The other boys in white were coming across the field towards us, staring. They knew strangers when they saw them, even if their teacher didn’t. Quite a few of them drifted away behind us as we walked. Adam was signaling to them. I heard snatches of whispers.
“I know. It would be old Smitty!”
“Right then. After that.” And muffled laughter.
We got to the middle of the field where the game happened. There were two sets of three little sticks stuck in the ground some way apart, and that was all. It was the most mysterious game I ever encountered. The schoolmaster wandered away to one side. “Right. Start again from the beginning of the over,” he said. Then he looked at the sky and seemed to enter a private dream. This game bored him.
Two boys approached Joris and me with derisive smiles and handed each of us a pair of large white things with buckles flapping off them. They looked like the kind of splints you might wear if you had broken both legs. But I rather thought they were to stop your legs getting broken. The other boys stood round us in a ring. “Get those pads on,” one of them said. “You two are batting.”
There were at least twenty boys. Joris gave me a dubious look. I gave him a helpless one. Joris shrugged, and we both buckled the splints to our legs. They were huge. When I had them on, I could only walk with both legs wide apart, as if I were wading. By this time I was hating Adam. I didn’t care if Rule Two got him. What better way to stop a person running away than to buckle his legs into dirty great splints?
When we were ready, they handed us each a long wooden bat and pushed each of us in front of a set of three sticks. Most of them spread out all round. The big boy picked up a red ball from somewhere and marched off beyond Joris with it. Joris turned round to stare after him, puzzled—and then turned back as the boy broke into a gallop and charged up beside him. The boy’s arm whirled. Joris stuck up one elbow, thinking he was going to be hit. But the red ball whizzed out of the boy’s hand and came straight at me instead, at the other end.
I saw it coming and dodged. Lucky I did. That ball was hard as a bullet. There was a wooden clatter beside me, and all three sticks fell down.
The schoolmaster came out of his dream. “Wasn’t that out?”
“Oh no, sir,” said a chorus of voices. “The wicket just fell down.”
They built the sticks up again, and the big boy once more did his gallop up to Joris. But Joris, this time, had decided that his part in the game must be to stop the big boy victimizing me like this. He stuck his bat into the boy’s stomach as the boy whirled his arm. The ball flew up into the air. The boy sat down.
“No ball!” shouted everyone. I was glad. I thought they had lost it.
The big boy bounced up and stuck his face into Joris’s. I couldn’t hear what they said, but I could see it was a fairly heated argument. Other boys gathered round and joined in. Joris’s voice rose out of the crowd. “I’m damned if I’m going to stand here and watch while you throw red stones at him!”
A boy came out of the crowd, grinning rather, and approached Adam. Adam was standing near me and wearing splints too, making sure I didn’t sneak off. “They don’t know the first thing about it!”
“I can see that,” Adam said. “They’ll have to learn, won’t they?”
“Come along, boys,” said the schoolmaster, turning from the sky again.
The ball wasn’t lost. The big boy took it and threw it at me five more times. These times, Joris stood glowering at the other end and did nothing but mutter remarks at the boy. I was left quite undefended. But I managed to dodge every time but once, when the ball somehow dodged with me and hit me on the leg. I was forced to hop about, which gave the boys a great deal of pleasure.
Then everyone walked about a little. While they did, Adam looked at me with contempt. “You’re supposed to hit the ball,” he said, and then trudged off to stand behind Joris.
Another boy came up beside me with a sort of waddling wander, squeezing the ball in his hands as he came. Then he threw it at Joris. By now, Joris had resigned himself to just standing there. He only noticed the ball at the last minute. I think it made him angry. Anyway, he hit it. I told you Joris was athletic. There was an almighty clop, and the ball soared out of sight.
Immediately, everyone began shouting at us. “Run!”
Naturally, Joris and I both dropped our bats and ran for our lives. We both thought the ball was coming down on us. And, once we were running, we both thought we might as well go on and escape.
“No!” shouted everyone. “Come back!” Most of them ran after us. Meanwhile the ball came down and just missed the schoolmaster.
They caught us fairly quickly. I couldn’t run in those splints. Joris could, but he waited for me. “Can’t you let us go now?” he said, as they all came up. “You’ve had your fun.”
“Certainly not,” said Adam. “I want my trousers back—my way. Can you two arch-cretins get it into your heads that a run means from one set of sticks to the other? Backwards and forwards.”
So we went back and did it Adam’s way. I thought Joris almost enjoyed it. He said he would have enjoyed it, if he hadn’t felt so contemptuous. It was so easy, compared with demon hunting. He hit the ball every time they threw it at him, whatever way they threw it. Once it went right over the hedge into the road. All I seemed to do was charge up and down when they told me to. Twice they knocked the sticks down before I panted up to them. Once I knocked them down myself when I was dodging the ball. Each time, the schoolmaster came back from the clouds and asked if that meant I was out, and each time they said I wasn’t. Out, I began to realize, meant that I could take the splints off and go and stand somewhere else. But they didn’t want that. I might have got away.
At last, I actually hit the ball. It was coming right for my head, and I had to hit it if I didn’t want to be hurt. The ball flew off sideways and Adam caught it. “You have now,” he said, “been out in every way possible. It may be a record. Shall we stop?”
“If you want to,” I said weakly.
So Adam coolly walked over and interrupted the teacher’s musings. “Sir, I think it’s time to go now, sir.”
I looked at Joris. We both sat down on the grass and unbuckled our splints as fast as we could go. But of course, the other boys weren’t wearing any. We looked up to find ourselves in a ring of white-clothed legs.
“Not thinking of going, were you?” Adam said.
We stopped thinking of going just then. We put the idea off until they would be busy changing their clothes.
Adam had thought of that. Not a single boy changed. Nearly all of them stayed milling round Joris and me as we walked across the field. A few of them dashed into the house-thing and came out laden with everyone’s clothes. By this time, the rest of us were in a crowd round the vehicle, and the schoolmaster was sitting in the front of it, ready to drive it. The last boy locked the house-thing and brought the key to the master.
The master seemed puzzled. “Why are none of you changed?”
“We’re all going to tea with Macready, sir,” the boy said. “We can change at his house.”
I didn’t like the sound of this at all. They were meaning to load us on that vehicle and take us off somewhere. Even if nothing else happened, we were going to lose Helen. There was no sign of Helen.
Adam stood by the door of the vehicle. “In you get,” he said to me, with a chilly smile.
I dived sideways and tried to run. They had been expecting that. Four of them caught me as I dived. “No fighting now!” said the teacher from inside.
“It’s all right, sir,” said someone. He hauled my arm up my back and twisted it. “He just fell over.” A knee went into my back and pushed me up the steps into the vehicle. Nothing happened to anyone. Rule Two didn’t seem to be working, much as I wished it would. Perhaps it didn’t work because Joris got into the vehicle behind me without giving any trouble at all.
There were lots of seats inside. Boys pushed past us and spread out into the seats. As th
ey did so, Helen stood up from between two seats at the back. She had made one of her mistakes again. She had thought the vehicle was the safest place to hide in.
You get quite a shock when you first see Helen. It’s the way she doesn’t seem to have a face. The boy nearest her went “Aah!” and backed away. He was really scared, but he tried to make a joke of it. “They’ve landed! There’s a faceless wonder here!”
“Ah,” said Adam, looking over my shoulder. “The female of the species.”
“What’s going on now?” the schoolmaster asked wearily.
I never heard what they told him, because Joris looked at Helen and burst out laughing. Helen took a wisp of her hair away to look at me. She was laughing too.
“What’s so funny?” asked someone.
“They don’t understand!” I said. “They’re having a joke on me! It’s not fair! This could happen to anyone!”
Adam looked at me. It was a colorless, blank look, stony with suspicion. It shut me up at once. But it didn’t shut Joris up. He kept bowing over and laughing. He went on doing it after the vehicle started and all the time the schoolmaster was driving us back towards the city. Joris was still red in the face and gurgling when the teacher called back over his shoulder, “Macready. Where do you and your gang want to be dropped?”
This meant Adam. Macready was his surname. He said, “I’ll show you, sir,” and went and stood behind the schoolmaster’s shoulder. “This’ll do, sir. By that lamp post.”
The vehicle stopped. All the boys surged to their feet. Somebody lugged me along. Joris came too, still amused, like somebody who is coming along to watch the fun. That was one of the times I could have shaken Joris. He didn’t see the trouble we were in at all. Helen clattered off the vehicle as well, at the end of the line. I hoped she could do something to help at least. The boys didn’t know what to make of Helen at all. They tried to pretend she wasn’t really there. They clustered in a group at the edge of a busy road, surrounding Joris and me, but leaving Helen standing out beyond, beside one of the trees that lined the street.
“Where to?” one of them asked Adam.
“Up here,” Adam answered. “There’s a lonely alley that will suit us perfectly.”
I had been afraid there would be an alley. It was uncanny how the streets in this city were like mine. It was a broad street, with unusually broad pavements. In this world, there were trees lining the pavements and shops standing back behind the trees. In my world, this street was the worst part of the slums, with rubbish heaped on the broad pavements and tramps and ruffians camped out among the rubbish. You could get robbed in the alley. In this world, clean and orderly though it was, there was a tramp on the wide pavement too. He was asleep under the next tree along from Helen. I noticed him because my resisting feet were dragged round his dirty old boots as the boys pulled me towards the alley.
“I hope you meant that about tea, Adam,” somebody said, as they pushed Joris and me up the steps that led to the alley.
“Sure,” said Adam. “My parents are away for the weekend. They left loads of food. Just deal with these two yobboes first. I want them to know how it feels to have their clothes stolen.”
By that I knew we were going to get robbed in this alley too. I’ve told you what happens if people rob a Homeward Bounder. And, as if that weren’t enough, I knew that the way to make Joris really fighting mad was to do something to his precious demon hunter’s uniform.
X
Our many feet went clopper-popper inside the high red walls of the alley. It was like being marched off to an execution—only it was the firing-squad who were marching off to commit suicide. Without knowing they were.
“Look,” I said, “I’ve told you you can have your trousers back. Take them.”
“Ah, but I want your shirt too,” said Adam.
“You can have it. I’ll give it you,” I said.
By now, we had got to a place where the alley curved, shutting us off from the view of anyone coming from either way. The boys stopped and dumped their clothes in a heap by the wall. Then they spread out so that there was a group round me and another round Joris.
“You are a coward, aren’t you?” Adam said. He really disliked me. I felt the same about him.
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” I said. “You take anything of ours and you’ll get killed. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care two hoots about you, but it seems a bit hard on the rest of them.” I said that to try and make Joris understand about Rule Two. “It would be safer for you just to beat us up,” I said. “We’d prefer that, wouldn’t we, Joris?”
I couldn’t tell what Joris thought. His mind worked on such different lines from mine. But I could see what the boys thought. They thought I was just trying to talk us out of it. They simply closed in.
Then I had to fight. It was the daftest situation. All the reasons were upside down. All the same, I went for Adam with a will, and tried to get his glasses off and stamp on them, while a whole crowd of others tried to get Adam’s trousers off me.
Someone shouted, “Look out! He’s got a knife!”
Everyone stampeded away backwards, with me in their midst.
That left Joris alone in a ring of us, standing in an expert-looking crouch. The knife Joris was holding looked very nasty. It was a thin glimmering prong, like a slice of glass. “This is a demon knife,” Joris said. He was fighting mad all right. “I’ll only have to touch you. Who comes first?” He followed up this invitation by advancing on the nearest boy.
“No! Stop it, Joris!” I shouted. “You can’t! That’s entering play!”
“Why should I keep Their rules?” said Joris. He glared round the ring of us as if we were all Them. Then he went crouching towards the nearest boy again, who flattened himself against the wall of the alley, terrified.
I remembered that it was only yesterday that Joris had stood inside a ring of Them. I suppose this had taken him right back to it. I unwrapped what felt like sixteen boys’ arms from my neck and arms. Joris raised the prong-like knife. I charged forward and tried to grab Joris.
Joris knew it was me. I could see from his face that he wasn’t meaning to hurt me. But, the very instant I grabbed him, a loud, quavering voice cried out, “For shame! For shame! A man’s hand against his brother!”
Joris jumped, and so did I. The knife stabbed down towards the terrified boy. And the next thing I knew, there was a sort of fizzle, and my left arm was pouring blood.
I clutched at my arm, trying to keep the cut closed, and leaned against the wall. I could see everyone staring at me in horror, Joris most of all. “It only takes a touch!” he said. “I’ve killed you!”
You say things you shouldn’t say, when you’ve had a shock. I said, “Now you’ll see what a mortal wound’s like on a Homeward Bounder. I won’t die, you fool. Rule One.”
“I’m sorry,” Joris said abjectly.
“Hope not to die! Hope not at all!” cried the quavering voice. It was the old tramp who had been asleep against the tree. Helen was with him. She had one side of her hair hooked up to stare at the blood running out of my arm. The sacred face looked unusually pale and upset. Beyond her, I could grayly see quite a few of the boys picking their clothes out of the heap and tiptoeing off. “Hope is an anchor, they say!” howled the tramp. “Indeed this is true. Hope you bear, bound to you like a millstone round the neck. I say cast it from you! Cast hope aside!”
I looked at the tramp, feeling decidedly gray and wavery, and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the ground. From down there, the old man looked truly disgusting. He had a whole bank of withered, wrinkled chins, loosely scattered with long strands of gray hair. Dirty white hair stuck up from under his filthy hat. His watery black eyes gleamed with a mad light, and his nose stuck out from below them, sharp and long and starved as the prow of the Flying Dutchman. I could tell he was a Homeward Bounder. That was why Helen had fetched him. But it was quite obvious that he was stark, raving mad too.
By th
is time, nearly all the boys had picked up their clothes and filtered away. I didn’t blame them. What with the knife and the blood and the discovery that they were dealing with lunatics, the alley must have seemed to them the kind of place you forget about quickly. In fact, before the old tramp had said very much more, only Adam was left. Adam seemed to be trying to do something to my arm. It hurt. I pulled aside. “Leave me be.”
“Hold still,” Adam said. “You can stop the bleeding like this. Have you another handkerchief?”
I hadn’t, of course. “Joris,” I said. “Something to stop the bleeding.”
Poor Joris. His face was cheesy-looking. He was carefully putting that knife of his into a sheath, but he stopped when I spoke to him. “Oh,” he said. “As to that.” And he felt inside his leather jerkin. In spite of everything, I started to laugh.
“If you cast hope aside,” the old tramp lectured us, “then all evil is cast out with it. Love and beauty enter in and a new world dawns.”
“What are you laughing at?” said Adam.
“Everything,” I said. I leaned back and giggled. Helen knelt down beside me with both sides of her hair hooked back. By this time, Joris had done his conjuring trick and brought out a First Aid kit. Adam seemed to approve of it. He and Joris got to work with it on one side of me. Helen was on the other side. I suppose Helen thought they weren’t attending to her, because the old tramp was still preaching away. But Adam was listening. I knew, because you can always tell, if someone is touching you. Their fingers go light and tense, not to interfere with what they’re hearing.
“What happened?” Helen said. “How did it happen? I was looking straight at you, and Joris didn’t even have his knife near you!”
“Them,” I said. “Another rule I hadn’t noticed before. Joris ought to have got that boy against the wall. But he couldn’t, because that would be entering play. It would have killed the boy. I suppose if I hadn’t been near, he’d have had to stab himself.” Then I burst out laughing again, for Adam’s benefit. They would make sure Adam didn’t understand. I hoped he’d think we were all lunatics and creep away like the other boys.
The Homeward Bounders Page 12
