Greybeard

7. The River: The End

Wild life swarmed back across the Earth as abundantly as it had ever done. In its great congress, there were a few phyla absent; but in numbers the multitude was as rich as it had ever been.

The Earth had great powers of replenishment, and would have as long as the sun maintained its present output of energy. It had supported many different kinds of life through many different ages. As far as that outcast spit of the European mainland called the British Isles was concerned, its flora and fauna had never entirely regained the richness they enjoyed before the Pliocene. During that period, the glaciers descended over much of the northern hemisphere, driving life southward before them. But the ice retreated again; life followed it back towards its northern strongholds. Towards the end of the Pleistocene, like the opening of a giant hand, a stream of life poured across the lands that had recently been barren. The ascendancy of man had only momentarily affected the copiousness of this stream.

Now the stream was a great tide of petals, leaves, fur, scales, and feathers. Nothing could stem it, though it contained its own balances. Every summer saw its weight increasing as it followed paths and habits established, in many cases, in distant ages before homo sapiens made his brief appearance.

The summer nights were short. They retained something of the translucence of the day, only losing the last of their warmth as light seeped once more across the landscape, so that the sigh of cool air that brought dawn ruffled the pelts of animals and the feathers of innumerable birds as they woke to another day of living.

The rousing of these creatures provided the first sounds to be heard every morning in a tent pitched so near the water that it was reflected on the surface.

When Greybeard and his wife Martha and Charley Samuels rose at this time, it was to find themselves on the edge of a widening Thames dissolved in mist. The new day drew from the land a haze into which a myriad ducks scattered. As the day advanced, the mist became orange-tinted before it thinned, to reveal the duck flying overhead or sailing in convoy on the burnished water.

Before the mists cleared, wings whispering overhead suggested the gathering of an invisible host. Geese, heading for their feeding grounds, moved over with a hollow sound that contrasted with the clat of flying swans. Smaller birds flew at higher levels. There were birds of prey too, eagles and falcons that were comparative strangers to the region.

Some of these birds had travelled over vast tracts of land to feed here, from the little teal to the sheld-duck, strutting with his striking plumage through the mud. Many of the migrants had been forced here by adamant necessity: their little warm-blooded morsels of fledgelings, with a high metabolic rate to sustain, would starve to death if left without food for eight hours; so their parents had flown to more northerly latitudes, where the hours of daylight at this time of the year lingered long over the feeding grounds.

The humans were of all the living things in this region of mist and water the least bound to such natural necessities. But they, unlike the proliferating bird-life about them, had no instinctual means of determining their direction, and within three days of leaving Oxford, their journey towards the river mouth was snared in a maze of waterways.

Their way might be difficult to find, but a sense of leisure filled them, and they felt no compulsion to get out of an area so abundantly stocked with food. Herons, geese, and duck went into a series of soups and stews at which Martha excelled herself. Fish seemed to ask only to be pulled from the river.

In these activities, they had few human rivals. Those few came mostly from the north side of the flood, from the settlements that still remained outside Oxford. They saw stoats hunting again — though not in packs — and an animal they took to be a polecat, making off through reeds with a mallard in its jaws. They saw otter and coypu and, at the place where they camped on the third night, the spoor of some sort of deer that had come down to the water’s edge to drink.

Here, next morning, Greybeard and Martha stood over their fire poaching fish with mint and cress when a voice behind them said, “I’m inviting myself in for breakfast!”

Floating towards them over the water, his oars raised and dripping water from the rowlocks, was Jeff Pitt in a much-mended rowing-boat.

“Fine friends you turn out to be,” he said across the intervening water. “I go out on a little hunting expedition with some friends. When I come back to Oxford, I find old Charley’s gone and his landlady’s heart-broken. I go up to Christ Church, and you two have disappeared. It’s a fine way to treat me!”

Embarrassed by the sense of grievance they felt behind his words, Martha and Greybeard went to the water’s edge to greet him. When he found they had actually left Oxford, Pitt had guessed the direction they would take; he told them that as a sign of his own cleverness as they helped secure his boat. He climbed stiffly out and shook them both by the hand, which he managed to do without looking them straight in the face.

“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 what used 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.

Much of this land bore signs of cultivation, while farther up the slopes they saw poultry and ducks confined in runs. Some old ladies who had been standing among the poultry came down to the water to inspect the new arrivals, told them this was called Wittenham Island, and grudgingly agreed that they could stay where they were for the night if they made no trouble. Most of the women had with them tame otters, which they said they had trained to catch fish and fowl for them.

They became slightly more friendly when they realized that Greybeard’s party had only peaceful intentions, and proved eager to gossip. It soon emerged that they were a religious community, believing in a Master who appeared among them occasionally and preached of a Second Generation. They would have tried to make converts had not Martha tactfully changed the subject by asking how long they had lived on the island.

One woman told Martha that they came from a town called Dorchester, retreating to these hills with their menfolk when their homes and land were besieged by the rising waters some seven years earlier. Now their old home lay completely under the Sea of Barks.

Much of what this old woman had to say was difficult to understand. It was as if the mist which spread over the water at this season had also spread between human comprehensions; but it was not hard to understand that small groups cut off from their neighbours should increasingly develop an accent and a vocabulary peculiar to themselves. What was suprising was the rate at which this process operated.

Martha and Greybeard discussed the phenomenon when they were between their blankets that night.

“Do you remember that old fellow we met on our way to Oxford, the one that you said had a badger for a wife?” Martha asked.

“It’s a long time ago. Can’t say I do.”

“I remember we slept in a barn with him and his reindeer. Whatever his name was, he was getting treatment from that weird man at that fair — oh, my memory!—”

“Bunny Jingadangelow?”

“That’s it — your friend! The old man talked some nonsense about the years speeding by; he reckoned he was two hundred years old, or some such age. I’ve been thinking about him lately, and at last beginning to understand how he felt. There’s been so much change, Algy, I begin to wonder quite seriously if we haven’t been living for centuries.”

“It’s a change in pace. We were born into a hectic civilization; now there’s no civilization left, and the pace has altered.”

“Longevity’s an illusion?”

“Man’s the thing that’s stopped, not death. Everything else but us — the whole bag of tricks — goes on unabated. Now let’s get to sleep, sweet. I’m tired after the rowing.”

After a moment, she said, “I suppose it’s not having any children. I don’t mean just not having them myself, but not seeing any around me. It makes a life terribly bare… and terribly long.”

Greybeard sat up angrily.

“For God’s sake, woman, shut up about not having kids. I know we can’t have kids — we’re too old for it anyhow, by now — it’s the cardinal fact of my life as much as it is yours, but you don’t have to go on about it!”

“I don’t go on about it, Algy! I doubt if I mention it once a year.”

“You do mention it once a year. It’s always about this time, late summer, when the wheat’s ripening. I wait for you to say something.”

In a moment he had repented his anger, and took Martha in his arms.

“I didn’t mean to snap,” he said. “Sometimes I’m scared at my own thoughts. I wonder if perhaps the dearth of children hasn’t caused a madness we don’t identify because it’s unclassified. Is it possible to be sane in a world where only your own senility greets you on every side?”

“Darling, you’re young yet, young and strong. We still have many years together.”

“No, but you see what I mean: you should be able to renew your youth in the generation that follows yours. In your thirties, your sons keep you nimble and laughing. In your forties, they keep you worried and attached to the world. In your fifties, you may have grandchildren to play with. You can live till your grandchildren come along to see your creaking smiles and your card tricks… They replenish you. If everyone’s cut off from all that — who’s to wonder if time goes wrong, or if poor old Charley gets some crazy idea about seeing gnomes?”

“Perhaps a woman looks at it differently. What I regret most is the reservoir of something in me — love, I suppose — that I sense has never found its object.”

He stroked her hair tenderly and answered, “You’re the most loving person who has ever lived. Now do you mind if I go to sleep?”

But it was Martha who slept. Greybeard lay there for a while, listening to the distant sounds of night-feeding birds. Restlessness took him. He pulled the end of his beard gently from under Martha’s shoulder, slipped on his shoes, unlatched the tent flap, and climbed stiffly outside. His back was not so flexible these days.

Because of its impenetrability, the night seemed more stifling than it was. He could not explain his unease. He seemed to hear the sound of an engine — he could only visualize the steamer that his mother had taken him on from Westminster Pier in his early childhood, before his father had died. But that was impossible. He indulged himself by thinking about the past and about his mother. It was wonderful how vivid some of the memories seemed. He wondered if his mother’s life — she must have been born — so long ago! — in the nineteen-forties — had not been more thoroughly ruined by the Accident than was his own. He could hardly recall the days before the Accident happened, except for a few snapshots like that cruise from Westminster Pier, so that he existed only within the context of the Accident and its aftermath, and was adapted to it. But how could a woman adapt? Rather owlishly, he thought, as if it were a discovery, women are different.

The steamer’s engine was heard again, as though it sailed to him across time and probability.

The sound grew. He went and woke Charley, and they stood together down by the water’s edge, listening.

“It’s some sort of steamer right enough,” Charley said. “After all, why not? There must still be supplies of coal lying about here and there.”

The sound faded. They stood about, thinking, waiting, peering at blankness. Nothing else happened. Charley shrugged and went back to bed. After a little while, Greybeard climbed back into his blankets too.

“What’s the matter, Algy?” Martha asked, wakening.

“There was a steamer somewhere out on the pond. Charley heard it too.”

“We may see it in the morning.”

“It sounded like the ones mother used to take me on. Standing there looking out into nothing, I thought how I’ve wasted my life, Martha. I’ve had no faith—”

“Sweetie, I don’t think this is a good time for an inquest on your life. Daylight in say twenty years time would be more suitable.”

“No, Martha, listen, I know I’m an imaginative and an introspective sort of chap, but—”

Her small laugh stopped him. She sat up in bed, yawned, and said, “You are one of the least introspective men I ever knew, and I have always rejoiced that your imagination is so much more prosaic than mine. May you always have such illusions about yourself — it’s a sign of youth.”

He leant over towards her, feeling for her hand.

“You’re a funny creature, Martha. Sometimes you make me wonder how much two people can ever know each other, if you know me so little. It’s amazing how you can be so blind when you’ve been such a wonderful companion for thirty years or three hundred years or however long it really is. You’re so admirable in many ways, whereas I’ve been such a flop.”

She lit the lamp by their bed and said gravely, “At the risk of getting chewed to death by mosquitoes, I must put on a light and look at you. I can’t stomach disembodied miseries. Love, what is this you’re saying about yourself? Let’s have it before we settle down.”

“You must have seen clearly enough. It is not as if I chose to marry a foolish woman, as some men chose to do. I’ve been a flop all through my life.”

“Examples?”

“Well, look at the way I’ve got us more or less lost now. And far bigger things. All that miserable time after father died, when mother married that ass Barrett. It’s not enough to say I was only a child; I just never caught up with what was going on. I felt I was being punished for something, and didn’t know what the sin was, or even what the punishment was exactly. I loathed and dreaded Barrett, although when he flirted with other floosies I was miserable for mother’s sake. He went off with one of them on one occasion. Mother got picked up by an undertaker called Carter, and we lived with him for some weeks.”

“I remember about Carter. Your mother had a talent for picking men whose jobs were prospering.”

“She also had a talent for picking impossible men. Poor woman, I suppose she was very much a ninny. Uncle Keith — Barrett — turned up one day and took us away from Carter. He and mother had rows for weeks after that. It was all so undignified… Perhaps that was what helped me in my teens to try and behave in a dignified way myself.

“Then there was the war. I ought to have refused to go — you know I was morally convinced of its wrongness. But I compromised, and joined the Infantop. Then there was the business of joining DOUCH. You know, Martha, I think that was the slobbiest thing I ever did. Those DOUCH fellows, old Jack and the others, they were dedicated men. I never believed in the project at all.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Algy. I remember how hard you worked, in Washington and London.”

He laughed. “Know why I joined? Because they offered to fly you out to Washington to join me! That was it! My interest in DOUCH was purely subsidiary to my interest in you.

“It’s true I did the job fairly well during the after-war years, when the government collapsed, and the United made peace with the enemy. But look at the chance I missed when we were in Cowley. If I hadn’t been so concerned about us, we could have been in on a important bit of history.

“Instead, we nipped off and vegetated all those dreary years at Sparcot. And what did I do there? Why, I flogged the DOUCH truck just because our bellies were a bit empty. And when I might have redeemed myself at Christ Church, by retrieving the truck, I just couldn’t bear to stick out another couple of years’ hard work. Hearing that engine throb out there on the pond, I thought of that bloody truck, and how it stands for all I might have been or had.”

Martha hit at a moth that circled round her face, and turned gleamingly to him.

“People who have been betrayed often see themselves as betrayers. Don’t do that, Algy. You’re thinking rubbish tonight. You’re too big a man to puddle about in silly self-deception. Don’t you see that what you’ve just told me is a potted history of your integrity?”

“The lack of it, you mean.”

“No, I don’t. When you were a child, your life was not under your control. Both your mother and Keith were idiots — I saw that even as a small girl — and they were quite disoriented by the crisis of their times. For that you cannot blame yourself.

“You spent the war first trying to save children, then trying to do something constructive about the future. You married me, when you might have been having the sort of debauches most men of your age were enjoying all over the world. And I suspect you have remained faithful to me ever since. I don’t think that shows any lack of character.

“As for your feebleness at Cowley, you can go and ask old Jeff what he thinks to that one! You sold the DOUCH(E) truck after infinite painful debate with yourself, and saved the whole community at Sparcot from starving. As for getting it back again, why should you? If there is a future for any humans, they’ll be looking ahead, not back; DOUCH was a great idea when it was conceived in the year 2000. Now we can see it’s irrelevant.

“But what’s never been irrelevant to you is other people me, among others. You’ve always put me first. I’ve seen it; as you say, I’m not a fool. You put me before your job in Washington and in Cowley. Do you think I minded? If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now.” She stopped abruptly. “That’s all, I think. End of lecture. Feeling better, Greybeard?”

He pressed his lips to her veined temple.

“Darling, I tell you we’re all suffering from some form of madness. After all this time — I’ve discovered yours!”

When he woke again, it was light, and Pitt was shaking him. Even before the old trapper spoke, he heard the throb of the steamer again.

“Better get your gun in case it’s pirates, Greybeard,” Pitt said. “The women say the boat’s coming in here.”

Pulling on his trousers, Greybeard moved out barefoot over the dew-soaked grass. Martha and Charley stood peering into the mist; he went behind them, laying a hand on his wife’s shoulder. This morning the mist was thick as milk. Behind, the hillside was lost. Summoned by the throbbing of the engine, the women of the religious community were materializing and shuffling down to line the bank.

“The Master is coming! The Master is coming!” they cried.

The throbbing engine stopped. The sound of it died across the water. They strained their eyes to see.

A phantom river steamer appeared, gliding forward in silence. It seemed to have no substance, to exist merely in outline. On its deck, people stood motionless, staring over the sea. The old women on shore, those of them that were capable of it, sank to arthritic knees and cried, “The Master comes to save us!”

“I suppose there must still be depots of coal about, if you know where to look,” Greybeard said to Martha. “Presumably there’s not a coal mine left in action. Or maybe they fuel it with wood. We’d better be wary but it hardly looks as if its intentions are hostile.”

“I know now how savages feel when the missionaries turn up with a cargo of Bibles,” Martha said. She was looking at a long banner draped along the steamer’s railings which bore the words: REPENT — THE MASTER COMES! And beneath, in smaller letters, The Second Generation Needs Your Gifts and Prayers. Donations Wanted To Further Our Cause.

“Looks as if the Bibles have a price tag,” Greybeard observed. A group of people on the steamer came forward and removed a section of rail; they lowered a small boat into the water, obviously with the intention of coming ashore. At the same time, a loud-hailer opened up with a preliminary rasp and began to address the women ashore.

“Ladies of Wittenham Island, the Master calls you! He greets you and he will deign to see you. But this time he will not leave his holy vessel. If you want to speak with him, you’d better come aboard. We’re putting out a boat to ferry you and your gifts over. Remember, it costs only a dozen eggs to get you into his presence, and for a chicken you can have a word with him.”

The rowing boat put out from the steamer and laboured towards the shore. Two women rowed it, bent double over the oars, coughing and gasping as if on the verge of thrombosis. They became less insubstantial as, emerging from the mist, they reached the bank and climbed ashore.

Martha clutched Greybeard’s hand.

“Do you recognize one of those women? The one spitting into the water now?”

“It can’t be! It looks like old — what was her name?”

“We left her at whatever that place was — Becky! It is, it’s Becky Thomas!”

Martha hurried forward. The women of the island were jostling to get into the boat. Carried in their arms or in baskets were provisions, presumably offerings to lay before the Master. Becky stood to one side, watching the proceedings apathetically. She looked even dirtier than she had in her Sparcot days, and much older, though her body remained plump. Her cheeks were sunken and her nose sharp.

Regarding her, Martha thought, “She’s of Algy’s and my parents’ generation. Amazing how some of them still survive, despite those gloomy predictions we used to hear about everyone dying young. Becky must be eighty-five if she’s a day.”

Arid, stabbingly, “What’ll be left of the world if Algy and I ever reach that age?”

As Martha approached her, Becky changed her position and stood with her hands on her hips. On one scrawny wrist, Martha noted, was strapped the battered old non-functioning watch that had once been Towin’s pride. Where was he?

“Hello, Becky,” she said. “It’s a small wet world. Are you taking a summer cruise?”

Becky showed little excitement at meeting up with Martha again, or at seeing Greybeard, Charley, and Pitt as they came over to speak to her.

“I belong to the Master now,” she told them. “That’s why I’m privileged even at my age to bear one of the Second Generation children. I shall be delivered of it in the autumn.”

Pitt cackled coarsely. “You was expecting when we left you at that fair place, however many years that was ago. Whatever happened to that kid? I reckon it was a phantom litter, wasn’t it? I always thought so at the time.”

“I was married then, you coarse old brute, you are,” Becky said, “and the Master had not then taken on his Masterhood, so of course I had no issue. Only now I’ve seen the Light can I conceive. If you want children, Martha, you’d better bring a gift to the Master and see what he can do for you. He works miracles, he does.”

“What’s happened to old Towin then, Becky?” Charley asked. “Isn’t he on the boat with you?”

She wrinkled her face into a frown.

“Old Towin Thomas was a sinful man, Charley Samuels, and I don’t think of him no more. He wouldn’t believe in the Master, or take the Master’s cures, and as a result, he died of a malignant cancer that wasted him away until he didn’t weigh above a stone and a half. Frankly, it was a blessing when he passed over. I’ve followed the Master ever since then. I’m now coming up for my two hundred and twenty-third birthday. I don’t look a day over a hundred, I reckon, do I?”

Greybeard said, “That line sounds familiar. Do we know this Master of yours, then, Becky? It’s not Bunny Jingadangelow, is it?”

“You were always free with your tongue, Greybeard,” Becky said. “You mind how you address him, because he doesn’t use that old name now.”

“It sounds as though he still uses the old tricks, though,” Greybeard said, turning to Martha. “Let’s go aboard and see the old rascal.”

“I’ve no wish to see him,” Martha said.

“Well — look, we don’t want to be stuck here on this sea in this mist. We could be lost here till autumn comes, and by then we ought to be well on our way down river. Let’s go and see Jingadangelow and get him to give us a tow. It’s obvious that the captain of the ship must know his way about.”

They did as he said, and ferried themselves out to the steamer in Pitt’s boat. They climbed aboard, although the deck was already crowded with the faithful and their offerings.

Greybeard had to wait while the women from the island entered the Master’s cabin one by one to receive his blessing before he was allowed to enter. He was then shown in with some ceremoney.

Bunny Jingadangelow sprawled in a deck chair, wrapped in the greasy equivalent of a Roman toga, a garment he evidently considered more fitting for his new calling than the antique collection of rabbit skins which had previously been his most notable garment. Round him — and now being carted away by an old man in shorts — were material tributes to his godly qualities, vegetables, lettuces with plushy fat hearts, ducks, fish, eggs, a fowl with its neck newly wrung.

Jingadangelow himself still affected his curling moustache and sideburns. The rotundity that once afflicted only his chin now covered new territory; his body was corpulent, his face assumed the pasty and lop-sided podginess of a gibbous moon, and was of a hitherto unprecedented blandness — though it gathered a good percentage of its area into a scowl as Greybeard entered. Becky had evidently passed on the news of his visit.

“I wanted to see you because I always thought you had a rare gift of insight,” Greybeard said.

“That is perfectly true. It led me to divinity. But I assure you, Mr. Greybeard, since I gather that you still call yourself by that undistinguished sobriquet, that I have no intention of exchanging gossip about the past. I have outlived the past, as I intend to outlive the future.”

“You are still in your old Eternal Life racket, I see, though the props are more elaborate.”

“You observe this handbell? I have merely to ring it to have you removed from here. You must not insult me. I have achieved sanctity.” He rested a podgy hand on the table by his side, and pouted in discontent. “If you haven’t arrived to join my Second Generationists, just what do you want?”

“Well, I thought — I came to see you about Becky Thomas and this pregnancy of hers. You’ve no—”

“That’s what you told me last time we met, centuries ago. Becky’s no business of yours — she’s become one of the faithful since her husband died. You fancy yourself a bit as a leader of men, don’t you, without actually leading them?”

“I don’t lead anyone, because I—”

“Because you’re a sort of wanderer! What is your goal in life? You haven’t one! Throw in your lot with me, man, and live out your days in comfort. I don’t spend all my life tramping round this lake in a leaky boat. I’ve got a base at the south end called Hagbourne. Come there with me.”

“And become a — whatever you call your followers, and make my wife become one? Not likely! We—”

Jingadangelow raised his little bell and tinkled it.

Two old women doddered in, both dressed in a parody of a toga, one of them run to a gross corpulence and with protruding eyes which took in only the Master.

“Priestesses of the Second Generation,” Jingadangelow said, “tell me the objects of my coming.”

With a singsong delivery, in which the thinner woman led by about half a sentence, they replied, “You came to replace the God that has deserted us; you came to replace the men who have left us; you came to replace the children that were denied us.”

“There’s nothing physical in all this, you understand, Greybeard,” Jingadangelow said parenthetically.

“You bring us hope where we had only ashes; you bring us life where we had only sorrow; you bring us full wombs where we had only empty stomachs.”

“You’ll agree the prose, in its pseudo-biblical way, is pretty telling.”

“You make the unbelievers die from the land; you make the believers survive; and you will make the children of the believers into a Second Generation which shall re-furnish the earth with people.”

“Very good, priestesses. Your Master is pleased with you, and particularly with Sister Madge, who puts the thing over as if she believes what she’s saying. Now, girls, recite what you must do for all this to come to pass.”

Again the two women assumed the recitative. “We must put away all sin in ourselves; we must put away all sin in others; we must honour and cherish the Master.”

“That is what one may term the qualifying clause,” Jingadangelow said to Greybeard. “All right, priestesses, you may go now.”

They fell to holding his hand and patting his head, begging to be allowed to stay, and mouthing pieces of jargon to him.

“Confound it, girls, I’m in audience. Leave me alone!”

They fled from his righteous wrath, and he said irritably to Greybeard as he shrugged himself about in his chair to get comfortable again, “That’s the penalty with having disciples — they get above themselves. Chanting all this repetitive stuff seems to go to female heads. Jesus knew a thing or two when He chose an all-male team, but somehow I seem to get along better with women.”

Greybeard said, “You don’t appear totally submerged in your role, Jingadangelow.”

“The role of a prophet is always a bit wearing. How many years have I kept this up ? Centuries, and centuries to come yet! But I give ’em hope — that’s the great thing. Funny, eh, to give people something you don’t have yourself.”

A knock came at the door, and a tatterdemalion man lost in a grey jersey announced that all the Wittenham women were safely ashore and the boat was ready to move on.

“You and your party had better leave,” Jingadangelow told Greybeard.

It was then that Greybeard asked for a tow. Irritably, Jingadangelow said it should be done, if they could be all ready to sail almost at once. He would tow them as far as Hagbourne in exchange for a certain levy of work from Pitt, Charley, and Greybeard. After some consultation, they agreed to this, and put together their belongings; most of these were stowed in the dinghy or Pitt’s boat, while the rest came with them on to the steamer, where they were allotted an area of deck space. By the time they were under way, the mist had cleared. The day remained brooding and heavy.

Pitt and Charley became involved in a game of cards with two of the crew. Martha and Greybeard took a walk round the deck, which bore the scars of the seats on which holiday makers had once sat to view the old river. There were few people aboard: perhaps nine “priestesses” to minister to Jingadangelow’s wants, and a few crewmen. There was also a couple of idle gentlemen who lounged in the shade at the stern and did not speak. They were armed with revolvers, evidently to repel any attack that might be made on the boat, but Greybeard, disliking their looks, felt some relief that he had his rifle with him.

As they were passing the saloon, the room curtained off for Jingadangelow’s use, its door opened, and the Master himself looked out. He greeted Martha ostentatiously.

“Even a god needs a bit of fresh air,” he said. “It’s like an oven in my cabin. You look as lovely as ever, madam; the centuries have left not a footmark in their passage over your face. Talking of beauty, perhaps you’d care to step in here and have a look at something.”

He motioned Martha and Greybeard into his cabin, and towards a door that stood at the other end of it.

“You’re both infidels, of course, born infidels, I’d think, since it has always been a theory of mine that unbelievers are born whereas saints are made; but in the hope of converting you, perhaps you’d like to see one of my miracles?”

“Are you still going in for castration?” Martha asked, standing where she was.

“Heavens, no! Surely the transformation which I have undergone is sufficiently apparent to you, Mrs. Greybeard? Crude trickery has no part in my make-up. I want to show you a genuine sample of the Second Generation.” He lifted a drape from a window in the door, and motioned them to look through into the next room.

Greybeard caught his breath. His senses rose up in him like music.

On a bunk, a young girl was sleeping. She was naked, and a sheet had fallen back from her shoulders, revealing most of her body. It was smooth and browned, moulded most delicately. Her arms, folded under her, cradled her breasts; one knee was tucked up so that it almost touched her elbow, revealing the scut of pubic hair between her legs. She slept with her face into the pillow, her mouth open, her rich brown hair in disarray, scowling in her sleep. She might have been sixteen.

Martha pulled the curtain down quietly over the glass panel and turned to Jingadangelow.

“Then some women are still bearing… But this child belongs to none of those you have aboard?”

“No, no, how right you are! This one is just a poor old prophet’s consolation, as you might say. Your husband looks moved. May I hope that after this evidence of my potentialities we may welcome him into the fold of the Second Generationists?”

“You sly devil, Jingadangelow, what are you doing with this girl? She’s perfect — unlike those rather sad creatures we saw in Oxford. How did you get hold of her? Where does she come from?”

“You realize you’re hardly entitled to cross-question me in this way? But I may as well tell you that I suspect that there are a lot more creatures as pretty as Chammoy — that’s her name — lurking up and down the country. You see I have something tangible to offer my followers! Now, why don’t the two of you throw in your lot with me?”

“We are making a journey to the mouth of the river,” Martha said.

He shook his head until his cheeks wobbled. “You are becoming the mouthpiece of your husband in your old age, Mrs. Greybeard. I thought when we met so many centuries ago that you had a mind of your own.”

Greybeard grabbed the front of his toga.

“Who’s that girl in there? If there are more children, then they must be saved and treated properly and helped — not used as whores for you! By God, Jingadangelow—”

The Master staggered backwards, grasped his hand bell, rang it violently, and struck Greybeard over the side of the face with it.

“You’re jealous, you dog, like all men!” he growled.

Two priestesses came in at once, screamed at the sight of the scuffle, and made way for the two men who had been sitting at the stern of the ship. They seized Greybeard’s arms and held him.

“Tie him up and throw him overboard!” Jingadangelow ordered, tottering back into his chair. He was panting heavily. “Let the pike have a go at him. Tie the woman up and leave her on deck. I will speak with her when we reach Hagbourne. Move!”

“Stay where you are,” Pitt said from the door. He had an arrow notched at his bow and aimed at Jingadangelow. His two remaining teeth gleamed behind the feathered Right. Charley stood by him, watching the corridor with his knife in his hand. “If anyone moves out of turn, I’ll shoot your Master without one second’s hesitation.”

“Get hold of their guns, Martha,” Pitt advised. “You okay, Greybeard? What do we do now?”

Jingadangelow’s henchmen showed no disposition to fight. Greybeard took their two revolvers from Martha and put them into his pockets. He dabbed his cheek on his sleeve.

“We’ve no quarrel with these people,” he said, “if they are prepared to let us alone. We will go on to Hagbourne and leave them there. It’s doubtful if we shall ever meet them again.”

“Oh, you can’t let them go like that!” Pitt exclaimed. “Look what a chance you’re passing up. Here’s our opportunity to get hold of a perfectly good boat. We can ditch this mouldy crew at the nearest bit of bank. Power!”

“We can’t do that, Jeff. We’re getting too old to turn pirate,” Martha said.

“I felt the power coming back to me, just as when I was a young man,” Pitt said, looking at no one.

“Standing there with my bow, I suddenly knew I could kill a man again. Gor… It’s a miracle…”

They looked at him without understanding.

Greybeard said, “Let’s be practical. We could not manage this ship. Nor could we get it out of the Sea of

Barks.”

“Martha’s right,” Charley said. “We’ve no moral right to pinch their boat, scoundrels though they may be.”

Jingadangelow straightened himself up and adjusted his toga. “If you’ve all finished arguing, kindly leave my cabin. I must remind you that this room is private and sacred. There will be no more trouble, I can assure you of that.”

As they left, Martha saw a wild dark eye regarding them through a rent in the curtain over the far window.

When Hagbourne appeared late that afternoon, it emerged not out of the mist but from curtains of heavy rain, for the morning mist had been dispersed by a wind that brought showers with it. They died away as the steamer was secured along a stone quay, and the line of the Berkshire Downs rose behind the small town. The town Jingadangelow called his base appeared almost deserted. Only three ancient men were there to greet the steamer and help tie it up. The disembarkation that followed lent some life to the dreary scene.

Greybeard’s party detached their own boats warily from the steamer’s crew. Jingadangelow did not give the appearance of a fighting man. What they did not expect was the appearance of Becky, who came up as they were loading their belongings into the dinghy.

She set her head on one side and pointed her sharp nose up at Greybeard.

“The Master sent me to speak with you. He says you owe him some labour for the privilege of the tow he gave you.”

“We’d have done his work if he hadn’t attacked Greybeard,” Charley said. “That was attempted murder, that was. Those that worship false gods shall be damned for ever, Becky, so you better watch it.”

“You keep your tongue to yourself, Charley Samuels, afore you speak like that to a priestess of the Second Generation. I didn’t come to talk to you anyhow.” She turned her back pointedly on him and said to Greybeard, “The Master always carries true forgiveness in his heart. He bears you no malice, and would like to give you shelter for the night. There is a place he has empty that you could use. It’s his offer, not mine, or I wouldn’t be making it. To think you struggled with him, laying hand on his person, you did!”

“We don’t want his hospitality,” Martha said firmly. Greybeard turned to her and took her hands, and said over his shoulder to Becky, “Tell your Master we will be glad to accept the offer of shelter for the night. And see that we get someone with a civil tongue to take us to it.”

As she shuffled back up the gangplank, Greybeard said urgently to Martha, “We can’t just leave without finding out more about that young girl of Jingadangelow’s, where she comes from and what’s going to happen to her. The night looks stormy in any case. We are surely in no danger, and will be glad of dry billets. Let’s bide here.”

Martha arched what would, in a different lifetime, have been her eyebrows. “I admit I don’t understand the interest that untrustworthy rascal holds for you. The attractions of that girl, Chammoy, are altogether more obvious.”

“Don’t be a silly little woman,” he said gently.

“We will do as you wish.”

A flush spread from his face over the dome of his head. “Chammoy has no effect on me,” he said, and turned to instruct Pitt about the baggage.

The quarters that Jingadangelow offered them proved to be good. Hagbourne was an untidy ruin of drab twentieth-century houses, many of them council-built; but at one end of the town, in a section Jingadangelow had chosen for the use of himself and his disciples, were buildings and houses in an older, less anaemic tradition. Over the area, vegetation grew thick. Most of the rest of the place was besieged by plants, elder, dock, willow herb, sorrel, nettle, and the ubiquitous brambles. Beyond the town, the growth was of a different nature. The sheep that once cropped short the grass of the downland had long ago disappeared. Without the flocks to eat the seedlings of shrubs and trees, the ancient cover of beech tree and oak was returning, uprooting on its way the houses where the sheep-consumers had lived.

This vigorous young forest, still dripping from the recent rain, brushed against the stone walls of the barn to which the party was directed. The front and rear walls of the barn were, in fact, broken in, with the result that the floor was muddy. But a wooden stair led up to a small balcony, on to which two rooms opened, snug under a still effective roof. They had recently been lived in, and held the offer of a comfortable night. Pitt and Charley took one room, Martha and Greybeard the other.

They made a good meal of a pair of young ducks and some peas Martha had bought off one of the women on the boat, for the priestesses had proved not adverse to a haggle in their off-hours. A search for bugs revealed that they were unlikely to have company during the night; with this encouragement, they retired early to their room. Greybeard lit a lantern and he and Martha pulled off their shoes. She began to comb and brush her hair. He was pulling the barrel of his rifle through with a piece of cloth when he heard the wooden stairs creak.

He stood up quietly, slipping a cartridge into the breach and levelling the rifle at the door.

The intruder on the stairs evidently heard the click of the bolt, for the voice called, “Don’t shoot!”

Greybeard heard Pitt next door call out a challenge. “Who’s that out there, you devils?” he shouted. “I’ll shoot you dead!”

“Greybeard, it’s me — Jingadangelow! I wish to speak to you.”

Martha said, “Jingadangelow and not the Master!”

He extinguished their lantern and threw open the door. In the protracted twilight, Jingadangelow stood half-way up the stairs, a small lamp held above his head. Its light, slanting down, lit only his gleaming forehead and cheeks. Pitt and Charley came out on to the little balcony to look at him. “Don’t shoot, men. I am alone and mean you no harm. I only wish to speak to Greybeard. You may go to bed and sleep securely.”

“We’ll decide that for ourselves,” Pitt said, but his tone suggested he was mollified. “You saw earlier on that we’ll stand no nonsense from you.”

“I’ll handle him, Jeff,” Greybeard said. “You’d better come up, Jingadangelow.”

The hawker of eternal life had put on flesh recently; the timbers creaked under his tread as he pulled himself up on to the platform. Greybeard stood aside, and Jingadangelow entered their room. On seeing Martha, he made the jerk at his hips that was a portly substitute for a bow. He placed his lantern on a stone shelf set in the wall and stood there, pulling at his lip and observing them, breathing heavily as he did so.

“Is this a social call?” Martha asked.

“I’ve come to make a bargain with you,” he said.

“We don’t make bargains; that’s your trade, not ours,” Greybeard said. “If your two toughs want their revolvers back, I’m willing to return them in the morning when we leave, provided you can guarantee their good behaviour.”

“I didn’t come to discuss that. You needn’t use that sharp tone just because you have me at a slight disadvantage. I want to put a straightforward proposition to you.”

Martha said coolly, “Dr. Jingadangelow, we hope to be moving early in the morning. Do please come directly to what you have to say.”

“Is it something to do with that girl Chammoy?” Greybeard asked.

Muttering that someone would have to help him up again, Jingadangelow sank to the floor and sat there.

“I see I have no option but to lay some of my cards upon the metaphorical table. I want you both to listen generously, since I have indeed come to unburden myself. May I say I’m sorry you don’t receive me in a more friendly way. Despite that little spot of trouble on the boat, my regard for you is unchanged.”

“We are interested in hearing about the girl in your possession,” Martha said.

“Yes, yes, you shall hear about that straightaway. As you know, I have toured the Midlands extensively during my centuries of duty. In many respects, I am a Byronic figure, forced to wander and to suffer… During my peregrinations, I have rarely seen any children. Of course we know there are supposed to be none. Yet my reason has led me to consider that the actual position may be vastly different from the apparent one. In reaching this conclusion, I considered a number of factors, which I will now lay before you.

“If you can recall that distant epoch before the ancient technological civilizations crumbled, back in the twentieth century A.D., you will remember that many specialists gave conflicting diagnoses of what was going to happen when the full effects of the space bombs were upon us. Some thought that everything would return to normal within a few years, others that accumulating radioactivity would wipe all life of every kind from this sinful but rather desirable world. As we who have the benefit of surviving now know, both these views were mistaken. Am I right?”

“Right. Proceed.”

“Thank you, I will. Other specialists suggested that the radio-activity from the big accident might be absorbed into the soil in the course of years. I believe this prediction to have come to pass. And I further believe that with it, some younger women have recovered the power to bring forth young.

“Now, I have to confess that I have come across no fertile women myself, although in my new calling I have been vigilant for them. So I have been forced to ask myself, ‘What would I do if I were a woman of approximately sixty summers who discovered she could produce what we call the Second Generation?’ This is rather a theoretical question; how would you answer it, madam?”

Martha said slowly, “If I were to have a baby? I should be delighted, I suppose. At least, I have spent a number of years supposing I would be delighted. But I should be reluctant to let anyone see my child. Certainly I should be reluctant to come forward to someone like you and declare my secret, for fear that I would be forced into — well, some form of compulsory breeding.”

Jingadangelow nodded magisterially. As talking soothed him, his manner acquired more of its old panache.

“Thank you, madam. You are saying you would hide yourself and your offspring. Or you would exhibit yourself and might well get killed, as happened to a foolish woman who bore a girl child near Oxford. If we suppose that a small number of women have borne children, we must remember that many must have done so in the isolated settlements that now lie off any beaten track. The news of the birth would not circulate.

“Next, consider the plight of the children. You might hold that their lot would be enviable, with all the adults in the neighbourhood to spoil and protect them. Deeper knowledge of humanity will persuade you otherwise. The rancorous envy of those people without children would be insupportable, and aged parents would be unable to ward off the tangible effects of that envy. Babies would be stolen by motherhood-mad harridans, by crazy sterile old men. Young children would be the constant prey of the sort of blackguards I was forced to associate with some eighty years ago, when I travelled with an itinerant fair for my own protection. By the time the children — boys or girls — reached their early teens, one can only draw back aghast at the thought of the sexual indignities to which they would be exposed—”

“Chammoy’s experience must bear out all you say,” Greybeard cut in. “Leave out the hypocrisy, Jingadangelow, and get to the point.”

“Chammoy needed my protection and my moral influence; besides which, I am a lonely man. However, my point is this: that the biggest menace any child could face would be — human society! If you wonder why there are no children, the answer is that if they exist, they hide from us in the new wilds, away from men.”

Martha and Greybeard looked at each other. They read in each other’s eyes an acknowledgement of the likelihood of this theory. In its support, they could recall the persistent rumours, dating back at least ten years, that there were gnomes and small human-like shapes in the bush that vanished when a man went near. And yet… It was too much to swallow at one time; in their minds and bodies they were dry of the belief in living children.

“This is all part of your madness, Jingadangelow,” Greybeard said harshly. “Your mind is obsessed with getting hold of more of these young creatures. Please leave us. We want to hear no more — we have our own madnesses to contend with.”

“Wait! You’re mad, Greybeard, yes, not I! Was my reasoning not clear enough? I’m saner than you are, with your crazy desire to get to the mouth of the river.” He leant forward and clasped his hands together in a sort of agony. “Listen to me! I have a reason for telling you all this.”

“It had better be good.”

“It is good. It’s an idea. It’s the best idea I ever had, and I know you — both of you — will also appreciate it. You are both reasonable people, and it has been a great delight to come across you again after all these centuries, despite that unfortunate incident this morning, for which I fancy you were even more to blame than I — but, no, let’s forget that. The truth is, that seeing you made me yearn for intelligent company — not the company of the fools that surround me now.” Jingadangelow leant forward and addressed himself solely to Greybeard. “I am offering to give up everything and come along with you, wherever you go. I shall follow your lead implicitly, of course. It’s a great and noble renunciation. I make it purely for my soul’s sake, and because I am bored with these imbeciles who follow me.”

In the brief silence that followed, the fat man looked anxiously at his listeners; he tried a smile on Martha, thought better of it, and switched it off.

“You collected the fools who follow you, and you must put up with them,” Greybeard said slowly. “That’s something I think I learned from Martha not a million years ago: however you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.”

“But this Master role, good heavens, it is not my only role. I wish to leave it behind.”

“I don’t doubt you have a dozen roles you can play, Jingadangelow, but I’m equally sure that the essence of you lies in your roles. We don’t want you with us — I have to be brutally frank. We are happy! For all that everyone has lost since the terrible accident back in 1981, one thing at least we have gained — there is no longer need for the hypocrisies and shams of civilization; we can be our natural selves. But you would cause dissent among us, because you carry the old rigmarole of mask-wearing into these simple days. You’re too old to drop it now — how many thousands of years old are you? — and so you would never find peace with us.”

“You and I are philosophers, Greybeard! The salt of the earth! I want to share your simple life with you.”

“No. You couldn’t share it. You could only spoil it. It’s no deal. I’m sorry.”

He took down the lantern from the stone shelf and put it into Jingadangelow’s hand. The Master looked at him, then slowly swung his head to see Martha’s face. Extending a hand, he clutched the hem of her dress.

“Mrs. Greybeard, your husband’s grown hard since we met at Swifford Fair. You persuade him. I tell you there are children on the downs near here — Chammoy was one of them. The three of us could hunt them out and instal ourselves as teachers. They’d look after us while we taught them all our old knowledge. Convince this hard-hearted man of yours, I beg you.”

She said, “You heard what he said. He’s the boss.”

Jingadangelow sighed.

Almost to himself he said, “In the end, we’re all alone. Consciousness — it’s a burden.”

Slowly, he helped himself to his feet. Martha also rose. A tear forced itself from his right eye and rolled with some command down his cheek and over the expanse of his chin, where a crinkle diverted it down towards his neck.

“I offer you my humility, my humanity, and you reject it!”

“At least you have the chance of getting back to your divinity.”

He sighed and produced the effect of bowing without, in fact, doing more than bend his knees slightly.

“I trust you will all be gone early in the morning,” he said. Turning, he moved out of the door, shut it behind him, and left them in darkness.

Martha worked her hand into her husband’s.

“What a splendid speech you made him, sweet! Perhaps you are imaginative after all. Oh, to hear you say as you did, “We are happy!” You are truly a brave man, my beloved Algy. We should take the untrustworthy old fraud with us, if he could regularly provoke you to such eloquence.”

For once, Greybeard wanted to silence her teasing sweetness. He strained his ears to the sounds Jingadangelow made, or had ceased to make. For after a few steps down the creaking wooden stair, Jingadangelow had paused, there had been a muffled noise Greybeard failed to interpret, and then silence. Putting Martha aside with a muttered word, he felt for where he had leant his rifle, took it up, and pulled open the door.

Jingadangelow’s light still shone. The Master no longer carried it. He stood on the floor of the barn with his hands shakingly above his head. Round him pranced three unbelievable figures, one of them grasping his lantern and swinging it about, so that the shadows whirled round the building, over roof timbers, floor and walls.

The figures were grotesque, but it was difficult to make them out in the dim and flickering light. They appeared to have four legs and two arms each, and to stand at a half-crouch. Their ears stood up sharp on their skulls; they had snouty muzzles and long chins. They leapt about the human staggering in their midst. An onlooker might have been forgiven for mistaking them for mediaeval representations of the devil.

All the hairs in Greybeard’s beard crackled with a flow of superstitious fear. Purely by reflex action, he brought up his rifle and fired.

The noise was overwhelming. A further section of the wall at the far end of the barn fell inwards into the mud. At the same time, the dancing figures with the lantern uttered a cry and fell. The light crashed amid scampering feet and went out.

“Oh God, oh Martha, bring a light!” Greybeard called, in a sudden alarm. He went lumbering down the dark stair as Pitt and Charley ran on to the balcony. Charley carried their lantern.

With a whoop of excitement, Pitt loosened an arrow at the escaping figures, but it fell short and remained quivering, upright in the dirt. He and Charley followed Greybeard down to the ground with Martha close behind, bringing her lantern. Jingadangelow leant against the safest wall, weeping out his shock; he seemed physically unharmed.

On the floor, huddled under a pair of badger skins, lay a small boy. One of the skins was fastened low about his body, providing him with an additional pair of legs; the other was fixed so that its mask covered the boy’s face. In addition, his lean body was smeared with coloured paint or mud. In his belt was a small knife. The rifle shot had gone through his thigh. He was unconscious and losing blood rapidly.

Charley and Pitt dropped on to their knees beside Greybeard as he pulled aside the badger skin. The wound was a disease feeding on the smooth flesh of the boy’s leg.

They hardly heard Jingadangelow blubbering over them. “They’d have killed me but for you, Greybeard. Little savages! You saved my life! The vicious little blighters were lying in wait for me! I caught Chammoy near here, and I think they were after her. Little savages! I mustn’t let my followers find me here! I must still be the Master! It is my destiny, curse it.”

Pitt went over to him, facing him squarely. “We don’t want to see anything more of you. Shut your noise up and get out of here.”

Jingadangelow pulled himself erect. “Do you imagine I’d care to stay?”

He staggered out of the barn into the befoliaged night as Martha applied a tourniquet to the boy’s leg. As she tightened it, the child’s eyes opened, gazing up at the pattern of shadows on the roof. She leant over and smiled down at him.

“Whoever you are, it’s going to be all right, darling,” she said.

The dinghy was off early next morning, with Pitt’s boat trailing behind it. Pitt sat in it alone, nodding to himself, sometimes grinning and rubbing his nose. When they left Hagbourne, the day was overcast, but as they moved on the next stage of the journey that they hoped would one day take them to the mouth of the river, the sun broke through the clouds and the wind freshened.

The mouldering strip of harbour, with the Second Generation steamer tied up alongside it, was deserted. To their relief, none of Jingadangelow’s party had appeared to give them a send-off, hostile or otherwise. When they were some way out, a solitary figure appeared on the shore and waved to them; they were too far away to identify it.

Greybeard and Charley shipped their oars as the breeze took the sail, and the former went to sit at the tiller beside Martha. They looked at each other but did not speak.

His thoughts were heavy. The fraudulent Master was right in at least one respect: human hands were turned against children in practice, if not in theory. He himself had fired at the first child he had seen close to! Perhaps there was some kind of filicidal urge in man forcing him to destruction.

It was clear at least that the drive to self-preservation was strong in the new generation — and since they were so very thin on the ground, that was well. They were wary of man. By their dress it was clear they identified themselves more with the animal kind than with the crazy methuselahs who still inbabited the earth. Well, in a few more years, things would be easier for them.

“They can be taught not to fear us,” Greybeard said absently. “After that vital lesson, we should be able to give them plenty of help.”

“Of course it must be as you say. But they’re virtually a new race — perhaps ideally they should not be taught not to fear us,” Martha said. She laid a hand across his shoulder as she rose.

Greybeard chewed over the implications of that remark as he watched her walk forward. She bent over the improvised stretcher, smiling as she began gently to change young Arthur’s bandage. For a minute her husband looked at her, her hands, her face, and at the child solemnly staring up into her eyes.

Then he turned his head, resting one hand on his rifle as with the other he shaded his brow and pretended to gaze ahead at the horizon where the hills were.