Birchwood

22

IT WAS STILL EARLY when I reached the town. The sunlight was bluish, laden with soft dust. More like summer really than spring, except for that sensation of pins and needles in the air. The townsfolk were abed, but stirring, I could hear them. I was stared at by dogs, by sleepy cats with cloudy green poison in their eyes. I have always felt a friend to dumb creatures. A milk cart creaked down the narrow main street, the horse with its tail arched dropping a trail of steaming brown pats like hoofs come undone. The milkman wore trousers made from flourbags. He landed a spit between my feet. Admirable aim.

I sat on the steps below a fragment of an ancient rampart. The barracks with its barred windows faced me across the road. To my left was the priory, with broken tombstones, a tower and a green bronze bell. Monks were slaughtered there by Cromwell. Some hard thing struck me on the spine. It was the toe of a boot. He stood behind and above me on the steps with the sun at his back, his hands on his hips. He wore a dark-green frock-coat with black and gold frogging, tight white duck trousers, stout black boots and gaiters laced to the knee. On his square head a cocked hat sat, with a flowing ostrich plume in the band. A white wirebrush moustache bristled under his granite nose. The voice when he spoke was like a distant cannonade.

‘Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, stood there.’ He eyed me distastefully, pointing at the spot where I sat. ‘Strong-bow himself, that was, on them very steps! Now bugger off.’

A most extraordinary fellow. What had I done to merit his displeasure? And the outfit! Extraordinary. I retreated under that fierce blue stare and from a safe distance threw a stone at him. He shook his fist.

Whelp!

I wandered idly up through the town. A joybell chimed, its ponderous music dancing on the morning air. A band somewhere began to clear its brassy throats. Around me in the narrow crooked streets a concourse swelled. There were droves of children, boys in white shirts and sashes, and little girls very pretty in pale-blue dresses wearing flowers in their hair. Fat babies in the arms of their fat mothers hung out of upstairs windows. Shawled crones gathered in gaggles here and there, shuffling their black boots. The menfolk leaned on their blackthorn sticks, their ankles crossed, big hardfaced fellows with knobbly hands and battered tall hats. A priest with a red bullneck and cropped carroty hair, his cassock swinging, strode up and down barking orders, vigorously cuffing little boys. A dogfight broke out, fangs and fur everywhere, foam flying. The band with a discordant blast of music wheeled into view. Strongbow and a group of his peers marched smartly out of a sidestreet, their ostrich feathers dipping. It was the feast of Our Lady of the Harbour. There was to be a procession.

On the footpath near me I noticed a raffish pair, a rednosed portly old man in a tight black suit and an odd-looking hat perched on a head of grizzled curls, and a fat woman with lank black hair and a broad flat yellowish face. They watched the milling crowd with amiable though faintly derisive smiles. There was about them something curious, an air, I could not quite identify it, but certainly they were not of the town. And there were others too, I amused myself by picking them out from the crowd, a young man with a dark brow and hot black eyes, two strange pale girls, a spare stringy man with big ears, all of them ignoring each other yet all joined by an invisible bond. The most outlandish of the lot were the two blonde children, androgynous, identical, exquisite, who, with their arms linked and their heads together, stood sniggering at Strongbow and his men. They wore sandals and shorts and yellow tunics with tight gold collars. Their lips and cheeks were painted, their eyebrows drawn in black. When I looked again for the pair who had been beside me, they were gone. On a broken-down wooden gate near where they had stood a bright red poster was pinned.

PROSPERO'S MAGIC CIRCUS

by apointment to the

CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE

magicians actors

acrobats clowns

wild beasts

THRILLS!

SPILLS!

EXCITEMENT!

Admission 6d

CHILDREN 2d

for one week only ‘WE WERE AMUSED’

HRH

The Queen

The others too were gone, but they too had left posters behind them, pinned to doors, stuck on windows, wrapped around lampposts. This bright spoor I followed. It led me down to the harbour, along the quay, a merry chase, until at last, in a field outside the town, I spied their horsedrawn caravans parked beside a big red tent. The caravans were garish ramshackle affairs daubed with rainbows of peeling paint, with stovepipe chimneys and poky little windows and halfdoors at the front. Grasses and moss, even a primrose or two, sprouted between the warped boards of the barrel-shaped roofs. The horses, starved bony brutes, stood about the field with drooping heads, spancelled, apparently asleep. The tent was crooked, and sagged ominously. A woman unseen began to sing. That sad song, rising through the still spring morning, called to me. I entered the field. The old boy with the odd hat sat sprawled on the steps at the rear of one of the caravans with his hands clasped on his big belly and his rapt smiling face turned upward toward the open door, from whence the singing came. It stopped abruptly, and I stepped forward.

Tardon me, sir. Are you Mr Prospero?’

The old man started and peered at me over his shoulder. Behind him, in the gloom of the doorway, one of the pale girls, the singer, was sitting on a chair, silent now, pulling a daisy asunder with her long glittering nails.

‘Eh?’ the old man grunted. He had plump pink lips and small bright blue eyes, a hooked nose. I remember his boots, worn thin and wrinkled like black paper.

‘Are you-?’

‘I am not,’ he answered cheerfully. Tuck off now.’

The pale girl spoke briefly in a low voice. He looked up at her, frowned, and turned to me again.

‘Why, I believe you're right, my dear,’ he murmured. ‘Well well.’ He struggled up from his sprawling position, but did not rise, and leaned forward to scrutinise my face, my clothes, and craned his neck and peered at the pack on my back. ‘A travelling man, I perceive. Tell me, boy, what is your name?’

‘Gabriel, sir.’

‘Gabriel Sir?’

‘No sir, Godkin. Gabriel Godkin.’

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

‘Godkin, eh? Well now, that's a fine name to have, a fine old name. And tell me this now, Gabriel Godkin, who sent you here?’ I did not answer. ‘And you come from where?’ Again, no answer. My silence seemed to satisfy him. He sat and beamed at me with his plump hands resting on his knees. Behind him the girl stirred and sighed. Her face was wide at the eyes, white, curiously boneless. She was not pretty, I would not say pretty, but striking, certainly, with those eyes, the straw-coloured hair, that trancelike calm. The old boy chuckled softly and glanced up at her.

‘He wants to see Prospero, did you hear? Did you hear that?’ He turned to me once again, shaking his head, still beaming. ‘Nobody sees Prospero. Why, I don't recall that I ever saw him myself! How about that now. You don't say much, do you, Gabriel Godkin? Still, there are worse faults, worse faults.’ He slapped his knees and stood up, hoisted up his trousers, tugged at his tight waistcoat. In spite of his bulk and the untidiness it entailed he possessed a certain elegance. We shook hands solemnly.

‘I am Silas,’ he said. ‘Come along with me now.’

I followed him down the line of caravans to the largest of them, painted black, and there, with another smile, in silence, he led me up the steps. They were all in there, perched on stools, reclining on the narrow bunks, standing idly about, the youth with the hot eyes, the fat woman, golden children, all. There was a great silence, and a smell of boiled tea. At my back the pale girl entered quietly. She went and stood by her twin, who was her double except for Ker ravenblack hair. No one said a word, but they all smiled, a symphony of strange smiles around me. Silas rubbed his hands.

‘Well here we are,’ he said. ‘Allow me to present-this is Angel, and Mario there, young Justin and Juliette.’ The painted children bowed and tittered. ‘And the baba under the table, little Sophie. Come out and say howdedoo, baba. Shy, are you? This is Magnus, and Sybil here, and last, but ah! the very best, my darling girls, Ada, Ida.’ He laid a hand on my shoulder and took a deep breath. ‘Children, this is Gabriel Godkin.’

I was confused. The names all slipped away from the faces, into a jumble. The tall slender woman with flame-red hair and agate eyes, Sybil it was, turned her face from the window and looked at me briefly, coldly. Still no one spoke, but some smiled. I felt excitement and unease. It seemed to me that I was being made to undergo a test, or play in a game the rules of which I did not know. Silas put his hands in his pockets and chuckled again, and all at once I recognised the nature of the bond between them. Laughter! O wicked, mind you, and vicious perhaps, but laughter for all that. And now I laughed too, but, like theirs, my laughter made no sound, no sound at all.

23

SILAS TOOK ME next on a tour of his collapsible kingdom. Now strictly speaking it was not a circus at all, but a kind of travelling theatre. Here was no big top strung with a filigree of tightropes and gleaming trapeze bars, but a long rectangular tent with benches and a stage, the latter an awkward hinged affair which took a workparty of four an hour to dismantle. The canvas roof above us, cooking slowly in the sun, gave off a smell of sweat and glue. I felt obscurely betrayed. There were worse disappointments in store. Out behind the tent we found the wild beasts promised by the poster, a melancholy tubercular grey monkey in a birdcage, and a motheaten tiger lying motionless behind bamboo bars on a trailer. The monkey bared his yellow teeth and turned contemptuously away from us, displaying his skinned purplish backside. I peered into the tiger's glassy yellow eye and ventured to enquire if it was alive. Silas laughed.

‘Stuffed!’ he cried, greatly tickled. ‘Yet very lifelike, would you not say? Fearsome. Ha!’ He clasped his hands on the shelf of his big belly and beamed at me, not without fondness, amused by my chagrin. ‘It is real, you know, Gabriel. They find it quite convincing.’

They were the folk who paid to look upon these wonders. There was both mockery and reverence in the way he spoke the word. People believed the shoddy dreams he sold them! The fact filled him with awe.

‘You see, my boy, they pay to gape at our stuffed friend here, to make faces at Albert the monkey, to watch us capering about the stage, they pay, mark you, and their pennies work like magic wands, transforming all they buy.’

We sat down side by side on the shaft of the trailer. He took from his waistcoat pocket a short black pipe and stuck it between his teeth, folded his arms and gazed at the blue hills away behind the town. I watched him suspiciously, with the uneasy feeling that he was making fun of me. He was an odd old man. I liked him. The sun, still low, was in our faces, and now I saw a figure approach out of a mist of light, skimming down the path by the caravans, a tiny figure on a threewheeled cycle. At first I thought it must be Prospero, and I stared at Silas. He said nothing. The little man pulled up before us and put one sharp shoe to the ground. He had a big square head and enormous hands. His black eyebrows and his hair were as smooth as fur. He wore a neat grey suit tightly buttoned. A red scarf was knotted at his throat. He was less than four feet tall.

‘Well well,’ said Silas, by way of greeting. ‘There you are.’

The little man stepped down from his cycle, tugged the wrinkles out of his jacket deftly with finger and thumb, and gravely bowed.

‘Silas, my friend, how are you? And…?’

‘This is Gabriel.’

He shook my hand.

‘The name is Rainbird,’ he said loftily, as though presenting to me something of inestimable value. We made room for him on the shaft and he settled himself daintily between us, clasping his mighty hands in his lap. Silas looked at him over his pipe and asked,

‘Well, any news?’

Rainbird squirmed, feigning a delicious horror.

‘What a day, O! what a day. Would you believe it, I was knocked off my bike. Just look at my things.’ There were a few faint mudstains on his jacket and his shoes were damp. ‘A child it was, a little girl, no higher than that. I could have slapped her face, I really could. And what's so funny, may I ask?’ Silas was chuckling. He turned his laughter into a cough and waved his hands apologetically. Rainbird sniffed. ‘I see nothing funny, I'm sure.’

He turned his attention to me and looked me up and down with a calm appraising gaze, and, still with his odd eye upon me, said to Silas,

‘Not much doing in these parts. Tenant farms, mostly. A village or two. They say the gentry are trigger-happy. Go north is our best bet.’

Silas nodded, paying scant attention to this information. He said to me,

‘Rainbird is our scout.’

The little man glared at him.

‘O that's all,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Our scout. Nothing more.’

Silas grinned, still gazing away toward the hills.

‘Does a couple of tricks too, for the show.’

‘Tricks! Well!’ cried Rainbird. He ruminated darkly for a while, then shrugged and turned to me again. ‘Well Gabriel? Another hopeful, I suppose?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Running away from home, are you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Aha, I thought so.’

‘Sir, the girl, the one who knocked you off your bike…?’

Although Silas did not stir, or look at me, I fancied that his delicate almost pointed ears quivered. I was sorry at once that I had spoken, and cursed myself inwardly for my incontinence. Had I not vowed that I would proceed upon my quest in silence cunningly? Now here I was, blurting out my heart's secrets, with no going back. Rainbird was examining me with a new interest, waiting for me to finish my question. When he saw that I would not, he said,

‘She was some child, I don't know. Why?’

Silas took the pipe out of his mouth and peered into the bowl, poked at the dottle with the nail of his little finger, clamped the pipe between his teeth again, gave it a couple of experimental puffs and put a match to it. He was waiting for me to proceed, and a perfect blue smoke ring, hovering above his head, seemed somehow to betray, unsuspected by himself, the very shape of his interest. Rainbird glanced inquiringly from one of us to the other. I found to my surprise that I had begun to enjoy my position at the centre of attention.

‘Well, I'm searching for someone, you see,’ I said, and added, faintly, ‘a girl.’

Rainbird's mouth formed a little circle, and he said,

‘Oo, are you now, indeed?’

‘Yes. My sister.’ They looked at each other and nodded slowly, apparently much impressed. ‘My twin,’ I said, quite reckless now. ‘She was stolen-’

‘By fairies?’ Rainbird asked innocently.

‘No no. I never knew her, you see, I mean I don't remember her, but I'm sure…that is I…’

I stopped, and looked at them suspiciously. They were altogether too solemn. Silas put a florid red handkerchief to his nose and blew a trumpet blast. Rainbird's nostrils quivered peculiarly.

‘And her name?’ he asked.

‘I-I don't know.’

‘O? And what does she look like?’

Silas nudged him.

‘He doesn't know that either, I'll bet.’

They brooded for a moment, and Rainbird drew a deep breath and said gravely,

‘Why then you have plenty of scope, haven't you?’

Silas gave a great sneeze of laughter, and Rainbird hugged his knees, pleased as punch with his joke. Their merriment made the shaft tremble under us. I could not understand it. Granted, my story had sounded silly, but why did they find it so screamingly funny? Once again I felt, as I had felt in the caravan earlier, that I was the only one who was ignorant of the rules of their game.

‘Plenty of scope!’ Rainbird squeaked, beside himself, and slapped Silas on the back. The old man began to cough uproariously. After a while their hilarity subsided, and Rainbird happily swung his little legs. I said icily,

‘I have a picture of her, you know.’

Silas gave me a curious glance.

‘I'm sure you have,’ he murmured, and it was impossible to tell from his tone whether he believed me or was being sarcastic. Without another word I strode away from them, to the black caravan under the steps of which I had left my pack. The golden children, Justin and Juliette, leaned out over the halfdoor and watched me eagerly as I rummaged through my things and brought out the small framed photograph. I hurried back the way I had come, and met Rainbird and Silas strolling with the cycle between them. Silas took the picture from me, and glanced at it and handed it to Rainbird, who winked.

‘She's a dandy,’ he said, and sniggered.

Silas laid his hand on my head and smiled at me benignly.

‘Come along,’ he said, ‘come along, Sir Smile.’

24

THAT NIGHT, as the ramshackle dream of the Magic Circus unfolded, I sat with damp hands and dancing heart in the centre of the third bench from the front, from whence in a little while Silas would pluck me out into the glare and glitter of my new career. The packed audience vibrated, sweating with excitement, their faces lit by the flickering glow from the oil lamps on the stage, where Magnus of the big ears sat on a stool squeezing rollicking tunes out of a wheezy accordion. We did our best to sing along with him, but no one knew the words, and there rose from the benches a drone of moans and mumbles in the midst of which I feared my own stagefright was audible, a piercing hum. At last, with a last flourish on the squeezebox, Magnus withdrew, and to the accompaniment of a roll on an unseen bodhran Silas sauntered out of the wings with his arms hieratically lifted. He welcomed the patrons, he sketched the delights the evening held in store. His hat was as black as a raven's wing.

Exit Silas right, bowing low, and enter left Mario the juggler, his black eyebrows arched, who filled the stage with glittering wheels and flashing spokes of light. His splendid scowl never faltered though the whirling rings got tangled on his wrists and the indian clubs cracked together like skulls, and his hot eyes only burned more fiercely the more hopelessly his act went askew. Next came Rainl?ird in a wizard's cloak, and a pointed paper hat festooned with silver stars which provoked some hilarity among the young bucks at the back of the tent. He conjured billiard balls out of the air, transformed a cane into a silk scarf. A white mouse escaped from a hidden pocket in his cloak.

The pale twins, Ada and Ida, barefoot, swathed in veils, danced a solemn pavane to the accompaniment of a tune from Mario's tin whistle. The audience sat rapt, heedless of the incongruous bump of bare heels on the boards. The dance ended and the girls drooped sinuously into the wings, fluttering their pale fingers. A roar went up. The men whistled and stamped their feet, the women bravely smiled, but in a moment all were silent as Magnus tumbled head over heel across the stage and leapt to his feet before us, grinning. He wore huge checked trousers, sagging braces, outsize frock coat, false bald skull, a cherry nose.

‘I say I say I say…’

We had Mario again, in a new outfit, heaving Justin and Juliette about the stage in a display of acrobatics. They raised a storm of dust. Flamehaired Sybil, with Magnus and Mario disguised in hunting pink, played a scene from a popular melodrama. Eyes flashed, riding crops whistled.

‘Aubrey, that cad deserves a thrashing’

I had begun to think that my moment would never come, but at last the bodhran rolled again and Silas appeared in a dented top hat and white gloves, and a frock coat which still bore some dusty traces of its first appearance on the back of Magnus the clown. He was followed by Justin and Juliette carrying between them a mysterious something hidden under a black cloth. They set it down on a table in the centre of the stage. Silas doffed his hat, peeled off his gloves and laid them on the table. He adjusted the pin in his cravat. The audience shifted its backside restlessly.

‘Who knows,’ Silas cried, turning suddenly and glaring down upon us, ‘who knows the power of the will, ah, my friends, the strength and weakness of the mind?’

We pondered the question while he pulled on his gloves again, put on his hat. He advanced to the edge of the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said quietly, ‘I am the keeper of dark powers, bestowed upon me by the gipsies of Persia. The druids of old knew nothing of which I do not know, the secrets of the alchemists are my secrets. I am Silas, to whom the world's will is as a twig, to be snapped-like that!’

He clicked his fingers, and behind him the golden children whipped away the black cloth and revealed Albert the monkey sitting in his cage with his arms folded and his black lips drawn back. The audience gasped. Albert scratched his belly. Silas smiled faintly.

‘My assistant,’ he said, and opened the door of the cage. Albert peered up at him inquiringly, shrugged, and clambered out and perched on a corner of the table. Silas closed his eyes and put his hand upon the creature's bald head, stood motionless for a moment and suddenly cried out, staggered, regained his balance, and roared,

‘Now his power is mine, will strengthen mine, his very soul has entered me. Look at him, he is empty.’ Albert indeed seemed drained, crouched there gaping. ‘Only when I have finished here will I give him back his substance, only then-’

Only then Albert's wicked sense of humour got the better of him. He roused himself out of his torpor and sprang on Silas's back and knocked his hat off, jumped down and scampered around the stage, shrieking and chattering, with Justin and Juliette after him. There was pandemonium. The audience was beside itself with glee.

‘Hooray!’

‘A banana, give him a banana.’

‘Peg something at him.’

‘Aye, peg your man!’

‘Wait! He have him.’

‘Begob he have him right enough.’

Ahh…r

Justin lay on the boards and carefully drew out from under him the dazed monkey, and, clutching the brute between them, the children brought him before Silas.

‘Ah, wretched animal! Thought you could escape, did you? Thought you could break my power? Here, hold his head, hold him now.’ Again he clasped that grey skull in his fist, again he cried out. ‘Now! Now, take him away. Go!’

They thrust poor Albert into his cage and swept him off, and Silas turned to us again.

‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, I call on you for a volunteer.’ My cue! ‘Who will test his will against mine? Who among you will risk a journey into the unknown depths of his own soul?’ I leapt to my feet and waved my arms, speechless with excitement. Silas beamed at me. At the other side of the hall two or three strapping fellows stood up, grinning foolishly and scratching their heads. Silas adroitly ignored them, and they sat down again abruptly. ‘Come up, brave lad, come, this way. Look friends, a beardless youth. And your name?’

All was noise and light up here, another world. Silas prodded me and roared, so it seemed, into my face.

‘Name!’

‘Gab-’ I began, and was prodded again.

‘What's that? Speak up, boy, don't be afraid.’

‘Johann Livelb, sir,’ I said, but my voice did not work, and I had to repeat that outlandish alias which Silas had found for me god knows where.

‘Well well, a foreigner, eh? Tell me, Johann, would you say that you have a strong will, eh?’

‘I don't know, sir-I mean yes. Sir.’

‘Yes. Good. Stronger than a monkey's, would you say?’

‘Yes.’

Laughter.

‘Stronger than mine, would you say?’

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I could not remember the answer, and when I searched in my poor frantic conciousness for the other answers I realised that I could not remember them either. All those lines, so carefully rehearsed, gone! Silas saw that I was lost, and bared his teeth at me. Justin brought out a three-legged stool and I was thrust down upon it. Silas took out his watch, a gold repeater, and dangled it before me on its chain.

‘Attend me now, boy, put all your attention upon me, your very soul.’ He swung the watch slowly. ‘You begin to feel drowsy. Come, you cannot resist me. Ah, sleep comes…sleep…sleep…’ He pocketed the watch and glanced at the audience. ‘See,’ he whispered, ‘see, he sleeps, he is mine. Boy! Speak!’

He watched me apprehensively as I stood up with my eyes half-closed, my arms hanging limp by my sides. One phrase from all that was lost came back to me.

‘Master, I am your slave, do with me what you could.’

He winked at me, and turned with a triumphant smile to face the surge of applause.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, what shall I have him do, my slave?’ He crooked a finger at me and brought me to his side, and for my ears only hissed, ‘Would, not could, you clown.’ He was a hard master.

I was made to crow like a cock, crawl like a snake, swim on dry land, leap from the stool with my arms flapping. I sang a song. I danced. The audience roared. Never had I felt such freedom, I cannot explain. Silas snapped his fingers at last and I was sent back to my seat. A great sigh filled the tent. The cast came back on stage to take their bows. I had no regrets at not being in their midst, for there on the bench among the crowd I was a magic creature, a unicorn. Silas laid aside his hat and gloves.

‘Gentles, gentles, our revels now are ended…’

25

IT WAS STRANGE, that so easy deception of so many. I say deception, but that is not it, not exactly. They wished to be deceived, they conspired with us in our fantasies. Silas's act hardly varied all that week-except that Albert more or less behaved himself and I conquered my stagefright-yet those who returned night after night, and they formed more than half of every audience, gazed at his antics with happy enthusiasm as though for the first time. Indeed, toward the end, there appeared in some of those faces a smug proprietary look-they knew what was coming next. It was a game that we played, enchanters and enchanted, tossing a bright golden ball back and forth across the footlights, a game that meant nothing, was a wisp of smoke, and yet, and yet, on the tight steel cord of their carefiJ lives we struck a dark rapturous note that left their tidy town tingling behind us.

Tingling too were our players when the lights were doused, and the dreamers straggled home to their second sleep. We all crowded into the cramped dressing-room tent behind the stage, laughing, shouting, falling over each other, knocking over candles, our nerves aquiver, seized by a manic gaiety which sprang from we knew not where, bubbled up through our blood and pop! burst as the greasepaint fell like scales from our eyes. Then one by one, sober now, we crossed the dark field to the black caravan where Angel waited for us with potato soup and bread and huge pots of tea. Most of the night we spent there, conversing idly, while the solitary paraffin lamp burned down. The children dozed, the pale twins sang in soft reedy undertones, and Silas sat in his high rocking chair and smiled down on us all through wreaths of pipesmoke. That was the time I liked best, huddled with my arms around my knees in a dim corner of that smelly warm caravan, drowsy and at ease, the green scent of grass coming up through the floorboards, one trembling star hanging in a corner of the window, and the great night all around me, stretching away across fields and woods and shining marsh pools, all that darkness, that silence.

In those nights they spoke of old times, better times, told fabulous tales, dreamt up new dreams. They never mentioned Prospero. When I asked about him they fell silent, and examined their fingernails, and Magnus, his lugubrious lopsided grin hanging in the gloom, said softly,

‘That prosperous fellow!’

So Prospero became for me a mystery bound up with my quest. I liked to imagine him as a tiny withered old man with skin like wrinkled brown paper, sparrow hands, a big hat, a cloak, a crooked stick, pale piercing eyes, always before me, like a black spider, his bent back, the tapping stick, leading me ever on into a mysterious white landscape. I knew that picture was all wrong, but it sufficed. Like our audiences, I also wanted to dream. I knew too that my quest, mocked and laughed at, was fantasy, but I clung to it fiercely, unwilling to betray myself, for if I could not be a knight errant I would not be anything.

Sometimes I had the uncanny feeling that the circus had been expecting me. How else explain my calm reception, that eerie introduction, the silence and the silent laughter? This question I considered through many a long night, and went out in the morning determined to have an answer, only to be disappointed by their impenetrable diffidence. They were loath to speak of themselves, and it took me a long tedious time to assemble even the outlines of their stories. It is true that I was accepted at once into the life of the circus, but I never felt that I belonged completely in their midst, as though the covenant by which they were bound to care for me demanded nothing beyond essentials. Was the cruelty of the golden children a shade crueller when turned on me? Did Sybil's anger have a keener edge when I came under its cuts?

My first difficulty was to unravel the threads of their relationships. For instance I imagined from the start, when they first appeared beside me in the town, that Angel and Silas were husband and wife. I was wrong, I soon discovered that, but what I did not discover for a very long time, for weeks, was that Sybil was his mate. Sybil of the flaming hair, the icy green eyes, Sybil the austere! I was astonished, and at first repulsed. How could this proud patrician creature allow that old goat to share her bed, her secrets, to paw her gleaming limbs? Sybil, with her cold beauty, her impassioned rages, was a vibrant and untouchable mystery, whereas Silas was just old Tosspot, barrel-arsed, wheezy, a laughable codger. Later, when I recognised Sybil's true nature, a bitter brew of spite and pettiness, I had to wonder how Silas, not so simple after all, could tolerate her. The answer was that she was his odd notion of beauty made flesh, beauty which was an inexaustible source of both wonder and amusement. One day I found her in their caravan fighting with Angel, screaming, foaming at the mouth. It was no uncommon thing, for Angel took a sweet delight in baiting her. Silas sat by the table with his legs crossed, his thumbs in his waistcoat, beaming at them as if to say, look, look, is she not exquisite, my Sybil?-and such a fool!

The pleasure he derived from his wife was intellectual in the main, while his baser longings were directed elsewhere. Once, merrily drunk on poteen, he confided to Rainbird and me his dream, which was to dwell in idyllic concupiscence, his word, with not one but both of the twins, Ada and her dark sister Ida. ‘To have them, one on each side of me, in the buff, their tits in my ears, ah, what a thing that would be!’ The girls were utterly indifferent to his attentions, but their indifference, he insisted, only goaded him into wilder transports of desire. I could never take seriously this farcical longing, partly for the reason that Silas himself regarded it as a perplexing but funny foible of his old age, and partly because, ironically, he was teaching me in his subtle way to take nothing seriously, or perhaps a better word is solemnly.

The most astonishing discovery of all that I made was that Justin and Juliette, those spiteful sprites, were the product of that union between Silas and Sybil. Yes! I confess I found it impossible to believe at first, and, when he told me, I searched Magnus's face for the twitch that would betray the joke, but it was no joke. I looked at the children with new eyes. They were an uncanny, disturbing couple. In spite of their difference in gender, which was minimal anyway, they were doubles in body and spirit, a beautiful two-headed monster, wicked, destructive, unfailingly gay. Magnus merged them into a single entity which he called Justinette. He had the right idea. I was afraid of them.

Magnus was a born clown. He had a long wedge-shaped head topped with a flat mat of furry fair hair. His thin blue-veined nose, with a knob at the tip, was almost painful to look at in its austerity, and his pale moist eyes, peering out through concentric circles of tired brownish flesh, seemed permanently on the point of overflowing with a flood of tears. That long sinewy frame, the mournful grin, provoked immediately in an audience the kind of laughter on which jesters thrive, that uproarious hee-haw with a seed of misgiving lodged at its root. He kept us entertained through all our trials except one, perched on his stool with his hands on his bony knees, spinning his elegant tales.

Our last night in the town was wet and wild. Sabres of black rain swept across the sodden field, the wind keened in the guy ropes of the tent. The show was a washout, and the audience, what there was of it, demanded its money back. We huddled in the caravan around the glowing stove, coughing as the smoke came billowing back down the chimney. Even Angel's stewed tea, strong enough to trot a mouse on, as Silas observed, could not revive our spirits, and we sat wrapped in a cocoon of melancholy until Magnus took out his harmonica and played a jig, always the prelude to a yarn.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ he began, smacking the harmonica on his palm and considering the ceiling with a frown, ‘about the Exploding Coffin?’

We snuggled closer to the stove and wrapped our hands around our teamugs. For all the smoke and the draughts, there is nothing on a stormy night so cosy as a caravan. Magnus's droll voice cast a spell about us and drew us out of our dejection, and when I think of him now I realise that of all the creatures I have lost I miss most his valiant and fastidious spirit. Ah Magnus, my friend.

26

SILAS LOVED the pale twins, and they loved Mario, but Mario's only love was his left hand. He explained his passion to me the day we left the town behind. I rode beside him on the last caravan, which at night I shared with him. It was a gleaming morning, washed clean by the storm in the night. Mario wore his black britches and a loose white shirt. A yellow scarf was knotted tightly around his slender neck. He cut a romantic figure there, with his bandit's black eyes and his angry mouth. In his lap sat Sophie the baby, a solemn watchful child with curly hair.

‘I fuckada woman one time, right?’ he said, chopping the air with the edge of his hand. ‘One time, no more, then she'sa mine, see? You know what I mean? I got her in my head, alia them in here'-he tapped his forehead-'and when I wanta the real woman, who do everything, you know? I justa think about one and-ratta tat tat I See?’

He laughed. Mario's laugh was something to hear, a sharp humourless snicker like the sound of something chipping nicks out of glass. The baby looked up at him with her saucer eyes. He tickled her fondly. On one of his specimen-gathering expeditions he had, to his intense surprise, fathered Sophie on blonde Ada. Delight, yes. His daughter was the one thing which could strike through his congenital beastliness and touch a faint and otherwise concealed vein of tenderness in him. That such a bright warm toy could spring unbidden out of that joyless gallop, there was something to wonder at. Ada's feelings, on the other hand, were quite untouched. She carried her load for as brief a time as possible before she spat out the brat and thrust it on Mario, and forgot about it.

The twins were alike only in appearance. Spiritually they were as different as dark and light. Ada, for all her golden beauty, was one of Mario's kind, sullen, given to incoherent rages, dark laughter, careless cruelty, yet one who, with her wanton ways, displayed a certain vicious splendour. She was a voracious eater. While the rest of us made do with potatoes and bread in various ingenious combinations, she always managed to find meat or fruit, some delicacy, supplied mostly by Magnus, who had a way with snares and things, and who also, I suspect, nursed a secret longing for Ada's wild flesh. Lolling with that negligent grace on her bunk, she would tear in her small white teeth the roasted leg of a rabbit, or a salmon's tender pink flank, greedy, and at the same time indifferent. Her life she lived at the tips of her five senses, and yet if one were foolish enough to strike one's will against hers there came back immediately a startling clang, for there was steel at her centre.

Ida, now, ah, our gentle Ida. She came to us when we stopped at noon, bringing our food, and sat with Sophie on the grass at the side of the road while we ate. The girl and the baby watched us with the same intent gaze, as though they were witnessing the celebration of some outlandish rite. The spectacle of two fellows eating their dinner was as mysterious and baffling today as it was yesterday, and all the days before that, but whereas Sophie would, like the rest of us, cease to seek the meaning of human gestures once she had learned to perform them, Ida would never lose her childlike vision. The world for her was a perpetual source of wonder. She had never recognised the nature of habit, the ease which it brings, and therefore it was the continuing oddity of things that fascinated her. It was not innocence, but, on the contrary, a refusal to call ordinary the complex and exquisite ciphers among which her life so tenuously hovered.

A figure approached up the road we had travelled, a tall woman in a long dress carrying a big stick. She strode along at a fast clip, swinging her arms, a mighty creature. Mario, hunched over his plate, chewed slower and slower the nearer she drew, and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. There was indeed something exceeding strange about her. On she came, her swinging gait expressing, even at that distance, a pent-up driving irascibility. She drew level with the caravan, and flounced past, fixing us with a sullen glare. On her large head sat a frilly bonnet. Her big black boots made the stones fly. She marched past, halted, abruptly swung around, came back, and planted herself in front of us. I stared at the square blue jaw, the horny hands and thick wrists, the swollen muscles doing violence to the arms of the dress. It was a man.

‘I could do with some of that grub,’ he growled, and tossed the stick menacingly from one hand to the other. Mario, with his mouth full of bread, cast a cautious look up the road. Our caravan was parked on a bend, and the others were out of sight. He shrugged, and nodded to Ida, who rose and gathered together what was left of the food, two cold spuds and a lump of bread. The fellow in the dress dropped his stick and snatched the plate out of her hands and, folding his legs like a pair of scissors, plopped down in the middle of the road and began to stuff the food into his mouth, watching us the while from under his black brows. Sophie chortled, and pointed her little fat finger at him. His jaws stopped working and he scowled, and slowly began to chew again as Ida silenced the baba. He swallowed the last potato whole and threw the tin plate aside, heaved a sigh, and suddenly with an angry grunt snatched the bonnet off his head.

Tucking yoke,’ he muttered, glaring at it with great disgust.

Now, behind him, two new figures appeared on the road, one short and fat, the other tall and thin, comical fellows in blue, jogging toward us. Mario laughed.

‘Eh, signora, look whosa coming.’

Our guest peered wildly over his shoulder, swore, and leapt to his feet and pounded off around the bend at high speed. The two policemen arrived, panting and heaving. They stopped, whipped off their helmets, mopped their brows, hauled up their sagging belts. Sophie chuckled again, delighted with them. The fat one jammed his helmet back on his head and pointed a threatening finger at us.

‘Youse crowd,’ he announced, ‘are just looking to be lifted.’ The finger turned and pointed up the road. ‘That lad is after splitting open a man's skull. Just asking for it, youse are, and I'm the man to do it. You can tell them Sergeant Trouncer said so.’

The other one, a consumptive hulk with a sheep's long grey face, who had hovered by his superior's shoulder nodding vigorous support, now said,

‘That's right, tell them that.’

We said nothing. Our apathy in the face of their threats disconcerted him. He thought for a bit.

‘Just asking to be-’

‘Come on, Jem, for Jesus’ sake,’ Trouncer roared. They galloped away. Mario laughed again, and sprang nimbly up on the ditch to watch the chkse, and Ida leaned across to me with her eyes wide and her lip trembling and whispered, as though she had uncovered some enormous secret,

‘Gabriel, it was a…a man!

27

THE EXOTIC, once experienced, becomes commonplace, that is a great drawback of this world. One touches the gold and it turns to dross. It was not so with Prospero's band. I travelled with them for a year, borne onward always amid an always new and splendid oddness which sprang not merely from the excitement of new sights and sites, a new sea of faces every night, but was the essence of these fickle things joined with something more, a sense of strange and infinite possibilities: There was something always ahead of us, a nameless promise never reached and yet always within reaching distance. Perhaps because of this, the fixing of my gaze on a luminous and mythical horizon, I remember best not the circus proper, its halts and performances, but the travelling, the grate of wheels on stony roads, the thick scent of the horses, the voices floating back from the forward caravans, and the land, revolving in great slow circles around our slowly moving centre, the sad land, the lovely land.

Later in the day that we left the town, as we {leaded toward the distant mountains, evening sunlight broke through the clouds, and Mario, suddenly gay, began to sing. Shadows crept across the sparkling meadows. Rain fell briefly. O mi amove, mi amove. The road sailed down a hill toward tall sand dunes. The sun disappeared, the light around us turned a misty blue. A sulphurous glow rose and trembled above the dunes. The wind sang in the tall reeds, the unseen sea muttered. We struck away inland again, climbing now, and when I looked back I saw, in the fast-failing light, a boat with a black mast, bearing no sign of life, glide out in silence from behind a headland, a mysterious silent ship. Hill fog settled on the thorns. Night fell.

We went up into the foothills under a huge sky of stars. Black dark it was, moonless and still. Moths reeled in the glow of our lanterns. In a valley away to our left a cluster of lights bespoke a village, but the winding road we wearily followed refused to lead us there. The horses, heads bent, half asleep, traipsed on, locked in their stride. No one called a halt. A strange torpor descended on us. The air up here was thin. I sat beside Mario on the driving seat, swaying with the sway of the caravan, heedless and at peace. Vague music reached my ears. At first it seemed to come from everywhere at once, this tiny song, as though the little lights and vivid stars, the far small noises, as though the night itself were singing, but then ahead I saw at the side of the road the glow of lamplight on the undersides of leaves, and I identified the wail of pipes, the skirl of a bodhran, and Mario sprang awake and swore as the caravan ahead of us halted abruptly. A pub!

We gathered on the road. Silas stamped his feet and vigorously rubbed his backside, and the golden children yawned. Sybil, rocking Sophie in her arms, muttered under her breath. The pub was a low dingy place with a thatched roof. There was a brown opaque window dimly lit, a lantern hanging beside a crooked door, and a suggestion of turf smoke up in the darkness. Tall poplars glimmered. The wild music issued forth along with a gush of porter fumes through an open vent above the door. Silas entered, and the uproar inside ceased immediately. We shuffled in behind him, pushing and shoving sleepily. He stuck his hands into his pockets and considered the upturned faces of old men and boys, flushed youths, wild-eyed women. He grinned.

‘Good evening, friends.’

None replied, but at the back someone laughed, a glass chimed, and the piper, a cadaverous fellow with a shock of lank black hair hanging over one eye, struck up another tune, the bodhran joined in with its truculent booming, and the conversation started up again. We made our way to the bar. The publican was a tubby little man with a red nose and a long apron.

‘Grand evening.’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Silas. ‘I think, ah, a glass of porter all round, and a small one for myself, to oil the j oints. And you'll have one yourself?’

‘Ah no.’

‘Ah do.’

‘Well…’

‘Your health.’

‘Good luck to you, sir.’

That was my first taste of porter. Frightful stuff, I must admit, for I am no hard-drinking broth of a boy, but, taken there, that brew, black and bitter, harbinger of a wild mordant gaiety, seemed to me, and still seems, to carry the savour of the country itself, this odd little land. I stood with an elbow on the bar behind me and a heel hooked on the footrail, trying to make the glass look at home in my unpractised hand, and surveyed the room. The topers were dressed in their Sunday best. It must have been a holiday, or a holyday, perhaps some feast of the Queen of May. Much raucous laughter tumbled out of gap-toothed mouths, and the voices and the strange macaronic talk clashed in the smoky air like the sounds of battle. A fat woman with a red face was copiously weeping, rocking back and forth on a stool between two sheepish, speechless men. The cadaverous piper, hunched over his reeds, swung into a gay dance tune, but his long face registered only a deeper melancholy. There is in the happiest of that music a profound thread of grief, never broken, equivalent to but not springing from the sustained drone note, an implacable mournful-ness, and so, although the jig made the glasses sing, the fat woman wept and wept, rocking her sadness to sleep, and the two old men, with their hands on their knees and their jaws munching, sat and stared, with nothing to say.

Maybe I was already drunk, no telling what a sip of porter will do to you, but one minute Silas and the rest were standing beside me, the next they were scattered about the room, joining the party. Silas was engaged in what, from the angle of his chin, appeared to be a furtive conversation with a red-haired boy or small man whose face was hidden from me. Ida had borrowed the bodhran from its master, a boy with buck teeth who hovered awkwardly behind her, shuffling his feet, his face clenched in a grin of embarrassment. Mario, on the whistle, joined the piper in his song. Magnus and Sybil, with the sleeping and swaddled Sophie wedged between them, were huddled on a crowded bench in the corner where a decrepit little old man with no teeth and extraordinary knees was dancing, capering and prancing wildly, his boots banging the flagstones. Rainbird conjured cards out of the air to the delight and fright of two wide-eyed, pretty, painfully shy little girls. The golden children were, ominously, nowhere to be seen. Only Ada, in a sulk, stayed by me, slumped against the bar.

I began to play a game, idly at first and then with some excitement. I would close my eyes and then, every few seconds or so, blink rapidly. Not much of a game? Each time I blinked I carried back into the gloom an image of arrested movement, the old man frozen in mid-air, Silas with his arm uplifted, the fat woman with a finger stuck in her red eye, and it came to me with the clarity and beauty of a mathematical statement that all movement is composed of an infinity of minute stillnesses, not one of which is exactly the same as any other and yet not so different either. It was enormously pleasing, this discovery of fixity within continuity. I elbowed my way outside, and out there in the fragrant darkness and the silence, yes, it was the same, I mean the same principle of continually fluctuating stasis held good, but the shifts and stillnesses here were vast and difficult to distinguish, but I distinguished them. And I saw something else, namely that this was how I lived, glancing every now and then out of darkness and catching sly time in the act, but such glimpses were rare and brief and of hardly any consequence, for time, time would go on anyway, without my vigilance.

Soon my rhapsodising under the glimmering poplars was interrupted when the others came tumbling out of the pub. The children, I gathered, had been found doing something frightful in the jakes, and they and their keepers were ejected. Silas peered at me in the dark, swaying and belching.

‘Come along, Caligula, come along.’

Later, lying in my bunk in the caravan, with Mario near me emitting a kind of low hum as he sorted through his file of phantasmal ladies, I thought about the pub and the people, the piper, the weeping woman, the ancient dancer, and I felt stirring deep within me a strange and unexpected emotion which as yet I could not name, which soon settled back into hiding, and then in drowsiness my thoughts wandered afar over the dark fields and lakes, the rivers, the murmuring woods. On the point of sleep my mind made a last effort to stay awake, and my foot jerked, my teeth clenched themselves, and the essence of all I had seen that day, spring rain on the road, a black ship, curlews crying, the residue of all this spun on the last remaining tip of wakefulness like one of Mario's discs on its stick, and as I sank down into the dark I carried one word with me, that word which gives me so much trouble, which is, time.

28

AT THE END of the spring we stopped in a little seaside village in the south. It was a pleasant enough place, sharply divided between the whitewashed hovels of the natives at one end and, at the other, handsome holiday villas perched on promontories or retiring behind cypresses, not a few of them unshuttered and loud with children even in this early part of the year. We camped in a meadow behind the beach. The weather was glorious, days full of sun and glass, soft black nights with stars. At dawn, as the mist lifted, rabbits came out of the ground and scampered heedlessly under our wheels, into Magnus's traps. We feasted on stew and new potatoes, buttermilk and brown bread. The circus drew capacity audiences. It was a good time. We should have known, with all this, that our carefree days were numbered, that our happiness was ending. For we were happy, in our way.

There were eggs too, and jugs of thick milk, purchased from a farm nearby. There I went each morning, barefoot through the dewy drenched grass, swiping at butterflies with the milkcan. The farmhouse was a crooked affair, long and low, in need of new thatch, with tiny windows and a warped green door. Violets flourished in the filth of the yard, among the cowflop. The hall was suffused with furry yellow light, tranquil and still. I stood in the silence curling my toes on the cool tiles and waited for the daughter of the house. The doorway framed a patch of yard where brilliant sunlight shone on stylised chickens, a mongrel scratching its ear, two sparrows staring at a breadcrumb. It was odd to be inside a house again, to step across a solid floor and hear no axle creak, no horse stir. Mag came down the stairs at the end of the hall, her arms lifted, hands doing something to her hair at the back.

‘Uh,’ she said sleepily.

She went ahead of me across the yard tugging her brown sacklike smock into something close to her own shape underneath it. Mag was a squat heavy girl, all bone and muscle, a year or two older than I, with fuzzy red hair and a button nose and hands like cut steaks. It will seem extraordinary, but when I saw her the first time my heart skipped a beat, that hair, those odd blue eyes, although how I could picture her, even for a moment, in a white dress under a lilac tree I cannot say. Still, I was no great judge of female beauty, and I imagine that Mag appeared to me as pretty as any other. I was at that time an innocent lad to whom the dark damp side of life was still another country. I began my journey a virgin, and ended it still unsullied, but I am not ignorant of certain facts, and if here they create a somewhat twisted view of the basic acrobatic duet I insist that the warp is in the facts and not my recounting of them.

The hens lived in a wire run behind the cowshed. Mag knelt in the soiled straw and reached inside the little hut where the nests were. How odd the eggs seemed with their smooth self-sufficiency and perfect form among the crooked posts and torn wire, straw, shit, Mag's big red hands. She lifted them into the brown paper-bag with care, almost with reverence, while those ludicrous birds pranced around us, outraged and quivering. As the bag filled she reached deeper into the hut, and then paused and frowned and slowly withdrew her arm. She opened her fist between us, and there on her palm a tiny yellow chick waggled its stumpy wings and emitted a feeble cheep. We stared at the little creature, astonished that life could exist in that minuscule form, and suddenly Mag thrust it back into the hut and we fled, disturbed and obscurely embarrassed.

We went into the dairy, a long stone room with white walls and a whiter ceiling. The vacant milking stalls were whitewashed, the bare floor scrubbed. The light through the little windows was limpid and delicate. In here a silence reigned such as I have never experienced anywhere else, something like that frail nothingness which persists long after a churchbell has dropped its last chime into the pale upper airs of morning. Mag took the lid from the churn and ladled milk into my can, great dollops of it, filling the white room with a white fragrance. She seemed preoccupied and feverish. She splashed milk on her black laceless boots and gave a brief frantic squeal of laughter.

It seems incredible that we did not speak during all that followed, but I can remember no words, only glances and advances, sudden retreats like complex dance steps, and, perhaps in place of words, small modulations, readjustments in the silence between us. Mag offered me the can. I tried to take it. She would not let go. I stepped back. She put the can down on the floor. I cleared my throat. She made a determined advance, and I dived aside very neatly and fussed with the bag of eggs, placing it carefully on the floor beside the can so that nothing should break, terrible if an egg should break, smashed yolk on the stone, that yellow ooze! She reached a hand toward my trousers. I was terrified.

She lay down on her back in one of the milking stalls and I knelt before her, red-faced, with pains in my knees, grinning foolishly, with that lugubrious puce stalk, my faintly pulsating blunt sword of honour, sticking out of my trousers. Mag yanked her smock up over her enormous bubs and clawed at me, trying to pull me down on top of her. I stared at her shaggy black bush and would not, could not move. The situation was wholly farcical. She moaned beseechingly and lay down on her back again, turned up her eyes until only the whites were visible, and opened wide her mottled legs, and it was as though she had split open, had come asunder under my eyes. I knelt and goggled at the frightful wound, horrified, while my banner drooped its livid head and Mag groaned and writhed. My hand shook as I reached it forward between her gaping knees and, with my eyes closed, put my finger into her. She gasped and giggled, gasped again and thrashed her arms wildly. I opened my eyes and looked at my hand. Part of me had entered another world. The notion left me breathless. How soft and silky she was in there, how immaculate. She took my hand in hers and slowly pushed my finger out and in again, out and in, smiling to herself a strange and secret smile, and all at once I was filled with compassion. This was her mortal treasure which I touched, her sad secret, and I could only pity her, and myself also, poor frail forked creatures that we were. She sat up at last, and I leaned forward to kiss her, to plant my tenderness on her cheek. She reared away from me, gave a snort of contempt at my mawkishness, and rose and fled across the yard.

I stood in the doorway and wondered if she would return. She did not. Out in the field the caravans were ranged in a circle on the rolling green, tiny at that distance, toylike, gay. The wind blew. The smell of the sea mingled oddly here with the heavy fragrance of milk. Two of the eggs were smashed. I gathered up those that remained. The cream was rising already in the can. I went out into the yard. Violets and cowshit, my life has been ever thus.

29

I HAVE GIVEN the impression perhaps that wherever we stopped we were greeted with a rousing cheer of welcome, or at the very worst indifference. It was not always like that. Sometimes indifference turned into a sullen resentment which seemed to spring paradoxically from part envy, part moral disapproval. That phenomenon necessitated a rapid departure, so rapid indeed that our goings then looked like high farce. A fast getaway was imperative too when our audiences went to the other extreme and worked themselves into such a paroxysm of excitement that we were all, performers, props, stage, everything, in danger of being trampled by stampeding boots and horny bare feet. In Wexford once a full house displayed its appreciation so strenuously that it brought the house down, the tent collapsed, and in the melee that followed two tiny tots and an octogenarian were smothered. You could not have seen our heels for the dust.

Official disapproval was worse. Some rat-faced fellow would arrive with a writ just as the last patrons had paid their pennies and the performance was about to begin, and then, feeling foolish in our makeup and our costumes, we would shuffle our feet outside the tent while Silas in the middle of the field vainly argued our case, acting out in dumb show before the queen's man our mute bafflement and resentment. I think it was better, I mean less dispiriting, when they swept aside the formalities and sent against us a squad of soldiers tramping behind a mounted officer, who placed an elegant hand on his knee and, leaning discreetly down, quietly ordered us to move. There was no arguing with those gleaming bared bayonets. I am thinking now of the last time they put the skids under us, the last time before the country became engrossed with disaster and no one bothered about us anymore.

It was a bright day in early summer, I remember it. We were campfed on a hill above a little town with a bridge and a glittering river, narrow streets, a steeple. The first performance the night before had been well received, and we rose in the morning with that calm elation which always followed a successful premiere. Magnus caught a couple of rabbits, and I was sent with them to Angel. I found her in the big caravan, standing by the table with her sleeves rolled up, slicing a lump of turnip. Silas was there too, collar and braces undone, bearded in lather, shaving himself before a bit of cracked mirror. He lifted the razor in a greeting.

‘Gabriel, my boy, good morrow.’

Angel took the still warm furry dead brutes and slit their bellies. The vivid entrails spilled across the table, magenta and purple polyps, tender pink cords, bright knots of blood, giving off a nutty brown odour. She hacked off the paws, chopping through bone, lopped off the head, peeled the skin. Into the big black pot it went, that painfully nude flesh, the turnip too, sliced carrots, parsnip, thyme and other aromatic things. Silas, beating the strop with the razor, lifted his head and sniffed, the wings of his red nose fluttering delicately.

‘Ah,’ he sighed fervently, ‘ahh, grub.’

Angel said nothing. Her hair was tied back in a greasy pigtail. An odd woman, our Angel. She rarely spoke, rarely even looked directly at anyone, but seemed always preoccupied by some abiding and malicious joke. If she did look at one it was with a brief but intense and probing stare, one eyebrow lifted, lips compressed. When she spoke, her words were scarred by elisions, run together into one sound like a bark, the tone jangling with derision and black amusement. Sometimes she would laugh without apparent cause, a rumbling hiccupping noise like that of something soft and heavy rolling about in a barrel. In spite of her seeming intangibility she presided over all the doings of the circus with a mysterious strength, her massive trunk, with that flat yellowish face set on the front of it, planted among us like an implacable and ribald totem. I found her unsettling and kept out of her way when I could, for she seemed to me to personify, more than any of the others, the capriciousness, mockery and faint menace on which the circus was founded. She wiped her bloodied hands on a rag.

‘Food, food,’ said Silas, towelling his face with such vigour that it gleamed. ‘Dear me, how I miss the splendours of my better days!’ He came and sat down by the table with a comically mournful look. ‘I remember a feast which my good friend Trimalchio once laid on for me. Such delicacies! Listen. Around the fountain, with the soothing sound of water in our ears, we ate olives, dormice smothered in honey and poppyseed, dishes of fragrant little sausages. Inside, where a hundred perfumed candles burned, we reclined on silken couches set so that we could look down over the twilit city, the hills. There we had goblets of seared wine with orioles baked in pastry. Next, the gleaming Nubians carried to us trays of capon and sowbelly, a hare with wings like a tiny Pegasus. The gravy boats…well well, forget the gravy boats. Then came a huge wild sow, a daunting brute, whose flank, split open, released a cloud of live thrushes. This pig was not to eat, only for show, for next there came a gargantuan hog which had for guts great rings of sausages and spiced blood puddings. There were fresh fruits and sweetmeats, eggs, pastry thrushes filled with raisins and nuts and sugar. There were quinces and pears and blushing peaches. At last came a platter of roast pork, pork roasted and boned and shaped into the form of fish and birds that swam in a gravy pond on which, ah my friends!, a goose fashioned from pork swam proudly. Great Jove, what a feed. And now? To what am I reduced?’ He puckered his mouth in distaste. ‘Rabbit stew F

Angel paid no attention to him. She counted off on her fingers silently the ingredients in the pot, paused a moment, pondering, and suddenly gave one of her frightful guffaws.

‘No spuds,’ she said, greatly tickled. ‘No spuds!’

Feet beat on the steps of the caravan and the twins tumbled in, struggling and giggling, fighting each other through the narrow doorway.

‘Theserverishere, theserverishere,’ they chanted, ‘theserveris-herewiththepaper!’

Silas jumped up and swiped at them with the towel. They fled amid screams of laughter.

‘Young ruffians,’ he said, shaking his head, and then stopped and stared with slowly dawning horror at his reflection in the cracked mirror. ‘What did they…? The server!’

He whirled about and kicked shut the lower half of the door. The process-server, hopping up the steps, was rapped smartly on the knees. He was a weedy fellow in a green jacket, black britches and a preposterous battered high hat. His long thin nose was raw and red, his pale eyes were moist. He brandished the writ at Silas, who stood inside the halfdoor with his hands clasped behind his back.

‘Are you-?’ the server began.

‘I am not,’ Silas said, and grinned.

Tm serving this writ on you in the name of-’

‘You are not.’

Now it was the server's turn to be amused. His pinched face twitched with a sly little smirk.

‘O I see,’ said he. ‘It's like that, is it? Well let me tell you, we've had your kind before. Would you rather have the squaddies? They're clumsy lads, they are. Things get broke when they arrive. Heads and things.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘I am, aye.’

‘Uncouth fellow!’ Silas roared, and slammed the top half of the door. There was a cry of pain outside, and the sound of feet clattering down the steps. Silas waited a moment, took a deep breath, hitched up his braces and flung open the door again. The server with streaming eyes stood below the steps gingerly fingering his bleeding nose. Silas charged at him, but veered abruptly and scampered away around the side of the caravan. The server stumbled after him with one hand clamped on his hat, the other feebly waving the writ. I poked my head out the door in time to see Silas come pounding around from the left. The server doubled back, they met, and Silas skidded to a halt with a scream of mock terror. Soon they were running in circles around the field, the server wiping his eyes as he ran, Silas puffing and laughing and flapping his arms. The twins, over by the tent, danced up and down and cheered gleefully. Others came out to watch, Magnus and Sybil, Ida wringing her hands, Mario scowling. Silas and his pursuer, exhausted, abandoned the race at last. Silas jammed his hands into his pockets.

‘I don't want it,’ he cried. ‘I don't want that thing.’

‘It's not a question of wanting!’

‘Listen, my man-’

‘Will you take it!’

‘But please-’

‘Right! This is one for Captain Tuzo to settle. We'll see how you get on with him and his men. I'll have the lot of you threw out of here before the day is done.’

‘Listen, my dear Malvolio, be reasonable-’

‘O that'll be all right now,’ said the server, with an assumed calmness, lifting a hand to straighten his hat. ‘That'll be all right.’ He stuffed the writ into his pocket, put a finger to the side of his swollen nose and deposited at Silas's feet a gout of blood and snot. ‘Now!’ he said, and left.

He was as good as his word, for within the hour Rainbird, who had been sent to scout, came back pedalling furiously with the news that the troops were on their way. We hauled down the tent, hitched up the horses, fled. Angel's stew was overturned and lost in the confusion. The army, at a distance, saw us go, lost interest in us and turned back to the town. Out on the roads the air was vile with a smell of rot, and in the ruined fields people stood motionless in groups, baffled and silent. The potato crop had failed.

30

I WAS NOW midway upon my journey, stumbling in darkness, and the day came when I could no longer ignore the fact that the darkness was of my own making. Accordingly, I began to consider seriously my past and my future. It was the present I should have thought about, but the present is unthinkable. It did colour my thoughts, however, with of all things a certain insouciance. The imminence of disaster brings not piety and a concern for last things, it brings frivolity and laughter. I think that we shall all be drunk and gay, dancing a jig in the nude, when the apocalypse arrives to annihilate us at last. Famine hung above us like black smoke, and under that black cloud I wondered, with incredible levity, if it might not be better for me to cast aside the notion of a quest.

The story of my sister, the stolen child, had been laughed at. That laughter woke me from a dream. No, not a dream precisely, but a waking, necessary fantasy. Necessary, yes. If I had not a solid reason to be here, travelling the roads with this preposterous band, then my world threatened to collapse, for I still believed then that life was at least reasonable. The future must have a locus! If not, what was the point? It was a cold bleak sea in which to be adrift. Still, for all the dangers it entailed, I admitted at last that the search for this doubtful sister could no longer sustain me. Well then, if she did not exist-and I could not admit that much- how explain the hints and discrepancies in my past, the tiny corners of enormous secrets revealed, and that one bold forthright message delivered to me the night before I left? I went over these fragments again and agaiq, and always there was distilled out of all my considerations one thrilling and inexplicable name- Prospero. Only the name emerged, no reasons, explanations, revelations, except for a barely substantial sense of a connection somewhere between a red-haired boy and a story told of the shadowy master of revels himself. I wearied my brain with wondering and then stumbled in a kind of trance to see Rainbird, but when I saw him I had nothing to say, for it was not Rainbird himself I had sought but something for which he was a paltry symbol. I turned away, angry and frustrated, and the dwarf smirked and said,

‘Find her yet?’

If she did exist, this sister whom I called Rose, I did not know why, what chance had I of finding her? The world is full of people, and how many of them know from where they come? A crack opens, a creature falls in, the crack closes. We were half a day's journey out of the town when Mario beside me suddenly cried,

‘Sophie! Where is she? You seen her, eh?’

I had not seen her. He leaped down and ran ahead to the forward caravans. Soon he returned, pale and frantic.

‘She'sa gone! My baba! We lost her.’

There was a touch of astonishment mixed with his grief. He trotted beside me for a while, wringing his hands and muttering, then he fell behind and stopped and looked helplessly this way and that, turned and sped off down the road we had travelled. We halted and called after him, but he would not hear. He did not return that night. The choice was clear before us, we must either return and face the soldiers or move on and leave him and the baby to their fate. Silas paced up and down in the black caravan after supper while the rest of us sat in silence watclung him. He avoided our eyes for as long as he could and at last turned to us and threw out his arms.

‘What can we do?’ he wailed. ‘We can't go back!’ He lumbered to his knees before Ada and took her hands in his. ‘What shall we do, my dear? It's your child, you…’ He searched desperately for a description of Mario. ‘Your friend,’ he said faintly.

Ada shrugged.

‘We can't go back.’ She glanced at the rest of us. ‘Can we?’

No, there was no going back. We used the soldiers as a name for our fear, but it was the murrain stalking our heels that drove us on. We travelled high into the mountains, thinking surely, up there, away from the towns, there would be no shortage of food. We were wrong. At first the full significance of the potato failure did not strike us. There would be a famine, that much we knew, and a few people might starve, but not us. The spud had never been our staple diet, and was there not a spectrum of other vegetables, of meat and bread, of milk, eggs? There was not, after a little while. As news of the blight spread, only marginally swifter than the blight itself, the fields were stripped, and what was left, the great meadows of corn, the cattle, these were reserved for export to another land, and trade would not be disrupted or even interrupted because of a mere famine. The first deaths were reported as the grainships sailed.

Up in the mountains we did not starve, but hunger was a constant baleful companion, as yet only a vague gnawing in the pits of our stomachs, but what horrors it promised! O I do not say that we were desperate up there. Like the rest of the country, things would have to get much worse before we would admit our plight. There was still the occasional rabbit, a loaf of bread. We developed a taste for nettle soup. It was summer, after all, glorious weather. Angel made sloe wine, and one night we got wildly drunk, every one, even the children, but in the morning with the hangovers the lethargy came back, that strange abiding paralysis which had attacked the spirit of the circus. In every village where we stopped Silas looked at the tumbledown hovels, the shuttered pubs, the drawn grey faces and remote eyes staring blankly, and shook his head, saying no, this was no place for our talents. At last we even stopped travelling. There seemed no point to it anymore. The summer sunshine took on a muddy cast, became somehow dimmed, as though our eyes were filled with water.

But what a spot it was where we chose to stop, a little green cleft between two hills with a stream and an oak tree and a view down a long verdant valley where the shadows of clouds swam down the mountain slopes all day, and larks at noon set the sky quivering with their music. It was here, one morning in July, that Mario caught up with us. I watched him make his way across the valley, plodding slowly along on a stick with his head bent. He lopked like an old man. His clothes were in tatters. The soldiers had beaten him. His eyes were strange. He sat wrapped in silence among us for a long time and then stirred and sighed.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Gone.’

One of his hands lay before him on the table like a dead white animal.

31

MY WANING FAITH in the existence of my sister was revived briefly and unexpectedly by Sybil. Now for Sybil there were only two kinds of people, those who came under Silas's sphere of influence, and those other altogether splendid creatures who came under hers. I do not know on what evidence she decided who was whose, but in her eyes the distinction was very clear, and those who could not be considered by any stretch of the imagination to belong to either camp she ignored so totally that they might have been transparent. Angel, being neutral, she would not see, but toward Mario, one of Silas's men, she bore an enmity so unrelenting, even after the loss of his daughter had broken him, that one was forced to admire it. Of course, when I say Silas's influence I mean that he was merely a handy yardstick by which she measured the depraved and raucous, vulgar side of life, that life lived in the nasty world of the people which horrified her so, and which, she firmly believed, touched at no point her private planet of rose petals. She saw herself as a delicate bloom struggling for survival on a dung heap, and the shrewishness, the foul temper, the coldness, these she regarded as but the traits of an aristocratic nature. Such was Sybil. Well well, blind pride is no crime, whatever they may say, and I think I must have loved her a little in my odd way if this feeling now, in deceptive September, can be trusted. She looked on me as Silas's pet prodigy and treated me accordingly, which is why I was surprised and frightened when she showed me what for her can only be called tenderness.

It rained all that day, drops like fat pearls fell out of a bright sky and turned our spot into a spongy green quagmire. Birds sat in silence despondently in the bushes shaking the wet out of their plumage, and the rocks dripped and streamed. It was one of those days when time seems to have paused out of a lack of interest. I was passing by Silas's caravan when I heard my name called softly through the open doorway. Inside, when I could see through the gloom, I found Sybil alone on a bench under the little window sitting with her legs crossed, one foot idly swinging, the fingers of her right hand resting against her cheek. She wore a long black skirt, a white blouse and narrow patent leather boots. I realised anew what an exquisite creature she was, with that vivid red hair, the sculptured face, pale slender hands, but now I saw also how much she had changed in the last weeks. Something had happened to her face, a minute but devastating change. Her left eye seemed to droop a fraction lower than the right, and this imbalance gave to what had been her cool measured gaze a querulous, faintly crazed cast. Her cheeks too had sunk, and their former bloom had now become a silvery sheen. Her fits of fury were more frequent, less comprehensible. She lacerated Silas for no reason that could be discerned other than his existence. Her rages fell asunder in the middle, the words dried up and she was left trembling, leaning out to one side, hiccupping speechlessly, her hands clenched and a red stain spreading slowly across her forehead. Then she would stumble away with her head bent, hands over her face, and, after an awkward silence, someone, usually Magnus, would rise and follow her with heavy tread while the rest of us sat and waited with bated breath for the first long piercing wail. Now she lifted her face to the pearly light in the window and gazed out across the valley.

‘Is it true you're searching for your sister? They say you are. That's very…romantic’

She spoke quietly and gravely. I could think of nothing to say, and I suppose, being young, I squirmed, pursed my lips, sighed. She looked at me with her crooked icy blue eyes.

‘What is her name?’

‘Rose. I-I think.’

‘Rose. Ah. And you know what she looks like? You have a picture?’

‘Yes.’

She smiled. I would have preferred her cold stare. Her foot swung faster. She twined a lock of hair around her fingers.

‘I might be able to help you,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to help you, Gabriel? There are a lot of things here that you don't know about. Silas tells me things. He has a plan, you know. Soon, soon we'll be leaving here, and then I could help you, if you…’ She paused and frowned, as though searching for something that I might have to offer. ‘If you were to become my… friend. That's all I have ever asked of anyone, that they be friends with me. They say I'm a bitch, O yes they do, Gabriel, they say that, but it's not true, not true at all. I am only…unhappy.’

The voice caressed me, it was almost a physical sensation, the warm words touching my eyelids, my hot cheeks. If I gave her any answer it must have been a tiny whine. She offered me her hand but I would not take it.

‘Gabriel? Don't you like me either?’ Her eyes narrowed, and although she did not seem to move her lips I could see now the glint of her sharp white teeth. The hand she offered began to tremble, and the fingers danced like pale snakes. ‘Why don't you like me. Gabriel!’ She stood up, and a handkerchief fell from her sleeve and fluttered to the floor. ‘Little beast,’ she snarled. ‘You're like the rest, you hate me. Well we'll see, my man, we'll see who needs who, yes, yes. I could save you but I won't, not after this. I'll laugh, yes I'll laugh, when they string you up and gut you. Now get out!

I turned to go, relieved and terrified all at once, but before I could take a step she swept past me through the door and plunged down the steps into the rain. I picked up her handkerchief, gingerly, gingerly, and put it on the bench. There was a flurry behind me and she was back again, staring at me wildly. Her hair was laced with shining raindrops. She fell to her knees and threw her arms around my hips, and with her head against my stomach she wept, such bitter tears, such black sorrow.

‘I'm so unhappy,’ she sobbed, ‘so unhappy!’

I wanted to laugh, although there was nothing funny, nothing at all, and now I am surprised to find that I still want to laugh, thinking of that scene, and still I can see nothing in it that merits laughter. Strange. What brought forth that grief? I hesitate, I am unwilling, I hardly dare to voice the notion which, if it did not come to me then comes to me now, the insane notion that perhaps it was on her, on Sybil, our bright bitch, that the sorrow of the country, of those baffled people in the rotting fields, of the stricken eyes staring out of hovels, was visited against her will and even without her knowledge so that tears might be shed, and the inexpressible expressed. Does that seem a ridiculous suggestion? But I do not suggest, I only wonder.

32

THAT SUMMER ENDED. We were relieved, I think. September suited better our sombre mood. Every autumn seems like the last. Not that the weather turned. The sun still shone, mocking us with its gaiety, and the little stream still chattered, but on the hills the trees were dusted with copper, autumn gold was in the air, and a smell of smoke at evening. But all that time, gone! Our lethargy frightened us. There were other, worse things. Terrible rumours were brought back from the lowland with each week's dwindling stock of provisions. The people had no food down there, they were eating grass, the bark of trees, dried leaves. Children were seen gobbling fistfuls of clay. Bands of savage-fanged hermaphrodites stalked the countryside at night killing and looting. Some said they ate their victims. These preposterous stories made us laugh yet filled us with a quiet terror which we could not admit to ourselves or to each other. The admission would have made it worse, and so we played with exaggeration as a means of keeping reality at bay. It did not work. Reality was hunger, and there was no gainsaying that.

We did find a way to neutralise the truth if not quite banish it, and that was by inventing taller stories than the tallest the lowland could produce. One day, however, the trick backfired in our faces when Silas told us of the ingenious and economical method which he swore they used to bury their dead down there. So many were dying, all of them penniless, that a full-scale funeral with all the trimmings was impossible for each of them, until someone invented the false coffin. This was a splendid affair, craftsman-built from the best wood, with brass handles and gleaming bolts, paid for out of a general fund.

‘Expensive, that's true,’ said Silas, ‘but here's the beauty of it, listen. A large town would need no more than two of them, say three at the most. Why? Well, the stiff is popped in, see, bolted down, out to the graveyard, hold the contraption over the hole, the druid says the prayers, then someone presses a switch and plop! down goes your man, fill up the grave, shut the trapdoor and you're ready for the next cadaver! How about that now for a notion?’

We laughed into our fists and stamped our feet, held our sides, the story was so droll, so ludicrous. An hour later Mario and Magnus returned from a vain search for food down below, and when they told us of a funeral they had witnessed, Silas's story was no longer fantasy, although the coffin they had seen had been no splendid casket but a plain wood box with an ill-fitting panel underneath which was wrenched out to release the body. Magnus remembered the dull thump inside the grave.

Now we ate only what the countryside could give us, wild berries, crab apples stewed, an occasional rabbit or a hare, some roots even. Once we ate a fox which Magnus had inadvertently trapped. Such a beautiful creature, we wept as we ate, for the fox and for ourselves, but beauty had no place in that world, the times were such that there was nothing to do with beauty but destroy it. Ah Ida, my gentle Ida. I went with her one afternoon to gather blackberries. It was a perfect autumn day, full of light and woody smells, glittering and crisp. We wandered far away from the camp, across the hill and down into another valley where the bushes were heavy with fruit. Ida sang as we picked. We ate our fill of the tender berries. They tasted of summer and sunshine. Disaster waits for moments like this, biding its time.

‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘have you really got a sister?’

‘Yes I have. Of course I have.’

She watched me with that odd awed gaze of hers, dropping her pickings absentmindedly into the grass beside the can.

‘But how will you find her?’ she cried very softly, and leaned toward me, full of concern. I shrugged, and looked away across the mountains with a frown. When I turned to her again there were tears in her eyes.

‘Poor Mario,’ she said.

She wandered away then across the meadow, and I lay down in the warm grass behind the bushes. I was half asleep when I heard them, and scrambled to my knees and peered out over the briars. On the far side of the valley three Soldiers were making their way laboriously down the hillside. Great hulking fellows they were, drunk I think, staggering and stumbling on the stony ground, clutching at each other, their rifles joggling on their backs. Once down in the valley they halted suddenly and stood with their heads lifted, listening. On a breeze there came to me faintly the sound, which they had heard, of Ida's piping song. They crept into the bushes and soon the singing stopped and there was a scream, a scream such as I have never heard again, and I have heard many, expressing as it did so little fear, but a terrible depth of desolation and woe. I raced across the valley, into the bushes, heedless of the thorns tearing my legs, but I could not find them, and there were no more cries to guide me.

I searched for hours, pacing the hills in a numbed trance. Rain fell. As the light began to fail I found them on the road. Only one soldier remained. He staggered ahead of me dragging Ida along by one limp arm. She was a heavy load, lying down on her back like that and her heels bouncing over the stones. He stopped and swore and began to beat her with the butt of his rifle, smacking her skull in a bored weary tattoo and saying over and over in a reedy voice, You nowghty girl you! You nowghty girl you! Poor Ida lay there silently, her head rolling from side to side under the blows as the rain fell on her. The soldier looked at me and paused with the rifle lifted above his shoulder. He looked at me, and at Ida, at me again, with his mouth hanging open, and then shrugged and lowered the rifle.

Tucking micks,’ he muttered. ‘Barmy!’

He reeled away down the road. I carried Ida on my shoulders back to the camp. How did I carry that weight so far? Perhaps it was not far. Silas said nothing. After all, he had been expecting this or something like it, some disaster, he was not surprised. Her blood was all over me, even in my hair. We wrapped her in a blanket and laid her on her bunk. In the night she woke and cried out for Mario. I found him lying in our caravan staring at the flame of a guttering candle. I told him he was needed for a deathbed scene. He looked up at me expressionlessly for a long time with those strange still eyes.

Tuck off,’ he said softly at last, and turned his face to the wall. It made no difference. She was already dead. I arrived back as Silas was closing her eyes, and it was as if he had closed a door on a whole world.

33

ODD, BUT I can remember no tears. Lamentations seemed somehow superfluous. If one stopped and thought for a moment about her death one said yes, really, it's logical enough, and it was, with the grotesque logic of the times. When we looked back now we saw that it was for this death we had waited, suspended up here in the mountains, as though a sacrifice were necessary before we could move on, and the sacrifice of course was the slaughter of innocence. Or is all that too subtle, too neat? We buried her next morning, wrapped in a white shroud, beside the stream, and there was silence but for the noise of the spade and the larks singing, no prayers, no eulogies, nothing.

With the murder of the innocent went our innocence, and in its place came something brutal and icecold. We struck camp that very day and travelled down into the plain. It was strange to be on the move again, to hear the wheels groan and the hoofs stamping. We had thought to leave death behind us in the mountains, but down here it was everywhere in the air. It was as bad as we had been told, worse. There was a smell of death. No beasts grazed in the meadows, no smoke rose from chimneys. Children sat motionless at the crossroads staring out of huge round eyes. We passed by a woman lying laughing in a ditch. The fields lay fallow. After a week we reached the coast and headed southwards in a storm. The wind roared for days, buffeting the frail walls of the caravans, filling our mouths and eyes with salt. When the wind dropped it was winter, and there was ice in the hedgerows, the fallen leaves were brittle with frost, and the air grew fangs. Now the hoofs on the road had a steely ring, and the mornings were black as pitch. My teeth went bad. We had no money, no food. That was a terrible time.

We came to a town, and an echo rose out of my past. Yes, there was the broken rampart, the belltower, the barracks. I was, if you like, home. There was no welcome there for me. Everything was the same and yet changed. Silas saw me looking, and smiled.

‘Aye, Master Little Boots, you recognise this place? Here we end our journey.’ He winked. ‘I know someone’

We rumbled down the empty main street. A bell chimed thrice, three sombre strokes. Children threw stones at us in an eerie, malevolent silence, and fled. We entered an empty crooked square. Here the houses along two sides were fine bright edifices, wine-red brick and white windows curtained with lace, while their counterparts facing them were low thatched shanties, ruined, most of them, with their walls breached as though by cannonshot. The roofs were in tatters. Shattered fireplaces hung in mid-air. Even the worst of these wrecks were inhabited. One, its front wall gone completely, was like a grotesque cutaway illustration of the times. On the lower floors an emaciated mother was cooking something frightful in a black pot while her brood of rickety children scuttled around her, and upstairs the father, tended by a dutiful daughter, lay on a pallet made of sacking, doing his best to die. They paid us not the slightest heed as our gaping cavalcade went past.

At one of the two streets leading out of the square Silas called a halt. We reined in the horses and waited, for what, we did not know, looking expectantly toward Silas, who sat in his doorway, puffing on his pipe, and considered the sky above the houses with a faint dreamy smile. Down at the end of the street which his caravan blocked a sliver of sea was visible. The silence was strange, deep yet light as the chill winter air, tingling, itching to be broken, as it was at last by a thin high-pitched whistle. Silas's ears seemed to twitch, but still he gazed upward, puffing and smiling. There was a stirring in the rubble of one of the shattered houses, and a small woman in a wide flowered dress with her head hidden by a black shawl stepped out into the square, shook the dust off herself like a dog shaking water out of its fur, and hurried toward us. There was something in that walk, the way the arms sawed, haunches rolled, shoulders strained at the delicate stuff of the gown, that reminded me of another time, a road, a chase. She reached Silas's caravan and stopped, and he, with a great show of surprise, whipped the pipe out of his mouth and bent to help her up beside him. We craned our necks and stared. What woman was this, rising out of the ground in a strange town? She put her foot on the rim of the wheel and Silas yanked her arm, the wind blew, the dress billowed, and there was revealed to us, instead of the pink knickers, say, we had expected, a pair of coarse tweed trousers hitched up around the knees and tied with binder-twine. The two, already deep in conversation, disappeared into the caravan, and we were left with the silence again. Someone laughed uneasily. I was excited and obscurely alarmed, for I had seen in that strange man-woman, behind the echo of that other one we had fed as he fled from the peelers, another fainter echo out of a deeper past. I began to step down from the seat, intending to creep up and spy on their secret conference, but Mario reached out a hand and held me fast.

‘Is none your business, boy,’ he growled, and it was at that moment that my real fear began. That black shawl was there to hide more than mere gender.

Half an hour passed. Magnus and Ada played a game of cards. The twins went back for another look at the starving family. Sybil sat on a wooden box behind Silas's caravan, staring intently at nothing and brushing her hair, stroke after slow stroke, endlessly. Now a noise that had begun as a vague distant buzzing became the quavering voice of a concourse lifted in song. The sound drew nearer, rising and falling like an ill heart's beat behind the houses up at the other end of the square. We turned our faces thither, awaiting the appearance of the singers, but instead there crept out of the mouth of the street a horde of squat grey creatures, scores of them, crawling on their bellies and scuttling over each other's backs, or hopping in that strange way they have, as though each hop were a pounce, stopping, rising on their haunches to sniff the air with delicate snouts, their black eyes glittering. Rats! They scattered into the broken houses, and the procession arrived and crawled painfully toward us across the square like a snake with a broken back, a wavering string of emaciated townsfolk. Their sad song rose like a moan. In the van there marched a priest with cropped red hair and cracked boots holding a rough wooden cross aloft, and out at the side, stalking the line like an outrider, was a figure in a cocked hat and gaiters, white trousers, a green jacket. Strongbow! There he was, in full regalia, as preposterously plumed and groomed as ever. I almost laughed to see him, my ridiculous friend. If I threw a stone at him would he remember that day when he chased me off the town's historic ramparts? It seemed unlikely, for he had larger issues to occupy him now than the irreverence of little boys. Behind the priest a coffin was borne along on the shoulders of four stooped men. It was a small box. They were building them smaller now. Famine shrivelled its corpses. I wondered if this were one of Silas's sliding contraptions.

Singing, weaving, staring blankly, they marched across the square. In the wake of the coffin a crazed old woman stumbled, softly wailing. I recognised her. The rest looked away from her as though embarrassed by her tears. Here was no place for such a show of grief, too many were dying, silence sufficed. Silas's caravan stood in their path. The priest halted and lowered the cross, and behind him a convulsion of halting ran back through the crowd. The song trembled uncertainly, soared on one last note and faded. Strongbow came marching up, conferred briefly with the priest, then stepped up to the caravan and rapped with his fist on the window. There was no response, and he retreated a pace in confusion, stamping his heels. One of the coffin bearers moaned very softly. Strongbow cast a sidelong glance at the other caravans and their silent attentive occupants. He was about to speak when the door above him opened and Silas stepped out on the driving board and leaned down and asked,

‘Well, my good man?’

Strongbow's plume bristled.

‘Get this yoke on up owwa the way there!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Get owwa the way!’

The priest pointed a shaking finger at the silent procession at his back.

‘You're blocking the street,’ he roared. ‘Can you not see it's a funeral, man!’

‘Why, so it is,’ said Silas.

‘You bloody get!’ Strongbow cried, and made a grab at Silas's leg and missed. With a banging of boots and a clatter of buckles two peelers came running. More old friends! Sergeant Trouncer straightened his helmet and said, ‘Right! what's up here?’

The consumptive constable behind him could not speak for lack of breath, but he backed up his superior officer with a fierce look out of his sheep's eyes. They all began to shout at once. The priest waved his fists, Strongbow stamped his feet and rumbled menacingly, and Sergeant Trouncer bellowed at the constable, who drew his truncheon and made to clamber up on the caravan. Silas kicked him on the side of the head, and as he toppled backward in a swoon he brought down Trouncer with him, and Trouncer clutched at Strongbow, who fell on the priest, and the four of them collapsed in a heap, flailing and roaring, and the cross poked the priest in the eye. Silas gleefully clapped his hands on his knees, the old woman shrieked, Mario began to laugh, and then the coffin exploded. Screws flew out of their sockets like a volley of shots, the lid flew open, boards splintered, and the corpse, O! that terrible swollen thing, slid down between the shoulders of the crouching bearers and rolled across the ground shedding a foul bandage in its wake like a snail's trail. Listen, listen to me, I have seen worse, I have seen things more terrible than this. The mourners fled in all directions waving their arms and screaming, and even the four felled pillars of the community scuttled away panicstricken. Only the old woman remained. She knelt and tore her hair, and laughed hysterically with that same raucous cackle I had heard long ago among the blackcurrant bushes. I stared down at the corpse lying in its wreckage. Silas lashed his horse, and the circus thundered out of the square.

34

OF HIM in the dress there was no sign until, a mile outside the town, he leaped down from Silas's careering caravan and vaulted a ditch, tripped on the other side and fell flat on his face, bounced up again immediately and scampered away across the fields. Our pace slackened as the panic evaporated, and then the horses would not go on, but halted and stood with lowered heads, shuddering and coughing. I got down and walked about the road in a daze. Up on the caravan Mario shook his head and laughed softly to himself.

‘Boom,’ he murmured, over and over. ‘Boom!’

Silas with his coattails flying and his black hat askew came rushing back along the line.

‘Come on, come on, keep moving, no stopping yet! Get up there, Little Boots. Mario! The soldiers are after us, get going.’

He was in fine fettle, full of excitement and glee. Mario smiled at him wildly and opened wide his eyes and said,

‘Boom!’

Silas halted in his tracks and began to laugh helplessly.

‘Mad,’ he cried, ‘stark mad! Gabriel, keep your eye on him, don't let him get behind you. Crackers!’ He scampered away. ‘Come on now, children, come on!

We whipped up the horses and turned down a boreen into a field, forded a stream and struggled up a hill of thorns, and when we reached the road again we met Rainbird pedalling furiously past us in the opposite direction. He soon returned, pale and breathless. Sergeant Trouncer and a dozen peelers, backed up by a squad of troops, were hot on our trail. They dogged us inexorably all day, until at evening we lost them. The weather turned, and a bitter wind blew up from the east. The land was hard and bare as a bone. With the cold came hunger pains. A sulphurous glow faded slowly out of the western sky, and in a bleak twilight we stopped at a pub, the same one we had visited on my first day travelling with the circus, an age past. This time there was no music. We crowded into the doorway and stared in silence at the chairs crouching empty by the tables, the lamps smoking, glasses gleaming, at our indistinct selves rippling in the mirror, and then Silas strode to the deserted bar and rapped upon it with his knuckles, and Rainbird darted under the flap of the counter and popped up grinning on the other side.

‘A ball of malt, my man,’ said Silas, but his words rang dully in the eerie stillness. He glared at the empty tables, daring the ghosts to show themselves, and turned to us in the doorway. ‘Come in, friends, and state your pleasure. It's on the house tonight. Come!’

We entered warily, and Rainbird busied himself with bottles. The first drink went down in an uneasy silence, but as it settled on their empty bellies a kind of delirium set in immediately, and the revels began. I would take nothing, and sat in a corner nursing my hunger. Glasses fell, and a keg burst and sprayed the mirror with froth. Someone knocked over a lamp. The blazing oil sprang across the floor with a roar. They poured porter on the flames. Mario, sitting cross-legged on a table, vomited repeatedly into his lap. Something was dying here. I watched it twitching in the drunken faces that I could no longer recognise, these impenetrable masks of grey and yellow wax. For all their laughter and their shrieks the silence was still there beneath all, the anguish and the dumb longing of those whose absence sat beside us like an implacable black bird in this house of the dead. It was not hunger that was killing us, but the famine itself. The black smoke was poisoning us. The plague was here. Silas alone seemed immune, presiding over the Totentanz with his old wicked gaiety, leaning against the bar and jogging his glass in time to the fevered rising rhythm of the dance.

I went out into the yard behind the pub. The night was moonless, tingling with ice. The wind sang over the invisible fields. I do not know how long I stood out there, gazing into the dark. Perhaps I fell asleep on my feet. The noises came to me unnoticed at first, voices and the thud of boots, clatter of metal and wood, and an oddly familiar crackling. I started back into the pub, thought better of it, and scurried around the side of the building under the poplars. One of the caravans was on fire, and there were soldiers on the road scurrying about against the glare like tin men. Away in the dark somewhere Sergeant Trouncer was roaring commands. Silas and the others blundered out of the pub and tripped over each other, swearing and squeaking. I set off at a run toward the blazing caravan. Magnus overtook me.

‘Get back, Gabriel, get back!’

A challenge rang out nearby and I veered away, flame spurted from the muzzle of a rifle, and over my shoulder I saw by that brief livid light Magnus halt as the back of his head exploded. He went down like a stricken spider, arms and legs spinning, and in his place there popped up before me, like a sad and lovely aunt sally, the image of him dancing in a field in April rain with mouth-organ music wreathed around him like flowers. Magnus! I found a horse unharnessed and leaped upon its sagging back and rode away across the fields.