Out of Time (12 page)

*

The court is dismissed.

‘Get them out!’ Helmuth orders. ‘And the child!’

He rises and goes. Another set of criminals dispensed with. Will these citizens never stop trying to overthrow him, never leave him to savour his high position, so long fought for? They have forced him to plot and plan, to lay bare treachery even before they have thought of it.

Susie weeps bitterly as she tries to fight off her guards who again place a cowl over her head but they are too strong for her. She is dragged out, kicking and screaming, her heels beating a tattoo on the ground. She is walked for what seems like hours but at least she is outside, in the fresh glorious air. She would like to go on walking forever.

All too soon she is halted and hears a door clang open. She is pulled down what she thinks is a long tunnel for the air is fetid and thick; then she is given a push and falls down a flight of steps.

Her hands now free, Susie tears the cowl off her face but quickly covers her nose with it against an overpowering smell of decomposition, decay and human waste. She looks around. She is in a large dungeon, water dripping down its walls. It is cold and she is shivering in her light clothes. She is alone and, for the first time, terrified. She has been left to die in this desolate place. She has no more fight in her. Her only option is to accept her fate. She sits on the wet floor and leans against the dripping walls, hoping for a swift end.

Sometime later Susie hears a noise at the far end of the dungeon and a door which she had not noticed is opened and in streams a group of children of all ages. They are dirty, cold, hungry, skeletal. Some can hardly drag their feet across the floor and slump down, regardless of the wet.

The children are too tired and exhausted to take notice of this newcomer but one boy, less degraded than the rest, comes up to her.

‘What have you been accused of?’ he asks.

‘Being alive,’ Susie says.

The boy’s name is Ian. He is two years older than Susie, tall for his age, with brown hair and hazel eyes. He has not been a prisoner for long. Though she is wary at first, Susie likes the look of him. Perhaps he will become a friend. She has not had a friend before.

‘Have you been tried?’ Susie asks him. But he has not. Ian, like Susie, was hidden by his family but one day his father fails to come home from work. His mother tells him that she is going out to look for him. He waits and waits but she does not return. After several weeks, when food and water have run out, Ian decides to take his life in his hands and run away into the country. He has heard that somewhere there is a dissident community and although he has no idea where he will try to join them.

But he does not get far, only to the outskirts of the town. He is picked up by two guards and thrown into this dungeon.

‘What do we do here?’ Susie asks. ‘You’ve been gone all day.’

‘We clean the sewers,’ Ian says.

JOE struggled to consciousness.

‘Who am I?’ he asked, panic stricken, ‘Where am I? What am I doing here?’

He could not remember. He was no one, nowhere, a lost soul without identity.

‘Joe, it’s all right, you’re all right now.’

He felt a soft hand on his forehead. A face framed with fair hair was leaning over him. Kathryn. Partial memories returned, his plight, the hostile group of people he had thought his friends, his overwhelming isolation. He tried to sit up, to get out of bed and flee but, overcome with dizziness, fell back.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Looking after you.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve been ill. Here.’

She handed him a mug of milk.

‘She’s tending me like a sick animal,’ he thought bitterly and pushed it away.

‘How long?’

‘Days, nights.’

‘You’ve been with me all the time?’

‘Others have visited.’

He wished she’d go away and leave him alone.

Yes, I’ve been with you all the time, watching you, trying to read the thoughts flickering over your face, as I tried in that terrible meeting to reach out to you. I knew you were telling the truth, at least as you saw it, at least how you had experienced it, and I wanted to say, leave him be, leave him, I don’t know who he is but he is not an enemy, he’s a strange boy, ignorant and sullen but not harmful. He’s strayed into our community, not infiltrated it for an evil purpose. The others knew it too, but we have to be so careful. We don’t, even now, know who you are.

Days passed in an indeterminate progression of half sleep, half wakefulness in which, suspended in no man’s land, Joe saw replays of his old life mingle with dreams of the present. Always he woke to the reality he least desired, his bare room, Kathryn. No exit signs anywhere. He felt trapped.

‘Who’s looking after the farm?’ he asked, hoping that necessity would call her away. He needed peace and time to think, and would have preferred Belinda by his side.

‘Belinda and Randolph, between them.’

‘Hadn’t you better help them?’

‘I will eventually.’

Not soon enough.

She nursed him night and day and he gradually regained his strength until, one morning, he woke with his mind clear and sharp. The meeting and its aftermath came back to him with startling clarity.

‘The well,’ he said. ‘I jumped in. I tried to kill myself.’

‘ We followed you and lowered Meredith down. He brought you up.’

‘Am I a prisoner?’ he asked.

‘No, of course not.’

Of course not?

‘Why not?’

‘We had to be certain...’

‘Certain of what? That I wasn’t going to, what was it, destroy the last spark of civilisation? Meaning you, I suppose?’

‘We had to be certain that you hadn’t been planted by the townspeople,’ she replied with dignity.

‘What would be in it for me? Certain death.’

‘We couldn’t know that.’

‘I tried to tell you who I was but none of you would listen. There was no need to try me as though I were a criminal.’

‘There was no need for you to be so violent. You’ve appeared out of nowhere, or at least somewhere we couldn’t believe in, and we were worried and uncertain. We live on a knife-edge.’

‘And now?’

‘We think you’re telling the truth.’

‘Well, that’s something to be grateful for.’

She ignored the sarcasm in his voice.

‘We still don’t know how you got here.’

Neither did Joe.

Kathryn returned to her duties and Joe resumed life downstairs. The weather had changed to early winter with sharp, cold days and a clear light that raised his spirits. He wanted to go outside but Otto advised caution for a few days. Joe was glad of the respite, did not feel ready to cope with the demands of daily life, though he calculated that he could not have been ill more than ten to twelve days; but he detected a change in himself. Unconscious forces had been at work, busy traffic between neural synapses sifting, sorting, processing, the instinct to survive altering his pattern of thought and reaction. He felt better adjusted, more able to deal with circumstances that, before his suicide attempt, had seemed intolerable. There was in any case little alternative, he had either to accept or flee. The only other remaining route open to him had failed. Joe was a pragmatist and he accepted.

He wandered round the house, making himself useful where he could. Otto, he discovered, did not work exclusively in the kitchen, being busy much of the day in a set of rooms facing the yard. They looked like the kitchen quarters of a former stately home, large with high ceilings and flagstones which felt cold underfoot. Dried rushes served as matting.

One room, larger than the others, housed two looms. Here Otto and Belinda wove textiles, clothes, blankets and rugs. The others from time to time took their turn. Wide thick rugs covered the floor and though worn thin in places retained their original colours, warm reds, blues, yellows and browns woven in geometric patterns of open squares fitting into one another with the infinite intricacy of an Escher drawing. These were designed, he learned, by Meredith. This surprised him. Meredith did not strike him as the artistic type.

A spacious room contained vats for dying. Others were used for leather work and sewing. Here Belinda spent most of her day. She had a natural gift for handiwork and made most of the clothes. She fitted Joe out with a new set, thick woollen trousers and a baggy shirt tightened with an elaborate leather belt. Under her tuition he made himself a pair of fur lined boots. She was the only one among this serious crowd with a lightness of touch. Working with her was fun. It was almost like being with one of his friends back home.

One afternoon he wandered, light in hand, down to the cellar. The door, usually locked and bolted, was close to the kitchen in a small passageway leading to the back of the house. He had seen others going in and returning with various stores but had never ventured down. Today, surprisingly, the door was unlocked. Stone steps led into a deep vault, the echo of his footsteps indicating its size. Even with the light held high he could not see the far walls. He moved forward carefully, awed by the gloom and silence.

Partitions either side were used for storage. Strong smelling hides hung from rafters, hunks of wool were suspended from hooks, lumps of salt rock piled along the far wall. Slatted wooden shelves housed various stores, bundles of rushes, straw twisted into ropes filled the floor space and shelving above. In a corner, standing alone, Joe found four wooden pillars, hieroglyphic markings on each though one was incomplete. He could not interpret their significance.

He tripped, almost extinguishing his lamp and cursed himself for a fool, coming down alone without flints or without telling anyone. Later he mentioned what he had seen.

‘It’s our store room. We keep it replenished in case of a siege.’

‘And those pillars with markings on them?’

Randolph looked up in surprise.

‘Our calendars, of course.’

Of course, he thought bitterly. They told him nothing but expected him to know everything. He forbore from asking more details but once again this insignificant incident emphasised his otherness, his separation from the community whose aims and interests remained alien no matter how hard he tried to adjust. But he went to the cellar again and studied the pillars. They were easy enough to interpret now that he knew their purpose, each one clearly representing a hundred years. Three were completed and one awaited its final markings. The house had seen almost four hundred years of family life. If family they were. Joe had no idea whether or not these young people were related.

‘Why don’t they just tell me?’ Joe muttered to himself.

When at last he felt strong enough to go outside he was glad he had made his boots thick and strong. Winter had taken over. The trees stood bare against a sky the colour of steel and the earth, whitened by frost, crunched underfoot. The exhilarating air, hard and cold, cut into his face.

The windmill’s huge sails were turning boisterously in the wind. Inside the noise was deafening.

The windmill was smaller than the occasional ones he had seen at home. It stood on a squat brick foundation about a yard high and consisted of only one large wooden room. Joe was faced with a mass of turning wheels, hoists, pulleys and governors whose functions were a mystery. Meredith, who had built and now maintained the mechanisms, explained how the stones worked, how they ground and how they were driven by wheels with interlocking teeth.

‘Look,’ Meredith showed him joyfully, ‘the best hornbeam, hardest wood there is.’

He glowed with enthusiasm.

‘And the pulleys and governors - all controlled by carefully balanced weights. You have to get it exactly right or it won’t work.’

‘We have the same but in metal.’

‘Won’t last as long as hornbeam.’

‘Maybe not.’

He showed him the smooth flour pouring out into sacks, later to be stored in bins.

Joe considered the community primitive in many of its aspects but he was impressed by the technology that had gone into the workings of the windmill and by Meredith’s meticulous craftsmanship. For all the computerised machinery he doubted they could do much better back home; and the flour was of superior quality, the bread more delicious than any he had ever tasted.

It snowed and though the white covering melted in the sun it presaged what was to come.

Joe found Kathryn disconsolate in the dairy.

‘The cows are drying up,’ she said.

‘Will we have to slaughter them?’

We? The word automatically uttered surprised him for it assumed that he would remain here in the foreseeable future. If Kathryn noticed she made no comment.

‘Not unless the winter gets worse. Usually we manage to hold out with the fodder.’

She looked away as though she did not believe what she said.

One evening after supper was cleared away Randolph said,

‘I’ve got something to show you.’

He took him into the wood carving shed. Among a pile of stripped wood lay a large section of oak.

‘That’s yours.’

Joe passed his hands over the surface. It felt rough to the touch but alive. He could hardly wait to pick up the tools arrayed before him and create an object worthy of the tree they had felled.