them in such a thieves’ den.”
They were towing Jeff Pitt’s little boat, so that he could be in with them. He said, “Who’s the thieves? It might have been Jingadangelow’s men took our property. On the other hand, I reckon it might just as well have been old Towin. I never did trust him, crafty old blighter.”
“Whoever it was, the Lord will provide for us,” Charley said. He bent his back and guided his paddle deeper into the sedgy waters.
IV. Washington
In the first dreary days at Sparcot, when the rabble cast up there were forming into a community and the disease-ridden summer broke into a rain-swept autumn, Charley Samuels had not realized for some while that he knew the big man with the high bald head and growing beard. It was a time when everyone was more alert for enemies than friends.
Charley arrived at Sparcot some days after the Timberlanes, and in a dejected state of mind. His father had owned a small bookshop in a South Coast town. Ambrose Samuels was a man of glooms and tempers. When he was in his most smiling mood, he would read aloud to Mrs. Samuels, the boy Charley, and his two sisters, Ruth and Rachel. He read to them from the thousands of obsolete theological books with which the second floor of the old shop was stocked, or from the works of obsolete and morose poets which sold no better than the theology.
Much of this dead stock thus inevitably passed into Charley’s mind. He could quote it at any later time of life, without knowing who wrote it or when, remembering only that it came from what his father had designated “a gilt- tooled thirty-two-mo” or a “tree’d calf octavo”.
It was a lie. When Charley was eleven, an alarming shock of fate set the thought of death in his heart for ever. In his eleventh year, came the radiation sickness — the result of that deliberate act men called The Accident. His father died of cancer a year later.
The shop was sold. Mrs. Samuels took her children to live in her home town, where she got a secretarial post. Charley went to work when he was fifteen. His mother died three years later.
He took a series of unskilled jobs while trying to act as father to his sisters. That had been in the late eighties and early nineteen-nineties. Compared with what was to come, it was — morally and economically — a fairly stable time. But work became harder to get. He saw his sisters established in good jobs while he was unemployed.
It was the outbreak of war that had the final shaping of him. He was twenty-nine. This madness added to madness, as nations bled themselves fighting over the few children who survived, decided him that there had to be something higher than man if all creation was not a mockery. Only in religion, it seemed to him, lay an antidote to despair. He had himself baptized into the Methodist church — a step that would have enraged his father.
To avoid being called to fight in the war, Charley joined the Infantop Corps, a semi-international branch of Childsweep, dedicated to saving life rather than taking it. At once, he had been swept away from Rachel and Ruth and plunged into the thick of the global struggle. It was then he met Algy Timberlane.
With the revolution and Britain’s retirement from the war in 2005, Charley returned to look after his sisters again. He found to his horror that Ruth and Rachel had taken to prostitution and were prospering. It was all done very discreetly, and they still worked in the afternoon at a nearby shop. Charley closed down part of his mind, settled in with them, and defended them where and when he could.
He became the glorified chucker-out of their thriving establishment. For under the Coalition and later the United governments, hard times came with a vengeance. The world was crumbling into senescence and chaos. But what the sisters supplied remained a necessity. They flourished until the cholera stalked through England.
Charley prised his sisters away from their stricken town and headed into the country with them. Rachel and Ruth did not protest; they had seen enough from their vantage point to scare them. A client dying on the stairs precipitated them into the little car Charley bought with his war savings.
Outside the town, the car expired. They found a nylon stocking rammed into the oil sump. They began to walk, carrying their bundles on their backs on a road that led — though they did not know it — to Sparcot. Many other refugees went by that way.
It was a gruesome exodus. Among the genuine travellers were bandits who set upon their fellows, cut their throats, and took their belongings. Another robber went that way; it crept through the blood, burst out on the brow, was interested only in taking life. It stole up on Ruth in the first night and on Rachel in the third, and left them face upwards in the mounds of humus over which Charley raised crosses made with sticks from the dusty hedgerows.
When he limped into the doubtful shelter of Sparcot (helping a woman called Iris whom he would find strength to marry eighteen months later), Charley was a man turned in on himself. He had no wish to interest himself in the world again. In his wounded heart, the sudden dread had found a permanent billet.
Both he and Timberlane had changed so much that it was not surprising recognition was only gradual. In that first Sparcot year of 2029, they had not seen each other for over a quarter of a century — since 2001, when the war still engulfed the world and they were both in the Infantop Corps. Then they had been operating overseas, combing the shattered valleys of Assam…
Of their patrol, only two survived. Those two, as from old habit, walked in single file. The man in the rear, Corporal Samuels, carried a natterjack, the light nuclear gun, various packs filled with provisions, and a can of water. He moved somnambulistically, stumbling as they walked down the wooded hillside.
Before him, a child’s head jogged, hanging upside down and regarding him with a sightless eye. The child’s left arm swung against the thigh of the man over whose broad back it lay. This was a boy child, a child of the Naga tribe, delicately built, shaven of head, and perhaps nine years old. He was unconscious; the flies that buzzed incessantly about his eyes and about the wound on his thigh did not trouble him.
He was carried by Sergeant Timberlane, a bronzed young man of twenty-six. Timberlane wore a revolver, had various pieces of equipment strapped about him, and carried a tall stick with which he helped himself along as he followed the path leading down to the valley bottom.
The dry season ruled Assam. The trees, which were no more than nine feet high, stood as if dead, their leaves limp. The river in the valley bottom had dried out, leaving a sandy chaung along which wheeled vehicles and GEM’s could move. The dust the vehicles had disturbed had settled on the trees on either side of the chaung, whitening them until they bore the appearance of a disused indoor television lot. The chaung itself dazzled in the bright sun.
Where the trees ceased to grow, Timberlane stopped, hoisting the wounded child more firmly on to his shoulder. Charley bumped into him.
“What’s the matter, Algy?”, he asked, coming back into weary wakefulness. As he spoke, he stared at the child’s head. Because it had been shaved, the hair showed only as fine bristles; little flies crawled like lice among the bristles. The boy’s eyes were as expressionless as jelly. Upside down, a human face is robbed of much of its meaning.
“We’ve got visitors.” The tone of Timberlane’s voice brought Charley instantly back on to the alert. Before
