It is a beautiful place, surrounded by a triple ring of trees, mostly oaks. In the centre the eleven graves ray out from an empty space, long mounds of yellow earth, each covered with a slab of our dark grey stone. Eleven’s grave, a few days old, still does not have its stone lid. Inside the ring of trees, the soft yellow earth of this hillside is allowed to grow the sparse grass of the region, a mat that keeps the soil from blowing. There are always birds in the trees. The tree shadows move, mass, thicken, grow thin, as the sun moves. A young couple leaned against a tree, embracing. A youth was digging soil from the heap over Eleven. I stood where my grave would be, and said to him, ‘Just a minute, young man, show some respect.’
He was a burly, unappetising youth, wearing an outfit that seemed wrong on him.
He stopped, looked up, and said, Whadyewmean?’ ‘That is where an old friend of mine is buried.’ There was a knife in his belt, and his hand went to it. But he was frowning, apparently thinking: I reminded myself that these days they need some time to take in facts.
I repeated, ‘A friend of mine was buried there a few days ago.’
He looked down at the now damaged mound. I saw that he was imagining how just beneath him … he jumped away from the grave, brushed his hands free of soil, and said, ‘Right, then,’
‘What do you want the earth for?’
‘My house is letting in water. This makes good clay, this soil up here, mixed with a little of the fine chalk near the shore.’
‘Why don’t you make yourself a stone house?’
‘My house does well enough. It needs some patching.’
He yawned, stretched, sat down on a grave. Nine’s. The water engineer who had created the Fall. He pulled some dried meat from his garment and began eating. Over in the trees, the couple were copulating. These days they couple any place they feel like it. The youth sitting on the grave saw them and shouted: ‘Co to it!’ He laughed. Then he said to me, sobering, ‘Oh, go on, it’s only a bit of fun.’
I had remembered what his clothes were. The desert people under the first Rod had worn tunics belted over loose trousers in sandy colours, and these had become a fashion, which must have looked well on those lithe quick people. On this hulk of a youth, with his bulging stomach, they were wrong.
‘So, you’re one of Rod’s warriors?’ I teased him.
‘What?’
I explained. He was interested. ‘That’s green,’ he said. ‘Did you know Rod?’
‘It was getting on for four hundred years ago.’
Again the frown of incomprehension. He shook his head, dismissing it all, stood up. The two copulators, having finished, strolled over, dishevelled but not discomposed.
‘Got your earth?’ asked the young woman.
‘Go on, take some,’ I said. ‘When they come to fit on the slab they’ll have to tidy it all up anyway.’
‘No … no … actually we just came up for a laugh, and then I saw this soil just lying here.’
The three turned, to go off down the hill.
! said, ‘One day I shall be put here just here, where I am standing.’
This embarrassed them. ‘Is this a special place?’ asked the youth who had his arms around the girl.
‘You could say that, I think,’ I said.
‘Green,’ said the girl.
I saw that green was the new in-word.
The two young men gave a kind of salute, but it was a joke, the girl made a joke curtsey, and off they went, running down the hill.
I sat myself down on the stone that covered Shusha and looked at the graves, one after another, thinking of my friends. Then at the lacing of vigorous grass over the yellow soil. Then at the enormous trees around this circle. Here was my life. All my friends, my wife, all gone under the earth.
How much I wished I could just lie down in my place and be done with it. I did not want to stand up, with the creaking effort it costs me these days, walk slowly down the hill, carrying such a load of doubts, fears, sorrow. Everything I had worked for had vanished. There had been that wonderful time, that excellence, which seemed like a dream, it was so far away, so done with. And the future was not anything I cared to think about,
I lay down on my place, on the rough grass, and folded my arms, as they will be, soon. The sun was striking low through the tree trunks, and black spokes marked the grass, the graves. Straight above me the blue air dazzled. I closed my eyes and dreamed.
Twelve youngsters were dancing in a ring that matched the encircling trees, and the almost complete circle of graves. They tripped and stepped and sang, cram-full of the energies and hopes of the very young. There we all were, The Twelve, not much more than children, just about the age we were when Destra died. There I was, too. The sun shone on our hair, on our bare brown limbs, and the happy shouts and singing rose up into the air like birds. I was both one of them and sitting on the grass, supporting my old weight with my hands. I wanted to call out to my younger self, but eon Id not. And then, it seemed, the light dimmed, the sun darkened, and one by one my young companions turned to smile at me over their shoulders as they ran off into the trees, going out like sparks or like fireflies. Each one, the quick flash of a smile, teasing, mocking, affectionate, and then he or she was gone, Shusha too, and I among them. Twelve. But where was DeRod? - and then there he was, strolling along near the trees, not a boy, or even a youth, but a grown man, as he had been long ago that day near the Fall. He was not looking about him, was self-absorbed. Or absent - yes: as if he did not know where he was. He stopped, urinated near one of the graves. This was done so casually, almost absently. He was thinking of something else. He walked off down the hill as the spray of urine came on the breeze to my face. I woke; the dew was falling; and night was falling too. The great clearing was filled with the blueish dark of twilight,
I stood up, trying to loosen my limbs from the stiffness of lying still for what must have been quite a time. I
