet’s lips were moving with the words, and her hands made faint unconscious efforts to flutter themselves.
All the Sikhs laughed when the story ended, then broke into smaller chattering groups. Nicky crossed to where Ajeet still sat staring at the orange firelight.
“What was the story about, Ajeet?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ajeet in her usual near whisper, shy and confused.
“Please tell me. I like to know anything your grandmother says. She is so … so special.”
“Oh, it was a tale of two Sikh brothers, farmers, whom my grandmother knew in India, and how they quarreled over a dead pigeon, and in the end lost their farm and their wives and everything. Listen. It was like this.”
Her voice changed and strengthened. She drew her head back and sat very upright, freeing her hands for gestures. The history of that forgotten feud rolled out in vivid, exact words, each phrase underlined with just the same gesture of finger or wrist that her grandmother had used. Once or twice she hesitated over a word, and Nicky realized that she was turning familiar Punjabi into English which didn’t quite fit. When she finished Nicky found herself laughing at the ridiculous disaster, just as the men had laughed, and heard more voices laughing behind her. Kewal and three of the other men had been standing around in silence to hear the same story all over again.
“Very excellent,” said Kewal, only half mocking.
One of the men called in Punjabi over his shoulder, and was answered by a pleased cackle from the open stall where the old woman lay on her cushions; she had been watching the show too. Ajeet accepted the compliments gravely, without any of her usual shyness, then took Nicky off to say good night to the old lady.
This had become a sort of ritual for Nicky, a good-luck thing, wherever they were. They couldn’t say much to each other, even with Ajeet to translate, because their lives had been so different, but somehow it ended the day on a comfortable note.
As they crossed the yard back to the shed where the women slept, Nicky looked around the firelit walls and the black-shadowed crannies. So this was home, now.
Provided nobody came to drive them out.
They settled in slowly. The bungalow had been left unlocked, and the first thing the Sikhs did was to redecorate the bedroom with rich hangings. They took their shoes off when they went into the room. Uncle Jagindar carried the old lady in when it was finished, and she clucked her satisfaction, though she wanted several details changed. Nicky watched fascinated from the doorway.
“It is a place to keep our holy book,” explained Kewal. “My family are very orthodox Sikhs. Before these troubles some of us younger ones didn’t treat our religion as earnestly as the elders, but now it seems more important. It will help to keep us together.”
“We’ll have to use the other houses to sleep in when the winter comes,” said Nicky. “It’ll be too cold to sleep out in the sheds.”
“You are very practical-minded. That was how the English ruled India. They would go and admire the Taj Mahal, but all the time they were thinking about drains. Anyway, my uncles don’t feel it proper to break into other people’s houses, even if the people have gone away.”
“They’ll have to in the end,” said Nicky. “I don’t mind doing the burgling, and then once the doors are open you could all come and use the houses like you are doing this one.”
Kewal laughed and pulled his glossy beard.
“That would be an acceptable compromise,” he said. “But I think we won’t tell my uncles until you’ve done it. I will attend and supervise, because in my opinion your techniques of burglary are a little crude.”
But you have to be crude with metal-framed windows. They fit too tight for you to be able to slide a knife or wire through to loose the catch. Nicky broke two panes, opened two windows, climbed into two musty and silent houses, and tiptoed through the dank air to unbolt two doors. The artist’s cottage was full of lovely bric-a-brac—a deer head, and straw ornaments that were made for the finials of hayricks, and Trinidadian steel drums. Kewal delightedly began to tonk out a pop tune, but Nicky (frightened now of what she’d done) dragged him away.
And the uncles were cross when she told them. (She left Kewal out of her story.) But when the women found that there was an open hearth in the cottage and a big closed stove in the farmhouse, in both of which you could burn logs, they told the uncles to stop being so high-minded. Here was somewhere to bathe and attend to small babies in the warm. And though the electric cookers were useless, a little bricklaying would turn the artist’s drawing-room fireplace into a primitive but practical oven and stove for a communal kitchen.
Even so, Uncle Jagindar spoke very seriously to Nicky.
“It is difficult for us,” he said. “If you were my child, or one of my nieces, I would punish you for this. Perhaps you are right and we will have to use these houses in winter, but you are wrong to take decisions on your own account against the wishes of us older people. If you continue to do this, then perhaps our own children will start to copy you, and then we will have to send you away. We will be sad, but we will do it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nicky. “My own family weren’t so … so …”
“If your own family were more like us,” said Uncle Jagindar, “you would not have become separated from them as you did, even though a mad priest caused a panic.”
Nicky was surprised. Ajeet was the only person she’d told about that wild Dervish who’d pranced red-eyed beside the retreating Londoners yelling about fire and brimstone; and the thunderstorm; and the hideous mass panic; and the long, sick misery of loss. Ajeet must have told her frowning mother, who must have passed the story on. But Uncle Jagindar was being unfair—anybody could have got lost in that screaming mob.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll try not to be a bad influence.” That was her own joke—Miss Calthrop at school used to talk about girls who were bad influences, but had spoiled her case by always picking on the girls who were most fun to be with. Uncle Jagindar nodded, and Nicky went up across the fields to the wood to see how the charcoal burners were getting on.
They had made an eight-foot pyramid of logs, covered them with wet bracken, and then sealed the pile with ashes and burned earth. Then the pile was lit by the tedious process of dropping embers down the central funnel and carefully blocking them in with straight sticks. A pockmarked man was in charge, because he had done the job in India. Nicky hardly knew him, as he was one of the Sikhs who was not related to the main families and spoke little English; but now he leaned on his spade by the water hole he had dug and gave orders to the two men who were building a second pyramid of logs.
Gopal came into the clearing with his father, shoving a handcart laden with more logs for the pile.
“Wouldn’t it be better sense to burn the charcoal near the log stack?” said Nicky. “Or to cut your wood from these trees here?”
“Wrong both times,” said Gopal. “Nought out of ten. You must have seasoned wood, and we were lucky to find that big stack up by the road. And you must have water
to quench the charcoal with when you take the pile to bits. If Mr. Harbans Singh hadn’t found that spring, we might have had to carry the wood all the way down to the well.”
“How long before you get any charcoal?”
“Three days, Mr. Harbans says, but the first lot may not be very good. Have you finished your bow, Risaldar?”
They all called Mr. Parnad Singh Risaldar now. It was a joke in a way, but he seemed to like it. Perhaps it reminded him of the glories of his father’s Simla club. He was an older man than the others, his beard a splendid gray waterfall. He looked up from where he was whittling at a long stave.
“In a year’s time, perhaps,” he said, “unless I can find some seasoned ash or yew before then. With something like this, I’d be lucky to kill a rabbit at twenty paces. But tell me, Nicky—if I used tempered steel from the farmyard—the right piece, I mean—would it be safe to use that?”
“I think so,” said Nicky uncertainly.
“Let’s try,” said Gopal. “There’s all sorts of metal littered about the barn.”
Halfway down the huge field two bright-colored figures were working, a man in a crimson turban and a woman in an orange sari. When the children came nearer they saw that it was Mr. Surbans Singh and his wife Mohindar, he scything, she raking. Mr. Surbans Singh had appointed himself head farmer.
“What are you doing?” called Gopal.
Mr. Surbans Singh straightened up, but his wife (whom Nicky thought the prettiest of all the Sikhs) went on tedding the grass he’d cut into a loose line.
The Changes Trilogy Page 5