‘Tom, I ’ Avery didn’t know what to say.
And oddly, it was Tom who comforted him. ‘Richard,’ he said quietly, ‘you don’t have to say anything. I know. He would have belonged to all of us. That’s how it will always be now. Whatever happens belongs to all of us I’m going to stay with Mary. We’ll be all right.’
He turned towards the tent.
Avery covered the baby tenderly. It was still warm—warm with the cruel illusion of life.
TWENTY-FIVE
Avery did not bury the baby until shortly before dawn. Barbara would not let him leave the camp in darkness, and so the fragment of wreckage that was Tom and Mary’s child lay in state, mutely on the rocky ground under a brilliant canopy of stars.
For the remainder of the night, no one slept. Physically, Mary was in better condition than any of them had dared hope. But the grief had frozen in her. She became dry-eyed and empty. There was a stone in her heart, and nothing that Tom could do would prise it out. The stone would remain with her, not for always but until time itself had worn the edges off, leaving only a hard, small roundness….
Avery left the camp at first light, taking with him a tomahawk and the now cold little bundle of colder hopes. He did not go very far from the camp. He went to the stream where they got their water, and then looked for a tall tree—one that would be easily identifiable. He found one almost at the water’s edge. Idiotically, he thought to himself: ‘Baby will like that—shade from the sun, and the sound of running water…. He shouldn’t be too lonely here, because we shall be coming close to him every day.’
Then he laid the bundle down and began to hack a little grave out of the soft earth with his. tomahawk.
At last it was deep enough. He laid the baby—still wrapped in one of Tom’s shirts—in soil that was now warmer than its own body.
Avery was no great believer in God. But there were things he felt, things he had to say. Saying them was different than just thinking them—even if there was no one to hear. Speech itself was a kind of ceremony. It was all he had to offer by way of a requiem.
‘Here,’ he said, speaking in a firm but quiet voice, ‘I commit a part of those I love and a part of Earth to the soil of a strange world. If this child had lived, he would have been a native of this world…. Perhaps the first member of an intelligent race ever to be born upon the planet…. But I don’t know about that. There is so much I don’t know…. I don’t even know why we of Earth were brought here, or why God—if there is a god—denied this child the right to live…. But I do know that by this act of burial we establish a bond with this place that cannot be broken. We establish a bond and a kind of possession. For here is part of the substance of two human beings who have learned to share happiness and must now share sorrow. Their stillborn child, in the very nature of things, is now committed to enrich the life of a land in which we were once intruders. This is the ultimate intrusion, for we and the land now share something that is intimate and personal…. I cannot say any more, because I do not know if there is anything more to say. Except that… In the names of Tom and Mary, Barbara and me—Amen.’
Sad, and strangely puzzled by his own thoughts, Avery began to scrape the soil back into the hole. Then, when he had patted down the surface of the mound smoothly, he went back to camp.
As he walked, an absurd kind of mental arithmetic took possession of his mind. One, Tom is wounded; two, Barbara is abducted; three, indirectly a child is killed. One, two and three. What would four, five and six be? What would they all add up to in the end? One, Tom is wounded; two, Barbara is abducted; three, indirectly a child is killed….
A child is killed. That was the important one. For now there was the promise of another child. And would that child, too, have to endure these unnecessary, other-than-normal hazards before and after birth? Must it learn to live with a fear it could not understand?
In the early morning, as he walked along the now well-known track, Avery found an answer to his question….
Breakfast was a sullen, silent meal. Mary could walk, but she chose to stay in the tent, staring at nothing, wanting nothing, eating nothing. The others, however, were hungry. They resented the hunger and they resented the food; but they ate well, nevertheless. In some way—in the obscure chemistry of mind and body—grief had sharpened their appetites. They ate to distract themselves; but the distraction was not enough.
Avery gazed at Barbara as if she was a stranger. For a while he would have to make her into a stranger, because there was something to be done that he would have to do alone.
‘Do you think you can pick up one of those rocks, Tom?’ he asked without preamble, indicating the permanent store of anti-siege ammunition that lay round the camp.
Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘I can pick it up, and I can throw it as well. The shoulder that wasn’t damaged is as good as ever.’
‘Let’s see you, then.’
Tom selected one of the rocks. ‘What do you want me to do—try for a coconut?’
‘Just throw it as far as you can.’
Because of the height of the camp above the rest of the shore, Tom managed to hurl the rock about thirty yards. But the effort made him wince.
However, Avery seemed satisfied. He turned to Barbara. ‘Do you think you can do any better?’
‘This isn’t the time for games, Richard.’
‘It isn’t a game. Now have a shot.’
Barbara managed to beat Tom’s effort by some ten yards.
‘Not bad,’ said Avery. ‘If Camp Two was attacked, I should think the pair of you could keep them happy for quite a time—providing you didn’t forget to dodge the javelins.’
‘I’m not entirely eager to get myself punctured a second time,’ observed Tom grimly. ‘But we have the gun and we have you. So if they try to take us by storm —and what wouldn’t I give to see them try! —it will just be like committing suicide the hard way.’
‘You won’t have the gun, and you won’t have me,’ retorted Avery. ‘Not for a few hours, anyway…. I don’t want to know whether you can conduct a massacre—just whether you can hold the fort.’
Tom understood. ‘We can hold the fort, if we have to…. But why don’t you wait a few days, then—’
‘Waiting doesn’t seem to be such a good idea,’ cut in Avery.
Barbara didn’t want to understand. ‘Richard, you are not going to go prancing off, today of all days. We have only just got back, and there’s enough meat for the time being, and we can’t let Mary feel ’
‘Mary will be all right,’ said Tom gently. ‘Don’t worry, Barbara. Richard hasn’t done too badly by us so far. He knows what he’s doing now.’
And then Barbara couldn’t avoid understanding. ‘Darling, you can’t just ’
‘Commit murder?’ supplied Avery. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, once. But I stopped being civilized the day before yesterday. All we wanted was to live in peace. As things stand, we can only live in fear. Unless we do something about it, what happened to Tom may happen to me—oh, yes, I’m scared for myself, all right—but even if nothing at all happens, and I wouldn’t bet on it, there’s still the fear…. You are carrying a baby. I don’t want to risk any more variations on the theme of what happened to Mary.’
‘Seconded and carried,’ said Tom heavily. ‘Incidentally, it has just occurred to me that they may have a little something similar to our pop-gun.’
‘Good luck to them, then,’ returned Avery grimly. ‘I’m not a hero, and I don’t much care for the medieval concept of chivalry. So I shan’t be challenging anybody to a duel…. I expect that whoever dumped us in this place tried to make sure it was a pretty fair match…. But to hell with cricket! If I have to fight, then I’ll damn well fight efficiently. No heroics—just plain, honest assassination, carried out as safely as possible.’