All Fall Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

young man with the weeping sore in the corner of his mouth and the restless eyes that wouldn’t settle on any of us. “I walked through the houses of the dying, stepping over the corpses of the dead in the street. I passed through the stinking air of the sickness, and I walked out the other side unharmed. And all I had was this!” And he shook a silken pouch stuffed with rosemary and lavender. “Worn by the skin,” he said. “Closer than a lover, and surer on a winter’s night.”
    The silence that followed this was so thick you could lift it with a spoon.
    â€œAnd you survived?” said Emma Baker.
    â€œAnd I survived.”
    The most important question is the one we ask every traveller.
    â€œOnce you have it – once you’ve caught it – can it be cured?”
    And the answer is always the same.
    â€œNothing cures it. Once you have it, you die.”
    And now it’s here, in the house where my brother lives.
    And the monks are coming from that house to walk barefoot through Ingleforn, leading us all to pray for the sickness to pass us by. They look so calm and holy, but the sickness clings to their hands and to their eyes and to the underside of their robes. Every time they come, they bring death closer.
    And I’ve promised Geoffrey not to tell.

8. Bone Fire
    Â 
    Â 
    O n St John’s Eve, we have the bone fire on the green and the Midsummer revels as usual. All the village gathers around the bone fire and we walk around it in solemn procession, holding hands and chanting the Midsummer rhyme.
    â€œGreen is gold.
    Fire is wet.
    Fortune’s told.
    Dragon’s met.”
    The rhyme is a riddle that can only be answered at St John’s Eve, when the first green leaves are still curled in golden buds, when the water is alight with little wishing-candle-boats, when fortunes are told and St George does battle with the dragon. The answer is Midsummer Eve, of course!
    After the chant, the revels begin. At Great Riding, they have a different mummer’s play each year, but in Ingleforn we always do St George and the Dragon. Will Thatcher is St George, on Gilbert Reeve’s black horse, and Edward Miller stands behind the stocks and is the voice of the Red Dragon.
    â€œI am the Dragon. Here are my claws! I am the Dragon. Here are my jaws!” he calls, and all the children shiver and stare. The Red Dragon itself is the same glorious red and gold kite as it always is, flown by Robin and another boy from the village. Last year my brother Richard’s wife, Joan, was the Princess, but this year she’s too heavy with the baby that’s coming, so Alice’s little sister Maude plays her instead.
    Will Thatcher is shy as St George – he stutters his lines and blushes when he has to rescue Maude from the Dragon. But when he draws his sword to fight the Dragon, he looks like a real knight from a stained-glass picture window. The Dragon-kite swoops from side to side in the sky, until St George subdues it by waving his sword around and ties a bit of silk around the kite string, to show that the Dragon is now defeated. He and Maude lead the kite by its leash, like a dog, while the audience cheers. But then the silk slips, and the Dragon escapes, and Robin and the other boy roar and bellow and swoop the Dragon-kite up and down to show the Dragon’s anger. Two little girls run across the stage trailing a length of red silk to show the Dragon’s flames. Will Thatcher collapses in a heap with something like relief, but Maude rolls about and moans most convincingly.
    When everyone is dead, Gilbert Reeve saunters in as the Doctor.
    â€œI am the Doctor, and I cure all ills.
    Just gulp my potions and swallow my pills.
    I can cure the itch, the stitch,
    The pox, the palsy, and the gout.
    All pains within, all pains without.”
    He gives a pill to St George and the Princess, who jump back up on to their feet. He gives another pill to the