‘Is it true you're searching for your sister? They say you are. That's very…romantic’
She spoke quietly and gravely. I could think of nothing to say, and I suppose, being young, I squirmed, pursed my lips, sighed. She looked at me with her crooked icy blue eyes.
‘What is her name?’
‘Rose. I-I think.’
‘Rose. Ah. And you know what she looks like? You have a picture?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled. I would have preferred her cold stare. Her foot swung faster. She twined a lock of hair around her fingers.
‘I might be able to help you,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to help you, Gabriel? There are a lot of things here that you don't know about. Silas tells me things. He has a plan, you know. Soon, soon we'll be leaving here, and then I could help you, if you…’ She paused and frowned, as though searching for something that I might have to offer. ‘If you were to become my… friend. That's all I have ever asked of anyone, that they be friends with me. They say I'm a bitch, O yes they do, Gabriel, they say that, but it's not true, not true at all. I am only…unhappy.’
The voice caressed me, it was almost a physical sensation, the warm words touching my eyelids, my hot cheeks. If I gave her any answer it must have been a tiny whine. She offered me her hand but I would not take it.
‘Gabriel? Don't you like me either?’ Her eyes narrowed, and although she did not seem to move her lips I could see now the glint of her sharp white teeth. The hand she offered began to tremble, and the fingers danced like pale snakes. ‘Why don't you like me. Gabriel!’ She stood up, and a handkerchief fell from her sleeve and fluttered to the floor. ‘Little beast,’ she snarled. ‘You're like the rest, you hate me. Well we'll see, my man, we'll see who needs who, yes, yes. I could save you but I won't, not after this. I'll laugh, yes I'll laugh, when they string you up and gut you. Now get out!
I turned to go, relieved and terrified all at once, but before I could take a step she swept past me through the door and plunged down the steps into the rain. I picked up her handkerchief, gingerly, gingerly, and put it on the bench. There was a flurry behind me and she was back again, staring at me wildly. Her hair was laced with shining raindrops. She fell to her knees and threw her arms around my hips, and with her head against my stomach she wept, such bitter tears, such black sorrow.
‘I'm so unhappy,’ she sobbed, ‘so unhappy!’
I wanted to laugh, although there was nothing funny, nothing at all, and now I am surprised to find that I still want to laugh, thinking of that scene, and still I can see nothing in it that merits laughter. Strange. What brought forth that grief? I hesitate, I am unwilling, I hardly dare to voice the notion which, if it did not come to me then comes to me now, the insane notion that perhaps it was on her, on Sybil, our bright bitch, that the sorrow of the country, of those baffled people in the rotting fields, of the stricken eyes staring out of hovels, was visited against her will and even without her knowledge so that tears might be shed, and the inexpressible expressed. Does that seem a ridiculous suggestion? But I do not suggest, I only wonder.
32
THAT SUMMER ENDED. We were relieved, I think. September suited better our sombre mood. Every autumn seems like the last. Not that the weather turned. The sun still shone, mocking us with its gaiety, and the little stream still chattered, but on the hills the trees were dusted with copper, autumn gold was in the air, and a smell of smoke at evening. But all that time, gone! Our lethargy frightened us. There were other, worse things. Terrible rumours were brought back from the lowland with each week's dwindling stock of provisions. The people had no food down there, they were eating grass, the bark of trees, dried leaves. Children were seen gobbling fistfuls of clay. Bands of savage-fanged hermaphrodites stalked the countryside at night killing and looting. Some said they ate their victims. These preposterous stories made us laugh yet filled us with a quiet terror which we could not admit to ourselves or to each other. The admission would have made it worse, and so we played with exaggeration as a means of keeping reality at bay. It did not work. Reality was hunger, and there was no gainsaying that.
We did find a way to neutralise the truth if not quite banish it, and that was by inventing taller stories than the tallest the lowland could produce. One day, however, the trick backfired in our faces when Silas told us of the ingenious and economical method which he swore they used to bury their dead down there. So many were dying, all of them penniless, that a full-scale funeral with all the trimmings was impossible for each of them, until someone invented the false coffin. This was a splendid affair, craftsman-built from the best wood, with brass handles and gleaming bolts, paid for out of a general fund.
‘Expensive, that's true,’ said Silas, ‘but here's the beauty of it, listen. A large town would need no more than two of them, say three at the most. Why? Well, the stiff is popped in, see, bolted down, out to the graveyard, hold the contraption over the hole, the druid says the prayers, then someone presses a switch and plop! down goes your man, fill up the grave, shut the trapdoor and you're ready for the next cadaver! How about that now for a notion?’
We laughed into our fists and stamped our feet, held our sides, the story was so droll, so ludicrous. An hour later Mario and Magnus returned from a vain search for food down below, and when they told us of a funeral they had witnessed, Silas's story was no longer fantasy, although the coffin they had seen had been no splendid casket but a plain wood box with an ill-fitting panel underneath which was wrenched out to release the body. Magnus remembered the dull thump inside the grave.
Now we ate only what the countryside could give us, wild berries, crab apples stewed, an occasional rabbit or a hare, some roots even. Once we ate a fox which Magnus had inadvertently trapped. Such a beautiful creature, we wept as we ate, for the fox and for ourselves, but beauty had no place in that world, the times were such that there was nothing to do with beauty but destroy it. Ah Ida, my gentle Ida. I went with her one afternoon to gather blackberries. It was a perfect autumn day, full of light and woody smells, glittering and crisp. We wandered far away from the camp, across the hill and down into another valley where the bushes were heavy with fruit. Ida sang as we picked. We ate our fill of the tender berries. They tasted of summer and sunshine. Disaster waits for moments like this, biding its time.
‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘have you really got a sister?’
‘Yes I have. Of course I have.’
She watched me with that odd awed gaze of hers, dropping her pickings absentmindedly into the grass beside the can.
‘But how will you find her?’ she cried very softly, and leaned toward me, full of concern. I shrugged, and looked away across the mountains with a frown. When I turned to her again there were tears in her eyes.
‘Poor Mario,’ she said.
She wandered away then across the meadow, and I lay down in the warm grass behind the bushes. I was half asleep when I heard them, and scrambled to my knees and peered out over the briars. On the far side of the valley three Soldiers were making their way laboriously down the hillside. Great hulking fellows they were, drunk I think, staggering and stumbling on the stony ground, clutching at each other, their rifles joggling on their backs. Once down in the valley they halted suddenly and stood with their heads lifted, listening. On a breeze there came to me faintly the sound, which they had heard, of Ida's piping song. They crept into the bushes and soon the singing stopped and there was a scream, a scream such as I have never heard again, and I have heard many, expressing as it did so little fear, but a terrible depth of desolation and woe. I raced across the valley, into the bushes, heedless of the thorns tearing my legs, but I could not find them, and there were no more cries to guide me.