The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  “Are you happy here?”

  “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.”

  “Then why don’t you leave? They can’t keep you.”

  “Because … because … oh, if only Your Highness knew how glad we all are to suffer for the Cause. Our lives are at your command, Sire. Weak woman that I am, I will fight to the last drop of blood in my veins for the day when your father shall come to his own again.”

  “My father?”

  His own inner preoccupations obliterated his irritation at her slipping gear again, and sharpened his voice with surprise, but she seemed not to notice.

  “Yes, Sire. The day is coming, and coming soon, when your royal father shall sit again upon his throne, and all shall be well with this ancient kingdom.”

  Again her hand moved up to control the straying hair, conjuring a crumb into her mouth as it passed. It was astonishing how clean and glossy her locks fell over her shoulders, considering what life she was forced to live. She was beautiful too, in a way that had no special appeal to Pibble; though her hands and nails were battered with stone-masonry, and her cheeks scooped with hunger and tiredness, yet her skin was smooth and clear and her eyes sparkled as she prattled her romantic drivel. And when the wind swirled the coarse habit round her he could see that she still carried the true male-fantasy figure—taut but generous bust, embraceable waist, wide hips—dead right for the kings of the earth in Babylon. Only her features betrayed the general effect, the extraordinary smile and the longish nose, not so well shaped as to seem characterful. Pibble could judge that even if she’d been sane she’d still have been stupid.

  Judge not that ye be not judged. She was beautiful now, by the sheer vitality of youth. But a few more months—a few more weeks, even—and the discipline of the Community would set her on the bitter road to hagdom. The first thing was to get her away; nudging her towards the grammar of sanity could wait, and had better wait, for a professional.

  Pibble had always disliked and distrusted amateurs, in any field. Now he looked towards the nearing spillage of buildings and wondered whether the sheer incompetence of the architecture wasn’t what had first set him against the then apparently inoffensive Community. Ah well, if it was all held together with cement as poor as St Bruno had been breaking up, only the truly Cyclopean sections of masonry would stand stone on stone for long.

  “My father’s truest friends are across the sea,” he said.

  “I know!” she cried, “I know!”

  “Was that why you were looking at the boat?”

  “Yes, yes! The serf was mending it, and I wanted to be certain that it would be ready for your escape.”

  “Our escape,” said Pibble.

  “Your father is here!” she whispered. “I did not know.”

  “He is in hiding—he is disguised. You must have seen him often without knowing. But you must come too, um, countess. We cannot win to safety without your guidance.”

  “Yours to the death!” she cried.

  “Hush,” he said. “Our enemies are very near. We must pretend again. The first thing is for you to conduct me to Brother Patience, to dress my wounds.”

  She dropped at once into her sullen walk, her lips moving silently for a few seconds.

  “The stones are my brothers,” she said aloud.

  “Wrong voice, countess.”

  She glanced at him with puzzled eyes and tried again.

  “Slower,” he said, “and duller.”

  This time she managed quite a convincing imitation of her Sister Rita voice. Pibble winked to encourage her, and she flushed. Then they walked in silence under the mean gateway, the curves of whose off-Gothic arch swung up in not quite symmetrical lines, so that the masons had had to contrive an inch-wide fillet to make the keystone fit. Pibble prayed as he passed under that the join had been fixed with one of the better batches of cement.

  The cloisters were loud with clacking chisels and that strange grunting mutter which accompanied the heaving of boulders. Round the first corner a group of brethren crouched down either side of a half-ton rock. Rita halted as if she and Pibble had been chattering tourists breaking into the middle of a solemn rite. Silently the whole group sank to their knees and placed their hands palm downwards on the boulder. Looking along the unfinished corridor to his left, Pibble could see the gap into which the stone would fit about three feet above the level of the paving. All together without any apparent signal, they broke into a low chant, so drilled that every, word was clear: “And it shall be on the day when ye pass over Jordan unto the land which the Lord giveth thee, that thou shalt set thee up great stones.” A few seconds’ silence and they rose in a brisk flurry, like pigeons from a wheat field.

  The little man at the head of the stone looked along the corridor and scratched his jaw.

  “Question is,” he said,“do we take her along on the rollers or do we tip her up and walk her along?”

  “Fair old distance to walk her,” said one of the others.

  “But we got the space to tip her here, see?” said the little man.

  “I reckon we could tip her there,” said the second man. “After all, we did it with a dice this big in the passage to the lonely cells.”

  “Right you are,” said the little man, “but we didn’t have to set that ’un in so high, not half.”

  “Look,” said the second man. “We roll her along, set a step for her a bit beyond, tip her on to that, set a step back this way, and I reckon we could get her up in three.”

  “We’ve got something to lash her to down there,” said the little man.

  “Rope’s been rubbing something dreadful,” said a third.

  “No use grumbling about that,” said the little man. “You heard Brother Courage say as there wasn’t no more.”

  Rita was plucking at Pibble’s sleeve, and he allowed himself to be led on, wincing now as he walked; but for his soreness he’d have liked to stay and see how the alliance of muscle and prayer coped with the formidable and risky manoeuvre of setting the huge stone into place. Brother Providence was walking along the cloisters towards them when they came round the next corner.

  “I’m afraid I’m late,” said Pibble. “I had a bit of a fall.”

  “Five minutes only, Superintendent. We have all learned to wait, we who are sealed.”

  Brother Providence spoke with donnish calm, but was watching Rita, not Pibble, and with a hot, unwinking stare. She stood her ground but Pibble thought he could sense an inward cringing, like that of a hound so used to beating that it interprets any movement as a coming blow.

  “The brother down at the harbour, the pilot, asked Sister Rita to bring me up,” he said. “He told her to take me to see Brother Patience.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Brother Providence in a preoccupied way. “Bad as that, was it? Tsk tsk. I’ll take you myself. Now, Rita, back you go to the cup and finish cutting your dice, and may the Great Mason strengthen your wrist and straighten your eye.”

  She bowed her head, turned and walked away. Only when she had vanished round the corner pillar did Brother Providence withdraw his stare from the sad, slim figure. Nasty old man, thought Pibble automatically—but no, it was not the gaze which follows the jigging hams of typists. It was Frank Truelove’s look. Frank was a colleague of Pibble’s, a hard-working and dedicated copper, with a special knack of persuading statements out of tight-lipped villains, especially young ones. Pibble had seen Frank with exactly that stare on his face in the lull of a long interrogation. Twice, he knew, Frank had only escaped sacking by the fluke of his victims­’ being part of cases too big to lose for the sake of one near-psychotic­ bobby.

  “I tried to come down the chute from the quarry,” he said. “But I lost my balance.”

  “Durus descensus Averno,” said Brother Providence, using the Old Pronunciation. “And you found our Cerberus at the bottom, I dare sa
y.”

  “Yes,” said Pibble, “Brother Love was there.”

  Whatever current Brother Providence had switched on for Rita, he had forgotten to switch off for Pibble, who had to drop his gaze to avoid the direct challenge of the yellow eyes. Yes, certainly the lust that fired them was far from drooling; no erosion of years would bring it to impotence; with such a glance do scheming patriarchs remodel codicils in their wheel-chairs, for the last pleasure of watching their heirs skip and submit.

  “It won’t take Brother Patience five minutes to patch me up,” he said. “Then perhaps you’d be kind enough to take me round and explain the work of the Community. I really am most interested. I’ve never come across an organisation like this before.”

  “Good, good,” said Brother Providence. “Patience keeps a useful little surgery. This way. We don’t make much use of it ourselves. One of the first ladders we climb on the board takes us past the ailments of the flesh. He is more concerned with balancing our diet.”

  He led Pibble along that side of the cloister, past the steps up to Sir Francis’s rooms and the niche where Brother Hope had endured his electronic vigil, round the corner and all down the blank wall of the Refectory. Straight ahead lay a finished passage, parallel to the one off which Pibble’s own cell opened. Pibble was still dazed with the irony of owing an insight to Frank Truelove, but a corner of his mind was also teased by an architectural anomaly as Brother Providence led him up this passage: there were doors on both sides of it, but those on the right couldn’t lead to anything larger than a cupboard, or if they led into cells the cells would be windowless. His own passage, which had doors only along the far side, ran too close for anything else.

  “Patience,” said Brother Providence, throwing open the furthest door without knocking, “you have a chance to prove whether your hand has lost the cunning it had in Babylon. Our guest has taken a nasty tumble.”

  Brother Patience rose from behind a rough table on which he had been working at some finicky task. Pibble recognised the box of chalks he had nursed in the helicopter. He also recognised the doctor-monk from breakfast, where he had stood out by being markedly the oldest of the Virtues—unless the scooped and wrinkled cheeks meant that the man had endured at some time a withering sickness or disease.

  “Dear me,” he said. “Take your habit off and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

  His voice was almost toneless with huskiness, like that of a true chain-smoker, though Pibble doubted if there was as much as a single fag on the island—even supposing the Community were peopled with old lags, he couldn’t see any of them being allowed to set up as tobacco barons.

  “I’ll take a turn or two round the cloisters,” said Brother Providence pleasantly, and left. Pibble stripped off his habit.

  “I banged the side of my head,” he said. “And my nose bled a bit. And I’ve done something to this hip. And I must have scraped my arse without noticing, because that’s hurting worse than anything now.”

  “Dear me,” said Brother Patience without solicitude. “When did you last have a tetanus jab, do you know?”

  “Last April.”

  “Well, that’s all right. I shall work from the top down. Perhaps you’ve cracked your skull, but that’s not as serious as it sounds, old chap. How old are you, in fact?”

  “Fifty-four.”

  “Hm. Your condition’s not bad, for Babylon. Tell me if I hurt you more than if it were normal bruising. You’ll know the difference.”

  His hands moved through Pibble’s hair, strong and confident, but trembling all the time.

  “Can’t tell without an X-ray,” he said at last. “Your ear’s never going to be as handsome as it used to be, and we’ll just have to pray that the bone’s in good nick.”

  With a curious prickle of dread Pibble realised that he meant the verb literally. The painful struggle out of his vest seemed a good moment to step onto quaggy ground.

  “Sister Rita’s a schizophrenic, isn’t she?”

  “That’s the normal jargon,” said Brother Patience after a short pause.

  “Shouldn’t she be having treatment—I mean more elaborate treatment than you can manage here?”

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Yes, but only on the surface. Shouldn’t she?”

  “You’ve caught yourself a nasty wallop, but your ribs seem sound and the contusions indicate that the blow missed your femur, though you may have chipped the top edge.”

  “Do you think, as a doctor, that the pressures of the Community are, well, the right thing for her?”

  Brother Patience sighed and straightened up.

  “When I was a doctor,” he said, “I might have agreed with you. Now that I am sealed and have moved many squares from Babylon I know that I would have been wrong. The City we are building is the answer to every patient’s need, however sick he may be in spirit or mind or flesh. From Providence to Love we are all being treated, all being trained. Take your pants down. No clinic in Babylon, however sympathetic, could give Rita the treatment she receives here, because no clinic in Babylon could truly understand the nature of her illness. Great Scott, you’ve done yourself an injury there, old chap. I’ll take those splinters out if I can find my tweezers—here we are—this is going to hurt. It is her immortal soul which is being cured, and not just the feeble mind and perishable flesh. Stand still, man. Flesh, bone, brain, nerve, id, ego, superego, that’s all nonsense. It’ll have to be iodine, as I don’t stock anything else. It doesn’t really matter what happens to them, as the only reality is the soul. This will hurt too.”

  “But wouldn’t her soul stand a better chance if the rest of her were allowed to come to terms with itself first? You seem to me to be trying her fearfully hard. Ouch.”

  “I told you it would hurt. You mustn’t think, old man, that we haven’t considered that point, in fact I’ve said much the same thing to Providence myself. He shot me down. No splinters this side, but it’s pretty raw. Grit your teeth, old man. Great Scott, what was that noise?”

  Pibble never heard the noise. At one moment he was warming towards this struck-off medico for having refrained from the joke about turning the other cheek. At the next he was weeping with remembered pain renewed.

  Father would never have beaten a child, even his own; but Ted Fasting had once caught small Jamie standing in the onion bed to reach for a copy-book which Sam had tossed over the fence for a lark. Fat, waistcoated Mr Fasting, his big face blue with insult, had larruped Jamie with a bunch of pea-sticks, holding the wriggling neck down with one greasy hand and thrashing with the other, until the blood came. Just so did the iodine bite in. In the fog of his tears Pibble could see the neat hem of turf round the sieved soil of the onion-bed; the huge, striped, brown-glistening bulbs; and the green haulms spearing upwards.

  “That should do,” said Brother Patience. “You’ll be eating off the mantelpiece for a week or so.”

  Pibble straightened and shook his head to clear the fog from his eyes. Mother had wanted to send for the Cruelty Man, but Father had strolled down the street that evening to have a chat with Mr Fasting. Thereafter a strange coolness had existed between the two families, long-lasting, quite different from the ten-day, quickly forgotten feuds which always racked the street. It was years since Pibble had thought of that beating or its aftermath, but now he realised that Father’s chat had certainly been an attempt to explain to Mr Fasting the nature of the inner drives that made him so ready to thrash the stretched buttocks of small boys.

  “Please,” said a voice from the door. Pibble recognised the lean, green-habited man who stood there; he came from the stone-shifting gang and had complained about the wear on the rope. Now his eyes shone with the first real pleasure and excitement that Pibble had seen on any countenance since he’d stepped out of the helicopter—unless you counted the doggy ecstasy in Brother Love’s starlit eyes.

 
“Yes,” said Brother Patience in the universal tone of doctors interrupted at their job. Pibble tenderly pulled up his pants.

  “Brother Providence says to come, please,” said the man. “The rope busted and we dropped a whopping dice on Gav’s ankle. You should have heard him holler.”

  “We did,” said Brother Patience calmly, and strode out. Pibble edged into his vest, but before he had his habit on the doctor was back to pick up the big octagonal bottle of iodine and four or five old bandages out of a drawer. Nothing to allay pain, Pibble noticed; no morphia, not even any aspirin; only the agonising disinfectant.

  Dressed, Pibble mooned about. The surgery was as poorly equipped as any witch-doctor’s: two clinical thermometers in a dusty jug; a stethoscope; a sweet-jar full of senna-pods; a bottle of white pills labelled cortisone, such as Sir Francis had frowned over at breakfast; volume one of a dictionary of diseases. Beside the carton of chalks on the table was a pestle and mortar with a little white powder in the bottom; two mixing bowls, one clean and one containing the yolk of an egg with the hard scum of exposure to air on it; an egg-shell; a lozenge tin containing six more white pills; and a curious bit of soldered metal, like a doll’s baking-tin, in which the doll could have baked eight teacakes the size of a pill.

  Pibble stared at the collection, humming, forgetting his pains. Um. Order school chalk from the mainland, grind it up; mix it with white of egg; bake eight pills overnight; give the old man two; that leaves six; put them in a lozenge-tin. Pibble hunted through drawers and found nothing that could conceivably be poison. So there ought to be a couple of days to play with, surely.

  Best not be found in too Nosey-Parkerish an occupation. He put everything back as near as possible where it had been and picked up the only reading matter in the room.

  A naked, moon-faced mulatto was the subject of the drab photograph on the page where the book opened; he was posed sideways to show the characteristic striations on the hips—some adrenal deficiency, according to the text. The next entry woke the unreliable goblin who presided over Pibble’s memory. “Who would not weep if Addison were he?” said the goblin. The Bartons’ lodger had had Addison’s disease, a malfunction of the adrenal gland. The salt was part of his treatment.