Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

  They roared past the army lorry without touching it, all four of them instinctively watching and yelling. Their offside headlight struck the soldier before he could turn. His rifle went flying. Like a bag of cement, he was flung against one of the concrete blocks. Something screamed as they scraped past the barrier: steel on stone. As they lurched across the bridge, the third vehicle in the convoy loomed up ahead of them.

  From the wooden sentry post they had passed, a machine gun woke into action. Bullets clattered against the grating across the back of their truck, making the inside ring like a steel drum. The windscreen of the vehicle ahead shattered; new rips bloomed sharp across its old canvas. With a whistle of tires, it slewed off to one side. The driver flung open his door, but fell back into the cab as it canted to the other side. Bumping and jarring, it smashed through railings down the embankment towards the railway line below.

  Timberlane had swerved in the other direction to avoid hitting the lorry. Only the accident that overtook it enabled him to get past it. They lurched forward again, and the road was clear ahead. The machine gun was still barking, but the lie of the land sheltered them from it.

  If Studley had not collapsed at that point, and had to be rested in a deserted village called Sparcot, where other refugees were gathering, they might have made it down to Devon. But Studley had the cholera; and a paranoiac called Mole arrived to turn them into a fortified outpost; and a week later severe rains washed out a host of opportunities. The halt at Sparcot lasted for eleven long grey years.

  Looking back to that time, Martha reflected on the way in which the nervous excitement of their stay at Cowley had embalmed it in memory, so that it all came back easily. The years that followed were less clear, for they had been dulled by misery and monotony. The death of Studley; the deaths of several others of that original bunch of refugees; the appearance of Big Jim Mole, and the quarrels as he distributed them among the deserted houses of the village; the endless struggle, the fights over women; the abandonment of hope, convention, and lipstick; these were now like figures in a huge but faded tapestry to which she would not turn again.

  One event in those days (ah, but the absence of children had been a sharper wound in her mind then!) remained with her clearly, because she knew it still fretted her husband. That was their bartering of the DOUCH(E) truck, during the second winter at Sparcot, when they were all lightheaded from starvation. They exchanged it for a cartload of rotting fish, parsnips, and vitamin pills belonging to a one-eyed wandering hawker. She and Algy had haggled with him throughout one afternoon, to watch him in the end drive away into the dusk in their truck. In the darkness of that winter, their miseries had reached their deepest point.

  Several men, among them the ablest, had shot themselves. It was then that Eve, who was mistress to Trouter, bore a child with no deformity. She had gone mad and run away. A month later her body and the baby’s were found in a wood nearby.

  In that vile winter Martha and Greybeard had organized lectures, not entirely with Mole’s approval. They had spoken on history, on geography, on politics, on the lessons to be learned from life; but as all their subject matter was necessarily drawn from an existence that died even as they spoke, the lectures were a failure. To the hunger and deprivation had been added something more sinister: a sense that there was no longer a place on earth for mind.

  Someone had invented a brief-lived phrase for that feeling: “the brain curtain.” Certainly the brain curtain had descended that winter with a vengeance.

  In January, the fieldfares brought their harsh song of Norway to Sparcot. In February, cold winds blew and snow fell every day. In March, the sparrows mated on the crusted and dirty piles of ice. Only in April did a softer air return.

  During that month Charley Samuels married Iris Ryde. Charley and Timberlane had fought together in the war, years earlier, when both had formed part of the Infantop Corps. It had been a good day when he arrived at the motley little village. When he married, he moved his bride into the house next to Martha and Algy. Six years later, Iris died of the cancer that, like sterility, was an effect of the Accident.

  That had been an ill time. And all the while they had laboured under Mole’s fears, hardly aware of the imposition. To get away was like a convalescence: one looks back and sees for the first time how ill one has been. Martha recalled how eagerly they had conspired with nature, encouraging the roads to decay, sealing them off from the dangerous world outside, and how anxiously they guarded Sparcot against the day when Croucher’s forces moved to overwhelm them.

  Croucher never came to Sparcot. He died from the pandemic that killed so many of his followers and converted his stronghold into a morgue. By the time the disease had run its course large organizations had gone the way of large animals; the hedges grew, the copses heaved their shoulders and became forests; the rivers spread into marshland; and the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities.

  Chapter Three

  The River: Swifford Fair

  Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long. The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.

  In the sharp winter’s air their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt’s pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.

  In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them. Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.

  Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt’s boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.

  His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange, spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.

  Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher’s guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher’s ways.

  Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsociable disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully at the ruffled winter landscape through which they journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.

  Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after leaving the inn where they found the sheep, they smelled woodsmoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.

  “My God, the gnomes!” he exclaimed. “There’s one of them for sure!”

  On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crotch and called t
o them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed, mesmerized, towards it.

  By the time they reached the bank the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.

  He was a lively octogenarian, judging by appearances, a sprightly grotesque with a tatter of red and violet capillaries running from one cheekbone to another over the alp of his nose. His beard and topknot formed one continuous conflagration of hair, tied bottom and top below jaw and above crown, and dyed a deep tangerine. He danced like a skeleton and motioned to them.

  “Are you alone? Can we put in here?” Greybeard called.

  “I don’t like the look of him — let’s press on,” Jeff Pitt called, labouring his boat up through the panes of ice. “We don’t know what we’re letting ourselves in for.”

  The skeleton cried something unintelligible, jumping back when Greybeard climbed ashore. He clutched some red and green beads that hung around his neck.

  “Sirrer vine daver zwimmin,” he said.

  “Oh — fine day for swimming! You have been swimming? Isn’t it cold? Aren’t you afraid of cutting yourself on the ice?”

  “Warreryer zay? Diddy zay zomminer bout thize?”

  “He doesn’t seem to understand me any better than I can understand him,” Greybeard remarked to the others in the boats. But with patience he managed to penetrate the skeleton’s thick accent. His name appeared to be Norsgrey, and he was a traveller. He was staying with his wife, Lita, in the barn they saw through the ash trees. He would welcome the company of Greybeard and his party.

  Like Charley’s fox, the sheep were all on tethers. They were made to jump ashore, where they immediately began cropping the harsh grasses. The humans dragged their boats up and secured them. They stood stretching themselves, to force the chill and stiffness from their limbs. Then they made towards the barn, moving their legs painfully. As they became used to the skeleton’s accent, what he had to say became more intelligible, though in content his talk was wild.

  His preoccupation was with badgers.

  Norsgrey believed in the magical power of badgers. He had a daughter, he told them, who would be nearly sixty now, who had run off into the woods (“when they was a-seeding and a-branching themselves up to march forth and strangle down the towns of man”) and she had married a badger. There were badger men in the woods now who were her sons, and badger girls her daughters, black and white in their faces, very lovely to behold.

  “Are there stoats around here?” Martha asked, cutting off what threatened to be a long monologue.

  Old Norsgrey paused outside the barn and pointed into the lower branches of a tree.

  “There’s one now, a-looking down at us, Mrs Lady, sitting in its wicked little nest as cute as you like. But he won’t touch us ’cause he knows as I’m related to the badgers by mattterrimony.”

  They stared and could see only the pale grey twigs of ash thrusting black-capped into the air.

  Inside the barn, an ancient reindeer lay in the half-dark, its four broad hoofs clumped together. Becky gave a shriek of surprise as it turned its ancient sullen face towards them. Hens clucked and scattered at their entrance.

  “Don’t make a lot of row,” Norsgrey warned them. “Lita’s asleep, and I don’t want her wakened. I’ll turn you out if you disturb her, but if you’re quiet, and give me a bite of supper, I’ll let you stay here, nice and warm and comfortable — and safe from all those hungry stoats outside.”

  “What ails your wife?” Towin asked. “I’m not staying in here if there’s illness.”

  “Don’t you insult my wife. She’s never had an illness in her life. Just keep quiet and behave.”

  “I’ll go and get our kit from the boat,” Greybeard said. Charley and the fox came back to the river with him. As they loaded themselves, Charley spoke with some show of embarrassment, looking not at Greybeard but at the cool grey landscape.

  “Towin and his Becky would have stayed at the place where the dead man sat in his kitchen,” he said. “They didn’t care to come any farther, but we persuaded them. That’s right, isn’t it, Greybeard?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Right. What I want to ask you, then, is this. How far are we going? What are you planning? What have you got in mind?”

  Greybeard looked at the river.

  “You’re a religious man, Charley. Don’t you think God might have something in mind for us?”

  Charley laughed curtly. “That would sound better if you believed in God yourself. But suppose I thought He had in mind for us to settle down here, what would you do? I don’t see what you are aiming on doing.”

  “We’re not far enough from Sparcot to stop yet. They might make an expedition and catch us here.”

  “You know that’s nonsense as well as I do. Truth of the matter is, you don’t really know where you want to go, or why, isn’t that it?”

  Greybeard looked at the solid face of the man he had known for so long. “Each day I become more sure. I want to get to the mouth of the river, to the sea.”

  Nodding, Charley picked up his equipment and started to trudge back towards the barn. Isaac led the way. Greybeard made as if to add something, then changed his mind. He did not believe in explaining. To Towin and Becky, this journey was just another hardship; to him, it was an end in itself. The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone. He did not have to explain it to Martha; she knew, she felt as he did in that respect.

  Distantly, he heard music.

  He looked about him with a tingle of unease, recalling the tales Pitt and others told of gnomes and little people, for this was a little music. But he realized it came to him over a long distance. Was it — he had almost forgotten the name of the instrument — an accordion?

  He went thoughtfully back to the barn, and asked Norsgrey about it. The old man, sprawling with his back to the reindeer’s flank, looked up keenly through his orange hair.

  “That would be Swifford Fair. I just come from there, done a bit of trading. That’s where I got my hens.” As ever, it was hard to make out what he was saying.

  “How far’s Swifford from here?”

  “Road will take you quicker than the river. A mile as the crow flies. Two miles by road. Five by your river. I’ll buy your boat from you, give you a good price.”

  They did not agree to that, but they gave the old man some of their food. The sheep they had killed ate well, cut up into a stew and flavoured with some herbs that Norsgrey supplied from his little cart. When they ate meat, they took it in the form of stews, for stews were kindest to old teeth and tender gums.

  “Why doesn’t your wife come and eat with us?” Towin asked. “Is she fussy about strangers or something?”

  “She’s asleep like I told you, behind that blue curtain. You leave her alone — she’s done you no harm.”

  The blue curtain was stretched across one corner of the barn, from the cart to a nail on the wall. The barn was now uncomfortably full, for they brought the sheep in with them at dusk. They made uneasy bedfellows with the hens and the old reindeer. The glow of their lamps hardly reached up to the rafters. Those rafters had ceased to be living timber two and a half centuries before. Other life now took refuge in them: grubs, beetles, larvae, spiders, chrysalises slung to the beams with silken threads, fleas and their pupae in swallows’ nests, awaiting their
owners’ return in the next unfailing spring. For these simple creatures, many generations had passed since man contrived his own extinction,

  “Here, how old was you reckoning I was?” Norsgrey asked, thrusting his colourful countenance into Martha’s face.

  “I wasn’t really thinking,” Martha said sweetly.

  “You was thinking about seventy, wasn’t you?”

  “I really was not thinking. I prefer not to think about age; it is one of my least favourite subjects.”

  “Well, think about mine, then. An early seventy you’d say, wouldn’t you?”

  “Possibly.”

  Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain.

  “Well, let me tell you that you’d be wrong, Mrs Lady — ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won’t believe me.”

  “Go on, how old are you?” Towin asked, growing interested. “Eighty-five, I’d say you were. I bet you’re older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate.”

  “They don’t have years with numbers attached anymore,” Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. “You won’t believe this, Mrs Lady, but I’m close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two-hundredth birthday next week.”

  Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, “You look well for your age.”

  “You’re never two hundred, no more than I am,” Towin said scornfully.

  “That I am. I’m two hundred, and what’s more I shall still be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried.”

  Towin leaned forward and kicked the old man’s boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man’s flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.