Three Bags Full (3 page)

Maple looked at him skeptically.

Cloud had said nothing so far. But now she perked up. “The lord is a lamb.”

The others stared at her in astonishment. Even Cloud herself looked surprised.

“No, the lord is a shepherd,” Heather contradicted her. “A very bad shepherd. Much worse than George.”

Cloud shook her head. “No, no. It wasn’t like that. If I could only remember better…” Cloud stared at a tuft of grass in front of her hooves, but the sheep could tell that she was thinking of something quite different.

“That man …I know him. He came to our meadow once before, long ago. I was still a lamb. George had me in his arms—he’d just been trimming my hooves. Everything smelled of…of earth and sun…like a summer shower. Such a lovely smell, and then…something bitter. I could smell at once that George didn’t like the man. The man was inviting George to something, but his voice was unfriendly. He said he wanted to give a blessing to the dumb animals. I didn’t know what a blessing meant, but it sounded uncomfortable. I thought he meant me, because George had said I was a dumbo just before, because I wouldn’t keep still. I was scared. George laughed. ‘If you mean Ham, you give him your blessing every Sunday,’ he said. The other man got very angry. I don’t remember what he said, but he talked about the lord a lot and how he was going to divide the sheep from the goats.”

The sheep bleated in alarm.

Cloud stared thoughtfully at her tuft of grass. Only when Zora nuzzled her side gently did she go on. “After a bit George got angry. He dumped me in the long-nosed man’s arms. ‘Give this dumb animal a blessing, then,’ he said. The other man smelled bad, and I was scared. He didn’t know how to hold me properly, but he took me away with him. His house was the biggest one in the village, tall and pointy and cold like the man himself. He shut me into his garden. All alone. There was an apple tree, but he’d put a fence round it, and the apples were just rotting on the ground.”

Several of the sheep bleated indignantly. Cloud shuddered.

“Then a whole lot of humans came streaming into the house all at once. They brought dogs with them, and other sheep, and a pig. And I had to go in too. There was a terrible racket, but the man in black talked above it. ‘Welcome to the house of God!’ he said.” She stopped and looked thoughtful.

“So his name is God,” said Sir Ritchfield.

Othello made a strange face. “God?”

“Could be,” said Cloud uncertainly. “But after a while I worked it out that they were worshipping a special lamb. I thought that was a nice idea. They called it ‘the lord.’ There was music, like on the radio…only not quite the same. I looked round a bit and got a nasty fright. There was a man hanging on the wall with no clothes on, and even though he was bleeding from lots of wounds you couldn’t smell the blood.” She wouldn’t say any more.

“And there was a spade sticking into him, right?” asked Sir Ritchfield triumphantly.

“This God sounds rather suspicious to me,” said Mopple.

“He’s very powerful,” Cloud went on. All the people went down on their knees in front of him. And he said he knows everything.”

Maude thoughtfully chewed some grass. “I remember that time,” she said. “Cloud was away for a whole day. Her mother was looking for her like…like a mother would.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us about this before?” asked Zora.

“I didn’t understand it,” said Cloud quietly. She looked a little dreamy and began awkwardly rubbing her nose on one of her forelegs.

The sheep thought some more about God.

“He can’t know everything,” bleated Othello. “He didn’t know that George reads those Pamela novels.”

“Used to read them,” said Sir Ritchfield drily.

“The murderer always returns to the scene of the crime,” said Mopple the Whale. “And the long-nosed man
did
return to the scene of the crime.” Mopple looked round proudly. That was the one useful fact they had learned from George’s detective story. Mopple, of course, had remembered it. “What do you think?” he asked Miss Maple.

“It does seem suspicious.” She nodded. “He didn’t like George, and George didn’t like him. He seems too interested in what’s going to happen to us and the meadow. And when they were standing in front of the dolmen he looked at the exact spot, just where George was lying.”

Impressed, the sheep said nothing. Maple went on. “But it could be just coincidence. He was looking at the ground the whole time. There are too many questions. What was the business with Ham that was over and done with long ago? Who is
she
—the person that Kate hoped George hasn’t left anything to?”

“It isn’t easy to understand humans,” said Maude.

The sheep lowered their heads. They grazed a little, and they thought.

Mopple was thinking that he hadn’t always understood even George, although George was quite easy to understand—for a human. He was interested in his vegetable garden, and he read Pamela stories to his sheep. He wasn’t interested in apple pie. But recently George had been doing some odd things. Every now and then he got out the target.

When George marched across the meadow in his gum boots with the round, brightly painted target, Mopple felt an urge to find a safe place. The only safe place where you couldn’t see the target was behind the shepherd’s caravan, close to the vegetable garden. When George came out of the caravan for the second time with his gleaming pistol he would find Mopple there. Then he aimed it at Mopple and shouted, “Caught you in the act! Hands up!” Mopple always ran for it, scuttling zigzag across the meadow, and George laughed.

The noise had always been unbearable, but once George had bought a silencer all you heard was a soft smacking sound, like a sheep biting into an apple. This sound, together with Mopple’s fear, was the only perceptible outcome of George’s enthusiasm for firing his pistol. There was no point in it. Mopple would have been delighted to produce the same sound, with real apples, but George wasn’t giving up his target practice.

Miss Maple was thinking of the way Lilly’s hands had wandered over George’s jacket like insects trying to find something.

Zora was thinking how bad humans were about heights. As soon as they had tottered too close to the cliffs they turned pale, and their movements became even clumsier. On the cliff tops, a sheep was infinitely superior to any human. Even George could do nothing about it when Zora jumped down onto her favorite rocky ledge. He stayed a safe distance away. He knew that it was a waste of time trying to lure her back with blandishments, so he would call and begin throwing things at her, first dirty tufts of grass, then dried sheep droppings.

From the depths below, the wind sometimes carried back to him the sound of a thin, long-drawn-out curse. George’s temper instantly improved. He would get down on all fours, crawl to the edge of the cliffs, and look to see tourists or villagers who had been hit on the head by his missiles. Zora saw them too, of course. Then they would look at each other—the shepherd, lying on his front grinning, and Zora, enthroned on her ledge like a mountain goat. At that moment they understood each other perfectly.

Zora thought that human beings would be a lot better off if they could only make up their minds to go around on four legs.

Rameses was thinking of the story of the escaped tiger that Othello sometimes told to a marveling flock of lambs.

Heather was thinking of the road they took to the other pasture. Of the humming of insects, the noise of cars and their stinking fumes as they drove past the sheep, of the shining surface of the sea. In spring the air smelled of damp earth; in summer flocks of sparrows fluttered like leaves through the cornfields; in autumn when the wind shook the trees, acorns pattered down on the sheep; in winter the hoarfrost drew strange patterns on the asphalt. It was always a wonderful way to go, until they came to the place where the green men lay in wait. The green men had caps and guns and meant no good. When they came to the green men, even George felt nervous. All the same, he gave them a friendly greeting and made sure their dogs didn’t get too close to the sheep. Without George they’d never have made it past the men. Heather wondered if they would ever see the other pasture again.

Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic. And even that Cordelia knew only because George had explained what magic is. When George read aloud and came to a word that he thought the sheep couldn’t understand, he explained it. Sometimes he explained words sheep knew anyway, words like ‘prophylactics’ and ‘antibiotics.’ You took prophylactics before you got ill; you took antibiotics while you were ill. They both tasted bitter. George didn’t seem to know his way around this subject too well. He got involved in a complicated explanation. Finally he swore and gave it up.

But he was very pleased with other explanations, even if the sheep didn’t understand a word he said. In such cases they were careful not to let George guess how little they had taken in. Sometimes, however, he really did teach them something new. Cordelia loved his explanations. She loved knowing words that belonged to things she’d never seen, even to things you couldn’t see at all. She remembered those words carefully.

“Magic,” George had said, “is something unnatural, something that doesn’t really exist. If I snap my fingers and Othello suddenly turns white, that’s magic. If I fetch a bucket of paint and paint him white, it isn’t.” He laughed, and for a moment it looked as if he felt like snapping his fingers or fetching that bucket. Then he went on, “Everything that looks like magic is really a trick. There’s no such thing as magic.” Cordelia grazed with relish. “Magic” was her favorite word—for something that didn’t exist at all. Then she thought about George’s death. That was like magic too. Someone had stuck a spade through the shepherd’s body in the middle of their meadow. George must have screamed horribly, but none of his sheep in the hay barn, quite close, had heard anything, and then a lamb had seen a ghost. A ghost silently dancing. Cordelia shook her head. “It’s really a trick,” she whispered.

Othello was thinking of the cruel clown.

Lane was thinking of the strange humans who used to visit George from time to time. They always came by night. Lane slept lightly, and heard the crunch of the car tires when they turned off the paved road and onto the path through the fields. She sometimes hid in the shadow of the dolmen to watch. It was a show performed just for her. The headlights of the cars cut lines of light through the darkness or were caught in the mist and formed a glowing white cloud. The cars that came along the path through the fields were big, with purring engines, and they didn’t stink nearly as badly as George’s car, which he himself called the Antichrist. Then their lights were switched off, and one or two shadowy figures in long dark coats would approach the shepherd’s caravan. They moved cautiously, taking care not to tread on any fresh sheep droppings in the dark. A hand knocked on the wooden door. Once, twice, three times. The door of the caravan was opened, cutting a rectangular space filled with a reddish glow in the darkness. For a moment the strangers stood in the doorway like huge, sharply outlined ravens. Lane had never seen their faces, yet by now they seemed to her almost familiar…

Something dark was moving along the path over the fields toward the meadow. It moved fast. There was a moment of panic among the sheep, who all galloped uphill without taking their eyes off the newcomer. God was back. He was pacing up and down the meadow like a hound on a trail, his long nose pointing to the ground.

He walked all round the dolmen and up the footpath to the cliffs. He almost fell over the edge, but at the last moment that nose shot up again and saw the great expanse of blue in front of it. Then the tall black body came to a halt. A sigh passed through the flock. The sheep had been watching God and the movements of his nose ever since the pair of them had started toward the cliffs.

The black-clad man glanced briefly their way. Othello lowered his horns menacingly, but God had already set off along the footpath toward the village. After three or four paces he heard something. He froze, then turned abruptly and fled along the footpath out to the moorland, his face pale and anxious.

The sheep heard it too—a humming, rushing noise. It sounded like the noise they themselves had made when they invaded George’s vegetable garden. It was coming closer. Now they heard dogs barking, and there were human voices too. The sheep saw exactly what the long-nosed man had been running away from. A flock was moving toward the meadow, a flock such as the sheep had never seen before.

3

Miss Maple Gets Wet

George had not liked other human beings. It was rare for any of them to pass the meadow—maybe a farmer now and then or an old woman who wanted a good gossip—and when they did, George got cross. He used to put a very loud cassette in his gray tape recorder and escape into the vegetable garden, where he worked on something as dirty as possible until the visitor had gone away again.

So the sheep had never seen a whole flock of humans before, and they were too surprised to panic. Later, Mopple claimed to have seen seven people in the flock, but he was shortsighted. Zora counted twenty, Miss Maple forty-five, and Sir Ritchfield lots and lots—more than he could count, anyway. But Ritchfield had a terrible memory, particularly when he was worked up. He forgot what he had counted already, so he counted everything and everyone twice or three times. He counted the sheepdogs too.

Mopple stared shortsightedly and morosely at the humans. Well, they could forget the theory of the murderer returning to the scene of his crime now. They had
all
come back to the scene of the crime, and the murderer must surely be concealed among them. With curiosity, the sheep watched the human flock moving on. It was led by neither the strongest nor the brightest among them but by Tom O’Malley. Then came the children, then the women, and finally the men, who were hanging back a little with their hands awkwardly thrust into their trouser pockets. Well behind them again came several very old folk, who could move only slowly and shakily.

Tom had brought a rusty old spade with him. He rammed it into the earth at least ten paces from where George had been lying. The people retreated, as if Tom had splashed them with cold water, and formed a circle at a respectful distance.

“It was here,” shouted Tom. “Right here. The blood splattered all the way to here,” he said, taking two long strides toward the dolmen. “And right here,” he added, with three strides in the other direction, “is where I was standing meself. The moment I see it, I knew it was all up with old George. Blood everywhere. And his face all distorted, horrible it were, with his tongue bright blue and hanging out.”

None of this was true. Miss Maple thought how odd that was. It should really have been just as Tom said: blood everywhere, a look of pain frozen on George’s face. But George had been there on the meadow looking as if he’d just lain down to sleep.

The human flock retreated a little farther and uttered a strange breathy sound, somewhere between horror and delight. Tom went on shouting. “But your old friend Tom didn’t panic, not him. He goes straight off to the Mad Boar to call the police—”

A grating voice interrupted him. “You bet your life! Our old friend Tom, he’ll always find his way to the pub!” People laughed. Tom bent his head. The sheep up on their hill couldn’t make out what he was saying anymore. Whatever remnants of order had still existed in the human flock now collapsed. Children were chasing around all over the place; grown-ups were forming little groups, bleating the whole time. The wind blew scraps of words up to the hill.

“Goblin King! Goblin King! Goblin King!” the children were singing.

“…could be he left it all to the Church,” said one red-faced farmer.

“That Lilly had a nervous breakdown when they found him!” twittered a chubby-cheeked woman. The man standing next to her held her hand and smiled.

A small man shrugged. “He was a sinner, what d’you expect?”

“And so are you a sinner too, Harry!” grinned an old woman with gaps in her teeth. “The Lonely Heart Inn…let’s say no more! Your auntie can think herself lucky to have such a good nephew!”

The man turned pale and indeed said no more.

“They say he was worth a fortune,” said a man with a prominent paunch.

“Old George had debts for sure, everyone knows that,” said another.

“…a little too fond of his sheep, was George,” a very young man was telling two friends, “know what I mean?” He gestured. The other two laughed.

“A crime of passion among the sheep, eh?” cried the thinnest of them, so loud that a couple of women turned round. All three young men laughed their unpleasant laugh again.

“Must have taken him by surprise, so it must,” said a man who smelled strongly of sweat, “and old George was damn hard to surprise.”

“This is a disaster for the tourist trade,” said another man in a high-pitched voice. “George really knew how to mess things up for us.”

“…he was going to sell everything to Ham—the sheep, the land, the whole lot!” said a woman with no neck.

“It was Satan himself who did it,” whispered a mousy woman to two small, fair-haired children.

“God have mercy on his soul!” said another woman in a trembling voice. The sheep knew her: “Bible-thumping Beth” was George’s name for her. Beth turned up regularly outside the shepherd’s caravan to urge George to do something called good works. The sheep didn’t know exactly what good works were, but they thought perhaps George was supposed to go and work in some other vegetable garden. But George had a garden of his own. The sheep could see why he didn’t want to do as Beth said. Every time George said no, she pressed a bundle of thin pamphlets called tracts into his hand, with a view to converting his sinful soul. There was no knowing what happened to George’s soul, always supposing he had one. But he was pleased to have those tracts, although he never read them aloud to the sheep. The evening after Beth brought them, George always had baked potatoes cooked over a small, flickering fire.

Suddenly the enemy raced into the middle of the flock—the ancient enemy. All you could do was run away. Until recently there had only been a couple of the enemy with the human flock, running round the meadow sniffing, whistled off by their masters now and then, told to lie down, trying to make for the wide open spaces. But the closer the whispering groups of humans came to the dolmen, the farther afield the dogs explored. They had now formed a small pack: three sheepdogs and another dog. The sheepdogs’ eyes were shining. The dappled pattern of their coats glinted across the meadow. They were making for the hill, keeping close to the ground. The sheep bleated in agitation. Now they’d be herded this way and that, chased apart and brought back together again, driven by sheepdogs moving like beasts of prey. No sheep can stand up to that. They weren’t really frightened—they’d been herded thousands of times before—but all the old discomfort had come over them.

Then they saw the way that other dog was moving, and their nervousness really did become fear. The gray wolfhound looked as if he were doing the same as the sheepdogs: crouching low before approaching. But something was wrong. He didn’t bark, he didn’t hesitate. For a moment the whole flock held its breath: they were being hunted for the first time in their lives. The dog began to run.

Unbridled panic broke out. The flock dashed off in all directions, carrying the startled sheepdogs away with it. Mopple ran right through the crowd of human beings and knocked Harry the Sinner over. Zora took refuge on her rocky ledge. From there, she was the only sheep who could see what was really going on.

The hill was empty. At its foot, close to George’s Place, lay two dark bodies, Othello and the dog. They were both just rising to their feet again. Othello attacked first. Zora had never seen a sheep go on the attack before; Othello should have run for it. The dog hesitated. It was a moment before he recognized the black figure of Othello racing up to him as his prey. Then he took off. But before they collided he lost his nerve, braked, and swerved aside. Othello immediately changed direction, moved in a slight curve, and galloped back toward the dog again. Zora stared incredulously at the hill. It was clear to her that Othello was faster than the dog. The dog seemed to realize it too. He crouched on the ground, teeth bared, ready to leap at the ram from below.

Zora quickly closed her eyes and thought about something else. That was her way of dealing with the bad moments in life. She thought of the day when she brought her first lamb into the world, she thought of the pain, and the anxiety later, because the lamb had been brown as earth, even after she had spent ages carefully licking the blood off his coat. Brown as earth, with a black face. Later the brown would turn a woolly white, but Zora wasn’t to know that at the time. She had wondered why she was the only sheep in the meadow not to have had a white lamb. But then the lamb had bleated, tiny and brown as he was, and he had a more beautiful voice than any of the other lambs. He had smelled good too. And Zora knew she would defend him against the whole world, whether or not he was the brown color of earth. She had taken him to the cliffs that very day to show him the gulls and the sea.

Zora relaxed. She had had three lambs so far, and they were the bravest and most sure-footed sheep anyone could imagine. She hadn’t brought a lamb into the world this year, and hardly any of the other ewes had had lambs either. Zora realized why she had found meditating on her rocky ledge so hard recently, and why she was further than ever from becoming a cloud sheep. She’d missed the lambs all summer. Only two inexperienced young ewes had produced lambs, in an excited, clumsy sort of way, and George had sworn when each of those lambs appeared. And then of course there was the winter lamb…Zora’s nostrils flared scornfully. She listened. She would have liked to hear a few young creatures bleating just now, but everything was unnervingly quiet, except for the cries of the gulls, and Zora did not take any notice of those anymore. The human beings were buzzing away in the distance like a lot of insects.

Zora heard a terrifying scream. Her eyes opened, even though she was trying hard to keep them closed. Instinctively she looked back at the hill. A dark body lay on the ground. Feet were twitching in the air as if they wanted to go on running. She shuddered. The dog had got Othello. Only a moment later did she see that it was the wolfhound lying on the ground. There was no sign of Othello.

The shaggy wolfhound was trying, unsuccessfully, to stand up. His master came along: one of the young men who had laughed in that nasty way. He was pale, and poked his dog with his foot. A farmer came to lift the animal and carry it away.

The humans were buzzing excitedly. None of them could explain what had happened to that fine, strong dog. When they saw the blood on his belly some of the women screamed. “Satan” and “Goblin King!” rang through the air again. Human mothers bleated till their children came back to them. The human flock went away in a hurry, as suddenly as it had come.

Only the spade was left.

Zora sat motionless on her rocky ledge, wondering if she might have been dreaming. Yes, that must be it. The grass around her was soft as a sheep’s muzzle, and herbs that no one else could pull up grew here too. Zora called them “herbs of the abyss,” and to her they tasted better than anything there was to eat in the meadow. The fresh sea air wafted up in cool, seaweed-scented gusts, and the gulls circled below her. It was a good feeling to have those screeching white birds lower down; it was good to be alone. No one could follow her here.

She saw the flock slowly calm down and begin to graze. Othello was with them. None of the sheep seemed to be taking any particular notice of him. Zora thought how little she really knew about Othello.

George had sometimes brought new sheep back with him. Usually they were newly weaned lambs, and were warmly accepted by the flock. As far back as Zora could remember, only two grown-up sheep had come from outside: Othello and Mopple the Whale. Mopple had arrived two winters ago, in George’s noisy car. George transported single sheep on the back seat. That’s where they had first seen him, a plump young ram staring in bewilderment out of the car window and eating George’s road map. George had placed Mopple in front of them and made a little speech. Mopple was a ram from a meat breed, he said, but they weren’t to worry—no one here was going under the knife—the idea was just to bring in a little fresh blood. The sheep hadn’t understood, and were afraid of Mopple at first. But the young ram was friendly and seemed embarrassed. When Sir Ritchfield challenged him to a duel it turned out that Mopple was no danger to anyone.

Ritchfield had never challenged Othello to a duel, and none of the sheep had ever wondered why. More surprising was the fact that Othello had never challenged Ritchfield. Othello seemed to respect Ritchfield, although the harder of hearing and more forgetful he became, the less the other sheep could understand it.

None of the sheep had seen Othello arrive. He just appeared one morning, a full-grown ram with four dangerously curved horns.
Four horns!
They had never seen a four-horned sheep before. The ewes were impressed, and the rams were secretly envious. Zora remembered all that very well; it wasn’t so long ago. George didn’t introduce Othello. Instead he sang and whistled and danced. They’d never seen him so excited. He sang in strange languages, and spread some of the stinging ointment they feared on a narrow but impressive wound running right over Othello’s forehead. The sheep shuddered, while Othello stood perfectly still. George jumped from one leg to the other until he had to take his woolly sweater off.

Zora trotted back to the other sheep. She wanted to ask if Othello had really just defeated a large gray dog. It seemed to her unlikely. She met Maude grazing near George’s Place, so close to it that Zora had to bite back a remark in passing.

Maude was chewing, lost in thought.

“Maude,” said Zora, “did you see how Othello fought that dog?”

Maude stared blankly at her. “Othello is a sheep,” she said. “Excellent grass around here,” she added invitingly. Zora turned. She’d ask Maple, or better still Mopple. If any sheep could remember peculiar things, then it was Mopple the Whale.

When she raised her head to pick up Mopple’s scent, she noticed that Othello had joined the other sheep and was grazing by. He looked just the same as usual. Zora bent her head and began grazing too. It was best for sheep to forget confusing things as quickly as possible, before the world gave way beneath their hooves.