The Chalk Giants (11 page)
From all this pondering, one idea emerged. He opened the new book once more, studied the flowers and trees. After a while he spread a second beside it. He discerned, now, certain similarities in the little black marks. Some of them, he saw, rose above their fellows, like tall bushes among lesser. Something in his brains said ‘head’ to that, or ‘north’. It was the first key to a brand new Mystery. Illiterate, Monkey had divined which way up one holds the printed page.
For a season, and another, and part of a third, Truck squeaked and rumbled aimlessly while Monkey lay absorbed. The whole equipage might have become irretrievably lost had not the sinews of Pru and Sal remembered what their scorched brains were unable to retain. They followed, faithfully, their course of previous years. They harvested wheat, pounded and husked the grain, baked the flat hard cakes; they hunted rabbits and deer, ate and drank and slept. They came finally to the New Sea again, and the broken road; and there, triumphantly, Monkey added his own gull-cryings to the wheeling birds. The words floated down, vaunting and clear, to lose themselves in the roar and surge of the water.
‘Even so our houses and ourselves and children have lost, or do not learn for want of time, the sciences that should become our country. . .’
How the wonder had come about will never be wholly explained. It was an achievement comparable to the first use of fire, the invention of the wheel; but of this Monkey remained unaware. Certainly, the concept of a map aided his first steps to literacy. That the books in his keeping were maps of a curious sort was never in question; though what such charts expressed he was wholly unable to define. He was conscious of an entity, or body of awareness; something that though vastly significant was yet too shadowy for the mind wholly to grasp. He grappled with it nonetheless while his bones - the bones of genius -divined the inner mysteries of noun, adjective and verb. It was slow work, slow work indeed; ‘tree’, for instance, was simple enough, but ‘oak’, ‘ash’ and ‘hawthorn’ baffled him for months, ‘Green tree’ was likewise a concept fraught with difficulty, though he mastered it finally, adding to it the red, blue and violet trees of his mind. The noises he made, first fitting breath to cyphers, were less comprehensible than the utterings of Pru and Sal. It was patience that was needed; patience and dogged, endless work.
Truck rolled on, while Monkey bleated and yelped. Seasons, hours, moods, all now brought forth their observation. To Pru, sucking at a scab on her leg, he confided his opinion that ‘lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’. Sal, seen piddling into a deep green brook, provoked an equally solemn thought. ‘In such a time as this,’ mused Monkey, ‘it is not meet that every nice offence should bear his comment.’ Staring into a leafy sunset reminded him of the lowing herd, while a sight of the sea brought forth memories of Coastwise Lights. ‘We warn the crawling cargo tanks of Bremen, Leith and Hull,’ he expounded gravely. Yet for all his learning he remained centrally baffled; for despite Kipling he saw no ships, despite Shakespeare he met with no great Kings. In the beginning, God might very well have created the heavens and the earth; but God, it seemed, was no longer an active agent. No spirits sat on thistle tops, in flat defiance of Tennyson; and though Keats’s nightingales still sang, indubitably Ruth no longer walked.
Monkey found himself sinking once more into despondency. The books he owned he had read, from cover to cover; yet understanding seemed as far away as ever. Pru and Sal jogged as they had always jogged; the sun rose and set, rain came and wind, mists and snow. The sea creamed and boomed; but Monkey’s mind was as rock-girt as the coasts. Nowhere, in any book, had he come upon a description remotely resembling Truck, or himself, or Pru and Sal; while all those things on which books most loved to dwell - armies and Legions, painters and poets, Queens and Kings - seemed lost for ever. ‘Left not a rack behind,’ muttered Monkey balefully. He lay sucking his wheel and brooding. Somewhere, it seemed, some great clue had evaded him. The books showed a world unreachable, but sweetly to be desired. As the maps had showed a world, incomprehensible at first, that now lay all about him.
He frowned, wondering. Then for the first time in many months he pulled the maps from their compartment. He unfolded them, tracing the confluences of roads, the strange knots he had never been permitted to explore. Their meaning was plain enough now. They were of course towns; their very names lay clear to read. He sat puzzling, and was struck by a wholly new thought. What if all the wonderful things of which he had read - the ships and Kings, the castles and palaces and people -still existed? What if, all this time, they had been waiting for him in the never-visited towns? He lay sleepless well into the night, turning over the brilliant, unsettling idea. Everywhere, glowing prospects opened; and when he finally dozed, he was visited by a splendid dream. He seemed to stand outside himself, and outside Truck; and Truck was bowling, unaided, along a great broad highway. To either side, half lost in a golden haze, reared towers and steeples; and everywhere, as Truck moved, there seemed to rise a great and rolling shout. It was as if all the people in the word - the glittering, wondrous people of the books - had come together to greet him; and there were hands and eyes, cheering and laughter, voices and the warmth he had so seldom known.
He sat up, peering from the confines of Truck. Dawn was grey in the sky; overhead, a solitary bird piped. Monkey’s whoop of triumph sent it scuttling from its branch. ‘Away toward Salisbury!’ he cried to the sleeping land. ‘While we reason here a Royal battle might be won and lost...’
The intention, once formed, was irrevocable; but at first the practical difficulties seemed impossible to overcome. For all their stolid obedience, on one point Pru and Sal stood firm; neither threats nor cajolery would get them near a town. Monkey tried the experiment several times more, always with the same result. As Truck neared each objective they would move slower and slower, keening and wailing in distress; and finally they would balk completely, or bolt like startled deer. Eventually, Monkey was forced to accept the obvious. What-ever was done must be done by his own efforts.
For several days more he lay frowning, puzzling at the problem. Finally a decision was reached, and he started work.
What he contemplated - a modification to the fabric of Truck itself - seemed at first like sacrilege. Eventually he overcame his qualms. Certain measurements, made for the most part secretly after dark, confirmed the practicability of his scheme. He worked carefully with his drawing-stick, scribing two broad circles on the side of Truck. When the work was
marked out, the auger came into play. With it he bored carefully through the planking on the circumference of one of the circles. When half a dozen holes had joined he was able to insert the tip of the little saw. The job was slow and tedious; more difficult, he imagined, than learning to read. His hands, unused to such exercise, grew blisters that cracked and spread; he bore the pain, keeping on stubbornly with his task. Finally he was successful. A circle of wood dropped clear; beyond, an inch or so away, revolved the battered, rusty rim of one of Truck’s wheels.
He stared awhile, fascinated by the unusual sight; then set to, puffing, on the other side. The second job was finished quicker than the first; the wood here was partly rotten, aiding the saw. The new holes let in a remarkable amount of draught and dampness; but Monkey was content. It was a small enough price to pay.
The next phase of the plan was more difficult still. Wheedling, coaxing, using all his skill, he persuaded Pru and Sal nearer and nearer to the town of his choice. He had selected it mainly for the flatness of the surrounding ground; that he deemed a vital factor in eventual success. The last stage of the approach was the most delicate of all. Pru and Sal were stamping and trembling; the slightest mismanagement could have sent them wheeling back the way they had come, and all the valuable ground gained would have been lost. When it was obvious they would go no farther Monkey allowed them to camp, in a spinney adjoining the road. He lay quietly but with thudding heart, waiting for night and the start of his greatest adventure.
The vigil seemed endless; but finally the light faded from the sky. Another hour and the moon rose, brightening the land again. Very cautiously, Monkey sat up. The springs and axles of Truck, well greased the day before, betrayed him by no creak. He inched forward, a fraction at a time. His height when fully erect was little more than a yard; but his arms were of unnatural length. Squatting in Truck, well forward of the hood, he could easily reach through the new holes he had made, grip the wheel rims with his great scabbed hands.
He pushed, tentatively. To his delight Truck moved a yard or more. Pru and Sal lay still, mouths stertorously open.
Another shove, and Truck had glided the whole distance from the little camp site to the road. Monkey, without a backward glance, set himself to steer his clumsy vehicle toward the distant town.
An hour later he was panting and running with sweat, while every muscle in his body seemed on fire. His hands were raw and bleeding from contact with the rusty rims; he had been obliged to stop, and bind his palms with rag. But progress had been made. Crawling to the spyhole - the rearward spyhole now, for Truck was technically moving in reverse - he saw the copse where Pru and Sal still lay as nothing more than a dim smudge on the horizon. Ahead, close now, lay the focus of his dreams.
By dawn, Truck was bowling merrily if jerkily along a smooth, paved road. To either side, dusty and grey, rose the remnants of buildings, their roofs and wall-tops bitten and nibbled away. Grass sprouted and bushes, here and there stunted, unhealthy-looking trees. The sight both appalled and fascinated Monkey. He thrust at the wheelrims, harder than before, staring round anxiously for signs of life; but a total hush lay over all the acres on acres of ruin. Apart from the trundling of Truck’s wheels, there was no sound; even the wind seemed stilled, and no birds sang.
The sunrise proved Monkey’s undoing. His eyes, weak at the best of times, were dazzled by the pouring light; he failed to observe and heed the steepening gradient ahead. Truck moved easily, without apparent effort, steadily increasing its pace. By the time understanding came it was too late. Monkey wailed despairingly, clutching at the wheelrims; but the flying iron tore the rags away, ploughed up the skin of his palms in thick white flakes. He shrieked, snatching his hands away; and instantly Truck was out of control. The rumbling of the wheels rose to a roar; Monkey, howling with pain and fright, felt himself banged and slewed before, with a heart-arresting jolt, Truck stopped dead. Monkey was propelled, catapult-fashion, in an arc. The blurred road rose to meet him; there was a crash, and the unexpected return of night.
He woke, blearily, a considerable time later. For a while, understanding was withheld; then realization came, and with it a blind terror. The sun beat down on the hot white road; behind him, seeming a great distance away, Truck was upended in a heap of rubble like a little foundered ship.
The panic got Monkey to his feet. He tottered, wildly, the first three steps of his life, stumbled and fell. He crawled the rest of the way, grazing his knees on the unfriendly surface of the road; but when at last he clutched the tall spokes of a wheel with his lacerated hands, some measure of sanity returned. A wave of giddiness came and passed. Monkey lay panting, staring round him at the awesome desolation.
From his low viewpoint little was visible but the bases of ruined walls. He raised his head, squinting. It seemed taller ruins reared in the distance. He thought he caught the glint of sunlight on high, bleached stone; but his head was spinning again, and with his streaming eyes, he could not be sure. He lay still, gathering strength; then, with a great effort, pulled himself to his feet.
Truck seemed to be undamaged, though the crash had mortally disarranged the lockers and their contents. Books and blankets sprawled everywhere inside, mixed and confused with the remnants of Larder. Monkey, scrabbling, managed to retrieve a few scraps of rag, and an unbroken bottle of water. He plumped back, gasping, in the shade. Unscrewing the cap of the bottle hurt his hands again; but the liquid, though lukewarm, restored his senses a little. The rag he bound, as tightly as he was able, round his palms. He rested an hour or more; then, painfully but with dogged determination, he drew himself to his hands and knees. He began to crawl slowly away from Truck, into the ruined town.
Some hours later, an observer stationed beside the broken road would have witnessed a curious sight. The night was black as pitch, neither moon nor stars visible; but despite the overcast the road was by no means dark. It was lit, in places quite brightly, by a wavering bluish glow that seemed to proceed from the ruined shells of buildings themselves. By its aid, a small wooden truck was jerking itself slowly along. Its method of propulsion was curious. From a hole at the rear of the vehicle protruded two long, smooth poles. Each in turn, to the accompaniment of grunts and labouring gasps, groped for the cracked surface, found a purchase and heaved. Truck, under the influence of this novel motivation, lurched and veered. Sometimes, as if its occupant were very, very tired, it rested for long periods motionless; but always the upward movement was resumed. In time, the slope eased; and there could have been heard, rising from the ungainly little vehicle, a cracked but triumphant refrain.
‘Silent the river, flowing for ever, Sing my brothers, yo heave ho ...’
Pru and Sal were waiting beneath the fringe of trees.
For a while, as Truck laboured toward them, they stood poised as if for flight. The hailing of Monkey, and his shouted exhortations, steadied them. His face, blackened and terribly peeling, loomed moon-like above a mound of tattered, browning paper; his arms terminated in dark red balls of rag; but it was Monkey, still indubitably and defiantly Monkey, who greeted them.
They ran to Truck with hard, gabbling cries, seized their long-accustomed handle and fled. Their feet galumphed, up hill and down dale, away from the sinister, shining town; and as they ran Monkey, his brain burning with strangest visions, regaled them with news of the world.