Greybeard
Page 27
On the floor, huddled under a pair of badger skins, lay a small boy. One of the skins was fastened low about his body, providing him with an additional pair of legs; the other was fixed so that its mask covered the boy’s face. In addition, his lean body was smeared with coloured paint or mud. In his belt was a small knife. The rifle shot had gone through his thigh. He was unconscious and losing blood rapidly.
Charley and Pitt dropped onto their knees beside Greybeard as he pulled aside the badger skin. The wound was a disease feeding on the smooth flesh of the boy’s leg.
They hardly heard Jingadangelow blubbering over them. “They’d have killed me but for you, Greybeard. Little savages! You saved my life! The vicious little blighters were lying in wait for me! I caught Chammoy near here, and I think they were after her. Little savages! I mustn’t let my followers find me here! I must still be the Master! It is my destiny, curse it.”
Pitt went over to him, facing him squarely. “We don’t want to see anything more of you. Shut your noise up and get out of here.”
Jingadangelow pulled himself erect. “Do you imagine I’d care to stay?”
He staggered out of the barn into the befoliaged night as Martha applied a tourniquet to the boy’s leg. As she tightened it, the child’s eyes opened, gazing up at the pattern of shadows on the roof. She leaned over and smiled down at him.
“Whoever you are, it’s going to be all right, darling,” she said.
The dinghy was off early next morning, with Pitt’s boat trailing behind it. Pitt sat in it alone, nodding to himself, sometimes grinning and rubbing his nose. When they left Hagbourne, the day was overcast, but as they moved on to the next stage of the journey that they hoped would one day take them to the mouth of the river, the sun broke through the clouds and the wind freshened.
The mouldering strip of harbour, with the Second Generation steamer tied up alongside it, was deserted. To their relief, none of Jingadangelow’s party had appeared to give them a send-off, hostile or otherwise. When they were some way out, a solitary figure appeared on the shore and waved to them; they were too far away to identify it.
Greybeard and Charley shipped their oars as the breeze took the sail, and the former went to sit at the tiller beside Martha. They looked at each other but did not speak.
His thoughts were heavy. The fraudulent Master was right in at least one respect: human hands were turned against children in practice, if not in theory. He himself had fired at the first child he had been close to! Perhaps there was some kind of filicidal urge in man forcing him to destruction.
It was clear at least that the drive to self-preservation was strong in the new generation — and since they were so very thin on the ground, that was well. They were wary of man. By their dress it was clear they identified themselves more with the animal kind than with the crazy Methusalehs who still inhabited the earth. Well, in a few more years, things would be easier for them.
“They can be taught not to fear us,” Greybeard said absently. “After that vital lesson, we should be able to give them plenty of help.”
“Of course it must be as you say. But they’re virtually a new race — perhaps ideally they should not be taught not to fear us,” Martha said. She laid a hand across his shoulder as she rose.
Greybeard chewed over the implications of that remark as he watched her walk forward. She bent over the improvised stretcher, smiling as she began gently to change young Arthur’s bandage. For a minute her husband looked at her, her hands, her face, and at the child solemnly staring up into her eyes.
Then he turned his head, resting one hand on his rifle while with the other he shaded his brow and pretended to gaze ahead at the horizon where the hills were.