“You can’t leave me behind, you know,” he said. “We belong together. It may be a long time ago, Greybeard, but I’ve not forgotten you could have killed me that time when I was supposed to shoot you.”
Greybeard laughed. “The idea never even entered my head.”
“Ah, well, it’s because it didn’t that I’m shaking your hand now. What you cooking there? Now I’m with you, I’ll see you don’t starve.”
“We were intending to fob off starvation with salmon this morning, Jeff,” Martha said, hitching her skirt to squat over the open stove.
“These must be the first salmon caught in the Thames for two hundred years.” Pitt folded his tattered arms and looked askance at the fish. “I’ll catch you bigger ’uns than that, Martha. You need me about the place — older we get, more we need friends. Where’s old Holy Joe Samuels, then?”
“Just taking a morning walk. He’ll be back, and horrified to see you standing here, no doubt.”
When Charley returned and finished slapping Pitt on the back, they sat down to eat their meal. Slowly the heat mist thinned, revealing more and more of their surroundings. The world expanded, showing itself full of sky and reflections of sky.
“You see, you could be lost here easy enough,” Pitt said. Now the first pleasure of reunion was over, he lapsed into his customary grumbling tone. “Some of the lads I know back in Oxford used to be free-booters and sort of water-highwaymen around this region, until they became too old and turned to a bit of quiet poaching instead. They still talk about the old days, and they were telling me that there was a lot of fierce fights went on here some years back. They call this the Sea of Barks, you know.”
“I heard them speak of it in Oxford,” Charley said. “They say it’s still spreading, but there are fewer folk to chart it now.”
Pitt wore two old jackets and a pair of trousers. He felt in one of the pockets of the inner jacket and produced a square of paper, which he unfolded and handed to Greybeard. Greybeard recognized the paper; it was one of the broadsheets distributed during the last exhibition of the Balliol children. On its back, a map was drawn in ink.
“It shows you what this region’s like now, according to these pals of mine, who explored most of it,” Pitt said. “Can you understand it?”
“It’s a good map, Jeff. Although there are names missing here, it’s easy to identify the old features. Barks must be a corruption of the old Berkshire.”
Martha and Charley peered at the map with him. Marked on the southern tip of the Sea of Barks was Goring. There, on either side of the old river, two ranges of hills, the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs, met. The river had become blocked at that point and, rising, had flooded all the land north of it, where a sort of triangular trough was formed between the two ridges of hills and the Cotswolds.
Charley nodded. “Although it’s far from being a sea, it’s easily twenty miles across from east to west, and perhaps fifteen the other way. Plenty of room to get lost on it.”
Martha traced the edge of the so-called sea with a finger and said, “A lot of towns must have been submerged in it, Abingdon and Wallingford among them. This makes Meadow Lake appear a mere pond! If the water level is still rising, I suppose in time the two stretches of water will meet, and then Oxford itself will sink.”
“Don’t things change fast when they’re under God’s care rather than man’s,” Charley said. “I’ve been reckoning up. It must be about fourteen years since I arrived at Sparcot, and before then the country was getting a bit run down and tatty — but now it’s a different country altogether.”
“Now it’s only us that’s getting tattier,” Pitt said. “The land’s never looked better. I wish I were younger again, Charley, don’t you? — Both of us young rips of eighteen, say, with a couple of nice young bits of stuff to keep us company! I’d see I had a better life than the one I have had.”
As Pitt expected, Charley would not agree to the young bits of stuff. “I wish I had my sisters with us, Jeff. They’d be happier in this place than they were, poor things. We’ve lived through desperate times! Now you can’t call this England any more — it’s reverted to God. It’s His country now, and it’s the better for it.”
“Nice of Him to put up with us,” Pitt said sarcastically. “Though He won’t have to do that much longer, will He?”
“It’s terribly anthropomorphic of me, but I can’t help feeling He’ll find it the slightest bit dull when we’ve all gone,” Martha said.
They moved off after their meal. As they had done a couple of years before, they all travelled in the dinghy and towed Pitt’s boat. The wind was hardly strong enough to move them over the silent waters.
They had been travelling only a brief while before they saw in the hazy distance the spires and roofs of a half-drowned town. The church steeple stood out cleanly, but most of the roofs were concealed by plants which had taken root in their blocked gutters. This vegetation would presumably be an important factor in causing the buildings to slide beneath the surface. For a while the steeple would remain; then the slow crumbling of its foundations would cause it, too, to disappear, and the finger of man would no longer be evident on the scene.
Pitt hung over the side of the dinghy, and peered into the “sea”.
“I was wondering what happened to the people that used to live down there,” he said uneasily, “and wondering if they might perhaps still be carrying on their life under the water, but I don’t see any of them looking up at us.”
“Here, Jeff, that reminds me,” Charley said. “What with you arriving, it went clean out of my mind, but you know you used to reckon there was goblins in the woods.”
“Goblins and gnomes,” said Pitt, regarding him unblinkingly. “What of it? Have you been seeing them too, a religious man like you, Charley?”
“I saw something.” Charley turned to Greybeard. “It was first thing this morning, when I was going to see if there was anything in our snares. As I knelt over one of them, I looked up, and there were three faces staring at me through the bushes.”
“Ah, I told you — gnomes without a doubt! I seen ’em. What did they do?” Pitt asked.
“Fortunately they were across a little brook from me and couldn’t get at me. And I stuck my hand out and made the sign of the cross at them and they disappeared.”
“You ought to have loosed an arrow at them — they’d have gone faster,” Pitt said. “Or p’raps they thought you were going to give ’em a sermon.”
“Charley, you can’t believe they really were gnomes,” Greybeard said. “Gnomes were things we used to read about as children, in fairy tales. They didn’t really exist.”
“P’raps they come back like the polecat,” Jeff Pitt said. “Those books were only telling you whatused to be in the times before men grew so civilized.”
“You’re sure these weren’t children?” Greybeard demanded.
“Oh, they weren’t children, though they were small like children. But they’d got — well, it was difficult to see, but they seemed to have muzzles like old Isaac’s, and cat’s ears, and fur on their heads, though I thought they had hands like us.”
There was silence in the boat. Martha said, “Old Thorne, for whom I worked in Christ Church, was a learned man, though a bit soft in the head. He used to claim that as man was dying off, a new thing was coming up to take his place.”
“A Scotsman perhaps!” Greybeard said laughing, recalling how Towin and Becky Thomas had believed that the Scots would invade from the north. “Thorne was vague as to what this new thing would be, though he said it might look like a shark with the legs of a tiger. He said there would be hundreds of it, and it would be very grateful to its creator as it moved in and discovered all the little people provided for its fodder.”
“We’ve got enough trouble from our own creator without worrying about rival ones.” Pitt said.
“That’s blasphemy,” Charley said. “You’re getting too old to talk like that, Jeff Pitt. Anyhow, if there was a thing like that, I should think it would prefer to eat duck to us lot. Look at us!”
That evening, they took care to select a site for the night where they would not be too easily taken by surprise.
Next day saw them sailing south, rowing when the freshets failed. The wooded hills that had been visible all the previous day sank slowly out of sight, and the only landmark was a two-humped island ahead. They made this by late afternoon, when the shadow of the boat hung away to one side, and tied up beside a boat already moored in a crudely made inlet.
