The Changes Trilogy (8 page)

“You are afraid that they will fall on you?” asked Uncle Chacha, rolling cat-footed beside her.

“No, it isn't that. But they feel like a … like a curse.”

“Probably that is why the village people have not come up to disturb us, then.”

“I expect so.”

In fact she could see a whole party of villagers in a field up to their right, almost half a mile away. They were loading a wagon with hay; the wagon was pulled by eight ponies. She pointed.

“They've quite enough fields to work on near the village,” she said, “without coming up our way.”

“It is curious that they are all working together,” said Uncle Chacha. “I would have expected them to be cultivating separate patches—that is more the English style. Perhaps somebody has organized them.”

He walked on the verge, keeping close in under the ragged hedge. He was wearing his dull green turban, for extra camouflage. They stopped about fifty yards from the first house, and he tucked himself in behind a bulge of hawthorn.

“If you are in trouble, run this way,” he said. “But I will not come to help you unless you scream or call.”

“All right,” said Nicky. “But I'm sure you needn't worry.”

She walked on. It had taken a lot of argument at the council before the Sikhs had agreed that the best way to make contact with the village was for her to go down alone and try to find somebody to talk to. Most of the women had thought it was dangerous, and the men had also felt that it was dishonorable to let a girl take the risk. But the old grandmother had been her ally in the argument, and together they'd won.

The first few houses were larger than cottages and looked empty. In front of one of them was a small paddock littered with striped pony jumps. The next houses were smaller and looked lived in, but there was no sign of life. She rounded the corner into the wider bit of road which is called the Borough, and there, under the inn sign of the Five Bells, three men sat on a bench with pewter mugs in their hands.

They looked up as soon as they heard her footfall.

“Good morning,” said Nicky.

The nearest man pushed a battered brown felt hat back over his short-cropped gray hair. His face was brown with sun, and his small gray eyes sharp and suspicious. But he spoke friendly enough.

“And good morning to you, miss,” he said. “Where're you from, then?”

“I'm staying on the farm up the hill,” said Nicky.

The group tensed. A lean-faced young man with a half-grown beard said, “Booker's Farm, that'd be?”

“I don't know its name,” said Nicky. “We just came there and stayed because one of my friends was going to have a baby.”

“How many o' you?” said the hat wearer.

“About forty.”

They looked at each other.

“That's them,” said a little old man in shirtsleeves. He spoke with an odd, crowing note.

The others nodded.

“I know what,” said the beard grower. “They kep' her prisoner and now she's run away and come to us.”

“No,” said Nicky. “They helped me get out of London, and so I stayed with them.”

“Bad place, London,” said the man in the hat.

“You aren't one on 'em, though?” crowed the man in shirtsleeves.

“No,” said Nicky. “They're called Sikhs.”

“Know what we call 'em?” said the man in the hat. “We call 'em the Devil's Children.”

“But they aren't like that at all,” said Nicky.

“Leastways they aren't like other folk,” said the man in the hat. “Not like good Christian folk. You grant me that.”

“They've been very good to me,” said Nicky.

“That's as may be,” said the man in shirtsleeves. “We don't want nothing to do with 'em. That's what the Master tells us, and he's right again, too.”

“Is there a smith in the village?” said Nicky.

“Neither there isn't,” said the man in the hat. “And if there was, he wouldn't care to work for the Devil's Children, would he now?”

The men seemed to become more hostile and suspicious every word they spoke.

“Oh,
we
don't need a smith,” she said. “But we thought
you
might. For making plows and mending spades and things like that. The Sikhs are very good smiths.”

She hoped that was true. The first furnace hadn't blown hot enough, and had had to be rebuilt. But the big double bellows had been fashioned from wood and canvas and proved to spout a steady blast of air; and though the first mound of charcoal opened had been poor stuff, and the second not much better, they were all delighted with the product of the new one which had been built on the site of the first.

The three villagers looked at each other, and the one in shirtsleeves rose to his feet.

“Perhaps I'd best go and fetch him, then,” he said.

“Right you are, Maxie,” said the man in the hat. Maxie scuttled away around the corner.

“And you'd best be up the hayfield, Dunc,” said the man in the hat, “afore he finds you sitting here swilling of a morning.”

The beard grower stood up too, but didn't leave.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I remember my granny telling me stories about the Queer Folk, and as often as not they was smiths and ironworkers. Under the hills they used to live then, she said.”

“That's a fact,” said the man in the hat. “I remember that too. Not as I actually thought on it for years and years, but maybe there's something in it. Maybe they went up to London after.”

“They'll bring you luck, if only you don't cross 'em,” said the beard grower eagerly.

“Best have nothing to do with them,” said the man in the hat.

“But good iron they made,” said the beard grower. “Never wore out, my granny told me.”

Yes, thought Nicky, it would be easy to believe the Sikhs were some sort of hobgoblins, if living with them day by day didn't keep reminding you that they were ordinary people—bones and veins and muscles and fat. Even she could only recall in shifting glimpses that other world, before all these changes happened, where you actually
knew
about Sikhs and foreigners without (perhaps) ever having met any. But these fancies were going to make barter difficult. On the other hand it meant that the villagers were less likely to come raiding up to the farm.…

She was still hesitating what to say next when the little man, Maxie, came back.

Beside him strode a giant. A man seven feet tall, red-faced and blue-eyed. He had no waist at all, but a broad leather belt held shirt and trousers together at the equator of his prodigious torso. Another strap hung across his shoulder and from it dangled a naked cutlass. His cheeks were so fat that separate pads of brick-red flesh bobbled below his eye sockets. Nicky noticed that the man in the hat had stood up when he appeared. The other man, the beard grower, was already standing, and it was at him that the giant stared.

“'Morning, Arthur,” said the man in the hat.

“What you doing down here, Dunc?” said the giant. “The rest of 'em's up at the hayfield. Them as don't work this summer won't eat this winter.”

“Right you are, Arthur,” said the beard grower. “My foot's been playing me up, but it's better now.”

He slipped away, and the blue gaze turned itself on Nicky.

“Who's this, then?” said the giant. His voice was a slow purr, like a well-fed tabby's.

“She says as she lives with the Devil's Children,” explained the man in the hat. “And she says as they've blacksmiths up there, willing to make and mend for us.”

“So Maxie told me,” said the giant. “You think we got nothing to do but break good tools, miss?”

“Oh no,” said Nicky. “But however careful you are, things do get broken, and it isn't going to be so easy to mend them now, or to buy new ones. And I expect there are things you haven't got, like plows which you can pull by hand or behind a horse. All the plows up at the farm are made for pulling behind those … you know … tractors.”

As she got the nasty word out the giant took a quick pace forward. She saw a pink thing wheeling toward her but before she had time to duck, his open palm, large as a dish, smacked into the side of her head and sent her sprawling. She hadn't even stopped her scraping slide across the dusty tarmac when her shoulders were seized and she was lifted into the air.

She opened her eyes and through the dizziness and tears she saw that the giant was holding her at arm's length, three feet above the ground, so that his face was directly opposite hers. He began to shake her to and fro. As he shook he spoke, in just the same purring voice.

“I'll have no talk
(shake)
like that
(shake)
in my village
(shake)
. Not one word of it
(shake)
. D'you hear
(shake)?
I'll have no talk
(shake)
like that
(shake)
in my village.”

“Easy, Arthur, easy!” The little man was hanging on to the giant's left elbow. His weight seemed to make no difference at all to the shaking.

“She's only a kid,” crowed the little man, as though he were speaking to the deaf.

The giant stopped shaking and put Nicky down.

“I'd treat my own kids a sight rougher if I heard 'em talking that kind of filth,” he purred.

“But what d'you make of what she was saying before?” said the man in the hat. “I got a spud-fork needs a good weld. And we'll be crying for hand plows come seed time.”

“Fetch her your fork then,” said the giant. “Let's see what sort of a job they do. And then maybe they can show us a plowshare. You, girl, they'll be wanting something out of us in exchange, won't they, or my name's not Arthur Barnard.”

The vast forefinger pointed suddenly at Nicky as though she'd been trying to cheat him.

“Milk and vegetables and vegetable seed for next year and meat,” she gabbled. “Not beef. They aren't allowed to eat beef in their religion.”

“Heathen,” purred the giant. “I'm not having them come among
my
streets, not with fifty plows. Fetch her your fork, Tom, and let's see what kind of a job they make of it.”

He turned on his heel and strolled away with four-foot paces. The man and the girl watched him until he was out of earshot.

“Sorry he hit you like that, miss, but it was your fault for talking nastiness.”

“Yes. Shall I call you Mr. Tom?”

“That'll do. Tom Pritchard's me full name.”

“But who is
he
?”

“Arthur Barnard. The Master we call him now. Time was Felpham was full of a different crowd of folk—men went up to London most days, children went away to school, women didn't have enough to do. So
they
ran the village. Then they left, all of a sudden, and only us kind of folk remained. Soon after that a band of ruffians come along, more than twenty of 'em, came here to break and steal and to gobble what food we had. They were that fierce and that rough that most of us were scared to stand up to 'em, but Arthur Barnard—cowman he used to be, up at Ironside's—he drove 'em out. Took that sword he wears out of the old admiral's cottage and drove 'em out. Pretty nigh on single-handed he did it. Since then what he says goes, like as you've seen. You come with me, miss, and we'll find that fork.”

He limped away to his council house up beyond the church. The fork had been broken just above where the handle joined the tines. One long strip of iron still ran up the front of the wood, but the wood itself was snapped and the strip of iron behind had rusted right through.

Uncle Chacha turned the tool over discontentedly in the shelter of the hedge and listened to Nicky's story.

“I don't know,” he said. “Perhaps Jagindar can mend it, but it doesn't look easy. This is not my trade; I am a checker in a warehouse, not a blacksmith. Does your head hurt where the man hit you?”

“I'm getting used to being hit,” said Nicky, fingering the bruised bone. “He wasn't quite so quick as you are, but his hand was much heavier.”

Uncle Chacha nodded, put the fork over his shoulder and started on the trudge up the lane. After a while he said, “This man sounds interesting. A smaller fighter can sometimes defeat a bigger one because he is quicker, but a man who is very big and quite quick will usually win.”

“If you were a checker in a warehouse,” said Nicky, “how do you know so much about fighting, and why are you so good at it?”

“I am very quick,” said Uncle Chacha, “because all my life I have played squash. I am quite good—I have played in the national championships, though I didn't get very far. I have also learned some judo, because I was not very popular at the warehouse when I first went there. The other men were racially intolerant, and I wished to be able to defend myself. A Sikh should know how to fight.”

“But swords and things,” said Nicky.

“Oh, we will have to see.”

They got the forge going properly two days later. Nicky stood in the doorway of the shed, where the stolid sun beat brilliant against the brick, and watched a pair of uncles pumping rhythmically at the bellows bar in the dusky interior. The pulses of air roared with a deep, hungry note as they drove through the glowing charcoal, turning it from dull red to orange and from orange to searing yellow. Uncle Jagindar stood in the orange cone of light from the furnace door, shading his eyes as he gazed against the glare. He was stripped to the waist and the weird light cast blue shadows between the ridges of his muscles. At last he grunted and nodded, and Mr. Gurchuran Singh picked up a pair of pincers and lifted a short bar of white-hot metal from the furnace. When it was firm on the anvil Uncle Jagindar smote steadily at it with a four-pound hammer. The brightness died out of it as though the blows were killing the light; the crash of each blow rang so sharp, and the next crash followed it so quickly, that Nicky's head began to ring with the racket and she put her hands to her ears. Kewal took her by the elbow and led her away.