Brian W. Aldiss
GREYBEARD
With my love to
CLIVE and WENDY hoping that one day
they will understand the story behind this story
I. The River: Sparcot
Through broken reeds the creature moved. It was not alone; its mate followed, and behind her five youngsters, joining the hunt with eagerness.
The stoats had swum a brook. Now they climbed from the chill water, up the bank and through the reeds, bodies low to the ground, necks outstretched, the young ones in imitation of their father. Father looked out with an impersonal hunger at rabbits frisking for food not many feet away.
This had once been wheat land. Taking advantage of a period of neglect, weeds had risen up and had their day, choking the cereal. Later, a fire spread across the land, burning down the thistles and giant grasses. Rabbits, which prefer low growth, had moved in, nibbling the fresh green shoots that thrust through the ash. The shoots that survived this thinning process found themselves with plenty of space in which to grow, and were now fair-sized young trees. The number of rabbits had consequently declined, for rabbits like open land; so the grass had its chance to return. Now it, in its turn was being thinned beneath the continuing spread of the beeches. The few rabbits that hopped there were thin of flank.
They were also wary. One of them saw the beady eyes watching in the rushes. It leapt for shelter and the others followed. At once the adult stoats were covering ground, twin stretches of brown rippling across the open space. The rabbits bolted down into their warrens. Without pause, the stoats followed. They could go anywhere. The world — this tiny piece of the world — was theirs.
Not many miles away, under the same tattered winter sky and by the banks of the same river, the wilderness had been cleared. In the wilderness, a pattern was still discernible; it was no longer a valid pattern, and so it faded year by year. Large trees, to some of which a raddled leaf still clung, marked the position of ancient hedges. They enclosed tangles of vegetation covering what had once been fields: brambles, lacerating their way like rusty barbed wire towards the centre of the fields, and elders, and prickly briars, as well as a sturdy growth of saplings. Along the edge of the clearing, these unruly hedges had been used as a stockade against further growth in a wide and ragged arc, thus protecting an area of some few hundred acres which had its longer side against the river.
This rude stockade was patrolled by an old man in a coarse shirt of orange, green, red, and yellow stripes. The shirt furnished almost the only splash of colour in the entire bedraggled landscape; it had been made from the canvas of a deckchair.
At intervals, the barrier of vegetation was broken by paths trodden into the undergrowth. The paths were brief and ended in crude latrines, where holes had been dug and covered with tarpaulins or wooden battens. These were the sanitary arrangements of the village of Sparcot.
The village itself lay on the river in the middle of its clearing. It had been built, or rather it had accumulated in the course of centuries, in the shape of an H, with the cross bar leading to a stone bridge spanning the river. The bridge still spanned the river, but led only to a thicket from which the villagers gathered much of their firewood.
Of the two longer roads, the one nearest the river had been intended to serve only the needs of the village. This it still did; one leg of it led to an old water mill where lived Big Jim Mole, the boss of Sparcot. The other road had once been a main road. After the houses petered out, it led in each direction into the stockaded wilderness of vegetation; there it was dragged down like a snake in a crocodile’s throat and devoured under the weight of undergrowth.
All the houses of Sparcot showed signs of neglect. Some were ruined; some were uninhabited ruins. A hundred and twelve people lived here. None of them had been born in Sparcot.
Where two of the roads joined, there stood a stone building that had served as a post office. Its upper windows commanded a view both of the bridge in one direction and the cultivated land with wilderness beyond in the other. This was now the village guardroom and, since Jim Mole insisted that a guard was always kept, it was occupied now.
There were three people sitting or lying in the old barren room. An old woman, long past her eightieth year, sat by a wood stove, humming to herself and nodding her head. She held out her hands to the stove, on which she was warming up stew in a tin platter. Like the others, she was wrapped against a wintry chill that the stove did little to dispel.
Of the two men present, one was extremely ancient in appearance, although his eye was bright. He lay on a palliasse on the floor, restlessly looking about him, staring up at the ceiling as if to puzzle out the meaning of the cracks there, or at the walls as if to solve the riddle of their damp patches. His face, sharp as a stoat’s beneath its stubble, wore an irritable look, for the old woman’s humming jarred his nerves.
Only the third occupant of the guardroom was properly alert. He was a well-built man in his middle fifties, without a paunch, but not so starveling thin as his companions. He sat in a creaking chair by the window, a rifle by his side. Although he was reading a book, he looked up frequently, directing his gaze through the window. With one of these glances, he saw the patrol man with the colourful shirt approaching over the pastures.
“Sam’s coming,” he said. He put his book down as he spoke. His name was Algy Timberlane. He had a thick grizzled beard that grew down almost to his navel, where it had been cut sharply across. Because of this beard, he was known as Greybeard, although he lived in a world of greybeards. But his high and almost bald head lent emphasis to the beard, and its texture, barred as it was with stripes of black hair sprouting thickly from the jawline and fading out lower down, made it particularly noticeable in a world no longer able to afford other forms of personal adornment.
When he spoke, the woman stopped her humming without giving any other sign she had heard. The man on the palliasse sat up and put a hand on the cudgel that lay beside him. He screwed his face up, sharpening his gaze to peer at the clock that ticked noisily on a shelf; then he squinted at his wristwatch. This battered old souvenir of another world was Towin Thomas’s most cherished possession, although it had not worked in a decade.
“Sam’s early coming off guard, twenty minutes early,” he said. “Old sciver. Worked up an appetite for lunch, strolling round out there. You better watch that hash of yours, Betty — I’m the only one I’m wanting to get indigestion off that grub, girl.”
Betty shook her head. It was as much a nervous tick as a negation of anything that the man with the cudgel might have said. She kept her hands to the fire, not looking round.
Towin Thomas picked up his cudgel and rose stiffly to his feet, helping himself up against the table. He joined Greybeard at the window, peering through the dirty pane and rubbing it with his sleeve.
“That’s Sam Bulstow all right. You can’t mistake that shirt.”
Sam Bulstow walked down the littered street. Rubble, broken tiles and litter lay on the pavements; dock and fennel — mortified by winter — sprouted from shattered gratings. Sam Bulstow walked in the middle of the road. There had been no traffic but pedestrians for several years now. He turned in when he reached the post office, and the watchers heard his footsteps on the boards of the room below them.
Without excitement, they listened to the whole performance of his getting upstairs: the groans of the bare treads; the squeak of a horny palm on the hand rail as it helped tug its owner upwards; the rasp and heave of lungs challenged by every step.
Finally, Sam appeared in the guardroom. The gaudy stripes of his shirt threw up some of their colour on to the white stubble of his jaws. He stood for a while staring in at them, resting on the frame of the door to regain his breath.