Ida lay there silently, her head rolling from side to side under the blows as the rain fell on her. The soldier looked at me and paused with the rifle lifted above his shoulder. He looked at me, and at Ida, at me again, with his mouth hanging open, and then shrugged and lowered the rifle.
Tucking micks,’ he muttered. ‘Barmy!’
He reeled away down the road. I carried Ida on my shoulders back to the camp. How did I carry that weight so far? Perhaps it was not far. Silas said nothing. After all, he had been expecting this or something like it, some disaster, he was not surprised. Her blood was all over me, even in my hair. We wrapped her in a blanket and laid her on her bunk. In the night she woke and cried out for Mario. I found him lying in our caravan staring at the flame of a guttering candle. I told him he was needed for a deathbed scene. He looked up at me expressionlessly for a long time with those strange still eyes.
Tuck off,’ he said softly at last, and turned his face to the wall. It made no difference. She was already dead. I arrived back as Silas was closing her eyes, and it was as if he had closed a door on a whole world.
33
ODD, BUT I can remember no tears. Lamentations seemed somehow superfluous. If one stopped and thought for a moment about her death one said
With the murder of the innocent went our innocence, and in its place came something brutal and icecold. We struck camp that very day and travelled down into the plain. It was strange to be on the move again, to hear the wheels groan and the hoofs stamping. We had thought to leave death behind us in the mountains, but down here it was everywhere in the air. It was as bad as we had been told, worse. There was a smell of death. No beasts grazed in the meadows, no smoke rose from chimneys. Children sat motionless at the crossroads staring out of huge round eyes. We passed by a woman lying laughing in a ditch. The fields lay fallow. After a week we reached the coast and headed southwards in a storm. The wind roared for days, buffeting the frail walls of the caravans, filling our mouths and eyes with salt. When the wind dropped it was winter, and there was ice in the hedgerows, the fallen leaves were brittle with frost, and the air grew fangs. Now the hoofs on the road had a steely ring, and the mornings were black as pitch. My teeth went bad. We had no money, no food. That was a terrible time.
We came to a town, and an echo rose out of my past. Yes, there was the broken rampart, the belltower, the barracks. I was, if you like, home. There was no welcome there for me. Everything was the same and yet changed. Silas saw me looking, and smiled.
‘Aye, Master Little Boots, you recognise this place? Here we end our journey.’ He winked. ‘
We rumbled down the empty main street. A bell chimed thrice, three sombre strokes. Children threw stones at us in an eerie, malevolent silence, and fled. We entered an empty crooked square. Here the houses along two sides were fine bright edifices, wine-red brick and white windows curtained with lace, while their counterparts facing them were low thatched shanties, ruined, most of them, with their walls breached as though by cannonshot. The roofs were in tatters. Shattered fireplaces hung in mid-air. Even the worst of these wrecks were inhabited. One, its front wall gone completely, was like a grotesque cutaway illustration of the times. On the lower floors an emaciated mother was cooking something frightful in a black pot while her brood of rickety children scuttled around her, and upstairs the father, tended by a dutiful daughter, lay on a pallet made of sacking, doing his best to die. They paid us not the slightest heed as our gaping cavalcade went past.
At one of the two streets leading out of the square Silas called a halt. We reined in the horses and waited, for what, we did not know, looking expectantly toward Silas, who sat in his doorway, puffing on his pipe, and considered the sky above the houses with a faint dreamy smile. Down at the end of the street which his caravan blocked a sliver of sea was visible. The silence was strange, deep yet light as the chill winter air, tingling, itching to be broken, as it was at last by a thin high-pitched whistle. Silas's ears seemed to twitch, but still he gazed upward, puffing and smiling. There was a stirring in the rubble of one of the shattered houses, and a small woman in a wide flowered dress with her head hidden by a black shawl stepped out into the square, shook the dust off herself like a dog shaking water out of its fur, and hurried toward us. There was something in that walk, the way the arms sawed, haunches rolled, shoulders strained at the delicate stuff of the gown, that reminded me of another time, a road, a chase. She reached Silas's caravan and stopped, and he, with a great show of surprise, whipped the pipe out of his mouth and bent to help her up beside him. We craned our necks and stared. What woman was this, rising out of the ground in a strange town? She put her foot on the rim of the wheel and Silas yanked her arm, the wind blew, the dress billowed, and there was revealed to us, instead of the pink knickers, say, we had expected, a pair of coarse tweed trousers hitched up around the knees and tied with binder-twine. The two, already deep in conversation, disappeared into the caravan, and we were left with the silence again. Someone laughed uneasily. I was excited and obscurely alarmed, for I had seen in that strange man-woman, behind the echo of that other one we had fed as he fled from the peelers, another fainter echo out of a deeper past. I began to step down from the seat, intending to creep up and spy on their secret conference, but Mario reached out a hand and held me fast.
‘Is none your business, boy,’ he growled, and it was at that moment that my real fear began. That black shawl was there to hide more than mere gender.
Half an hour passed. Magnus and Ada played a game of cards. The twins went back for another look at the starving family. Sybil sat on a wooden box behind Silas's caravan, staring intently at nothing and brushing her hair, stroke after slow stroke, endlessly. Now a noise that had begun as a vague distant buzzing became the quavering voice of a concourse lifted in song. The sound drew nearer, rising and falling like an ill heart's beat behind the houses up at the other end of the square. We turned our faces thither, awaiting the appearance of the singers, but instead there crept out of the mouth of the street a horde of squat grey creatures, scores of them, crawling on their bellies and scuttling over each other's backs, or hopping in that strange way they have, as though each hop were a pounce, stopping, rising on their haunches to sniff the air with delicate snouts, their black eyes glittering. Rats! They scattered into the broken houses, and the procession arrived and crawled painfully toward us across the square like a snake with a broken back, a wavering string of emaciated townsfolk. Their sad song rose like a moan. In the van there marched a priest with cropped red hair and cracked boots holding a rough wooden cross aloft, and out at the side, stalking the line like an outrider, was a figure in a cocked hat and gaiters, white trousers, a green jacket. Strongbow! There he was, in full regalia, as preposterously plumed and groomed as ever. I almost laughed to see him, my ridiculous friend. If I threw a stone at him would he remember that day when he chased me off the town's historic ramparts? It seemed unlikely, for he had larger issues to occupy him now than the irreverence of little boys. Behind the priest a coffin was borne along on the shoulders of four stooped men. It was a small box. They were building them smaller now. Famine shrivelled its corpses. I wondered if this were one of Silas's sliding contraptions.
Singing, weaving, staring blankly, they marched across the square. In the wake of the coffin a crazed old woman stumbled, softly wailing. I recognised her. The rest looked away from her as though embarrassed by her tears. Here was no place for such a show of grief, too many were dying, silence sufficed. Silas's caravan stood in their path. The priest halted and lowered the cross, and behind him a convulsion of halting ran back through the crowd. The song trembled uncertainly, soared on one last note and faded. Strongbow came marching up, conferred briefly with the priest, then stepped up to the caravan and rapped with his fist on the window. There was no response, and he retreated a pace in confusion, stamping his heels. One of the coffin bearers moaned very softly. Strongbow cast a sidelong glance at the other caravans and their silent attentive occupants. He was about to speak when the door above him opened and Silas stepped out on the driving board and leaned down and asked,
‘Well, my good man?’
Strongbow's plume bristled.
‘Get this yoke on up owwa the way there!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
