‘ Watch it,’ she instructed Rosalind, and then disappeared down the outside ladder.
Some twenty minutes later her head reappeared. She threw a couple of discs of hard bread over the sill and climbed in after them. She went to the pot, stirred it, and sniffed at the contents.
‘No trouble?’ I asked her.
‘Not about that,’ she said. ‘They found him. They think you did it. There was a search – of a sort – early this morning. It wasn’t as much of a search as it would have been with more men. But now they’ve got other things to worry about. The men who went to the fighting are coming back in twos and threes. What happened, do you know?’
I told of the ambush that had failed, and the resulting disappearance of resistance.
‘ How far have they come now?’ she wanted to know.
I inquired of Michael.
‘We’re just clear of forest for the first time, and into rough country,’ he told me.
I handed it on to Sophie. She nodded. ‘Three hours, or a bit less, perhaps, to the river-bank,’ she said.
She ladled the species of porridge out of the pot into bowls. It tasted better than it looked. The bread was less palatable. She broke a disc of it with a stone, and it had to be dipped in water before one could eat it. Petra grumbled that it was not proper food like we had at home. That reminded her of something. Without any warning she launched a question:
‘Michael, is my father there?’
It took him off guard. I caught his ‘yes’ forming before he could suppress it.
I looked at Petra, hoping the implications were lost on her. Mercifully, they were. Rosalind lowered her bowl and stared into it silently.
Suspicion insulated one curiously little against the shock of knowledge. I could recall my father’s voice, doctrinaire, relentless. I knew the expression his face would be wearing, as if I had seen him when he spoke.
‘A baby – a baby which . . . would grow to breed, and breeding, spread pollution until all around us there would be mutants and abominations. That has happened in places where the will and faith were weak, but here it shall never happen.’
And then my Aunt Harriet:
‘ I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world….’
Poor Aunt Harriet, with her prayers as futile as her hopes. . . .
A world in which a man could come upon such a hunt himself! What kind of a man?
Rosalind rested her hand on my arm. Sophie looked up. When she saw my face her expression changed.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Rosalind told her. Her eyes widened with horror. She looked from me to Petra, then slowly, bemusedly, back to me again. She opened her mouth to speak, but lowered her eyes, leaving the thought unsaid. I looked at Petra, too: then at Sophie, at the rags she wore, and the cave we were in. …
‘Purity . . .’ I said. ‘The will of the Lord. Honour thy father . . . Am I supposed to forgive him! Or to try to kill him?’
The answer startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.
‘Let him be,’ came the severe, clear pattern from the Sealand woman. ‘Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled – they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?
‘The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.
‘The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils. . . .’
Her patterns became less harsh and decisive. A kindlier shaping softened them, but, for all that, she seemed to be in a mood which required an oracular style of presentation, for she went on:
‘ There is comfort in a mother’s breast, but there has to be a weaning. The attainment of independence, the severing of ties, is, at best, a bleak process for both sides; but it is necessary, even though each may grudge it and hold it against the other. The cord has been cut at the other end already; it will only be a futile entanglement if you do not cut it at your end, too.
‘Whether harsh intolerance and bitter rectitude are the armour worn over fear and disappointment, or whether they are the festival-dress of the sadist, they cover an enemy of the life-force. The difference in kind can be bridged only by self-sacrifice : his self-sacrifice, for yours would bridge nothing. So, there is the severance. We have a new world to conquer: they have only a lost cause to lose.’
She ceased, leaving me somewhat bemused. Rosalind, too, looked as if she were still catching up on it. Petra seemed bored.
Sophie regarded us curiously. She said:
‘ You give an outsider an uncomfortable feeling. Is it something I could know?’
‘Well -‘ I began, and paused, wondering how to put it.
‘She said we’re not to bother about my father because he doesn’t understand – I think,’ observed Petra. It seemed a pretty fair summary.
‘She . . .?’ Sophie inquired.
I remembered that she knew nothing of the Sealand people.
‘Oh, a friend of Petra’s,’ I told her, vaguely.
Sophie was sitting close to the entrance, the rest of us farther back, out of sight from the ground. Presently she looked out and down.
‘ There are quite a lot of the men back now – most of them I should think. Some of them are collected round Gordon’s tent, most of the others are drifting that way. He must be back, too.’
She went on regarding the scene while she finished the contents of her bowl. Then she put it down beside her.
‘ I’ll see what I can find out,’ she said, and disappeared down the ladder.
She was gone fully an hour. I risked a quick look-out once or twice, and could see the spider-man in front of his tent. He seemed to be dividing his men up into parties and instructing them by drawing diagrams in the bare earth.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked Sophie as she returned. ‘What’s the plan?’
She hesitated, looking doubtful.
‘For goodness sake,’ I told her, ‘we want your people to win, don’t we? But we don’t want Michael to get hurt, if it can be helped.’
‘We’re going to ambush them this side of the river,’ she said.
‘Let them get across?’
‘There’s nowhere to make a stand on the other side,’ she explained.
I suggested to Michael that he should hang back at the riverside, or, if he could not do that, he might fall off during the crossing and get carried away downstream. He said he’d bear the proposal in mind, but try to think of a less uncomfortable means of delay.
A few minutes later a voice called Sophie’s name from below. She whispered:
‘ Keep back. It’s him,’ and sped across and down the ladder.
After that nothing happened for more than an hour, when the Sealand woman came through again:
‘ Reply to me, please. We need a sharper reading on you now. Just keep on sending numbers.’
Petra responded energetically, as if she had been feeling left out of things lately.
‘Enough,’ the Sealand woman told her. ‘Wait a moment.’ Presently she added: ‘ Better than we hoped. We can cut that estimate by an hour.’
Another half hour went by. I sneaked a few quick glimpses outside. The encampment looked all but deserted now. There was no one to be seen among the shacks but a few older women.
‘ In sight of the river,’ Michael reported.
Fifteen to twenty minutes passed. Then Michael again:
‘They’ve muffed it, the fools. We’ve spotted a couple of them moving on the top of the cliffs. Not that it makes a lot of difference, anyway – that cleft’s much too obvious a trap. Council of war now.’
The council was evidently brief. In less than ten minutes he was through again:
‘Plan. We retreat to cover immediately opposite the cleft. There, at a gap in the cover, we leave half a dozen men occasionally passing and repassing in view to give the impression of more, and light fires to suggest that we are held up. Rest of the force is splitting to make detours and two crossings, one upstream and one down. We then pincer-in behind the cleft. Better inform, if you can.’