Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

  He snapped down the shutter of his mind on that thought, and began to concentrate on what Sam Bulstow had reported. It was probably an invention to gain him twenty minutes off patrol duty. The rumour about the Scots sounded unlikely, though no more so than other tales that travellers had brought them — that a Chinese army was marching on London, or that gnomes and elves and men with badger faces had been seen dancing in the woods. Scope for error and ignorance seemed to grow season by season. It would be good to know what was really happening...

  Less unlikely than the legend of marching Scots was Sam’s tale of a strange packman. Densely though the thickets grew, there were ways through them and men who travelled those ways, though the isolated village of Sparcot saw little but the traffic that moved painfully up and down the Thames. Well, they must maintain their watch. Even in these more peaceful days — “the apathy that bringeth perfect peace,” thought Greybeard, wondering what he was quoting — villages that kept no guard could be raided and ruined for the sake of their food stocks, or just for madness. So they believed.

  Now he walked among tethered cows, grazing individually around the ragged radius of their halters. They were the new strain, small, sturdy, plump, and full of peace. And young! Tender creatures, surveying Greybeard from moist eyes, creatures that belonged to man but had no share of his decrepitude, creatures that kept the grass short right up to the ragged bramble bushes.

  He saw that one of the animals near the brambles was pulling at its tether. It tossed its head, rolled its eyes, and lowed. Greybeard quickened his pace.

  There seemed to be nothing to disturb the cow except a dead rabbit lying by the brambles. As he drew nearer, Greybeard surveyed the rabbit. It was freshly killed. And though it was completely dead, he thought it had moved. He stood almost over it, alert for something wrong, a faint prickle of unease creeping up his backbone.

  Certainly the rabbit was dead, killed neatly by the back of the neck. Its neck and anus were bloody, its purple eye glazed.

  Yet it moved. Its side heaved.

  Shock — an involuntary superstitious dread — coursed through Greybeard. He took a step backwards, sliding the rifle down into his hands. At the same time, the rabbit heaved again and its killer exposed itself to view.

  Backing swiftly out of the rabbit’s carcass came a stoat, doubling up its body in its haste to be clear. Its brown coat was enriched with rabbit blood, the tiny savage muzzle it lifted to Greybeard smeared with crimson. He shot it dead before it could move.

  The cows plunged and kicked. Like clockwork toys, the figures among the Brussels-sprout stumps straightened their backs. Birds wheeled up from the rooftops. The gong sounded from the guardroom, as Greybeard had instructed it should. A knot of people congregated outside the barns, hobbling together as if they might pool their rheumy eyesight.

  “Blast their eyes, there’s nothing to panic about,” Greybeard growled. But he knew the involuntary shot had been a mistake; he should have clubbed the stoat to death with the butt of his rifle. The sound of firing always woke alarm.

  A party of active sixty-year-olds assembled and began to march towards him, swinging cudgels of various descriptions. Through his irritation he had to admit that it was a prompt stand-to. There was plenty of life about the place yet.

  “It’s all right!” he called, waving his arms above his head as he went to meet them. “All right! I was attacked by a solitary stoat, that’s all. You can go back.”

  Charley Samuels was there, a big man with a sallow colour; he had his tame fox, Isaac, with him on a leash. Charley lived next door to the Timberlanes, and had been increasingly dependent on them since his wife’s death the previous spring.

  He came in front of the other men and aligned himself with Greybeard.

  “Next spring, we’ll have a drive to collect more fox cubs and tame them,” he said. “They’ll help keep down any stoats that venture onto our land. We’re getting more rats, too, sheltering in the old buildings. I reckon the stoats are driving ’em to seek shelter in human habitation. The foxes will take care of the rats too, won’t they, Isaac, boy?”

  Still angry with himself, Greybeard made off along the perimeter again. Charley fell in beside him, sympathetically saying nothing. The fox walked between them, dainty with its brush held low.

  The rest of the party stood about indecisively in midfield. Some quieted the cattle or stared at the scattered pieces of stoat; some went back towards the houses, whence others came out to join them in gossip. Their dark figures with white polls stood out against the background of fractured brick.

  “They’re half disappointed there was not some sort of excitement brewing,” Charley said. A peak of his springy hair stood out over his forehead. Once it had been the colour of wheat; it had achieved whiteness so many seasons ago that its owner had come to look on white as its proper and predestined hue, and the wheaty tint had passed into his skin.

  Charley’s hair never dangled into his eyes, although it looked as if it would after a vigorous shake of the head. Vigorous shaking was not Charley’s habit; his quality was of stone rather than fire, and in his bearing was evidence of how the years had tested his endurance. It was precisely an air of having withstood many ordeals that these two sturdy elders — in superficial appearance so unlike — had in common.

  “Though people don’t like trouble, they enjoy a distraction,” Charley said. “Funny — that shot you fired started my gums aching.”

  “It deafened me,” Greybeard admitted. “I wonder if it roused the old men of the mill?”

  He noticed that Charley glanced towards the mill to see if Mole or his henchman, Major Trouter, was coming to investigate.

  Catching Greybeard’s glance, Charley grinned rather foolishly and said, by way of something to say, “Here comes old Jeff Pitt to see what all the fuss is.”

  They had reached a small stream that wound its way across the cleared land. On its banks stood the stumps of some beeches that the villagers had cut down. From among these, the shaggy old figure of Pitt came. Over one shoulder he carried a stick from which hung the body of an animal. Though several of the villagers ventured some distance afield, Pitt was the only one who roved the wilds on his own. Sparcot was no prison for him. He was a morose and solitary man; he had no friends; and even in the society of the slightly mad, his reputation was for being mad. Certainly his face, as full of whorls as willow bark, was no reassurance of sanity; and his little eyes moved restlessly about, like a pair of fish trapped inside his skull.

  “Did someone get shot then?” he asked. When Greybeard told him what had happened, Pitt grunted, as if convinced the truth was being concealed from him.

  “With you firing away, you’ll have the gnomes and wild things paying us attention,” he said.

  “I’ll deal with them when they appear.”

  “The gnomes are coming, aren’t they?” Pitt muttered; Greybeard’s words had scarcely registered on him. He turned to gaze at the cold and leafless woods. “They’ll be here before so long, to take the place of children, you mark my words.”

  “There are no gnomes around here, Jeff, or they’d have caught you long ago,” Charley said. “What have you got on your stick?”

  Eyeing Charley to judge his reaction, Pitt lowered the stick from his shoulder and displayed a fine dog otter, its body two feet long,

  “He’s a beauty, isn’t he? Seen a lot of ’em about just lately. You can spot ’em more easily in the winter. Or perhaps they are just growing more plentiful in these parts.”

  “Everything that can still multiply is doing so,” Greybeard said harshly.

  “I’ll sell you the next one I catch, Greybeard. I haven’t forgotten what happened before we came to Sparcot. You can have the next one I catch. I’ve got my snares set along under the bank.”

  “You’re a regular old poacher, Jeff,” Charley said. “Unlike the rest of us, you’ve never had to change your job.”

  “What do you mean? Me never had to change my job? You
’re daft, Charley Samuels! I spent most of my life in a stinking machine-tool factory before the revolution and all that. Not that I wasn’t always keen on nature — but I never reckoned I’d get it at such close quarters, as you might say.”

  “You’re a real old man of the woods now, anyhow.”

  “Think I don’t know you’re laughing at me? I’m no fool, Charley, whatever you may think to yourself. But I reckon it’s terrible the way us town people have been turned into sort of half-baked country bumpkins, don’t you? What’s there left to life? All of us in rags and tatters, full of worms and the toothache! Where’s it all going to end, eh, I’d like to know? Where’s it all going to end?” He turned to scrutinize the woods again.

  “We’re doing okay,” Greybeard said. It was his invariable answer to the invariable question. Charley also had his invariable answer.

  “It’s the Lord’s plan, Jeff, and you don’t do any good by worrying over it. We cannot say what He has in mind for us.”

  “After all He’s done to us this last fifty years,” Jeff said, “I’m surprised you’re still on speaking terms with Him.”

  “It will end according to His will,” Charley said.

  Pitt gathered up all the wrinkles of his face, spat, and passed on with his dead otter.

  Where could it all end, Greybeard asked himself, except in humiliation and despair? He did not ask the question aloud. Though he liked Charley’s optimism, he had no more patience than old Pitt with the too-easy answers of the belief that nourished that optimism.

  They walked on. Charley began to discuss the various accounts of people who claimed to have seen gnomes and little men, in the woods, or on rooftops, or licking the teats of the cows. Greybeard answered automatically; old Pitt’s fruitless question remained with him. Where was it all going to end? The question, like a bit of gristle in the mouth, was difficult to get rid of; yet increasingly he found himself chewing on it.

  When they had walked right around the perimeter, they came again to the Thames at the western boundary, where it entered their land. They stopped and stared at the water.

  Tugging, fretting, it moved about a countless number of obstacles on its course — oh yes, which it took as it has ever done! — to the sea. Even the assuaging power of water could not silence Greybeard’s mind.

  “How old are you, Charley?” he asked.

  “I’ve given up counting the years. Don’t look so glum! What’s suddenly worrying you? You’re a cheerful man, Greybeard; don’t start fretting about the future. Look at that water — it’ll get where it wants to go, but it isn’t worrying.”

  “I don’t find any comfort in your analogy.”

  “Don’t you, now? Well, then, you should do.”

  Greybeard thought how tiresome and colourless Charley was, but he answered patiently. “You’re a sensible man, Charley. Surely we must think ahead? This is getting to be a pensioner’s planet. You can see the danger signs as well as I can. There are no young men and women anymore. The number of us capable of maintaining even the present low standard of living is declining year by year. We — ”

  “We can’t do anything about it. Get that firmly into your mind and you’ll feel better about the whole situation. The idea that man can do anything useful about his fate is an old idea. What do I mean? Yes, a fossil. It’s something from another period... We can’t do anything. We just get carried along, like the water in this river.”

  “You read a lot of things into the river,” Greybeard said, half laughing. He kicked a stone into the water. A scuttling and a plop followed as some small creature — possibly a water rat, for they were on the increase again — dived for safety.

  They stood silent, Charley’s shoulders a little bent. When he spoke again, it was to quote poetry.

  “ ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall

  The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

  Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath...’ ”

  Between the heavy prosaic man reciting Tennyson and the woods leaning across the river lay an incongruity. Laboriously, Greybeard said, “For a cheerful man, you know some depressing poetry.”

  “That was what my father brought me up on. I’ve told you about that mouldy little shop of his...” One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backwards in time.

  “I’ll leave you to get on with your patrol,” Charley said, but Greybeard clutched his arm. He had caught a noise upstream distinct from the sound of the water.

  He moved forward to the water’s edge and looked. Something was coming downstream, though overhanging foliage obscured details. Breaking into a trot, Greybeard made for the stone bridge, with Charley following at a fast walk behind him.

  From the crown of the bridge they had a clear view upstream. A cumbersome boat was dipping into view only some eighty yards away. By its curved bow, he guessed it had once been a powered craft. Now it was being rowed and poled along by a number of whiteheads, while a sail hung slackly from the mast. Greybeard pulled his elder whistle from an inner pocket and blew on it two long blasts. He nodded to Charley and hurried over to the water mill, where Big Jim Mole lived.

  Mole was already opening the door as Greybeard arrived. The years had yet to drain off all his natural ferocity. He was a stocky man with a fierce piggy face and a tangle of grey hair protruding from his ears as well as his skull. He seemed to survey Greybeard with nostrils as well as eyes.

  “What’s the racket about, Greybeard?” he asked.

  Greybeard told him. Mole came out smartly, buttoning his ancient army greatcoat. Behind him came Major Trouter, a small man who limped badly and helped himself along with a stick. As he emerged into the grey daylight, he began to shout orders in his high squeaking voice. People were still hanging about after the false alarm. They began to fall in promptly, if raggedly, women as well as men, into a prearranged pattern of defence.

  The population of Sparcot was a many-coated beast. The individuals that comprised it had sewn themselves into a wide variety of clothes and of rags that passed for clothes. Coats of carpet and skirts of curtain material were to be seen. Some of the men wore waistcoats cobbled from fox skins, clumsily cured; some of the women wore torn army greatcoats. Despite this variety, the general effect was colourless, and nobody stood out particularly against the neutral landscape. A universal distribution of sunken cheeks and grey hairs added to the impression of a sad uniformity.

  Many an old mouth coughed out the winter’s air. Many a back was bent, many a leg dragged. Sparcot was a citadel for the ailments: arthritis, lumbago, rheumatism, cataract, pneumonia, influenza, sciatica, dizziness. Chests, livers, backs, heads, caused much complaint, and the talk in an evening was mostly of the weather and toothache. For all that, the villagers responded spryly to the sound of the whistle.

  Greybeard observed this with approval, even while wondering how necessary it was; he had helped Trouter organize the defence system before an increasing estrangement with Mole and Trouter had caused him to take a less prominent part in affairs.

  The two long whistle blasts signified a threat by water. Though most travellers nowadays were peaceable (and paid toll before they passed under Sparcot Bridge), few of the villagers had forgotten the day, five or six years ago, when they had been threatened by a solitary river pirate armed with a flame-thrower.

  Flame-throwers seemed to be growing scarcer. Like petrol, machine guns, and ammunition, they were the produce of another century, and the relics of a vanished world. But anything arriving by water was the subject for a general stand-to.

  Accordingly, a strongly armed party of villagers — many of them carried homemade bows and arrows — was gathered along the riverside by the time the strange boat came up. They crouched behind a low and broken wall, ready to attack or defend, a little extra excitement shaking through their veins.

  The approaching boat travelled sideways to the stream. It was manned by as unruly a set of landlubbers as ever cast anchor. The oarsmen
seemed as much concerned with keeping the boat from capsizing as with making progress forward; as it was, they appeared to be having little luck in either endeavour.

  This lack of skill was due not only to the difficulty inherent in rowing a fifty-year-old, thirty-foot-long cruiser with a rotten hull, or to the presence aboard of fully a dozen people with their possessions. In the cockpit of the cruiser, struggling under the grip of four men, was a rebellious pack reindeer.

  Although the beast had been pollarded — as the custom was since one of the last authoritarian governments had introduced the animal into the country some twenty years ago — it was strong enough to cause considerable damage; and reindeer were more valuable than men. They could be used for milking and meat production when cattle were scarce, and they made good transport animals; whereas men could only grow older.

  Despite this distraction, one of the navigators, acting as lookout and standing in the bow of the boat, sighted the massed forces of Sparcot and called out a warning. She was a tall, dark woman, lean and hard, her dyed black hair knotted down under a scarf. When she called to the rowers, the promptness with which they rested on their oars showed how glad they were to do so. Someone squatting behind one of the baggages of clothing piled on deck passed the dark woman a white flag. She thrust it aloft and called out to the waiting villagers over the water.

  “What’s she yelling about?” John Meller asked. He was an old soldier who had once been a sort of batman to Mole, until the latter threw him out in exasperation as useless. Nearly ninety, Meller was as thin as a staff and as deaf as a stone, though his one remaining eye was still sharp.

  The woman’s voice came again, confident though it asked a favour. “Let us come by in peace. We have no wish to harm you and no need to stop. Let us by, villagers!”

  Greybeard bawled her message into Meller’s ear. The whitehead shook his scruffy skull and grinned to show he had not heard. “Kill the men and rape the women! I’ll take the dark-haired hussy in the front.”