Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online

your faces, also?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘The Professors think you have reverted to beasthood,’ she said censoriously. ‘You are a perfect illustration of the breakdown of social interaction and the death of social systems.’
    ‘You don’t say,’ he remarked with complete disinterest. He wasoccupied in watching her. If he looked strange to her, she seemed at least as strange again to him, since she was so small, clean, trim, pale and sure of herself. He had never seen a woman of her class so close before and he scrutinized her curiously, taking in her cloth skirt and white blouse now daubed with mud. They examined one another like interesting specimens but he got bored with looking first. There were stories among the Barbarians that Professor women did not bleed when you cut them; however, he did not believe these stories, though he fingered his last remaining knife thoughtfully.
    Soon it grew too hot for the fox pelt and she carried it over her arm. He walked on before her. Though the cloth of his clothes had been stolen from the Professors, it had been dyed from its original sober grey to camouflage colours of mossy greens and browns, for the Barbarians were hunters and practised dissimulation in the woods. He rarely glanced behind him and she had to make her way as best she could through the bushes, tall grass, bracken and flowers. She wondered how he came to be called Jewel; it was perhaps a corruption of some other name, perhaps a Biblical name such as Joel. Many of the Barbarians had adopted apocalyptic religious sects after the war, as had some of the Professors. Or perhaps he was called Jewel because he was so beautiful, though also very strange.
    There were small, pink blossoms on the brambles and yellow points on the gorse. The tallest cow parsley rose five or six feet high and he often used his knife to cut them a path. Some of the stems of fern were as thick as her wrist. Tangled in briars, she called out to the young man but he did not hear her for the forest seemed to merge into an element heavier than air, which drowned her voice. And an extraordinary silence reigned. The light, filtered through the leaves, seemed perfectly green. She tore her skirt free. Jewel waited for her beneath some giant skeletal candelabra of cow parsley; he was grinning again.
    ‘No wonder they had to put the Professors in shelters, when they can’t even find their way through a wood. If I wasn’t with you you’d walk round and round in circles.’
    ‘I’m not familiar with the country,’ she snapped angrily. He appeared to take immense, if derisive, pleasure in the pure, round sound of her vowels. She guessed he was taking her home as a battle trophy, of lessuse but more interest than a bolt of cloth. Her head ached with the viridian dazzle of the sunlit forest. As they went on, her eyes began to play her tricks. Now he seemed taller than the tallest of the trees; when he stretched out his arm, he could pull down the sky on everything. Then he shrank to a point of nothing and she lost him in the grass.
    ‘You should have had some sleep,’ he said with vague irritation, looming beside her, the whites of his eyes showing. ‘Now you’re all weak and feeble.’
    ‘I shall survive,’ she said, for she would not ask for any assistance.
    A squirrel chattered in the branches. It ticked away like her father’s clock but was a biological timepiece of flesh and blood which did not tell the hours. Turned up towards the invisible squirrel, her face looked so pinched and ghost-like that her companion suddenly doubted she was real and put his hand against her face to see if it was flesh.
    ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, flinching.
    ‘It’s no pleasure,’ he replied sharply for the gesture had betrayed him; he thought he did not believe in ghosts.
    Towards midday, he allowed her to rest in a clearing among some fallen stones, once a cottage. A few garden flowers wildly and unnaturally returned to nature scrambled about the fallen