Theodosia Pretorius watched the horde of stormers which smothered the green of the slope. Instead of turning the field of battle dark, the pale colours of normal, everyday tunics made it iridescent as the onrushing foam of a broken wave. She was appalled to see a sprinkling of women among the men. But why not? It could not be assumed that Silvia Brown was the only one who valued bloodstained patriotism above peace and prosperity.
She became aware that she was very much alone at her west window. The secretariat, seeing that there was no hope of the attack being repulsed by the sentries at the main gate or any available reinforcements, had now fled across to the east wing where they hoped at least for mercy. Curiosity – human or professional – had held her where she was. Her father had retired to his private suite, where he could weep without witnesses. Tito Pezulu had sneaked in time down to the town where, by now unrecognisable, he was probably hidden away among his secret agents. The only other authority who could advise her what to do, that absurd soldier Aranda, was buzzing about the interior courtyard and garden, no doubt shouting orders to which nobody would give any attention.
She crossed the room and looked out into the courtyard. Aranda was indeed buzzing about and shouting orders. With a handful of men he had blocked the main gate with a curious machine not unlike the wide mouth of a dragon set with tubes instead of teeth, and was supervising the loading of racks of ammunition into its grey belly. Whatever it was, it had been driven into position just in time. The wave of insurgents had already engulfed the terrace.
As she was crossing the room back to her former position she heard the roar of the discharge and involuntarily ducked. It was a rippling roar, perhaps resembling the chatter of machine guns of which one read in histories of war, or the spaced explosion of tactical atomic bombs laying waste their colossal avenues of death immediate or death deferred.
The view from the west window had utterly changed. There was plenty of green now to be seen on the slope and tiny rivulets of red were seeking the edge of the terrace. Here and there men still stood upright, isolated and unwounded, among others who lay still or crawled or wriggled. Those who could run ran back and reformed in the dead ground halfway down the slope. She could distinguish the formation of groups and their leaders. The obvious course was to split into columns and take one of the two undefended gates by flank attack. They tried. The sight of their own dead did not stop them. But meanwhile the dragon had boldly emerged into the open. So far as she could tell not one of the British got further than the terrace.
The green gap between defenders and attackers was now silent or, rather, gave an impression of silence in spite of the groans and cries of the wounded which formed a background like the loud chattering of birds in the silence of dawn. From the front ranks of the British a single woman strode out dressed in white and leading a child by the hand. She had no need of speech or gestures; the meaning of her steady advance to death was plain to everyone. It was not an offer of surrender, nor any heroic attempt to restore the morale of the defeated. It was protest.
On and on the two walked until they reached the terrace, the white-clad woman upright as a statue, the child trusting its mother to lead it safely through this adult hell. One man of the many thousands responded to her unspoken message: the soldier who had killed from duty, not from hate, the soldier trained to accept the cost of the guilt he must conceal. Aranda paced out from the gate and saluted her. He then lifted her hand, stood for a moment by her side facing the half-formed columns of the attack, and led her back onto the grass.
Below them, into that deadly gap where spiritual courage had made a space for peace, ventured the first ambulances and stretcher-bearers weeping and vomiting, helpless from lack of experience, but taking advantage of the silence and hesitation of the adversaries. It was the end.
Chapter VI
After three intolerable days of withdrawal into a divided self, Thea had sought assurance from the neutral forest: not for physical safety, since the Residency was no longer in any danger, but safety for her opinions and personality. The courage of those British immigrants had deeply impressed her, let alone the still greater courage of that unknown woman who had stopped the massacre by the offer of herself and her child. And why and how had the professional soldier instantly understood her gesture, this Arpad Aranda whom she had always pictured as a cold representative of the outdated ‘art’ of war and quite unmoved by the inhumanity of it.
Were nationalism and its attendant patriotism such deadly crimes? Well, of course they were. Yet there remained in her mind the splendour of willingness to die for such follies. All she had been brought up to believe and did believe was for the moment in question. Her father could be of no help; his ideals were fixed and unshakeable, and she would not have him any different. Humphrey of Middlesex, however, with his humour and his curious grasp of essentials might restore her equanimity. Within his tribe and his family the problem of nationalism and patriotism were unknown and unneeded.
She told her father where she would be. As always he disapproved but did accept that his Thea’s emotions were overwhelmed and that if she chose to continue her researches in the forest that might be as healthy for her as a return to Africa. He sent with her an escort of four armed police with orders – on her insistence – to leave her as soon as she entered the forbidden territory. No police were necessary. When she left Avebury streets were empty and houses were shut to keep out the dawn.
She sat down on a fallen trunk much farther into the wilderness than even the most adventurous child had ever dared to go. How and by whom her presence would be noticed she could not know, but she was certain that it would be. Humphrey’s need of up-to-date intelligence from the outer world meant that someone unseen and unsuspected would be watching the open ground of Avebury.
She was in a temple of the trees; nothing but their pillars held up the sky, a sky which stayed invisible except in patches where bramble and tall bracken could find a way to the sun. It was not from this ground cover that George of Middlesex appeared, but from the mass of trunks where a man, still and upright as they, could glide from one to another to reach his objective.
‘All quiet?’ he asked.
‘Except in their hearts and ours.’
‘No more Landa Fope?’
‘I liked the tune.’
‘Perhaps that is all that matters. Well, I’ve sent back a runner with the good news of your arrival. We’ll have to walk an hour and a bit till we pick up my tandem. Horses this time, Thea! None of Humphrey’s grunting bullocks.’
The path twisted between tree trunks over the dead leaves and more directly through the patches of undergrowth where George led the way, slashing down branches of thorn and drooping nettles which might have touched her. After an hour of easy walking they came out into an open glade where two slender ponies were grazing. Near them was a curious vehicle with two large, light wheels between which the driver sat. Behind it was a two-wheeled trailer covered by a thick mattress.
‘My emergency ambulance, Thea. I take it whenever I want to get a patient – or sometimes myself – away quickly.’
Seeing that she kept a careful distance from the ponies, he told her to touch them.
‘Stroke their noses and pat their necks. They enjoy attention just like you and I.’
Nervously she did so, and found that the bite she expected turned out to resemble a kiss.
‘How did they survive the cold and darkness and poisonous grass?’ she asked.
While he harnessed the two ponies to the trap, one in front of the other, George answered her with a story of the far past.
‘By Love,’ he said. ‘There was a dying stallion on the downs, perhaps not far from Avebury, and with him his dying trainer. The trainer was never very clear how he came to clean food and water. He swore that a passer-by had led them to a barn but he saw no more of the man and would sometimes say that he had dreamed him. However, he cherished and fed his stallion till it could walk firmly and he himself ate whatever
he could find in the burnt villages of the deserted land. They walked side by side to the west and there he met another like himself who loved his beasts and had kept alive the two last mares of the little moorland breed. It was he who wrote down the story for us as best he could. Together they helped the stallion to cover the mares, believing that must be the purpose of the dream, if it was a dream. Soon afterwards the stallion died and with him his trainer having nothing more to give to life. But from the mares came a colt and a filly and from them all our horses are descended.’
When the pair of ponies were ready in their traces he placed Thea in the trailer on her back and strapped her in.
‘You’re going to bump up and down a bit,’ he told her, ‘but that won’t bother you. There’s a foot of goose feathers between you and the floor. Give me a yell if you feel sick and we’ll take it much slower.’
He mounted to the box and the tandem trotted neatly away. The path was sometimes a ribbon of grass under a patchwork of leaves, sometimes a tunnel under branches, and always so narrow that it would be possible for one man to keep miles of it in perfect condition. That, she supposed, was why this vehicle itself was so very narrow. The bumps neither threw George off his seat nor her off her goose feathers, but the journey to the east reminded her of being tossed in a blanket for fun when she was a child. Though neither bruised nor seasick she was thankful when George unstrapped her and set her on her feet.
So there were inns, too, in this land. A low house stood in a clearing with its garden running down to a leisurely river. At the beat of the tireless little hooves, a woman came out and greeted George with a delight in which there was no shade of deference. She was tall with the gracious slimness of age, grey hair loose on her shoulders and dressed in a jerkin and skirt of supple leather.
‘Got a room for the lady?’ George asked.
‘If she don’t mind the barn owl. I’ll tell him to stop his snoring.’
‘Give him a fat mouse with my compliments when he comes home. And what have you for her?’
‘Trout tonight and beauties, Mr George.’
‘Ha! Miss Pretorius is in luck.’
‘Pretorius? I’ve heard that name somewhere. Devon, maybe?’
Neither of them commented. Thea, noticing that the landlady spoke poor Federal, switched the conversation to Old English. Avebury and the whole damned Federation were blessedly far away.
‘Now I must leave you,’ George said, ‘but you needn’t have a care in the world. If I pick you up early we shall reach Humphrey in the late afternoon.’
‘You have patients here?’
‘Yes. One who has a cough I don’t like, but we must all die sometime; another who will be fit again if he surrenders himself as I tell him to the wind in the rushes. And there is a tree, the tallest oak, it is said, in all Britain, to whose life I must pray, giving thanks for my horses and, such as they are, for my gifts.’
‘I thought you were all atheists. That’s what Schröder says.’
‘He did not understand. We are animists. We give thanks to the purpose wherever its Glory is manifest – in the egg which carries the colours of a butterfly, in the seed which contains the shape and destiny of an oak, in a universe which obeys its own laws. Your scientists know the how but neither we nor they know the why. I think that scientists never did, even before the Age of Destruction. Yet the why is there and the spirits who are not blinded by material can sometimes give the answer.’
‘Can you see them?’ she asked, vaguely thinking of Pezulu and his warnings of the night.
‘That depends on who looks and gives them praise.’
Her room was simple and spotless, lit when the forest swallowed the sun by a large candle with the incense smell of resin. Except for the candle and the owl it might have been anywhere in the remoter provinces of the Federation. The owl’s quarters consisted of a long, dark box at ceiling level, the entrance outside and on the inside a grating which allowed conversation, if desired, with any fellow occupant of the room.
The owl was preening plumage before leaving for the evening; with enormous eyes he observed Thea and the landlady who presented him with a dead mouse, still warm, with the compliments of George, and requested him not to snore when he returned home. Thea could have sworn there was a change in the luminous eyes at the mention of George.
‘Does he understand what you say to him?’ she asked.
‘Well, as he don’t answer back I don’t know. But Mr George and he don’t need words. He’s a very reverent owl, Mr George says.’
Thea approached her grilled trout with caution, for the only fish familiar to her were the federally approved fingers sometimes modelled of fish paste to resemble the living creature. Daringly she asked for a glass of beer, and sat over her meal trying to make sense of George as apparently a doctor of men and a priest of animals, a very different character from the enchantingly regal Humphrey. But even Humphrey, she remembered, when she asked him the meaning of the Old English word ‘Glory’, had spoken mysteriously of the Glory of the Purpose.
She went to bed early, feeling slightly pulped in spite of the merciful goose feathers. The owl woke her up when he landed heavily in their common home. She dozed off again to the rhythm of his snoring – for he did snore – annoyed with her imagination for sleepily insisting that he was repeating over and over again the first syllable of ‘Humphrey’.
She was already up and in the riverside garden when dawn greeted her. Greeted was the right word. In the cities of the Federation, dawn did not greet; it arrived in a business-like manner, welcome or not. Here the birds, the plopping of the fish, the unfolding of the buds resumed the Purpose of the day. She found herself using in thought the brothers’ name for God. Like most Euro-Africans she had no religious beliefs. But it did occur to her that if communion with nature had continued undisturbed for seven hundred years, a personal name for that Unity was not needed and atheism meaningless.
George and his tandem trotted out of the forest. The owl drifted from its bedroom and silently swung twice above them while the ponies’ heads followed the white ghost with companionable interest. She was strapped on to the trailer again, mildly complaining. All the same, she had begun to be fascinated by the curious viewpoint of the track that had been passed rather than the track ahead, of the exuberance of vegetation above her rather than the long vista of crowded trunks through which the ponies must wind their way.
On their arrival after the long day she was resurrected to a splendour of welcome and carried off by the Dowager, indignant at George’s method of transport, to the guest room prepared for her, to rest and a bath. In spite of the primitive resources of this haunting palace, her mother, she thought, could hardly have done better if receiving the President of the Federation. She had not expected such comfort – had not expected anything more than peace – and had entered the forest with only a pack on her back containing the bare necessities for a travelling ethnologist, to which she had added a close-fitting robe of deep emerald and gold with a high neck and flowing sleeves in case there was a chance to wear it for Humphrey’s delectation.
The chance was now. Breeches and boots were hardly ceremonious enough for the preparations in the courtyard which she observed from her window: a table of heavy, polished timber, seats of carved benches, magnificent silver. As night fell, four braziers set on poles gave clear red flames reflected in the table and the pool. Emerald and gold, she decided, were exactly right for the shapes and shadows beyond the flames. The High Commissioner’s daughter swept gallantly out to join the family, somewhat embarrassed to find the Dowager still in her woollen sack of a garment though now wearing on her grey hair the same golden circlet as Humphrey with the badge of the perched owl, like a third barbaric eye, over her forehead.
The conversation ran easily over George’s ambulance until Humphrey, sitting on her left, remarked:
‘Not afraid of us any more, Thea?’
‘No. To be here again is like coming home after – after all the ag
ony of a hospital which tries to save and can’t.’
‘Do you care so much what happens to the immigrants?’
‘I care because we have failed so terribly. It was such a wonderful experiment to return them to the land of their dreams. I’ve grown up with it, you see. And now there’s a people beaten and massacred and a girl going to be deported and imprisoned as a bit more example to them. And all it does is to turn them sullen. They won’t work and won’t speak to us and they don’t care if they die of starvation so long as they do die.’
‘We call that a General Strike,’ Humphrey said.
Guelph added that he had joined the strike himself last time, that the Middlesexes couldn’t always be allowed to have their own way.
‘And bitterness doesn’t remain?’ she asked.
‘Not long. It’s an old tradition and it works. But we have never had to see what you have seen.’
She spoke more quietly, trying to lend herself to the calm of the forest.
‘The dead were peaceful. It’s not the sights – it’s the lies. You watch the lies changing their faces like illness, even my father’s face. How can they say he did this horrible thing?’
‘Because he’s a mystery to them, so powerful and yet so compassionate. What beats me is that they believe Pezulu Pasha did. He couldn’t be anything but correct. A policeman doesn’t rape. He nudges.’
Thea smiled, but the memories were too vivid. She shivered and broke down in a single deep sob.
‘We shouldn’t dine out of doors in September,’ Humphrey said, ‘but we go on as long as we can.’
He threw a rich cape of squirrel fur over her shoulders. She reached up a hand, ostensibly to adjust the collar, and imperceptibly held his.
Arrows of Desire Page 6
