‘You can shove them up—’
‘Ah?’
‘You can—’
‘Ah?’
Truckle shut his eyes and clenched his fists.
‘Dang it all to heck!’ he shouted.
‘Good,’ said Mr Saveloy. ‘That’s much better.’
He turned to Cohen, who was grinning happily at Truckle’s discomfort.
‘Cohen,’ he said, ‘there’s an apple stall over there. Do you fancy an apple?’
‘Yeah, might do,’ Cohen conceded, in the cautious manner of someone giving a conjuror his watch while remaining aware that the man is grinning and holding a hammer.
‘Right. Now, then, cla— I mean, gentlemen. Ghenghiz wants an apple. There’s a stall over there selling fruit and nuts. What does he do?’ Mr Saveloy looked hopefully at his charges. ‘Anyone? Yes?’
‘Easy. You kill that little’ — there was a rustle of unfolding paper again — ‘chap behind the stall, then—’
‘No, Mr Uncivil. Anyone else?’
‘Whut?’
‘You set fire to—’
‘No, Mr Vincent. Anyone else …?’
‘You rape—’
‘No, no, Mr Ripper,’ said Mr Saveloy. ‘We take out some muh — muh—?’ He looked at them expectantly.
‘—money—’ chorused the Horde.
‘—and we … What do we do? Now, we’ve gone through this hundreds of times. We …’
This was the difficult bit. The Horde’s lined faces creased and puckered still further as they tried to force their minds out of the chasms of habit.
‘Gi …?’ said Cohen hesitantly. Mr Saveloy gave him a big smile and a nod of encouragement.
‘Give? … it … to …’ Cohen’s lips tensed around the word ‘… him?’
‘Yes! Well done. In exchange for the apple. We’ll talk about making change and saying “thank you” later on, when you’re ready for it. Now then, Cohen, here’s the coin. Off you go.’
Cohen wiped his forehead. He was beginning to sweat.
‘How about if I just cut him up a bit—’
‘No! This is civilization.’
Cohen nodded uncomfortably. He threw back his shoulders and walked over to the stall, where the apple merchant, who had been eyeing the group suspiciously, nodded at him.
Cohen’s eyes glazed and his lips moved silently, as if he were rehearsing a script. Then he said: ‘Ho, fat merchant, give me all your … one apple … and I will give you … this coin …’
He looked around. Mr Saveloy had his thumb up.
‘You want an apple, is that it?’ said the apple merchant.
‘Yes!’
The apple merchant selected one. Cohen’s sword had been hidden in the wheelchair again but the merchant, in response to some buried acknowledgement, made sure it was a good apple. Then he took the coin. This proved a little difficult, since his customer seemed loath to let go of it.
‘Come on, hand it over, venerable one,’ he said.
Seven crowded seconds passed.
Then, when they were safely around the corner, Mr Saveloy said, ‘Now, everyone: who can tell me what Ghenghiz did wrong?’
‘Didn’t say please?’
‘Whut?’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t say thank you?’
‘Whut?’
‘No.’
‘Hit the man over the head with a melon and thumped him into the strawberries and kicked him in the nuts and set fire to his stall and stole all the money?’
‘Whut?’
‘Correct!’ Mr Saveloy sighed. ‘Ghenghiz, you were doing so well up to then.’
‘He didn’t ort to have called me what he did!’
‘But “venerable” means old and wise, Ghenghiz.’
‘Oh. Does it?’
‘Yes.’
‘We-ell… I did leave him the money for the apple.’
‘Yes, but, you see, I do believe you took all his other money.’
‘But I paid for the apple,’ said Cohen, rather testily.
Mr Saveloy sighed. ‘Ghenghiz, I do rather get the impression that several thousand years of the patient development of fiscal propriety have somewhat passed you by.’
‘Come again?’
‘It is possible sometimes for money to legitimately belong to other people,’ said Mr Saveloy patiently.
The Horde paused to wrap their minds around this, too. It was, of course, something they knew to be true in theory. Merchants always had money. But it seemed wrong to think of it as belonging to them; it belonged to whoever took it off them. Merchants didn’t actually own it, they were just looking after it until it was needed.
‘Now, there is an elderly lady over there selling ducks,’ said Mr Saveloy. ‘I think the next stage — Mr Willie, I am not over there, I am sure whatever you are looking at is very interesting, but please pay attention — is to practise our grasp of social intercourse.’
‘Hur, hur, hur,’ said Caleb the Ripper.
‘I mean, Mr Ripper, that you should go and enquire how much it would be for a duck,’ said Mr Saveloy.
‘Hur, hur, hur — What?’
‘And you are not to rip all her clothes off. That’s not civilized.’
Caleb scratched his head. Flakes fell out.
‘Well, what else am I supposed to do?’
‘Er … engage her in conversation.’
‘Eh? What’s there to talk about with a woman?’
Mr Saveloy hesitated again. To some extent this was unknown territory to him as well. His experience with women at his last school had been limited to an occasional chat with the housekeeper, and on one occasion the matron had let him put his hand on her knee. He had been forty before he found out that oral sex didn’t mean talking about it. Women had always been to him strange and distant and wonderful creatures rather than, as the Horde to a man believed, something to do. He was struggling a little.
‘The weather?’ he hazarded. His memory threw in vague recollections of the staple conversation of the maiden aunt who had brought him up. ‘Her health? The trouble with young people today?’
‘And then I rip her clothes off?’
‘Possibly. Eventually. If she wants you to. I might draw your attention to the discussion we had the other day about taking regular baths’ — or even a bath, he added to himself — ‘and attention to fingernails and hair and changing your clothes more often.’
‘This is leather,’ said Caleb. ‘You don’t have to change it, it don’t rot for years.’
Once again Mr Saveloy readjusted his sights. He’d thought that Civilization could be overlaid on the Horde like a veneer. He had been mistaken.
But the funny thing — he mused, as the Horde watched Caleb’s painful attempts at conversation with a representative of half the world’s humanity — was that although they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, or possibly because they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, he actually liked them. Every one of them saw a book as either a lavatorial accessory or a set of portable firelighters and thought that hygiene was a greeting. Yet they were honest (from their specialized point of view) and decent (from their specialized point of view) and saw the world as hugely simple. They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn’t steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.
And although they didn’t set out to give the money away to the poor, that was nevertheless what they did (if you accepted that the poor consisted of innkeepers, ladies of negotiable virtue, pickpockets, gamblers and general hangers-on), because although they would go to great lengths to steal money they then had as much control over it as a man trying to herd cats. It was there to be spent and lost. So they kept the money in circulation, always a praiseworthy thing in any society.