Heroes and Villains Read Free

early for poppies but she saw a flare of scarlet. She ceased to watch the Soldiers; instead, she watched the movement flow to the fences and crash through them and across the tender wheat. Bursting from the undergrowth came horseman after horseman, filling the air with terrible screamings. They were dressed in furs and brilliant rags. A look-out in a watch tower had already been strangled to let them through and the men at the sentry post were playing cards so they did not see the visitors in time; two Soldiers, paying the price of lack of discipline, were shot. Then all was chaos.
    The rabble came to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill. Like hobgoblins of nightmare, their flesh was many colours and great manes of hair flew out behind them. They flashed with curious curved plates of metal dredged up from the ruins. Their horses were bizarrely caparisoned with rags, small knives, bells and chains dangling from manes and tails, and man and horse together, unholy centaurs crudely daubed with paint, looked twice as large as life. They fired long guns. Confronted with terrors of the night in the freshest hours of the morning, the gentle crowd scattered, wailing.
    Marianne bemusedly saw a good deal of blood, as when animals were slaughtered, but when she raised her eyes from the battle-field of the village green, she noticed a second party of Barbarians (bristling with knives but far less gaudily painted) who jumped the wires without flamboyance and now, while the fighters were engaged, were calmly occupied in seizing sacks of flour, crocks of butter and bolts of cloth while nobody attempted to stop them. They went in and out of the houses, occasionally making threatening passes with their knives, and then she saw some Worker women seemed to be helping them. Marianne thought this was very interesting.
    Soldiers and Barbarians fought hand to hand. Riderless horses seethed back and forth, screeching. Noises of gunfire and voices rose up to Marianne and she listened absorbedly. A Barbarian in a helmet of feathers decorated with the antlers of a stag appeared like a crazy sunrise on the flat roof of the museum; he held a knife between his teeth and was about to spring into the mêlée below when a bullet shattered his eyes. The knife fell from his lean lips. He inscribed a great arc on the morning as he dived forward to the ground, spouting his brains. He was the first man Marianne saw die; the second was her brother.
    He rolled in the dust with a shaggy Barbarian boy armed with a knife. They threshed and wrestled, ends of fur blurring their faces, and the knife kept flashing in the sun. They were some way from the general fighting as if they had arrived beneath her viewing platform on purpose to demonstrate violence to her. The Barbarian boy’s mound of black plaits and ringlets covered and uncovered them but she saw them staring at one another, both oddly startled, as if this was the last thing they expected to happen, this embrace to the kill.
    Their mother had returned to the tower. Perhaps she saw them and perhaps she called out and perhaps her brother heard her voice or some distracting noise for he glanced away from his adversary, who immediately took advantage of this lost guard to stick a knife into the other’s throat. Blood bubbled. The Barbarian boy dropped the knife and clasped his victim in his arms, holding him with a strange, terrible tenderness until he was still and dead. Marianne waited for somebody to shoot the Barbarian boy but nobody with a gun was available. The boy pushed the newly-made corpse against the wall and sat back on his haunches, pushing the hair out of his face. She saw he had several loops of beads around his neck and his hands were covered with rings. Since Marianne looked down at him from so high up, he appeared foreshortened and she only noticed his rings because they caught the light. The sound of the fighting was terrible music. The boy looked up and saw the severe child who