Singing, weaving, staring blankly, they marched across the square. In the wake of the coffin a crazed old woman stumbled, softly wailing. I recognised her. The rest looked away from her as though embarrassed by her tears. Here was no place for such a show of grief, too many were dying, silence sufficed. Silas's caravan stood in their path. The priest halted and lowered the cross, and behind him a convulsion of halting ran back through the crowd. The song trembled uncertainly, soared on one last note and faded. Strongbow came marching up, conferred briefly with the priest, then stepped up to the caravan and rapped with his fist on the window. There was no response, and he retreated a pace in confusion, stamping his heels. One of the coffin bearers moaned very softly. Strongbow cast a sidelong glance at the other caravans and their silent attentive occupants. He was about to speak when the door above him opened and Silas stepped out on the driving board and leaned down and asked,
‘Well, my good man?’
Strongbow's plume bristled.
‘Get this yoke on up owwa the way there!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Get owwa the way!’
The priest pointed a shaking finger at the silent procession at his back.
‘You're blocking the street,’ he roared. ‘Can you not see it's a funeral, man!’
‘Why, so it is,’ said Silas.
‘You bloody get!’ Strongbow cried, and made a grab at Silas's leg and missed. With a banging of boots and a clatter of buckles two peelers came running. More old friends! Sergeant Trouncer straightened his helmet and said, ‘Right! what's up here?’
The consumptive constable behind him could not speak for lack of breath, but he backed up his superior officer with a fierce look out of his sheep's eyes. They all began to shout at once. The priest waved his fists, Strongbow stamped his feet and rumbled menacingly, and Sergeant Trouncer bellowed at the constable, who drew his truncheon and made to clamber up on the caravan. Silas kicked him on the side of the head, and as he toppled backward in a swoon he brought down Trouncer with him, and Trouncer clutched at Strongbow, who fell on the priest, and the four of them collapsed in a heap, flailing and roaring, and the cross poked the priest in the eye. Silas gleefully clapped his hands on his knees, the old woman shrieked, Mario began to laugh, and then the coffin exploded. Screws flew out of their sockets like a volley of shots, the lid flew open, boards splintered, and the corpse, O! that terrible swollen thing, slid down between the shoulders of the crouching bearers and rolled across the ground shedding a foul bandage in its wake like a snail's trail. Listen, listen to me, I have seen worse, I have seen things more terrible than this. The mourners fled in all directions waving their arms and screaming, and even the four felled pillars of the community scuttled away panicstricken. Only the old woman remained. She knelt and tore her hair, and laughed hysterically with that same raucous cackle I had heard long ago among the blackcurrant bushes. I stared down at the corpse lying in its wreckage. Silas lashed his horse, and the circus thundered out of the square.
34
OF HIM in the dress there was no sign until, a mile outside the town, he leaped down from Silas's careering caravan and vaulted a ditch, tripped on the other side and fell flat on his face, bounced up again immediately and scampered away across the fields. Our pace slackened as the panic evaporated, and then the horses would not go on, but halted and stood with lowered heads, shuddering and coughing. I got down and walked about the road in a daze. Up on the caravan Mario shook his head and laughed softly to himself.
‘Boom,’ he murmured, over and over. ‘Boom!’
Silas with his coattails flying and his black hat askew came rushing back along the line.
‘Come on, come on, keep moving, no stopping yet! Get up there, Little Boots. Mario! The soldiers are after us, get going.’
He was in fine fettle, full of excitement and glee. Mario smiled at him wildly and opened wide his eyes and said,
‘Boom!’
Silas halted in his tracks and began to laugh helplessly.
‘Mad,’ he cried, ‘stark mad! Gabriel, keep your eye on him, don't let him get behind you. Crackers!’ He scampered away. ‘Come on now, children, come on!
We whipped up the horses and turned down a boreen into a field, forded a stream and struggled up a hill of thorns, and when we reached the road again we met Rainbird pedalling furiously past us in the opposite direction. He soon returned, pale and breathless. Sergeant Trouncer and a dozen peelers, backed up by a squad of troops, were hot on our trail. They dogged us inexorably all day, until at evening we lost them. The weather turned, and a bitter wind blew up from the east. The land was hard and bare as a bone. With the cold came hunger pains. A sulphurous glow faded slowly out of the western sky, and in a bleak twilight we stopped at a pub, the same one we had visited on my first day travelling with the circus, an age past. This time there was no music. We crowded into the doorway and stared in silence at the chairs crouching empty by the tables, the lamps smoking, glasses gleaming, at our indistinct selves rippling in the mirror, and then Silas strode to the deserted bar and rapped upon it with his knuckles, and Rainbird darted under the flap of the counter and popped up grinning on the other side.
‘A ball of malt, my man,’ said Silas, but his words rang dully in the eerie stillness. He glared at the empty tables, daring the ghosts to show themselves, and turned to us in the doorway. ‘Come in, friends, and state your pleasure. It's on the house tonight. Come!’
We entered warily, and Rainbird busied himself with bottles. The first drink went down in an uneasy silence, but as it settled on their empty bellies a kind of delirium set in immediately, and the revels began. I would take nothing, and sat in a corner nursing my hunger. Glasses fell, and a keg burst and sprayed the mirror with froth. Someone knocked over a lamp. The blazing oil sprang across the floor with a roar. They poured porter on the flames. Mario, sitting cross-legged on a table, vomited repeatedly into his lap. Something was dying here. I watched it twitching in the drunken faces that I could no longer recognise, these impenetrable masks of grey and yellow wax. For all their laughter and their shrieks the silence was still there beneath all, the anguish and the dumb longing of those whose absence sat beside us like an implacable black bird in this house of the dead. It was not hunger that was killing us, but the famine itself. The black smoke was poisoning us. The plague was here. Silas alone seemed immune, presiding over the Totentanz with his old wicked gaiety, leaning against the bar and jogging his glass in time to the fevered rising rhythm of the dance.
I went out into the yard behind the pub. The night was moonless, tingling with ice. The wind sang over the invisible fields. I do not know how long I stood out there, gazing into the dark. Perhaps I fell asleep on my feet. The noises came to me unnoticed at first, voices and the thud of boots, clatter of metal and wood, and an oddly familiar crackling. I started back into the pub, thought better of it, and scurried around the side of the building under the poplars. One of the caravans was on fire, and there were soldiers on the road scurrying about against the glare like tin men. Away in the dark somewhere Sergeant Trouncer was roaring commands. Silas and the others blundered out of the pub and tripped over each other, swearing and squeaking. I set off at a run toward the blazing caravan. Magnus overtook me.