The Grandmothers (18 page)

Now that was an odd false note to strike, surely?

I said, ‘But DeRod, that sounds as if you are not one of us.’

He made an impatient movement, frowned, ‘I’ve got things to do.’ He was glancing up at the top of the path, expecting someone.

I felt more and more that this conversation did not - fit. He did not make sense. ‘But DeRod, we miss you. We talk about you. We wonder why you never …’

At this he shrugged me off, mí off, brusque, rude, but he felt the rudeness himself, and having already walked off a few paces he stopped and said, half-turning, ‘I’ll see you. Yes … soon.’ At the top of the path a woman had appeared. Presumably his town girl. Nothing much to say about her: she was a nice enough looking woman. But she stood there waiting for him, not looking at me at all. He was hurrying up to her, and the noise of the Fall made it useless to call after him.

And we did not hear one word from him. Not for years. Then it was always messages putting us off. And, always, there was about this communication, if you could call it that, something unexpected, discordant. We couldn’t make sense of it. What was he doing? He had become obsessed with his army. Instead of an institution that we saw as a useful way of keeping young men out of mischief, and discouraging greedy people who might be tempted by the riches of The Cities, it had become a major part of our economy. It glittered and excelled, it was marched and drilled and exercised out of its wits - the soldiers actually complained. He invented new clothes for them, using extravagant colours, scarlet, blue, gold. To stand on one of our little hills watching our army at their exercising down there on the plain - what a spectacle. And for what? He did not go to war, he did not threaten or even use it for his own prestige. He was nominally Commander-in-Chief-a title we knew had not been used before with us - but he did not interfere in the actual exercises and manoeuvres. And this went on. And it went on. We began to be alarmed at the way our wealth was being drained off into the army. And then there was a change, which we would have thought impossible.

But I am describing my visit to the burial place, and here I am still standing on the edge of the Fall, remembering, I walked down the path beside the Fall, hardening myself for what I would see. The pool for infants and small children was now a playground for the youth. It had become the fashion for them to assemble there, day and night, sitting around the edge, lolling in the shallow water, eating, drinking, smoking and - much else. For longer than most of the time these young ones had been alive, small children had not used this pool. It was now the property of The Young Hawks. Their name for themselves.

I walked by, at a small distance, because the noise was horrible, remembering the happy scenes and shrieks of the little children’s play. The Hawks took no notice of me. What they were seeing was a very old man, in the brown garment of The Twelve. Whom they had forgotten, and their parents had too. Sitting on the edge close to me were some girls and boys, about the age I think of when we became The Guardians, as always eating and throwing food about. A girl shouted at me, ‘Hey, old thing, what’s that you’ve got on?’ I went a bit closer, and said, ‘This is what The Twelve wear.’ I heard, as I knew I would, ‘The Twelve? What’s that?’ Then another girl said, ‘Hey, let me look. Would it suit me, do you think?’ Then she laughed and said, ‘I’m only joking, don’t worry. “You could easily make it,’ I said, knowing that none of them knew how to use a needle. And she boasted, ‘I wouldn’t know one end of a needle from the other.’ Her companions were all laughing and applauding. Clearly, she was some kind of leader.

‘You take a length of cloth,’ I said. ‘You cut a hole for the head.

You sew up the sides, leaving room for the arms. You can wear it as it is in hot weather, as I am now, or put it over others if it is cold.’ She was straining to listen, to understand. They know no crafts, have no skills now. They are dependent on the Barbarians. Because she was interested I went on. ‘When Destra chose The Twelve it was thought best that we should wear the simplest garb available. In cotton.’ I omitted to say that this was partly to encourage the use of cotton, which we had just begun to develop.

‘Who’s Destra?’ she asked smartly: she had decided to entertain her comrades by baiting me. ‘And who are The Twelve? I thought you were all dead long ago, ‘Well, she had at least heard of us, if not of Destra.

She began turning it into a song. ‘Twelve old men, they keep it - neat. They wear old sandals on their feet.’

‘Men and women,’ I said.

But she only grimaced, prettily, and began splashing the boy next to her with water.

I said to a youth near her, ‘Did you know this pool was once only for small children?’

He frowned. ‘Really? Oh - shame.’ He began clowning, ‘The Young Hawks have taken the little kids’ pool.’

Much laughter and then some horseplay. These were bored youngsters looking for an excuse to have some fun, as they would put it. The violence in The Cities is growing, and I had no intention of becoming a victim.

They saw themselves as hawks: now that was painful. They were a good-looking crowd, true enough, but they were soft and fatty.

‘Goodbye,’ I said, and walked on, thinking that the girl had been prompt in making up rhymes and singing them: not all of Destra’s legacy had gone.

I walked along the irrigation ditches that run out from the pool, and along the edges of the fields which grow our vegetables. There were people at work, men and women, all Barbarians. Our young despise this work, bending and tending, their hands in earth.

What do they do, then? A good question. Nothing much. They like to dress each other’s hair, tend each other’s bodies, create new kinds of food, new clothes. We are still so rich, though these days it is what we loot from others. We are rich because we don’t make war. We raid and steal and our victims are afraid of us, and do not fight back. Over the mountains that are like a barrier between us and the cities on the opposite edge of the peninsula, they fight each other and are poor. I wondered if their young people call themselves Young Eagles. Panthers, perhaps? Mountain Lions? These sour thoughts took me part of the way up the hill, approaching the burial ground. When I reached the big trees which I saw planted as saplings, I began walking cautiously: there were young people there, among the graves.

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 wanted so much to weep. My throat was sore from the tears that choked it. Oh, how brilliant is the Dreamer that lives in us all, how witty, and how well it uses the events of a day for its purposes. What an apt depiction of my situation. Standing there in the half-dark I saw again how each of my old comrades and my young self turned to send me the fleeting, half-mocking goodbye smile and then - out, gone. And DeRod. There was something in that dream of him that said to me: Pay attention. I am telling you something. It was not contempt that he was using, when he urinated almost on the grave of an old friend, no, it was carelessness. You could say indifference. It did not matter to him, that was the point. That was the point. And what a contrast between how we all had been seeing him, talking of him, wondering, speculating: he had come to assume in our eyes the demeanour, the stature, of something not far from that old fabled Whip, who had been so cruel. We had spoken of him more and more as a tyrant, a monster of a ruler, deliberately destroying everything that was good. But the DeRod of my dream was not like that, commonplace, he was; someone you’d not look at twice. A pleasant fellow. Matching him with our years-long deliberations - such complicated and sometimes far-fetched explanations we had found for his behaviour - we had even laughed at ourselves. They nearly always focused on arrogance, on the distortions of sense that come from the loneliness of power. And there was always something that did not fit our thoughts of him. We knew that he lived as simply as his mother had done, that his children were not more privileged than anyone else’s, and that he occupied himself with … and that is what I must now record.

When I was able to move comfortably, I found my clothes too damp for comfort, and imagined I must have wet them with my tears. Though I had not wept, I had been thinking too hard about DeRod. I kept seeing him, indifferent, careless: and now to my memory of the dream I added something else, his smile at me as he turned to go, almost embarrassed, almost irritated, as if at someone importunate, demanding too much. How painful, and how informative that dream had been, and my thoughts about it afterwards.