“Tim? This is Stormchild, over.” The handheld radio suddenly squawked in my oilskin’s pocket.
“David? This is Tim, over.”
“Tim. I’ve just seen one green-dressed fellow run to the hills behind the house. He seemed to be carrying a weapon.” David’s voice sounded ominous, as though the violence he feared had already started. “Do you hear me, over?”
“I hear you,” I told him, “and I’ll go gently.”
“Remember our agreement! We’re withdrawing if there’s trouble!”
“Perhaps the fellow has just gone duck hunting,” I said, then put the radio back in my pocket and smiled at the two bearded men who had edged close to eavesdrop on my conversation. “Where’s Nicole?” I asked them.
“Go away!”
Ignoring the monotonous order, I trudged through the muddy soil toward the northern wing of the house. I noticed that all the ground floor windows were protected with the stout iron bars, and the thought occurred to me that this would not be an easy building to break into.
I turned to follow the northern wing where it bent back toward the encircling hills. The single-storied extension was windowless, though here and there, and looking menacingly like loopholes, apertures had been crudely hacked through the limestone blocks. I peered through one such aperture, but could see nothing but darkness inside. My two bearded companions followed a dozen paces behind me, but no longer tried to stop me from exploring the settlement. I walked past rows of carrots, some small bean plants, potatoes, and a wilting patch of red beets. The gardens stretched to the very edge of the escarpment, which formed the near slope of the semicircle of hills toward which David had seen the gunman run.
I walked to the rear of the buildings and saw that the long house and its two wings did indeed form three sides of an open courtyard. I took out the radio and pressed my transmission button. “David? There’s a courtyard behind the house. I’m going to have a shufti. I can’t see your gunman, so I assume he’s holed up on the ridge line. No one will talk to me and the house is locked, so I don’t know whether Nicole is here or not. We’ll probably lose radio contact when I’m in the courtyard, but if I’m not on the air within fifteen minutes then you’d better break out the guns and all of you should come and look for me. Out.” I thought it would do no harm if my unfriendly guardians got the impression that Stormchild was crammed with armed men ready to turn their dung-ridden paradise into a killing ground.
I moved into the bare, dank courtyard. Nothing grew in that depressing space, not even a blade of grass. There was a child’s sandpit in one corner, which held some very old and faded plastic toy buckets and spades. Near the damp sandpit were a rusting iron swing, a wooden rocking horse, a doll without its head, and a heap of broken, rusting lobster traps. A cat hissed at me from the roof of one of the two low wings of the house.
From within the yard the two wings of the house looked like rows of stables, each with a Dutch door. In one of the stable compartments were two huge vats and a stench so vile that the homemade manure smelled sweet by comparison. There were bundles of otter pelts hanging on hooks above the vats, and I assumed that this was the settlement’s tannery. But a tannery? Why would environmentalists be skinning sea otters?
“You must go away.” The man with the black beard was clearly becoming ever more uncomfortable with my brazen snooping.
“Where’s Nicole?” I asked him cheerfully and, as before, received no reply. “Is Caspar here?” I asked instead, but with the same result.
I walked to the back door of the house, which, not surprisingly, was locked as firmly as the front entrance. I peered through a barred window to see a kitchen equipped with an ancient wood-fired stove. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling beams. I walked on to the next window and saw racks of guns that looked like assault rifles. Some of the spaces in the wooden racks were ominously empty.
I strolled past a vast and disorganized woodpile, evidence of the community’s reliance on timber for their heating and cooking. I heard a child cry inside the house, the first sign that people other than my bearded followers were present at the settlement, but when I shouted a greeting through one of the dusty windows, no one answered.
I explored the southern wing. Hens lived in two of the stablelike rooms, but otherwise I saw nothing alive except the vituperative cat that spat at me from the corrugated, rust-streaked roof. At the corner of the building I stopped to stare at the crest of the escarpment where the radio mast was built, but I could not see the gunman David had spotted, and whom I assumed must now be hidden among the tangle of rocks that crowned the ridge. Just to the north of the radio mast was an earth-faced dam, which suggested a reservoir had been created in a saddle of the escarpment, presumably to control the flow of water from the hills to the settlement’s vegetable gardens.
I walked to the building’s southern flank and there I stopped in astonishment. A dozen young people were struggling toward the settlement with a big handcart that was stacked high with freshly cut logs. The clumsy cart was being maneuvered along a muddy path by a disconsolate group of women and children who all wore drab and uniformlike gray overalls. The work party was escorted by two bearded men, who, like the two guardians who still dogged my every footstep, wore green trousers and jerkins.
The woodcutting group, who were still a hundred paces from the buildings, saw me and froze. One of the women gaped in such abject terror that I thought she would faint.
I walked toward them. The man with the black beard tried to call me back, while the small children clung in terror to their mother’s gray trousers. I could not see Nicole among the women, who all looked lank, unhappy, pale, and ill-fed. One of the frightened children began wailing.
“Hello!” I called aloud. “It’s all right! I’m a friend!”
“Go away!” One of the green-dressed men seized an ax from the stalled woodcart and started toward me. “Go away!”
I stopped some fifty paces from the big cart. “My name is Tim Blackburn,” I shouted, “and I’ve come here to find my daughter, Nicole. Do any of you know where I can find her?”
None of the group answered. The gray-uniformed women huddled together and seemed to shiver with a collective fear of my appearance. They looked to me like zombies, and I recalled Jackie’s assertion how Utopian communities were very often based on one man’s idealism, which, to preserve itself, degraded into a fascist system of discipline. These people, the zombies in gray and their bearded guards in green, seemed evidence that von Rellsteb’s community was an example of that sad fate. The axman, who had a ginger beard, walked confidently toward me as though he planned to split my skull open. “Is Caspar von Rellsteb here?” I asked him.
“You’ve got to go.” The axman, like the black-bearded man, had an American accent.
“Where’s Nicole Blackburn?” I asked him patiently.
“Go away!”
“I’m fed up with all of you,” I said dismissively, and tried to walk toward the frightened women. The ginger-bearded man immediately swung his ax at me. His swing was wildly violent and came nowhere close to me. Instead the energy of the blow unbalanced my attacker so that he tottered helplessly backward. I took two quick steps toward him and brought the toe of my right sea boot hard up into his groin.
His breath whooshed out, his eyes opened wide, the ax dropped into the mud, then he followed it with a sudden scream of pure agony. The other bearded men looked as terrified as the women and children.