Mandrake (3 page)

‘Ridiculous,’ Queston said irritably. ‘They might as well go the whole hog, and make it a beaten earth track.’

‘I don’t agree with you there,’ the policeman said amiably. ‘The Middle Ages, that’s the time we want. Oxford was strongest then.’

He seemed eager for conversation. He fell into heavy step with Queston along the pavement away from the Broad.

‘The Romans laid tessellated streets,’ Queston said faintly. If lunatic intellectuals operated the law, no wonder Oxford was running mad.

The policeman discoursed for fifty yards on Oxford’s return to her former self. He quoted Anthony a Wood. He mentioned that grass had been seen growing in a corner of the High Street. ‘A fellow from the
Daily Express
noticed that. There’ve been some excellent articles in the papers. The
Observer
were the best, they sent an Oxford man—’ His voice had the soft burr of Oxfordshire, deep and slow. He said: ‘You’ll be a stranger here, sir.’

Queston was irritable still. ‘I know Oxford well.’

‘Will you
be
staying long?’

‘Only till tomorrow, I’m afraid.’

They turned the corner into Beaumont Street. ‘We don’t see so many visitors here these days,’ the policeman said. ‘You can almost spot the strange faces. It’s a look they have.’ Queston said: ‘I am taking this strange face to bed. I leave you to your beat, constable. Good night.’

The policeman saluted him gravely, and he went up the steps into his hotel. It was not until he was half-undressed that he realized he had been neatly escorted home.

‘Do come and sit down, Dr Queston,’ said Mandrake. He slipped quickly sideways to the seat next to the fuselage wall, leaving its twin empty. ‘I’m so grateful for the chance to meet you.’

Warily, Queston sat down. He was remembering the snatches of news and reports about Britain, and Mandrake’s progress there, that had filtered through to his indifferent ears during the last few years. The range had been remarkably wide. Oxford, and others, transformed more or less into walled cities. Checks put on all countryside building, and a great resurgence of stress on farming, home-production of food. Something about a reshuffling of population, something to do with the regional councils… but it was all too vague in his mind. When he was away on the other side of the world, Britain became always a very small and distant place; and in these days you heard little or nothing of her at all in international news. There was nothing but the tense up-and-down war of nerves between the Big Three: the Sino-Soviet-American meetings that seemed never to accomplish anything but raising the entire world to a fever-pitch of fear, and then dropping it to cold mistrust again.

‘You have been working in New York? ’ Mandrake said. His voice was soft, with the slight affectation of Oxford vowels; the setting of the plane’s head-rests made it difficult for Queston to look at his face. Instead he found himself studying the hands clasped loosely on Mandrake’s knee: smooth, white, competent hands, with long square-tipped fingers.

‘No, I just called in to see my publishers. I’m on my way back from South America.’

‘Ah yes. The Brazilian project. I remember Klaus Brunner mentioning it to me.’

‘You have a long memory,’ Queston said. ‘I met Mr Brunner once casually, three years ago.’ He was beginning to have an uncomfortable feeling of having been an object of research. But whose research? Mandrake’s? And why?

‘You have always done very interesting work on the relations between men and their environments,’ Mandrake said. ‘I have all your books. Sometimes I think our minds work along very similar lines. After all, I deal with much the same kind of material, in a different way.’ He half-turned in his seat so that he was looking Queston full in the face; there was a startling youthfulness about him, a smoothness round the eyes and mouth, and a suspiciously deliberate boyish wedge of dark hair loose over the forehead. He added, reproachfully, ‘I did suggest once that you should consider working with me, if you remember.’

Queston remembered. A letter had come on Ministry of Town and Country Planning paper only a few days after he had met Brunner in Oxford. He had torn it up, not even bothering to reply, and had put it completely out of his mind until now.

He said lightly: ‘I don’t think I should have been your cup of tea.’ Then, trying to change what was beginning to seem a familiar line: ‘I saw you had some trouble at the airport. Who was the man who took a pot at you?’

Among the entourage the blunt words went home: the back of Brunner’s head jerked sharply in the seat in front of him, and across the aisle he saw two nameless aides glance warningly across. But Mandrake simply raised one smooth hand and let it fall again. ‘The ordinary risk of the public man. There’s always some opponent unbalanced enough to go to an extreme. I don’t know what was up with this one—we shall find out, in due course. These people are rarely good shots, fortunately.’ He smiled easily at Queston. ‘I believe there are rather more of them in South America.’

‘One of my best reasons for keeping away from politics.’ Mandrake laughed. It was a high-pitched, almost foolish laugh, but increasingly, talking to him, Queston could feel a strength of character which seemed to have no connexion with the young face, or the direct manner. This is a man, he thought to himself, who keeps his mind hidden; and who has a lot to hide. Or is the greatest secret that he hides the absence of any real strength?

Mandrake began asking him questions about his work. At first he thought it simply an examination of the thought-processes of an anthropologist, by a man seeking always to learn from the minds of other men; but gradually he became less sure. The Minister fired at him detailed questions on obscure points of social behaviour described in books or papers he had written years before; either he had a real and searching interest in Queston’s not always orthodox ideas, or someone had prepared him some extremely efficient homework at high speed. But how could anyone have known that they were going to meet that day…?

‘The business of emotional attachment to place outweighing even basic human needs—’ Mandrake was saying, alert and absorbed. ‘You went back to Brazil, I believe, to continue some work that Klaus told me about. Naturally, with the situation in Britain as it is at the moment, this is a subject of some concern to me. Tell me, Queston, what conclusions have you come to about the people of your caves?’

How could he have known? Why should Brunner have remembered? To cover his astonishment, Queston said lightly: ‘I don’t really know much about the situation in Britain at the moment. Has it changed much?’

Mandrake’s eyes flickered. ‘A little. But your cave people—’

Unobtrusively Queston took a long slow breath, and held it for a little while. The one thing he did not want to look at again; the one memory that he had been running away from, because always since it had happened it had brought ideas singing into his mind that he knew were very nearly insane: one chance encounter with a planning-happy politician had to plunge a probe deep into the one vulnerable spot. It was his own fault, of course. Whenever he broke his own iron rule of solitude, something went wrong for him. He should have waited until he had done the writing. Now, because he had once incautiously quoted the beginning of the story, years before, the indiscretion was whipping back into his face to flay him with the implications of the story’s end. Was it possible, now, to tell the bare facts, without being led on into the nightmare of deduction that for months had been haunting him?

Perhaps. He said, silently cursing Mandrake’s interest: ‘You’d better draw your own conclusions. They may not be the same as mine.’

From Oxford, that time, he had gone back to London, and from London straight back to Brazil. But there the Brazilian government, who paid his salary, had detained him in the capital as adviser to a long United Nations study, and he had not been free for the long journey back to the highlands for more than two years.

By air and land the way back to the caves in the hills took him almost three weeks. Intermittently his mind had been playing on the small strange tribe he had grown to know there, and their curious worship of the land; he was eager to get back. At the end of the last day’s journey, where the trees ended and the land began to rise, he left his men to pitch camp in a clearing and went on alone up the trail to get a glimpse of the hills.

Somehow he sensed a difference in the place, but at first he could not understand what it was. The night was almost down, after the swift sunset, and he was tired and not properly alert. But there was something about the familiar hillside that arrested his attention… then he realized what it was. He could not see a single point of light anywhere. He paused half-way up the slope, looking up at the rising mass of the range, darker than the darkening sky. There was no sign of the fires which always burnt outside the caves. Puzzled, he went back to the camp.

When daylight came, the morning puzzled him still more. There was no sign of life anywhere; no smoke, no human movement or sound. His own men were muttering, restless, and again he went up alone. When he climbed to the settlement, he realized in sudden alarm what it was that had disturbed him in the appearance of the place. The hillside had changed. Nowhere was its shape the same as it had been before; some cave entrances were widened by jagged cracks, others blocked, and the great fissures gaped black and menacing here and there in the ground.

He found the dappled circles of dead, cold fires, and a few scattered mats, tools, spears. But of the people he had left two years before he found no trace at all.

Other natives had told him, on his way, that they had seen landslips in parts of the hills, though there had been no heavy rains. Queston frowned. There could have been some rogue earth tremor here, perhaps; terrifying the tribe so that they had migrated at last. That must be it… but why, if so, should their precious belongings be scattered about? Even if they had fled, they would have come back through any amount of fear for those.

His natives refused to stay near the place, and there was no useful purpose to be served by arguing. But on the trek back through the lowlands, he found an old man alone in a rough-hoed field; the people here knew of the tribe in the caves, and Queston had spoken to them often before. He beckoned the old man, and pointed up to where low fronds of cloud drifted round the tops of the hills.

‘What happened? ’ he said in Portuguese.

‘They were a strange people,’ the old man said. He seemed to know at once what Queston was talking about.

‘But what has happened?’

‘It was the boy,’ the old man said. He squinted upward; his brown, ancient face was seamed as corduroy, the eyes bright and dribbling; he mumbled round a single yellow tooth. ‘It was the boy. He was chief, in place of the old one, because he was of the family who spoke to the caves. But he was too young. He did not go in alone, as those of his blood had always done. He had no respect. He took others with him, who should not have gone. And the caves were angry.’

He stopped, mumbling. Queston looked at him keenly. This was not dotage; the old man was not a fool. Only reluctant to go on.

‘Was the boy hurt?’

‘The boy, yes. And all of them. It has been a bad season.’

Queston waited, uneasy.

‘The boy had no respect,’ the old man said. ‘No respect for the place. And the hills were angry. They called all the people into the caves into the deep caves, where they had never been. They went in, chanting. And when they were all inside, the caves gave their punishment, and consumed all those there. Not one of them came out again.’

The words echoed in meaningless enormity through Queston’s head. He stared at the old man, appalled. ‘They were all killed?’

‘O yes. All of them.’ The voice was almost placid.

‘But why did they go into the deep caves? They were always frightened to enter, even for sheltering, unless they were of the family.’

The old man said patiently: ‘The caves called them in.’

For a terrible moment Queston felt as if he heard the tearing splitting roar that must have overwhelmed them; smelt the bitter dust, and the sudden shrieking terror as death came in tumbling tons of rock. And in that flash of a second he thought of something else behind the terror: a blind, orgasmic surrender, almost a welcoming… but then it was gone.

A remnant of reasoning stirred in his mind, forcing its way through the shock. He said thickly, staring at the old man: ‘You speak as if you had their faith in the caves. In the power of the caves. But your people have always before thought it foolishness.’

The old man looked up at him out of the bright sunken eyes. ‘It has been a bad season,’ he said again. He mumbled, and looked down. ‘A bad season.’

Queston gave him money, and went away.

‘But you didn’t leave the place altogether, of course,’ Mandrake said.

‘O no. There was a lot more than that to be found out. I worked on it there for three or four months.’

‘And you found out more? About this curious extinction?’

Mandrake’s eyes were fixed on him with close interest; he had listened to all the story in complete silence. They were close to Britain now; their seat-belts were on, and their ears prickling with the de-pressurization that went with a descent from 70,000 feet.

Queston shrugged. ‘It’s complicated. I have work to do still. Really, that’s why I decided to come back—to retreat somewhere and just put all the pieces together. I want to write about it.’ And that understatement, my friend, he thought, will have to do for you.

Brunner said, turning from the seat in front: ‘Where will you go?’

‘Haven’t thought about it. Somewhere quiet.’ He smiled, grimly. ‘Some part of the country where people aren’t quite so attached to their surroundings. Or their surroundings to them.’

He felt a touch on his shoulder; it was the stewardess, smiling for his empty glass. Holding it up to her, he missed her outstretched hand by about half an inch, and pulled himself upright in the seat, frowning. Bad to have his reactions blurring on two Scotches, even airline-size. Well, but there had not been much chance of drinking for some time now.