Unknown - The Devils Children

“Right agin the edge,” he said. “You can cut across to our back garden through Mr. Banstead’s paddock.”

“Good,” said Nicky. “We won’t go till it’s nearly dark. I’m afraid your mother will be worrying for you.”

“That she will,” said the boy.

“Are you hungry?”

Suspicion tightened the lines of his face again.

“I’m not eating the Queer Folk’s food,” he muttered.

“I could bring you water from the well,” Nicky suggested. “That was here before us. And there’s a bag of apples which came up from the village only yesterday morning.”

He thought for a few seconds, hunger and terror fighting.

“All right,” he said at last.

After supper they lifted him gently back on to his hurdle and four of the uncles carried him down the lane. He stared at his bearers in mute fear until, between step and step, he fell deep asleep. Nicky had to shake him awake at the edge of the village so that he could tell them their way through the dusk.

It was the last cottage in the lane to Hailing Down. The uncles lowered the hurdle onto the dewy grass and stole off into the darkness by the paddock hedge. A dog yelped in the cottage next door as Nicky pushed the sagging gate open. A man’s voice shouted at the dog. The door at the end of the path opened, sending faint gold across a cabbage patch. A woman stood in the rectangle of light. Nicky walked up the path.

“That you, Mike?” called the woman.

The boy cried faintly to her from his hurdle.

“I found him hurt,” said Nicky, “so we bandaged him up and brought him home.”

The woman picked up her long skirt and rushed down the path. It was the same Mrs. Sallow who’d been complaining in court about her neighbor’s dog. When Nicky got back to the paddock she was kneeling by the stretcher with her arm under the boy’s shoulders.

“His foot’s very bad,” said Nicky. “I think I could manage one end if you do the other.”

Mrs. Sallow stood up and looked despairingly around. Obviously her feud with the dog owner meant she could expect no help from there, and she had no neighbor on the other side.

“All right,” she said. “But mind you, I owe you nothing.”

“Of course not,” said Nicky.

The boy and the hurdle weighed like death. The boy groaned as they tilted through the gateway. The woman said nothing. Nicky lowered her end on the path outside the door.

“I’ll cope from here,” said the woman. She knelt by the hurdle and pulled the boy to her. Then with a painful effort she staggered to her feet. Nicky held the door open for her.

“You keep out,” said the woman.

“I never told ’em my name, Mum,” said the boy.

“Good lad,” said the woman.

“But, Mum . . .” said the boy.

“Tell me later,” she said, and kicked the door shut with her heel.

Nicky had dragged the hurdle down the path and joined the uncles by the hedge when the cottage door opened again. Mrs. Sallow stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, head thrown back.

“You people,” she called. “I give you my thanks for what you have done for my boy.”

The door shut as the neighbor’s dog exploded into an ecstasy of yelping.

“What was the significance of that?” said Mr. Surbans Singh.

“It’s unlucky to take help from fairies,” explained Nicky, “if you don’t thank them. All the stories say so. Goodness I’m tired.”

“In that case,” said Mr. Surbans Singh, “it is most fortunate that we happen to have a magic hurdle here, with four demons to carry it.”

So Nicky rode home through the dark while the uncles made low-voiced jokes about their supernatural powers. It was almost a month before she saw Mike Sallow again.

VI

THIEVES’ HARVEST

THEY HAD BEEN PLOWING all day, with four plows going and every man and woman, as well as all the older children, taking turns at the heavy chore. Between turns they worked at the two strips which were wanted for autumn sowing, breaking down the clods with hoes and dragging the harrow to and fro to produce a fine tilth. The thin strips of turned earth looked pitiful amid the rolling steppes of stubble and unmown wheat. The strips were scattered apparently at random over the farm, wherever prodding with sticks had shown the soil to be deepest or least flinty, or where there seemed some promise of shelter from the winds. There’d been no rain for a week, so the soil was light and workable, which was why the whole community was slaving at it today. On other days logging parties had been up in the woods, getting in fuel for the winter. And twice a raiding party had set off at dusk, trekked the twenty miles to Reading through the safe night, stayed in the empty city all day, and trekked back laden with stores and blocks of the most precious stuff in all England, salt.

But today had been stolid plowing. Resting between her turns, Nicky had been vaguely conscious that something was happening down in the village. The bells rang for a minute, not their proper changes, and then stopped. Shouts drifted up against the breeze, but so faint and far that she didn’t piece them together into a coherent sequence, or even realize that they were more and louder than they might have been.

About six it was time to go and get the hens in by scattering corn in their coops. If you left it later than that they tried to roost out in the shrubs of the farmhouse garden. She was helping Ajeet search the tattered lavender bushes for hidden nests when she saw, down the lane and out of the corner of her eye, a furtive movement — somebody ducking into the crook of the bank to avoid being seen. Kewal, she thought, out checking the rabbit snares to escape his share of plowing. But Kewal had been up in the field, lugging at the ropes as steadily as anyone (it was really only that he didn’t like starting jobs) and besides, hadn’t the shape in the lane had fair hair? And wasn’t there something awkward about the way it had moved?

Inquisitive she slid down the bank and stole along the lane. They all went barefooted as often as possible now, because shoes were wearing out and making new ones was a job for winter evenings. No council workmen had been along the lanes of England that summer, keeping the verges trim, so you could bury yourself deep in the rank grasses. Mike, peering between the stems, must have seen her coming; but he stayed where he was. He had been crying, but now his mouth was working down and sideways as though something sticky had lodged in the corner of his jaw; his lungs pumped in dry, jerking spasms.

“What’s the matter, Mike?” said Nicky, forgetting that she wasn’t supposed to know his name. But he’d forgotten too.

“The robbers have come!” he gasped. “The robbers have come!”

Nicky stared at him, not taking it in.

“They was herding all the children together,” said Mike, “and taking ’em off somewheres. I was abed still, with my foot, but my Mum shoved me out of the back gate and says to come to you. I been crawling across the fields, but I dursn’t come no further, though you done me good once. My Mum says you done my foot good.”

“But what about Mr. Barnard — the Master? Didn’t he stop them?”

“They killed him! They killed him!”

Mike began to wail, and Nicky’s whole being was flooded by a chill of shock at the thought of that huge life murdered. She put her arm around Mike’s shoulders and waited for the sobbing to stop.

“Come with me,” she said. “My friends will know what to do. Shall I give you a piggyback again?”

“I’ll do,” sniffled the boy. “There’s not nowhere else to go, is there?”

“That’s right,” said Nicky, and helped him, half hobbling and half hopping, up the lane. His foot was still clearly very sore, and she could see from his scrattled knees that he really must have crawled most of the way.