Three Bags Full (17 page)

“How about the butcher?” bleated Mopple, who had already abandoned his good resolution to say nothing and chew the cud. “The butcher knew about McCarthy too.”

“The butcher,” said Maple thoughtfully. “The butcher.” It was as if she were chewing on the word. “The butcher has safeguarded himself.
That’s
why no one kills the butcher! Was it meant as a warning to him—because they didn’t dare touch him personally? On the other hand,” said Maple, twitching her ears, “on the other hand it could be just the opposite. Perhaps someone wants it all to get out now. Perhaps he murdered George so that it
would
all get out at last. And now, after failing with George, he has his eye on the butcher. The village people are afraid of the butcher. We’ve heard that they don’t want him to die, even though no one likes him.”

“It
is
a love story!” bleated Heather defiantly.

“Not if the butcher comes into it,” said Mopple.

But Miss Maple seemed to think that even the butcher could feature in a love story. “Why not?” she said. “The butcher seems to be interested in Kate, anyway. And he knew what happened to McCarthy back then. Perhaps the butcher stuck the spade in George to make it look as if the others had done it again. All of them together! No one would dare to give him away—because he’s safeguarded himself.”

All this thinking on Miss Maple’s part was making the sheep dizzy. Wherever she put her sheepy nose, new possibilities came buzzing around like flies from the feeding trough. It seemed to be more than Miss Maple herself could cope with now. “We still don’t know enough,” she sighed. “We need to know more about human beings.”

They all decided to recuperate from the strain of so much detecting in the hay barn.

After the hot day, it was musty and stuffy in the barn. The heat had hunted old smells out of all the corners and nooks and crannies. A young mouse who had died under the wooden planks last summer. George sweating as he forked hay through the hatch in the roof and down on them, a fragrant shower. A screw that had fallen out of his radio and still smelled the way it used to, of metal and music. Blood and the stinging ointment dripping from Othello’s wound to the floor. Swallow’s eggs under the roof. The smell of oil. The smell of many lambs. The smell of snow. Powder on butterfly wings.

All these smells scurried round the hay barn like inquisitive rats.

Sleepily, Maple listened to them. In spite of the heat she soon dropped off.

It was cool in her dream. She was standing beside a brook, and the brook was murmuring to her. Gurgling, humming, singing. The brook was saying that everything flowed toward the sea and nothing ever came back. But Maple didn’t trust the brook. There was a large flock of magnificent white sheep grazing on one of its banks, and sometimes one of them crossed the brook. Every time it reached the other bank it was a black sheep. Black from head to hoof. Maple strained her eyes to see just how and when the change happened. The black sheep stared longingly back to the bank where the white sheep grazed, but the white sheep didn’t seem to notice them until one of the black sheep took a run and leaped back over the brook. But it didn’t turn white again. In mid-leap it turned into a large gray wolf. The white sheep scattered before it, running straight up into the sky. In her dream, Maple made up her mind to notice just how they did it, so that she could tell Zora later. But in her dream Maple also knew that she would never be able to bring the secret back past the moment of waking. An unnerving smell wafted down from the sky.

Maple woke from her dream with a start and was back in the dark heat of the hay barn. The smell of a flock of sheep! Strange sheep, quite close! Only a moment later did she remember that Melmoth was back with them now. Melmoth who smelled like a flock of half sheep. He had probably returned from his nighttime stroll sooner than expected, Maple reassured herself. She wondered why Melmoth smelled so strange, different from all the other sheep she knew. Perhaps it was because of his wandering life. Melmoth had never lived the way sheep normally live, so why would he smell like an ordinary sheep?

It could be to do with the flocks he had met, flocks where he had felt good and stayed for a little while. So many different lives begun in so many different flocks. And none of them grazed to the end. It made Maple dizzy to think of it. No wonder Melmoth smelled like many different sheep.

Or perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps Melmoth had met special sheep that he liked during his wanderings, and had brought them away with him as a memory, as a smell, as a grazing habit, as a voice in his head. Had Melmoth chosen himself a flock, a flock of ghostly sheep, which he was now leading along behind him on invisible scent threads?

This idea made her uneasy. She’d never get used to Melmoth’s scent. No sheep could. As if to confirm that thought, she smelled the strange flock outside again.

And suddenly she was wide awake.

Not Melmoth! Nothing half sheepish, nothing mysterious and inexplicable. A young, shallow, greedy scent. Gabriel’s sheep! Very close.

Maple bleated in alarm.

It was a penetrating bleat, and instantly brought the sheep back from their lush dreamland pastures to the night. Heads were raised everywhere, peering around. A little later George’s flock was standing at the door of the hay barn, watching the goings-on in their meadow.

A closed phalanx of muscular necks and munching heads was moving toward them. Gabriel’s sheep had somehow managed to break out of their fenced-in patch of the meadow and were now grazing toward the hay barn, close together, side by side, unstoppably. In the dark their bodies looked even paler, giving off a wan light. Now that they weren’t herded in behind the wire fence anymore, you could see how many of them there really were, like one of those sputtering, buzzing machines that drove over the fields in autumn.

“Gabriel’s no good at putting up fences,” said Zora tartly. “He’s a bad shepherd.”

“What are we going to do now?” asked Heather.

“Nothing,” said Cordelia. “Stay here in the hay barn. They won’t come into the hay barn.”

“But we can’t let them graze our whole meadow bare!” Mopple was beside himself. “Where are we going to graze tomorrow ourselves? We must drive them off!”

“Do you see how many of them there are? How are we going to drive all those off?” asked Zora. “I wasn’t even able to talk to them.”

“But we have to do it somehow!” Mopple wasn’t giving up. “They’ll eat everything up. The hill. The clover on the cliff tops. The herbs down the cliff side, the herbs of the abyss.”

“Not
all
the herbs of the abyss,” said Zora proudly.

“George’s Place!” Mopple suddenly bleated. “They’ll graze George’s Place bare!”

The sheep looked at one another in alarm.

“George’s Place,” whispered Cloud. “Everything we mustn’t graze ourselves.”

“The mouse weed,” said Maude.

“Sheep’s ear and sweet-wort!” said Lane.

“Milk-grass and oats!” said Cordelia. It turned out that the sheep had a remarkably good knowledge of the plants that grew on George’s Place.

The thought of George’s Place tipped the scales. It was bad enough if Gabriel’s sheep were devouring what was really
theirs
, but to think of them devouring what was meant to be a memento of George too, the grazing they had voluntarily given up themselves…

“No!” Mopple was looking furious. “They’re not going to have George’s Place!”

And so it was decided that the sheep would defend George’s Place.

Led by Mopple, the flock trotted over to George’s Place. If Mopple the Whale wasn’t afraid, then it couldn’t be so very dangerous.

Once they had reached George’s Place they stood around at first, uncertain what to do. How do you defend a meadow from grazing sheep?

But then Othello showed them how they could form a circle around George’s Place, sheep next to sheep next to sheep, shoulder to shoulder, heads turned toward the strange flock. Othello himself stood in the middle of the circle. From there he could lend a hoof anywhere and help to keep Gabriel’s sheep off.

“Now you just have to keep standing where you are,” said Othello. “If they can’t get past you, they won’t graze George’s Place bare. It’s that simple.”

It did seem surprisingly simple. At first.

When they saw the pale wave of sheep rolling toward them, however, they felt doubtful again. Some of Gabriel’s sheep were already raising their heads and scenting the air in their direction. George’s sheep tried to give a determined impression, without conspicuous success. A strange ram bleated something, then Gabriel’s sheep trotted toward them. “Fodder!” they bleated.

Fodder! George’s sheep looked at each other uncertainly. What did being a meat breed actually mean?

The first of Gabriel’s sheep had reached the ring of defenders and were craning their necks in the direction of George’s Place. What they scented there seemed to convince them. They began forcing their way through George’s sheep as they would have forced their way through a hedge. Mopple bleated indignantly.

Now that they knew where the best grazing was to be found, Gabriel’s sheep kept quiet, as if there was nothing else in the world to say. Inexorable as surging water, they came ruthlessly closer and closer to George’s Place, with their sinister eyes and their blank, sinister faces. But for Othello, George’s sheep wouldn’t have held out for long. It wasn’t just the confused pushing and shoving, it was the stress and strain too.

Suddenly Cordelia uttered an indignant bleat: a young sheep with short legs had managed to push her aside and break through the defenders. Othello immediately came galloping up and, in a single great charge, sent the intruder flying to the other side of George’s Place and out again.

“This isn’t going to work,” he muttered.

George’s sheep were forced to retreat step by step. Mopple alone still stood in his original defensive position like a rock among the breaking surf. He looked in alarm to all sides, where Gabriel’s sheep were succeeding in pushing his own flock farther and farther back. Zora was looking stoical, but her back legs were already among the forbidden herbs. There were just too many of Gabriel’s sheep. Suddenly Othello came up beside Lane.

“Lane, run,” he told her. “Find Melmoth. Bring him here!”

“Find him where?” Lane was a sheep who knew what mattered.

“I don’t know,” snorted Othello irritably. “Anywhere!”

It didn’t sound exactly promising, but Lane was glad she didn’t have to stand around like part of a living hedge anymore. She could run. Lane was the fastest sheep in the flock. Without a word, she pushed her way through Gabriel’s sheep and galloped off. Othello filled the gap she had left in the ring of defenders, moving in between Heather and Miss Maple.

“But how will Melmoth get them away from here?” asked Heather. “He’s not their lead ram. They won’t follow him.”

“No, they won’t follow him,” said Othello. “They’ll run away from him.”

Maple snorted incredulously. Even Heather looked skeptical.

By now Gabriel’s sheep had discovered that it was simpler to stand sideways and lean their whole weight on the defensive ring. George’s sheep groaned.

Then Zora lost patience. She nipped an intruding sheep sharply on its nose. The sheep bleated in alarm. The strange sheep raised their heads, and for a menacing moment nothing at all happened.

Then the pushing and shoving, the pushing back and resistance went on. At least they had had a moment to get their breath back. But the sheep who had been nipped had sounded so hurt that none of George’s sheep felt like trying violence again.

Then—all of a sudden—Gabriel’s sheep stopped shoving. They just stood there, listening to the darkness. Their flanks rose and fell, quivering with strain—or perhaps with something else. All around them, circling ever more closely, a dark body was hunting through the night.

Later, none of the sheep could remember exactly what had happened. It had been a sequence of flight and breathless panting, of crowding together and scattering, of blind excitement and tense expectation. There was never any panic, never a sense that there wasn’t any way out. There was always another step to be taken. Somewhere out there, someone was herding them in a masterly manner.

After a short time—it could only have been a short time, because their breath was coming clear and their hearts thudded only with excitement—all the sheep were back where they belonged: George’s flock in the hay barn, Gabriel’s flock behind their wire fence.

On top of the cliffs, her eyes shining with admiration, stood Lane, the fastest sheep in the flock, looking dreamily into the night.

15

Zora Learns Something About the Grim Reaper

Next morning the sheep trotted out into the meadow early to look at George’s Place by daylight. They were pleased: George’s Place was unharmed, and even the trampled grass around it was beginning to revive. Gabriel’s sheep were back where they belonged behind the fence, and not one of them had ventured through the gap a second time. George’s sheep felt proud of themselves. They waited expectantly for Gabriel to arrive. He’d see what his own sheep had done, and so at last he’d realize what kind of sheep he’d brought here to join them: just a set of useless mouths to feed.

It was quite late by the time Gabriel turned up. Even the bumblebees who didn’t like early morning were out and about, and lizards were basking in the sun on the drystone wall beside the gate. They disappeared like dark lightning when Gabriel finally appeared in the meadow. Beside him walked a man with quick, restless eyes, carrying a black bag. They both stopped in front of the shepherd’s caravan.

“It’d be useful to be able to get in,” said Gabriel. “I could leave my stuff in there. And maybe spend the night now and then.”

“That’s right,” said the man, with a wealth of meaning in his voice, and he blinked his quick-moving eyes, “very useful, that’d be. Interesting too. Let’s have a look.”

The man took several tools out of his bag.

A magpie landed on the roof of the caravan and put its head inquisitively on one side.

The man set to work on the door of George’s caravan with his metal implements. Soon he was sweating. The sheep could feel the heat of the new day too. It wasn’t comfortable, it was the brooding heat before a storm.

After a while the man straightened up again, and wiped the sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. The flies buzzed.

“Sorry,” said the man.

“Meaning?” asked Gabriel.

“Meaning I can’t open it with a couple of tools, just like that. You’ll need plenty of time and a specialist.”

“I thought you were supposed to be a specialist, Eddie.”

“Not with this kind of thing. Yes, I did once learn, but when you only kind of do it on the side, along with the farming…” Eddie shrugged his shoulders.

“What’s the problem?” asked Gabriel.

“The lock’s the problem. A security lock. You don’t just make a second key. You have to call the firm and give a secret code before they’ll tell you how to do it.”

“Ah,” said Gabriel.

“Look, Gabriel. We both know why you want to get in there. Your stuff could go somewhere else. Why not just break the door down, and if it’s wrecked, so what? I mean, it’s ridiculous, fitting a lock like that to a door like this…”

“So I could get in?”

“You could get in, easy.”

“But people would see?”

“People would see.”

“How about the windows?”

“Same thing. Getting in, no problem, but people would see.”

Gabriel nodded. “That’ll have been his idea. We’ll let it alone.”

For a moment the man looked at him blankly. The sheep could feel how much he wanted to get into that caravan. Almost as much as Gabriel himself. Once again they realized how different George had been from all other humans. He hadn’t been interested in anything but his sheep. The rest of the humans weren’t interested in anything but the shepherd’s caravan.

Eddie’s face cleared again.

“Scared, are you? Of them, the drugs mafia. If they can make sure the police don’t search that caravan it must be important to them. So there’s something in it after all…”

“I’m not scared,” said Gabriel. He was lying. Scent trails of fear made their way out into the air even through Gabriel’s woolen jacket, steeped as it was in tobacco smoke from his pipe. “I just don’t want any unnecessary talk. Seems like I’m alone there, though.” He looked sharply at the man.

“A little more talk in the right place might not have hurt,” said Eddie. “The way things are, everyone’s doing whatever occurs to ’em.”

Gabriel looked at the man a little like a lead ram watching a young ram frisking about, almost courteously.

“What d’you think of this, then?” Gabriel put his hand in his pocket and brought out another shiny metal object.

The man whistled through his teeth.

There was a strange expression on Gabriel’s face. For the first time since the sheep had known him, he looked tense.

Eddie noticed.

“You don’t find a thing like that just lying in the road,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

“Fell from heaven,” growled Gabriel.

The man shook his head. “That won’t do, Gabriel. D’you know what’s going on in the village? In the Mad Boar? They sit there drinking and waiting. They talk about anything and everything, they even laugh at O’Malley’s jokes. Only of course they don’t talk about this—this here. They’ve a right to know what’s going on here.”

“Nothing’s going on,” said Gabriel. He looked hard at the man with his blue eyes. “I’m taking good care there’s nothing going on.”

The sheep flapped their ears incredulously. A whole lot had been going on here the night before, and Gabriel had been the last person to do anything about it. They began admitting to themselves that they were disappointed in Gabriel.

The man sighed. “Okay, so it’s the key to a safe. But not a safe you can just get by mail order. A very good one. Expensive. Really expensive, I mean. Maybe it has a combination too. Maybe it needs several keys. But it’s sophisticated, anyway.”

Gabriel nodded, as if he’d known that all along. “About how big would a thing like that be?”

Eddie shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to say. Big as a microwave? Big as a fridge? Don’t depend on size, not as far as I know. The advantage of the big ones is you can’t just carry them off. But you can’t blow up the little ones without blowing up what’s inside too. All depends what you want it to do.”

He was looking curiously at Gabriel. Gabriel just looked indifferently at his sheep, as if he’d known that all the time himself.

“Thanks,” he said. “There you go, then.”

But Eddie wasn’t to be so easily shaken off. “It’s nearly noon,” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll just eat my lunch here.”

“As you like,” said Gabriel absentmindedly. He had spotted the gap in the wire fence now, and he began looking for another piece of wire netting and a fence post under the shepherd’s caravan.

“You’re lucky they didn’t run off,” said Eddie.

“Well trained,” said Gabriel.

“You know how to handle
animals
, I have to give you that.”

The sheep were indignant. Well trained! But for a small miracle, Gabriel might now be searching all the vegetable gardens of Glennkill for his wonderful sheep. It was only thanks to Melmoth that they were still behind that wire fence and dared not come out.

While Gabriel repaired the fence, his sheep cast greedy glances at George’s Place.

“They’re hungry,” said Eddie, with his mouth full.

Gabriel nodded with a touch of pride. “Yes, they eat a lot, but they’re good doers on it. You have to fatten ’em up.”

Gabriel marched over to the little toolshed behind the shepherd’s caravan and rummaged about in it. When he came out again he had a scythe in his hand.

George’s scythe. The sheep knew that curious tool made of wood and metal, but they didn’t know what it was for. “People who keep sheep can spare themselves the use of a scythe,” George always used to say as he polished up the blade with a red and white rag. Only out of conscientiousness.

Gabriel did not spare himself the use of the scythe. He did not spare
them
the use of the scythe. He began grazing at the foot of the hill, on the side facing away from the sea.

The sheep fell silent. This was the first time they had seen a human out at pasture, grazing. It was a terrible sight. In Gabriel’s hand, the strange implement turned into a gigantic iron claw that passed through the grass with a hostile singsong note. Strange noises hissed over the meadow, like the sound of sharp-beaked birds flying low. Wherever the scythe had passed grass blades lay flat on the ground, offering no resistance. Gabriel was grazing, but at the same time he didn’t want the grass. It was a picture of senseless destruction. The good smell that rose from the dead grass made things even worse.

The sheep felt cold in spite of the summer sun. Mopple began trembling slightly, somewhere between indignation and horror.

Apart from the wicked swish of the scythe there wasn’t a sound to be heard. Gabriel’s sheep themselves had stopped bleating “Fodder!” and were watching Gabriel with hunger in their pale eyes.

“Why don’t you go for to reap that bit?” asked the man. “The grass stands much higher over there.” He pointed to George’s Place.

The sheep held their breath.

“Better not,” said Gabriel. “If the others don’t graze it, could be there’s some kind of poison in the soil. All I need is for my sheep to die off now, just when they’re nicely fattened up.”

“You certainly know your way around animals,” said the man. “Better than I know mine around locks.” Gabriel gave him a black look.

A point came when Gabriel the grim reaper was satisfied with his work of destruction. He stuck a single long grass blade between his teeth where he usually put his pipe, and strolled over to the shepherd’s caravan to fetch the wheelbarrow. Eddie was sitting on the caravan steps. He had finished his sandwiches long ago. Gabriel took no notice of him. He wheeled the grass over to his sheep and threw it over the fence to them. The sheep had struck up their bleating of “Fodder!” once again, and they bleated until the last of them had their noses stuck in the dead grass.

Then calm descended. Gabriel went back to the caravan, where Eddie was still sitting on the steps. They looked at each other long and hard.

“So you’re just planning to wait for that will to be opened on Sunday?” asked Eddie.

Gabriel nodded. Eddie abruptly stood up, took hold of his bag, and marched off in the direction of the village.

It took the sheep some time to get over their experience with the scythe. No one still claimed that Gabriel was a good shepherd.

“He’s not a shepherd at all,” said Heather. “We ought just to ignore him. He doesn’t look at us either.”

A good plan. Soon afterward the rear ends of several sheep were turned toward the shepherd’s caravan. They had decided to graze straight past Gabriel, demonstratively showing their contempt. George would have been indignant, but Gabriel didn’t even seem to notice. However, one of Gabriel’s sheep was watching them with interest. It was the powerful ram that Zora had seen before. He had stopped stuffing himself with the mown grass, and was looking hard at George’s sheep.

Zora was the first to notice him. She had made up her mind never to speak to Gabriel’s sheep again. She had come to that decision for the first time after her failure to strike up a conversation, and for the second time last night, when Gabriel’s sheep had swarmed all over their meadow like pale caterpillars. But this one ram interested her. He was older than the others and more intelligent, or so it seemed to Zora. Besides, she could scent an abyss somewhere between his pale eyes. She began grazing in his direction as unobtrusively as possible. She grazed past him once, then a second time. His eyes followed her, but nothing else happened. Zora decided to have a third try, closer to the wire fence.

This time she succeeded.

“Fodder,” said the ram. “Death.” He had a beautiful voice, gentle and melodious, which didn’t suit his short-legged, sturdy body. It was the voice of a very elegant sheep.

“Yes,” said Zora sympathetically. “Your grass is dead. He cut it down. With a scythe.”

The ram shook his head. “We are fodder. He is death. Run away!”

“Gabriel?” she asked. “He’s death? Nonsense, he’s a shepherd. If not a very good one.”

The ram shook his head again.

“We are meat,” he said.

Zora gave him a funny look. Something in her began to tremble. The abyss was there, somewhere in front of her, but she couldn’t see it yet. She could only scent it.

“Meat is fodder,” the ram went on.

Zora shook her head. “Grass is fodder,” she said.

In frustration, the ram banged his hornless head against the wire fence. A metallic sound rang out across the meadow. Gabriel glanced at them briefly.

“Grass is death,” said the ram, with emphasis. “Grass
brings
death.” He looked at Zora almost pleadingly. Zora wondered whether the ram was simply round the bend. She had never heard a sheep mention meat before. She was about to turn away and give up Gabriel’s sheep for good as a hopeless case when two little words came drifting up to her out of the abyss. Meat breed, thought Zora.

The air was suddenly very oppressive. Zora uneasily breathed in the heat of the approaching storm. The ram looked at his own flock, still mindlessly feeding their faces with the mown grass.

“They eat. They get fat. They die,” said the ram. “And I…” He lowered his head and said no more. Zora braced her hooves against the ground like a mountain sheep, to help her cope with the scraps of words whirling up to her from the abyss. Mopple, she thought, they get fat, a meat breed…under the knife …good doers…nicely fattened up. Suddenly the mists parted, and Zora could see the abyss gaping before her. It was the deepest abyss of her life.

The strange ram was looking at her expectantly. He could tell from Zora’s wide eyes that she had understood, and he looked relieved.

“Run away!” he repeated.

“Why don’t you warn
them
?” asked Zora, trembling. “Why don’t
you
run away? Yesterday, for instance—instead of attacking George’s Place?” As soon as she had said that she regretted it. The ram looked sadder than she had ever seen a sheep look before.

“Fear,” he said. “Fences and fear. Fences made of fear. They’re young, they don’t understand, they’re meant not to see it. The mother ewes forget. Every year. They
want
to forget. His fences are high. His dogs are fast.” He was looking across the meadow at Gabriel with an empty expression in his eyes.