In that vile winter, Martha and Greybeard had organized lectures, not entirely with Mole’s approval. They had spoken on history, on geography, on politics, on the lessons to be learnt from life — but as all their subject matter was necessarily drawn from an existence that died even as they spoke, the lectures were a failure. To the hunger and deprivation had been added something more sinister: a sense that there was no longer a place on earth for mind.
Someone had invented a brief-lived phrase for that feeling: the Brain Curtain. Certainly the brain curtain had descended that winter with a vengeance.
In January, the fieldfares brought their harsh song of Norway to Sparcot. In February, cold winds blew and snow fell every day. In March, the sparrows mated on the crusted and dirty piles of ice. Only in April did a softer air return.
During that month, Charley Samuels married Iris Ryde. Charley and Timberlane had fought together in the war, years earlier, when both had formed part of the Infantop Corps. It had been a good day when he arrived at the motley little village. When he married, he moved his bride into the house next to Martha and Algy. Six years later, Iris died of cancer that, like sterility, was an effect of the Accident.
That had been an ill time. And all the while they had laboured under Mole’s fears, hardly aware of the imposition. To get away was like a convalescence, when one looks back and sees for the first time how ill one has been. Martha recalled how eagerly they had conspired with nature, encouraging the roads to decay, sealing them off from the dangerous world outside, and how anxiously they guarded Sparcot against the day when Croucher’s forces moved to overwhelm them.
Croucher never came to Sparcot. He died from the pandemic that killed so many of his followers and converted his stronghold into a morgue. By the time the disease had run its course, large organizations had gone the way of large animals; the hedges grew, the copses heaved their shoulders and became forests; the rivers spread into marshland; and the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities.
III. The River: Swifford Fair
Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long. The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.
In the sharp winter’s air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt’s pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.
In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them. Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.
Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt’s boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.
His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.
Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher’s guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher’s ways.
Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsocial disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully back at the ruffled winter landscape through which they had journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.
Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after they had left the inn where they found the sheep, they smelt wood smoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.
“My God, the gnomes!” he exclaimed. “There’s one of them for sure!”
On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crutch and called to them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed mesmerized towards it.
By the time they reached the bank, the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.
He was a lively octogenarian, judging by appearance, a sprightly grotesque with a tatter of red and violet capillaries running from one cheekbone to another over the alp of his nose. His beard and top-knot formed one continuous conflagration of hair, tied bottom and top below jaw and above crown, and dyed a deep tangerine. He danced like a skeleton and motioned to them.
“Are you alone? Can we put in here?” Greybeard called.
“I don’t like the look of him — let’s press on,” Jeff Pitt called, labouring his boat up through the panes of ice. “We don’t know what we’re letting ourselves in for.”
The skeleton cried something unintelligible, jumping back when Greybeard climbed ashore. He clutched some red and green beads that hung round his neck. “Sirrer vine daver zwimmin,” he said.
“Oh — fine day for swimming! You have been swimming? Isn’t it cold? Aren’t you afraid of cutting yourself on the ice?”
“Warreryer zay? Diddy zay zomminer bout thize?”
“He doesn’t seem to understand me any better than I can understand him,” Greybeard remarked to the others in the boats. But with patience, he managed to penetrate the skeleton’s thick accent. His name appeared to be Norsgrey, and he was a traveller. He was staying with his wife, Lita, in the barn they saw through the ash trees. He would welcome the company of Greybeard and his party.
Like Charley’s fox, the sheep were all on tethers. They were made to jump ashore, where they immediately began cropping the harsh grasses. The humans dragged their boats up and secured them. They stood stretching themselves, to force the chill and stiffness from their limbs. Then they made towards the barn, moving their legs painfully. As they became used to the skeleton’s accent, what he had to say became more intelligible, though in content his talk was wild.
His preoccupation was with badgers. Norsgrey believed in the magical power of badgers. He had a daughter, he told them, who would be nearly sixty now, who had run off into the woods (“when they was a-seeding and a- branching themselves up to march forth and strangle down the towns of man”) and she had married a badger. There were badger men in the woods now who were her sons, and badger girls her daughters, black and white in their faces, very lovely to behold.
“Are there stoats round here?” Martha asked, cutting off what threatened to be a long monologue. Old Norsgrey paused outside the barn and pointed into the lower branches of a tree.
“There’s one now, a-looking down at us, Mrs. Lady, sitting in its wicked little nest as cute as you like. But he won’t touch us ’cos he knows as I’m related to the badgers by matterrimony.”
They stared and could see only the pale grey twigs of ash thrusting black-capped into the air. Inside the barn, an ancient reindeer lay in the half-dark, its four broad hooves clumped together. Becky gave a shriek of surprise as it turned its ancient sullen face towards them. Hens clucked and scattered at their entrance.
“Don’t make a lot of row,” Norsgrey warned them. “Lita’s asleep, and I don’t want her wakened. I’ll turn you
