The Chrysalids

15

I was being dragged along. There were hands under my shoulders. Small branches were whipping back and slapping me in the face.

‘Sh—!’ whispered a voice behind me.

‘Give me a minute. I’ll be all right,’ I whispered back.

The dragging stopped. I lay pulling myself together for a moment, and then rolled over. A woman, a young woman, was sitting back on her heels, looking at me.

The sun was low now, and it was dim under the trees. I could not see her well. There was dark hair hanging down on each side of a sunburnt face, and the glint of dark eyes regarding me earnestly. The bodice of her dress was ragged, a nondescript tawny colour, with stains on it. There were no sleeves, but what struck me most was that it bore no cross. I had never before been face to face with a woman who wore no protective cross stitched to her dress. It looked queer, almost indecent. We faced one another for some seconds.

‘You don’t know me, David,’ she said sadly.

Until then I had not. It was the way she said ‘David’ that suddenly told me.

‘Sophie!’ I said, ‘Oh, Sophie…!’

She smiled.

‘Dear David,’ she said. ‘Have they hurt you badly, David?’

I tried moving my arms and legs. They were stiff and they ached in several places, so did my body and my head. I felt some blood caked on my left cheek, but there seemed to be nothing broken. I started to get up, but she stretched out a hand and put it on my arm.

‘No, not yet. Wait a little, till it’s dark.’ She went on looking at me. ‘I saw them bring you in. You and the little girl, and the other girl — who is she, David?’

That brought me fully round, with a jolt. Frantically I sought for Rosalind and Petra, and could not reach them. Michael felt my panic and came in steadyingly. Relieved, too.

‘Thank goodness for that. We’ve been worried stiff about you. Take it easy. They’re all right, both of them tired out and exhausted; they’re asleep.’

‘Is Rosalind—?’

‘She’s all right, I tell you. What’s been happening to you?’

I told him. The whole exchange only took a few seconds, but long enough for Sophie to be regarding me curiously.

‘Who is she, David?’ she repeated.

I explained that Rosalind was my cousin. She watched me as I spoke, and then nodded slowly.

‘He wants her, doesn’t he?’ she asked.

‘That’s what he said,’ I admitted, grimly.

‘She could give him babies?’ she persisted.

‘What are you trying to do to me?’ I asked her.

‘So you’re in love with her?’ she went on.

A word again…. When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one’s own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another…. When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.

‘We love one another,’ I said.

Sophie nodded. She picked up a few twigs, and watched her brown fingers break them. She said:

‘He’s gone away — where the fighting is. She’s safe just now.’

‘She’s asleep,’ I told her. ‘They’re both asleep.’

Her eyes came back to mine, puzzled.

‘How do you know?’

I told her briefly, as simply as I could. She went on breaking twigs as she listened. Then she nodded.

‘I remember. My mother said there was something… something about the way you sometimes seemed to understand her before she spoke. Was that it?’

‘I think so. I think your mother had a little of it, without knowing she had it,’ I said.

‘It must be a very wonderful thing to have,’ she said, half wistfully. ‘Like more eyes, inside you.’

‘Something like,’ I admitted. ‘It’s difficult to explain. But it isn’t all wonderful. It can hurt a lot sometimes.’

‘To be any kind of deviant is to be hurt — always,’ she said. She continued to sit back on her heels, looking at her hands in her lap, seeing nothing.

‘If she were to give him children, he wouldn’t want me any more,’ she said at last.

There was still enough light to catch a glistening on her cheeks.

‘Sophie dear,’ I said. ‘Are you in love with him — with this spider-man?’

‘Oh, don’t call him that — please — we can’t any of us help being what we are. His name’s Gordon. He’s kind to me, David. He’s fond of me. You’ve got to have as little as I have to know how much that means. You’ve never known loneliness. You can’t understand the awful emptiness that’s waiting all round us here. I’d have given him babies gladly, if I could…. I — oh, why do they do that to us? Why didn’t they kill me? It would have been kinder than this…’

She sat without a sound. The tears squeezed out from under the closed lids and ran down her face. I took her hand between my own.

I remembered watching. The man with his arm linked in the woman’s, the small figure on top of the pack-horse waving back to me as they disappeared into the trees. Myself desolate, a kiss still damp on my cheek, a lock tied with a yellow ribbon in my hand. I looked at her now, and my heart ached.

‘Sophie,’ I said. ‘Sophie, darling. It’s not going to happen. Do you understand? It won’t happen. Rosalind will never let it happen. I know that.’

She opened her eyes again, and looked at me through the brimming tears.

‘You can’t know a thing like that about another person. You’re just trying to—’

‘I’m not, Sophie. I do know. You and I could only know very little about one another. But with Rosalind it is different: it’s part of what thinking-together means.’

She regarded me doubtfully.

‘Is that really true? I don’t understand—’

‘How should you? But it is true. I could feel what she was feeling about the spi— about that man.’

She went on looking at me, a trifle uneasily.

‘You can’t see what I think?’ she inquired, with a touch of anxiety.

‘No more than you can tell what I think,’ I assured her. ‘It isn’t a kind of spying. It’s more as if you could just talk all your thoughts, if you liked — and not talk them if you wanted them private.’

It was more difficult trying to explain it to her than it had been to Uncle Axel, but I kept on struggling to simplify it into words until I suddenly became aware that the light had gone, and I was talking to a figure I could scarcely see. I broke off.

‘Is it dark enough now?’

‘Yes. It’ll be safe if we go carefully,’ she told me. ‘Can you walk all right? It isn’t far.’

I got up, well aware of stiffness and bruises, but not of anything worse. She seemed able to see better in the gloom than I could, and took my hand, to lead the way. We kept to the trees, but I could see fires twinkling on my left, and realized that we were skirting the encampment. We kept on round it until we reached the low cliff that closed the north-west side, and then along the base of that, in the shadow, for fifty yards or so. There she stopped, and laid my hand on one of the rough ladders I had seen against the rock face.

‘Follow me,’ she whispered, and suddenly whisked upwards.

I climbed more cautiously until I reached the top of the ladder where it rested against a rock ledge. Her arm reached out and helped me in.

‘Sit down,’ she told me.

The lighter patch through which I had come disappeared. She moved about, looking for something. Presently there were sparks as she used a flint and steel. She blew up the sparks until she was able to light a pair of candles. They were short, fat, burnt with smoky flames, and smelt abominably, but they enabled me to see the surroundings.

The place was a cave about fifteen feet deep and nine wide, cut out of the sandy rock. The entrance was covered by a skin curtain hooked across it. In one corner of the inner end there was a flaw in the roof from which water dripped steadily at about a drop a second. It fell into a wooden bucket; the overflow of the bucket trickled down a groove for the full length of the cave, and out of the entrance. In the other inner corner was a mattress of small branches, with skins and a tattered blanket on it. There were a few bowls and utensils. A blackened fire-hollow near the entrance, empty now, showed an ingenious draught-hole drilled to the outer air. The handles of a few knives and other tools protruded from niches in the walls. A spear, a bow, a leather quiver with a dozen arrows in it, lay close to the brushwood mattress. There was nothing much else.

I thought of the kitchen of the Wenders‘ cottage. The clean, bright room that had seemed so friendly because it had no texts on the walls. The candles flickered, sent greasy smoke up to the roof, and stank.

Sophie dipped a bowl into the bucket, rummaged a fairly clean bit of rag out of a niche, and brought it across to me. She washed the blood off my face and out of my hair, and examined the cause.

‘Just a cut. Not deep,’ she said, reassuringly.

I washed my hands in the bowl. She tipped the water into the runnel, rinsed the bowl and put it away.

‘You’re hungry, David?’ she said.

‘Very,’ I told her. I had had nothing to eat all day except during our one brief stop.

‘Stay here. I won’t be long,’ she instructed, and slipped out under the skin curtain.

I sat looking at the shadows that danced on the rock walls, listening to the plop-plop-plop of the drips. And very likely, I told myself, this is luxury, in the Fringes. ‘You’ve got to have as little as I have…’ Sophie had said, though it had not been material things that she meant. To escape the forlornness and the squalor I sought Michael’s company.

‘Where are you? What’s been happening?’ I asked him.

‘We’ve leaguered for the night,’ he told me. ‘Too dangerous to go on in the dark.’ He tried to give me a picture of the place as he had seen it just before sunset, but it might have been a dozen spots along our route. ‘It’s been slow going all day — tiring, too. They know their woods, these Fringes people. We’ve been expecting a real ambush somewhere on the way, but it’s been sniping and harassing all the time. We’ve lost three killed, but had seven wounded — only two of them seriously.’

‘But you’re still coming on?’

‘Yes. The feeling is that now we do have quite a force here for once, it’s a chance to give the Fringes something that will keep them quiet for some time to come. Besides, you three are badly wanted. There’s a rumour that there are a couple of dozen, perhaps more, of us scattered about Waknuk and surrounding districts, and you have to be brought back to identify them.’ He paused a moment there, then he went on in a worried, unhappy mood.

‘In point of fact, David, I’m afraid — very much afraid — there is only one.’

‘One?’

‘Rachel managed to reach me, right at her limit, very faintly. She says something has happened to Mark.’

‘They’ve caught him?’

‘No. She thinks not. He’d have let her know if it were that. He’s simply stopped. Not a thing from him in over twenty-four hours now.’

‘An accident perhaps? Remember Walter Brent — that boy who was killed by a tree? He just stopped like that.’

‘It might be. Rachel just doesn’t know. She’s frightened; it leaves her all alone now. She was right at her limit, and I was almost. Another two or three miles, and we’ll be out of touch.’

‘It’s queer I didn’t hear at least your side of this,’ I told him.

‘Probably while you were knocked out,’ he suggested.

‘Well, when Petra wakes she’ll be able to keep in touch with Rachel,’ I reminded him. ‘She doesn’t seem to have any kind of limit.’

‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten that,’ he agreed. ‘It will help her a bit.’

A few moments later a hand came under the curtain, pushing a wooden bowl into the cave-mouth. Sophie scrambled in after it, and gave it to me. She trimmed up the disgusting candles and then squatted down on the skin of some unidentifiable animal while I helped myself with a wooden spoon. An odd dish; it appeared to consist of several kinds of shoots, diced meat, and crumbled hard-bread, but the result was not at all bad, and very welcome. I enjoyed it, almost to the last when I was suddenly smitten in a way that sent a whole spoonful cascading down my shirt. Petra was awake again.

I got in a response at once. Petra switched straight from distress to elation. It was nattering, but almost as painful. Evidently she woke Rosalind, for I caught her pattern among the chaos of Michael asking what the hell? and Petra’s Sealand friend anxiously protesting.

Presently Petra got a hold of herself, and the turmoil quietened down. There was a sense of all other parties relaxing cautiously.

‘Is she safe now? What was all that thunder and lightning about?’ Michael inquired.

Petra told us, keeping it down with an obvious effort:

‘We thought David was dead. We thought they’d killed him.’

Now I began to catch Rosalind’s thoughts, firming into comprehensible shapes out of a sort of swirl. I was humbled, bowled over, happy, and distressed all at the same time. I could not think much more clearly in response, for all I tried. It was Michael who put an end to that.

‘This is scarcely decent for third parties,’ he observed. ‘When you two can disentangle yourselves there are other things to be discussed.’ He paused. ‘Now,’ he continued,’ what is the position?’

We sorted it out. Rosalind and Petra were still in the tent where I had last seen them. The spider-man had gone away, leaving a large, pink-eyed, white-haired man in charge of them. I explained my situation.

‘Very well,’ said Michael. ‘You say this spider-man seems to be in some sort of authority, and that he has come forward towards the fighting. You’ve no idea whether he intends to join in the fighting himself, or whether he is simply making tactical dispositions? You see, if it is the latter he may come back at any time.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I told him.

Rosalind came in abruptly, as near to hysteria as I had known her.

‘I’m frightened of him. He’s a different kind. Not like us. Not the same sort at all. It would be outrageous — like an animal. I couldn’t, ever… If he tries to take me I shall kill myself….’

Michael threw himself on that like a pail of ice-water.

‘You won’t do anything so damned silly. You’ll kill the spider-man, if necessary.’ With an air of having settled that point conclusively he turned his attention elsewhere. At his full range he directed a question to Petra’s friend.

‘You still think you can reach us?’

The reply came still from a long distance, but clearly and without effort now. It was a calmly confident ‘Yes’.

‘When?’ Michael asked.

There was a pause before the reply, as if for consultation, then:

‘In not more than sixteen hours from now,’ she told him, just as confidently. Michael’s scepticism diminished. For the first time he allowed himself to admit the possibility of her help.

‘Then it is a question of ensuring that you three are kept safe for that long,’ he told us, meditatively.

‘Wait a minute. Just hold on a bit,’ I told them.

I looked up at Sophie. The smoky candles gave enough light to show that she was watching my face intently, a little uneasily.

‘You were “talking” to that girl?’ she said.

‘And my sister. They’re awake now,’ I told her. ‘They are in the tent, and being guarded by an albino. It seems odd.’

‘Odd?’ she inquired.

‘Well, one would have thought a woman in charge of them…’

‘This is the Fringes,’ she reminded me with bitterness.

‘It — oh, I see,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Well, the point is this: do you think there is any way they can be got out of there before he comes back? It seems to me that now is the time. Once he does come back…’ I shrugged, keeping my eyes on hers.

She turned her head away and contemplated the candles for some moments. Then she nodded.

‘Yes. That would be best for all of us — all of us, except him…’ she added, half sadly. ‘Yes, I think it can be done.’

‘Straight away?’

She nodded again. I picked up the spear that lay by the couch, and weighed it in my hand. It was somewhat light, but well balanced. She looked at it, and shook her head.

‘You must stay here, David,’ she told me.

‘But—’ I began.

‘No. If you were to be seen there would be an alarm. No one will take any notice of me going to his tent, even if they do see me.’

There was sense in that. I laid the spear down, though with reluctance.

‘But can you—?’

‘Yes,’ she said decisively.

She got up and went to one of the niches. From it she pulled out a knife. The broad blade was clean and bright. It looked as if it might once have been part of the kitchen furnishings of a raided farm. She slipped it into the belt of her skirt, leaving only the dark handle protruding. Then she turned and looked at me for a long moment.

‘David—’ she began, tentatively.

‘What?’ I asked.

She changed her mind. In a different tone she said:

‘Will you tell them no noise? Whatever happens, no sounds at all? Tell them to follow me, and have dark pieces of cloth ready to wrap round themselves. Will you be able to make all that clear to them?’

‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘But I wish you’d let me—’

She shook her head and cut me short.

‘No, David. It’d only increase the risk. You don’t know the place.’

She pinched out the candles, and unhooked the curtain. For a moment I saw her silhouetted against the paler darkness of the entrance, then she was gone.

I gave her instructions to Rosalind, and we impressed on Petra the necessity for silence. Then there was nothing to do but wait and listen to the steady drip-drip-drip in the darkness.

I could not sit still for long like that. I went to the entrance and put my head out into the night. There were a few cooking fires glowing among the shacks; people moving about, too, for the glows blinked occasionally as figures crossed in front of them. There was a murmur of voices, a slight, composite stir of small movements, a night-bird calling harshly a little distance away, the cry of an animal still farther off. Nothing more.

We were all waiting. A small shapeless surge of excitement escaped for a moment from Petra. No one commented on it.

Then from Rosalind a reassuring ‘it’s-all-right’ shape, but with a curious secondary quality of shock to it. It seemed wiser not to distract their attention now by asking the reason for that.

I listened. There was no alarm; no change in the conglomerate murmur. It seemed a long time until I heard the crunch of grit underfoot, directly below me. The poles of the ladder scraped faintly on the rock edge as the weight came on them. I moved back into the cave out of the way. Rosalind was asking silently, a little doubtfully:

‘Is this right? Are you there, David?’

‘Yes. Come along up,’ I told them.

One figure appeared dimly outlined in the opening. Then another, smaller form, then a third. The opening was blotted out. Presently the candles were alight again.

Rosalind, and Petra; too, watched silently in horrid fascination as Sophie scooped a bowlful of water from the bucket to wash the blood off her arms and clean the knife.