‘ 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.