Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

masonry, where trees of dark ivy grew. Outside the communities, the order of nature was awry; a bee buzzed above a magic sunflower fully two feet across. A patch of rhubarb had become a plantation of huge, sappy stems holding up a thick roof of worm-eaten leaves.
    ‘Did they ever teach you medicine?’
    ‘Only a little history and social theory.’
    ‘That won’t help my brother, then, who’s ill.’
    ‘What is he ill with?’
    ‘Gangrene.’
    She remembered the festering wound on the shoulder of the Barbarian she had seen on the road on May Day; gangrene would have crept over him like ivy.
    ‘Probably be dead before we get back, anyway. My middle brother, that is. Or was. To be exact, my half-brother. All my brothers are half-brothers, see, owing to my father’s wives having this facility for dying in childbirth. Have you any brothers?’
    ‘I used to have one but the Barbarians killed him.’
    ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ said Jewel philosophically, chewing on a stem of grass.
    He talked like a half-educated man and this surprised her very much since she had thought the Barbarians possessed no education at all. He also possessed, in his curiously elegant if abrupt movements as much as in his speech, a quality her father had called irony, unusual among the Professors. But, all the same, she recognized it. Talking to her, he half turned away his face and watched her from the corners of his eyes as if assessing his effect on her, or perhaps he was afraid to let her out of his sight while he was also afraid to look at her too closely. Yet he seemed to find some desperate humour in his own suspicions for she was only a young girl.
    ‘What sicknesses do Barbarians get?’
    ‘Barbarian …’ he repeated lovingly, giving each syllable an equal weight so that the word lost all its meaning and became abstract. ‘We get fevers from bad water. Cancers, when you grow old, if not before, or if you grow old, that is. Tetanus if you cut yourself. And that withering of the blood, you know? When you dry up and blow away in a matter of weeks.’
    ‘Do Barbarians go mad?’
    He darted her a glance of extreme curiosity.
    ‘You don’t usually get the time; you need a bit of leisure to go properly mad. Donally is mad, though. Not that I’ve got much to compare him with, but I think he’s a bit mad, taking all in all.’
    ‘Who is Donally?’
    ‘My tutor,’ he said. ‘Dr Donally. Not that he’d teach me to read.’
    ‘How extraordinary you should have a tutor.’
    ‘He appointed hisself, I didn’t want him. He came with a snake in a box when my father, poor old sod, was old and ill. And the Doctor came riding on a donkey and he had a baby with him, he wrapped it in a blanket and it did nothing but dribble. And he had cases of books and a whole lot of needles, for the tattooing. And colours, he brought with him, a whole lot of colours.’
    ‘Is he a big man, with a beard in red and purple?’
    ‘Where did you see him?’ he asked sharply.
    ‘In the forest. I was out by myself and saw your tribe ride by but I don’t think I saw you. I think I’d remember you. Though perhaps not.’
    ‘And I thought we went so secret and all.’
    ‘I was by myself, nobody knew where I was and I didn’t tell anybody. It was the day my father died and I saw your tribe. I felt so sorry for them, they were so tired. If I hadn’t seen them, so defenceless, I would have told my uncle I saw you hiding in the shed and my uncle would have shot you.’
    She paused, to observe his reaction, and realized she was boring him. It was about noon. The sun was directly overhead and cast no shadows.
    ‘Come on, let’s get on.’
    She did not look where she was going and trod on an adder basking on the warm stone; the adder stung her calf and slid off into the bracken as quick as variegated lightning. She felt a burning pain around the wound.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Jewel with deep satisfaction, as if he had expected this.
    He made her lie