“How long before you get any charcoal?”
“Three days, Mr. Harbans says, but the first lot may not be very good. Have you finished your bow, Risaldar?”
They all called Mr. Parnad Singh Risaldar now. It was a joke in a way, but he seemed to like it. Perhaps it reminded him of the glories of his father’s Simla club. He was an older man than the others, his beard a splendid gray waterfall. He looked up from where he was whittling at a long stave and spoke in Punjabi.
“He says he might be able to make a good bow in a year’s time, when he has seasoned some ash, but this will be good enough to kill a man with at twenty yards. Nicky, if we found some tempered steel on the farm, would it be safe to make a bow with that?”
“I think so,” said Nicky uncertainly.
“Let’s try,” said Gopal. “There’s all sorts of metal littered about the barn.”
Halfway down the huge field two bright-colored figures were working, a man in a crimson turban and a woman in an orange sari. When the children came nearer they saw that it was Mr. Surbans Singh and his wife Mohindar, he scything, she raking. Mr. Surbans Singh had appointed himself head farmer. “What are you doing?” called Gopal.
Mr. Surbans Singh straightened up, but his wife (whom Nicky thought the prettiest of all the Sikhs) went on tedding the grass he’d cut into a loose line.
“I found this scythe in a shed,” he said. “It is very bad, and the hay is grown too coarse to be good feed, but poor hay will be better than none if we are to keep sheep through the winter.”
‘‘Sheep?” said Nicky, surprised.
“I hope so,” said Mr. Surbans Singh. “I would not like to eat nothing but chapati all the year round. Eh, my dear?”
Mrs. Mohindar stopped raking and smiled at him.
“I have married a greedy man,” she said.
Mr. Surbans Singh looked at the tiny patch he had cut, and then at the vast sweep of the hayfield.
“We have a long way to go,” he said ruefully, and bent to his scything.
From the gray-white hulk of the barns came an erratic clinking of metal. Nicky noticed Gopal looking at her out of the corner of his eye as they walked down the slope.
“What are they up to?” she said nervously.
“Come and see.”
She wouldn’t actually go in under the big roof, but the barn was open at both ends and she could see the whole scene. All down one side a rank of bright-colored engines, gawky with insectlike joints and limbs, stood silent. Other machines and parts of machines littered the floor of the barn, leaving only just enough passageway for the tractors to haul the attachments they needed in and out.
“This farmer liked gadgets,” said Gopal. “Three combines, two hay balers, six different tractors, all the latest devices.”
“What are the men doing?” said Nicky, quivering. Uncle Jagindar was walking about among the engines with a hammer. From time to time he would tap at one, which produced the clinking, and call a man over to him, point and explain.
“Iron and steel are funny stuff,” said Gopal. “There are lots of different kinds. Some you can work with, and some you can’t — it is too hard, or its softening point is too high, or it comes from the forge too brittle. My Uncle Jagindar wants ordinary mild steel, and he’s looking for bits he can use; the others are trying to take them off the tractors and attachments.”
“And the things won’t go when they’re taken to bits?” said Nicky.
“That would suit you?”
“Yes, but it’s not as good as smashing them.”
She was quite serious, but Gopal laughed and Uncle Jagindar heard the noise and came out into the sunlight. He was interested in the idea about the bow, but said he didn’t think they’d find steel whippy enough, and he didn’t think he could temper a rod to that state either. Besides, it would be very dangerous to the bowman if it snapped under tension. Then he shouted to one of the men who brought out an old sickle without a handle which they’d unearthed. Uncle Jagindar sharpened it with a stone and bound sacking tightly around the tang until it was comfortable to hold. Gopal, much to his disgust, was sent up to help Mr. Surbans Singh in the hayfield, and Nicky went with him to turn the hay.
It was surprising how much got cut, provided you didn’t stop every few minutes to look and see how you were getting on.
IV
STEEL ON THE ANVIL
EIGHT DAYS LATER Nicky went down to the village. She bent her head and ran with a shudder of disgust under the double set of power lines that swooped from pylon to pylon across the lane.
“You are afraid that they will fall on you?” asked Uncle Chacha, rolling cat-footed beside her.
“No, it isn’t that. But they feel like a . . . like a curse.”
“Probably that is why the village people have not come up to disturb us, then.”
“I expect so.”
In fact she could see a whole party of villagers in a field up to their right, almost half a mile away. They were loading a wagon with hay; the wagon was pulled by eight ponies. She pointed.
“They’ve quite enough fields to work on near the village,’* she said, “without coming up our way.”
“It is curious that they are all working together,” said Uncle Chacha.“I would have expected them to be cultivating separate patches — that is more the English style. Perhaps somebody has organized them.”
He walked on the verge, keeping close in under the ragged hedge. He was wearing his dull green turban, for extra camouflage. They stopped about fifty yards from the first house, and he tucked himself in behind a bulge of hawthorn.
“If you are in trouble, run this way,” he said. “But I will not come to help you unless you scream or call.”
“All right,” said Nicky. “But I’m sure you needn’t worry.”
She walked on. It had taken a lot of argument at the council before the Sikhs had agreed that the best way to make contact with the village was for her to go down alone and try to find somebody to talk to. Most of the women had thought it was dangerous, and the men had also felt that it was dishonorable to let a girl take the risk. But the old grandmother had been her ally in the argument, and together they’d won.
The first few houses were larger than cottages and looked empty. In front of one of them was a small paddock littered with striped pony jumps. The next houses were smaller and looked lived in, but there was no sign of life. She rounded the corner into the wider bit of road which is called the Borough, and there, under the inn sign of the Five Bells, three men sat on a bench with pewter mugs in their hands. They looked up as soon as they heard her footfall. “Good morning,” said Nicky.
The nearest man pushed a battered brown felt hat back over his short-cropped gray hair. His face was brown with sun, and his small gray eyes sharp and suspicious. But he spoke friendly enough.
“And good morning to you, miss,” he said. “Where’re you from, then?”
“I’m staying on the farm up the hill,” said Nicky. The group tensed. A lean-faced young man with a half-grown beard said, “Booker's Farm, that’d be?” “I don't know its name,” said Nicky. “We just came there and stayed because one of my friends was going to have a baby.”
“How many o’ you?” said the hat wearer.
“About forty.”
They looked at each other.
“That’s them,” said a little old man in shirtsleeves. He spoke with an odd, crowing note.
The others nodded.
“I know what,” said the beard grower. “They kep’ her prisoner and now she’s run away and come to us.”
“No,” said Nicky. “They helped me get out of London, and so I stayed with them.”
“Bad place, London,” said the man in the hat.
“You aren’t one on ’em, though?” crowed the man in shirt-sleeves.
“No,” said Nicky. “They’re called Sikhs.”