out if you disturb her, but if you’re quiet, and give me a bite of supper, I’ll let you stay here, nice and warm and comfortable — and safe from all those hungry stoats outside.”
“What ails your wife?” Towin asked. “I’m not staying in here if there’s illness.”
“Don’t you insult my wife. She’s never had an illness in her life. Just keep quiet and behave.”
“I’ll go and get our kit from the boat,” Greybeard said. Charley and the fox came back to the river with him. As they loaded themselves, Charley spoke with some show of embarrassment, looking not at Greybeard but at the cool grey landscape.
“Towin and his Becky would have stayed at the place where the dead man sat in his kitchen,” he said. “They didn’t care to come any further, but we persuaded them. That’s right, isn’t it, Greybeard?”
“You know it is.”
“Right. What I want to ask you, then, is this. How far are we going? What are you planning? What have you got in mind?”
Greybeard looked at the river. “You’re a religious man, Charley. Don’t you think God might have something in mind for us?”
Charley laughed curtly. “That would sound better if you believed in God yourself. But suppose I thought He had in mind for us to settle down here, what would you do? I don’t see what you are aiming on doing.”
“We’re not far enough from Sparcot to stop yet. They might make an expedition and catch us here.”
“You know that’s nonsense as well as I do. Truth of the matter is, you don’t really know where you want to go, or why, isn’t that it?”
Greybeard looked at the solid face of the man he had known for so long. “Each day I become more sure. I want to get to the mouth of the river, to the sea.”
Nodding, Charley picked up his equipment and started to trudge back towards the barn. Isaac led the way.
Greybeard made as if to add something, then changed his mind. He did not believe in explaining. To Towin and Becky, this journey was just another hardship; to him, it was an end in itself. The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch:
Distantly he heard music. He looked about him with a tingle of unease, recalling the tales Pitt and others told of gnomes and little people, for this was a little music. But he realized it came to him over a long distance. Was it — he had almost forgotten the name of the instrument — an accordion?
He went thoughtfully back to the barn, and asked Norsgrey about it. The old man, sprawling with his back to the reindeer’s flank, looked up keenly through his orange hair.
“That would be Swifford Fair. I just come from there, done a bit of trading. That’s where I got my hens.” As ever, it was hard to make out what he was saying.
“How far’s Swifford from here?”
“Road will take you quicker than the river. A mile as the crow flies. Two miles by road. Five by your river. I’ll buy your boat from you, give you a good price.” They did not agree to that, but they gave the old man some of their food. The sheep they had killed ate well, cut up into a stew and flavoured with some herbs which Norsgrey supplied from his little cart. When they ate meat, they took it in the form of stews, for stews were kindest to old teeth and tender gums.
“Why doesn’t your wife come and eat with us?” Towin asked. “Is she fussy about strangers or something?”
“She’s asleep like I told you behind that blue curtain. You leave her alone — she’s done you no harm.”
The blue curtain was stretched across one corner of the barn, from the cart to a nail on the wall. The barn was now uncomfortably full, for they brought the sheep in with them at dusk. They made uneasy bedfellows with the hens and the old reindeer. The glow of their lamps hardly reached up to the rafters. Those rafters had ceased to be living timber two and a half centuries before. Other life now took refuge in them: grubs, beetles, larvae, spiders, chrysalises slung to the beams with silken threads, fleas and their pupae in swallows’ nests, awaiting their owner’s return in the next unfailing spring. For these simple creatures, many generations had passed since man contrived his own extinction.
“Here, how old was you reckoning I was?” Norsgrey asked, thrusting his colourful countenance into Martha’s face.
“I wasn’t really thinking,” Martha said sweetly. “You was thinking about seventy, wasn’t you?”
“I really was not thinking. I prefer not to think about age; it is one of my least favourite subjects.”
“Well, think about mine, then. An early seventy you’d say, wouldn’t you?”
“Possibly.” Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain. “Well, let me tell you that you’d be wrong, Mrs. Lady — ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won’t believe me?”
“Go on, how old are you?” Towin asked, growing interested. “Eighty-five, I’d say you were. I bet you’re older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate.”
“They don’t have years with numbers attached any more,” Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. “You won’t believe this, Mrs. Lady, but I’m close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two hundredth birthday next week.”
Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, “You look well for your age.”
“You’re never two hundred, no more than I am,” Towin said scornfully.
“That I am. I’m two hundred, and what’s more I shall still be be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried.”
Towin leant forward and kicked the old man’s boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man’s flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.
“Give over,” he said sternly. “Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions.”
“’Tisn’t no delusion,” Norsgrey said irritably. “You can ask my wife when she wakes up.”
Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, “We’d’a done better if you’d listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!”
“You can get outside if you don’t like the company,” Norsgrey said. “Your trouble is you’re rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you’ll die! None of you lot know anything of the world — you’ve been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you’ve never heard of.”
“Such as?” Charley asked.
“See this red and green necklace I got round my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I’m one of the few men who’ve actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn — phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs.”
“What happens to them?” Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lampglow.
Norsgrey laughed. “Eyeballs never die. Didn’t you know that, Mrs. Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles.”
“Where is this place Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this. There aren’t any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there’s this place Mockweagles, only it’s secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It’s a castle — well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don’t live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you’ve got to go right up to the top floor to find them.”
