Heroes and Villains Read Free Page B

flies which these plants produced in autumn, for the noxious sap burned the fingers. She knew how brambles sometimes masked the mouths of bottomless vents in the ground, the original purpose of which baffled her. She found out that if she ignored the obese and hugely fanged rats who nested in the choked sewers and sometimes came out to play, they would ignore her.
    Shells of houses now formed a dangerous network of caves, all so overgrown it seemed nothing could ever have lived there and she never found anyone, though sometimes she would find the picked remains of bones of animals and human excrement, indicating that the ghosts in the ruins ate and defecated and therefore were unlikely to be ghosts at all, or ghosts only in the sense that they had forfeited their social personalities, like those mendicants of the swamp who sometimes came begging at the gates of the village, men and women running with sores, filth and rags scarcely covering their deformities. Sometimes the Soldiers threw bread to them and sometimes frightened them away by firing bullets over their shapeless heads but they were never let in.
    ‘They are the outcasts of the outcasts,’ said her father. When she was twelve, he told her:
    ‘Before the war, there were places called Universities where men did nothing but read books and conduct experiments. These men had certain privileges, though mostly unstated ones: but all the same, some Professors were allowed in the deep shelters with their families, during the war, and they proved to be the only ones left who could resurrect the gone world in a gentler shape, and try to keep destruction outside, this time.’
    He had read more books than any other Professor in the community. He reconstructed the past; that was his profession. His lashless eyes were bleared with shortness of sight; soon he would go blind and then have nothing but the things he could touch such as his little clock. Marianne would have to read his books aloud to him. Rousseau, forexample. He was writing a book on the archaeology of social theory but maybe nobody in the community would want to read it, except Marianne, and she might not understand it. Theirs was primarily a community of farmers with the intellectual luxury of a few Professors who corresponded by the trading convoys with others of their kind in other places. And the Soldiers were there to protect them all.
    ‘There were no wild beasts in the woods, before the war. And scarcely any woods, to speak of. And everyone alive was interlinked, though some more loosely meshed into the pattern than others. Now it has all separated out; there are genuses of men, not simply
Homo faber
any more. Now there is
Homo faber
, to which genus we belong ourselves; but also
Homo praedatrix
,
Homo silvestris
and various others. In those days, Marianne, people kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?’
    He was fond of posing questions of this type, as were all the Professors; but especially her father. Sometimes she thought he was not talking to her at all but to himself or to a congregation of scholars who only existed in his mind. Nevertheless, she listened to every word he said.
    Now and then the community broke from its trance. A Worker went mad one midnight and fired the house where his wife and three children slept. They choked and smothered. He ran through the streets laughing and weeping, entered the Professor’s tower and flung himself from the balcony. Suicide was not uncommon among Workers and Professors when they reached a certain age and felt the approach of senility and loss of wits, though it was unknown among the Soldiers, who learned discipline. But homicide was very rare and usually happened shortly before a Barbarian raid.
    Another time, an old man broke into the museum and began systematically to wreck the glass cases and the treasures