The Devils Children

IV

STEEL ON THE ANVIL

EIGHT DAYS LATER Nicky went down to the village. She bent her head and ran with a shudder of disgust under the double set of power lines that swooped from pylon to pylon across the lane.

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

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

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

“I expect so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m staying on the farm up the hill,” said Nicky. The group tensed. A lean-faced young man with a half-grown beard said, “Booker's Farm, that’d be?” “I don't know its name,” said Nicky. “We just came there and stayed because one of my friends was going to have a baby.”

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

“About forty.”

They looked at each other.

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

The others nodded.

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

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

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

“You aren’t one on ’em, though?” crowed the man in shirt-sleeves.

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

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

“But they aren’t like that at all,” said Nicky. “Leastways they aren’t like other folk,” said the man in the hat. “Not like good Christian folk. You grant me that.”

“They’ve been very good to me,” said Nicky. “That’s as may be,” said the man in shirt-sleeves. “We don’t want nothing to do with ’em. That’s what the Master tells us, and he’s right again, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ ’Morning, Arthur,” said the man in the hat. “What you doing down here, Dune?” said the giant. “The rest of ’em’s up at the hayfield. Them as don’t work this summer won’t eat this winter.”

“Right you are, Arthur,” said the beard grower. “My foot’s been playing me up, but it’s better now.” He slipped away, and the blue gaze turned itself on Nicky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Til have no talk {shake) like that {shake) in my village {shake). Not one word of it {shake). D’you hear {shake) ? I’ll have no talk {shake) like that {shake) in my village.”

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

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

The giant stopped shaking and put Nicky down. “I’d treat my own kids a sight rougher if I heard ’em talking that kind of filth,” he purred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. Shall I call you Mr. Tom?”

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

“But who is he?”

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

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

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

“I do not know,” he said. “Perhaps Jagindar can mend it, but it does not look easy. This is not my trade; I am a checker in a warehouse, not a blacksmith. Does your head hurt where the man hit you?” “I’m getting used to being hit,” said Nicky, fingering the bruised bone. “He wasn’t quite so quick as you are, but his hand was much heavier.”

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

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

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

“But swords and things,” said Nicky.

“Oh, we will have to see.”

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

“Is it all right?” he said. His anxiety seemed to make his squint worse than ever.

“Oh yes,” said Nicky. “Only it’s so noisy. What are they making?”

“Just a practice piece, a small sword for one of the children. It may not be very good because Jagindar is not sure of the quality of the steel he is using. Steel is a mixture of iron and carbon in exact quantities, and the hot charcoal adds more carbon to the iron, so you achieve steel of a different temper. In primitive conditions like this it is all a matter of judgment, so the first few things he makes will probably be flawed or brittle.”

Nicky looked down the slope to where two extraordinary figures were prancing on the unmown lawn behind the farmhouse. Their padded necks and shoulders made them look heavy and gawky, but they skipped around each other like hares in March, taking vicious swipes at the padding with short curved staves. Few of the swipes reached their target because the figures ducked and backed so agilely, or took the blow cunningly on the little round leather shields which Uncle Chacha had cut from old trunks in the farmhouse attic. Suddenly Nicky realized that the six-yard folds of fine linen from which the Sikhs contrived their turbans would be almost as useful in battle as a steel helmet. The fencing practice stopped, and Uncle Chacha and Mr. Harbans Singh leaned on their staves and discussed what they had learnt.

“Yes,” said Nicky, “I suppose a brittle sword wouldn’t last long with that amount of bashing. But I thought proper fencers prodded at each other with the points of their swords, instead of swiping like that.”

“It is a different type of sword,” said Kewal. “We Sikhs have always used the tulwar, which you call a saber. The curve of the blade helps the cutting edge to slice through whatever you strike at. You Europeans invented the dueling sword, using the point to pierce your enemy before he could reach you, but even European cavalry has always used the saber, because the horse carries a man to close quarters where the cutting edge is handier than the point.”

“I hope he doesn’t make Mr. Tom’s fork brittle,” said Nicky. “Let’s go and help in the hayfield.”

Kewal made a face, but walked up the path beside her. Nicky was learning all sorts of surprising differences between the Sikhs, who had at first seemed so like each other. Kewal, for instance, was quick and clever, but lazy and vain; most days he seemed to have some reason to wear his smartest clothes, and the clothes then became a reason for not doing any hard or dirty work — though he was usually on the fringe of any working party, criticizing and giving advice. If Nicky had suggested going up to the wood to help in the endless job of carting charcoal down to the forge, he’d have found a reason for doing something else. The black and brittle treasure from the opened mounds filled all the air around with a fine and filthy dust. That was work too dirty for Kewal.

Suddenly Nicky laughed aloud. She was going up to the hayfield as an excuse for not taking her turn at the flour milling, which she thought the dreariest job on the whole farm: you pounded and rubbed and sieved for an hour, and finished with two cupfuls. Kewal looked to see if she would share the joke, but she shook her head.

The toy sword was given to Kaka, and he swaggered about with it stuck into his straining belt, looking just like a miniature version of the giant down in the village. Uncle Jagindar was pleased with it, because it didn’t snap when you bent it or banged the anvil with it, and the edge came up killing sharp. He practiced all next day at the forge and on the third day he mended Mr. Tom’s fork, welding a new length of steel up the back. The risaldar shaped a new handle, and the finished job looked almost as good as a fork from a shop. Nicky was ready to take it down at once, but Gopal said, “No, listen!”

The bells were going in the church tower, tumbling sweetly through their changes. It must be Sunday. The Sikhs didn’t keep Sunday or any other day as special; instead they had long prayers and readings from their holy book morning and evening. Yes, it would be a mistake to go down on a Sunday, another sign of how different the two communities were.

She found Mr. Tom at his house on Monday morning. He fingered the weld and the new handle with hands so harsh that you could hear his skin scrape across the surface.

“Clean and sturdy, Fd say,” he said. “We’ll show the Master. He’s in court, Mondays.”

They found the giant in what had been a classroom in the school. Mr. Tom led Nicky quietly in and pointed to a bench where she could sit. Twenty other villagers were there, cramped behind childsized desks; the giant sat up on the dais, also cramped, though his desk had been made for a grown man. Maxie sat at a table below the dais, scribbling in a ledger. A dark, angry-looking woman stood in front of the desk complaining about something. When she stopped she sat down. The giant looked at the room in silence for a full minute.

Then he nodded to Maxie, who had stopped writing. Maxie leaped to his feet and crowed like a cock.

“Now hear this!” were the words he crowed. The giant purred into the silence.

“Mrs. Sallow,” he said, “has brought a complaint against her neighbor Mr. Goddard, saying that his dog spoils her flower beds by burying bones in 'em. There are three points to this case. Firstly, it is the nature of a dog to bury its bones where it feels like, and you can’t change that. Secondly, flower beds aren't of no account in Felpham no more — it’s vegetables we’ll be needing, beans and such, to see us through the coming winter. Thirdly, which falls into two parts, a man must have a good dog, and if that dog goes digging up the neighbor’s flower beds the neighbor has to put up with it, though it would be different, like I said, if it was vegetables. And moreover it is the use and custom of Felpham that a woman is subservient to a man, and when it comes to a complaint, other things being equal, the man shall have the best of it. Case dismissed.”

“Case dismissed,” crowed Maxie and began to scribble again in his ledger.

The dark woman, looking angrier than ever, bustled out of the classroom.

“That’s the last case, eh, Maxie?” said the giant.

“Yessir.”

Mr. Tom stood up.

“The girl’s brought my spud fork back from the Devil’s Children,” he said. “Seems like a good mend to me.”

“Let’s have a squint at it,” said the giant.

Tom took the fork up to the dais and the giant rose from his desk. First he waggled the tool to and fro in his huge hands, then he peered at the actual join, then he took the tines in one hand and the handle in the other, put his knee to the join and heaved.

“Oi!” cried Mr. Tom. “Don’t you go busting of it, Arthur!”

The giant stopped heaving and gazed at Mr. Tom from under reddish eyebrows. Mr. Tom looked away, and the giant resumed heaving. Nicky could see the squares of his check shirt change shape where they crossed his shoulders as the oxlike muscles bulged with the effort. The classroom was silent as a funeral. Suddenly there came a crack and a twang, and the fork changed shape.

The giant straightened and held it up. He had snapped the wooden handle clean in two, and one of the steel supports had broken with it, but the other had held. It was the piece Uncle Jagindar had mended which had stayed unbroken.

“Now hear this,” purred the giant, panting slightly with the aftermath of that great spasm of strength.

“Now hear this!” crowed Maxie.

“We’ll be needing a fair whack of honest tools,” said the giant. “Some will want mending, and some we haven’t got. You all know how the Devil’s Children have settled in up at Booker’s, and how near we came to raiding up there and driving ’em out, bad wires or no bad wires. Now it turns out that they’ve blacksmiths among them, as will make and mend ironwork for us, and do an honest job at it. So I say this: if a man wants a piece of iron mended, or made, he’ll come to me and tell me what he wants, and I’ll fix a fair price for him with this girl here as lives with the Devil’s Children. If you want a job done, you must pay a fair price. But I won’t fix a price which the village nor the man can’t spare, I promise you that. It’ll be a bag of carrots, maybe, for a mended spade, and a lamb or two for a new plow. And I hereby appoint Tom Pritchard my deputy to handle this trade, seeing as I broke your fork, Tom, though I’ll oversee it myself till we’ve got it running smoothly. But if I find one of you, or any other man or woman in Felpham, dealing with the Devil’s Children direct, other than through me or Tom Pritchard and this girl here, I’ll skin ’em alive, I promise you that. We have to trade with ’em, but they’re heathen, outlandish heathen, and apart from trade we don’t want to see nor hide nor hair of ’em. I’ve heard some of you talking fancy about them, saying as they’re the Queer Folk and suchlike rubbish. I don’t want to hear no more of that. They’re mortal flesh, like you and me. But they’re heathen foreigners besides, and it is the use and custom of Felpham to have nothing to do with ’em. Now, such of you as’ve got metal to make and mend, you’re to bring it to the Borough, or drawings of what you want. Maxie, you can cry the news through the village. Court adjourned.”

“Court adjourned,” crowed Maxie and whisked out of the room like a blown leaf. Tom went ruefully up to the dais to collect his ruined fork; Nicky saw that he was too afraid of the giant to complain. She sat where she was while the room cleared; all the time the giant stared at the wall above the door, as though he could see through it.

When the last of the villagers had gone he yawned, scratched the back of his head, stood up, settled his cutlass strap over his shoulder, covered it with an orange cloak which he pinned in place with a big brooch, clapped a broad hat with a plume in it onto his head and strode toward the door. Nicky saw that he was wearing boots now, and that the cloak had once been a curtain. The room boomed at every footfall. He stopped suddenly, as though he’d only just noticed her.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” he said.

“I wanted to ask you how we’re going to fix a proper price for the work if you won’t meet any of the Sikhs.”

“The Devil’s Children,” he said.

“They aren’t like that at all,” said Nicky. “They’re proud, and they wear funny clothes, and they talk a lot, but when you get to know them they’re really like anybody else. Just ordinary.”

“None of my folk’s going to get to know the Devil’s Children,” said the giant without looking at her. “But I give you my honor I’ll strike a fair price. Think, girl, it’s in my interest till we can find a smith of our own; there’s a heap of metalwork to be done before winter if we’re to come through it short of starving. I don’t want your people trading over to Aston, nor Fadlingfield, because they think we’ve cheated ’em here. Now you run along. This afternoon I’ll send a barrow of stuff up as far as the bad wires; you can fetch it back, mended, this day week. We’re vicious short on scythes, too, so you can get your friends to forge us half a dozen new ’uns — we’ll shape the handles.”

“All right,” said Nicky and turned to go.

“Come back, girl,” said the giant. “I’ve more to say. You heard what I told my people about having nothing to do with the Devil’s Children. You tell your friends the same. If I see one of those brown skins down this side of the bad wires I’ll tear him apart, man, woman or child. Joint by joint I’ll tear him.”

There was no point in arguing, so Nicky walked out into the midmorning glare and ran down the street, left through the Borough and up the lane to where Kewal was waiting for her in the shadow of the hedge. (Now that the job was known to be safe he had volunteered for it because it was also known to be easy.) He was almost as interested by the description of the court as Uncle Chacha had been by the first meeting with the giant.

“Yes,” he said. “He is becoming a feudal baron, and he is setting about it the right way. It would be curious to know whether he has thought it out or whether his behavior is instinctive. The first step is to make all the villagers obey him, and this he must do partly by frequent demonstrations of his physical strength — that was why he broke the fork — and partly by laying down strict rules which they can obey. And at the same time he must channel all the business of the village through his own hands. Now a man who wants a fork mended or a scythe made must come to him, and if that man is out of favor with him then the work will not be done. So our forge is another source of power for him.”

“He protects them too, don’t forget,” said Nicky. “And I thought they seemed to like being bullied like that, in a funny way.”

“Oh yes, of course. Most people prefer to have their thinking done for them. Democracy is not a natural growth, it is a weary responsibility. You have to be sterling fellows, such as we Sikhs are, to make it work.”

That afternoon two barrow loads of broken implements waited where the power lines crossed the lane. Uncle Jagindar and his assistants toiled in the roaring and clanging smithy as long as there was light. By Friday the work was done.

The giant scrutinized tool after tool in the Borough before handing them back to their owners, but as far as Nicky could tell from the blue, unwinking eyes and the blubbery cheeks he was satisfied. She explained about the pieces which Uncle Jagindar had said were past mending, and he nodded. Half an hour later she was herding two fat lambs up the lane, while a disgruntled Kewal toiled behind her shoving a barrow piled high with vegetables.