“You mustn’t talk like that And it wasn’t you who killed him—it was Pirrie.”
“Was it? I don’t know. We’ll blame Pirrie, shall we? And Pirrie is gone, washed away with the river, and so the land flows with milk and honey{146} again, and with innocence. Is that all right?”
“John! It was Pirrie.”
He looked at her, “Pirrie gave me his gun—he must have known, then, that he was finished. And when I saw that he had gone under, I thought of throwing it after him—that was the gun which brought us here to the valley, killing its way across England. I could have got to the shore more easily without it, and I was deadly tired. But I hung on to it.”
“You can still throw it away,” she said. “You don’t have to keep it.”
“No. Pirrie was right. You don’t throw away a good weapon.” He looked at the rifle, resting against the dressing-table. “It will be Davey’s, when he is old enough.”
She shrank a little. “No! He won’t need it. It will be peace then.”
“Enoch was a man of peace,” John said. “He lived in the city which his father built for him. But he kept his father’s dagger in his belt.”
He went to the bed, bent down, and kissed his brother’s face.
He had kissed another dead face only a few days before, but centuries lay between the two salutations. As he turned away towards the door, Ann asked:
“Where are you going?”
“There’s a lot to do,” he said. “A city to be built.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Christopher was born in 1922 and educated at Peter Symonds School, Winchester. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Corps of Signals. He is a writer whose early interests were conditioned by pre-war American science fiction, and his own books such as The Death of Grass and The World in Winter have had that flavour, but the emphasis has been more on character than on scientific extrapolation. The writer of fiction he most admires is Jane Austen. He writes (under an assumed name) general novels to which critics and public alike display a massive indifference, but his books for children such as The White Mountain, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire and The Lotus Caves have enjoyed considerable success. His latest novel is Pendulum.
John Christopher, who was born at Knowsley in Lancashire, was involuntarily transported at the age of ten to Hampshire, a manoeuvre which he regards as in a sense equivalent to Dickens’s banishment to the blacking factory. He is now, however, so reconciled to the South that he has settled with his wife and children on the island of Guernsey.