Urn Burial

by Robert Westall

Genres: Young Adult; YA Science Fiction

Synopsis

Life is simple where Ralph lives, up in the Pennines. It's peaceful. Ordinary.

Until one day, when out with the sheep, he finds something strange, too strange to be from Earth.

The alien grave holds secrets of the past, but also draws Ralph into the middle of an epic war between two alien races, taking place among the stars above his head. Has he thrown his planet into a battle it can't possibly fight? This war has raged for centuries, but perhaps Ralph could hold the key to ending it once and for all.

Release date: January 1, 1988

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Ralph finished storing his gear in the top-box of the scrambler-bike. A jar of Stockholm tar, a bottle of cold tea, butties wrapped up tight in his anorak to keep the tar smell out of them.

The sheepdogs were waiting, keeping their eye in, herding the free-range hens round the farmyard and up the outside stair of the barn, from which they flew down squawking in a cloud of feathers; which sent the collies into their loll-tongued grins.

The scrambler started third kick; first crisis of the day over. Ralph distrusted, hated, all machinery. But he had to use the scrambler. The trip up Fiend’s Fell took too long on foot. He turned out of the farmyard, skidded on the pool of cow-dung at the corner, and shot up on to the green-road.

The green-road zigzagged up the fell between black stone walls, lined with last year’s bracken, high and brown. This year’s bracken, so green and new you wanted to eat it, was just curling through to take possession.

Ralph’s heart lifted. It was good to be up and away on the fell. But the turf of the green-road was slashed and rutted by the other shepherds’ scramblers, and the explosions of his own engine blatted back from the black stone walls, spoiling the peace. Everything was getting spoilt these days. He looked down on the village, tight huddle of grey houses that had stood so right for so long. But spoilt by those shiny metal barns and silos; the straggle of new red-brick bungalows leading nowhere. What did rich folk want to live in the country for?

But it was great to climb up into the quiet; with the dogs racing alongside, or taking short-cuts over the walls to keep up.

A mile on, he parked, put on his anorak, sandwiches in one pocket, tea and tar in the other. The top of Fiend’s Fell was too much even for scramblers. Steep as a house roof, covered with tussocks of dead, blond grass bigger than pop-stars’ haircuts; veined through with black burns deep as trenches and treacherously concealed by overhanging tussocks. It was hard enough to keep your feet walking; sliding and panting. The only thing that moved fast on Fiend’s Fell were the scatters of dirty sheep fleeing upwards before him. And the sheepdogs, tiny and black with a ruff of white at the throat, flying up like birds, not attacking the sheep but instinctively cutting them into flocks, moving them here and there from habit. Sheepdogs were like policemen, never off duty. He whistled them to heel; otherwise they’d run themselves too hot, then lie down in a burn to cool off and give themselves colic.

He kept to the wire fence, drawn like a pencil line up the fell. The sheep grazed more heavily there; shepherds walked there; the going was easier; it avoided the precipitous black burns.

But it was also depressing. Unlike stone walls, the fences gave the sheep no shelter in winter blizzards. The sheep drifted downwind, until the fences stopped them, caught in the open, and there they died. There was always a scatter of skulls along the fence; sodden, yellow fleeces laid out like hearthrugs with the bones delicately scattered on top where the carrion crows had left them. Often, a small scatter lay tangled in the big scatter, where a lamb had died with its mother.

It pained Ralph. The lowland sheep, the fat white-faced Cheviots, were cosseted in barns for the lambing, fed from hay bales in the bitter weather. The fell-sheep, the black-faced Herdwicks, were left all year to live or die. Visited annually, in August, to be counted and sheared, branded and dipped. That’s what he was doing now, early in July, getting ready for the shearing. Counting the corpses, the survivors, the number of well-grown lambs, twins.

That and his own particular brand of mercy, the Stockholm tar. The sheep got whicked, see? Cut themselves on the barbed wire, or leaping wildly over stone walls in one of their sudden inexplicable panics. Then the blowflies laid their eggs in the open wounds, and the foul white grubs hatched out and began to eat the sheep alive.

He spotted their first victim, running well behind its group with a humping, rocking-horse gait, the raw red patch on its rump clearly visible in the sunlight. He sent off the dogs, Jet to the left, Nance to the right, cutting their wide circles across the tussocks, coming in from behind, penning the whole group into a corner where the fence met an old black wall.

‘Coom by. Jet! Coom by, Nance!’ But he was just making noises. The dogs, veterans, knew what he wanted better than he did himself. Soon, there was stillness. The sheep huddled together, staring at him hostile with their strange, oblong, yellow eyes. The dogs lay staring at the sheep, tongues lolling, edging forwards on their bellies inch by inch. Keeping the sheep just scared enough to be still; not scared enough to try a wild leap over the wall.

‘Laydoon, Jet!’ ‘Laydoon, Nance!’ He waded among the dense-packed woolly bodies that shifted uneasily; felt their sharp feet through the leather of his boots. Grabbed the victim, clenched her backwards between his knees, and reached out the Stockholm tar. It glugged, black and oily, into the red wound as big as a man’s hand, and soon the evil maggots swam upwards, drowning as they died. The victim would live; the maggots hadn’t reached a vital part, spine or bowel. She glared up at him with eyes that comprehended nothing but terror. He let her go, checked the rest, called off the dogs. The little flock went off like a rocket.

‘I am the good shepherd,’ he thought wryly. ‘I know my sheep and am known of them.’ He never heard that reading, sitting beside Mam in chapel, without smiling. Sheep must have been a lot brighter in Jesus’ time. To these sheep he was just one more terrifying monster in their terror-stricken lives. Why? Cows came to him, pigs were friendly, even the lowland Cheviots. He knew so little of these sheep’s lives. Fifty-one weeks in the year they were up here alone, in the snow and wind and rain. What went on, to make them so frightened? The top of Fiend’s Fell was a lonely place, always had been. Take away the man-made fence, it might be a hundred years ago, a thousand. If he himself fell into the black gully of an overhung burn, broke his leg, would anybody ever find him? Or would his bones lie, picked white as the sheep’s, till they rotted away in the beer-brown water?

He glanced around; he had dipped into a bowl of the land. All round stretched the brown swell of the fell. Apart from the fence, not a work of man in sight. He shuddered, despite the July sun.

Don’t be daft; the dogs would bring help; the dogs would find him. He called them to him, looked into their warm, brown eyes, played with their floppy, velvet ears. At least he knew his sheepdogs and was known of them.

Get on; it’s nearly lunch-time.

He ate it sitting against the cairn that marked the top of Fiend’s Fell. The dogs, as usual, coaxed half his sandwiches out of him. Spam, cheese, pickle, they loved them all. Nosed the greaseproof paper carefully to make sure of the last crumb, then went off hunting something live for the rest of their dinner. Never still, sheepdogs. He could see their feathery, black tails waving out of some shallow burn. They moved towards each other from opposite ends, hoping to trap something tasty and stupid between them.

Overfull, he drowsed, surveying the sunlit fell through half-closed eyes. Why Fiend’s Fell? Local people didn’t call it that; just ‘the fell’. But on the Ordnance Survey map at school he’d found it quite clearly named. When he asked, people just shrugged and said it was some daft idea of people in London, who’d nothing better to do …

Then he felt the change come. A gentle pressing against one side of his face that wasn’t wind, but a new, faint, warm dampness. He knew, even though the sky was still blue, that it’d be raining before four. Heavy, maybe thunder. No fun, on the open fell in a thunderstorm. Last time, the only dry spot on him had been a two-inch patch under his belt. He’d dripped a pool in Mam’s kitchen four feet wide. No shelter up on the fell, see? None at all.

Suddenly urgent, he got up to get on.

It was then he noticed some stones had fallen off the top of the cairn and were lying in the heather.

Nobody knew who’d made the cairns. They’d always been there, ten-foot pyramids of stones as big as your head. Some said the old stone-wallers had built them. Some said they were older than the stone-wallers. Some said that in the dim and distant, every shepherd starting out from the valley had brought a stone up with him, and the cairns were built that way. Certainly there were no other loose stones around for miles.

The one certainty was that if you were a shepherd you didn’t let the cairns fall down. After a sudden freak blizzard, they were the only familiar things in a totally changed landscape. They looked after cairns, shepherds.

He picked up the first fallen stone, and leaned over to put it back.

Funny; there was a piece of metal sticking up, like the tip of a bricklayer’s trowel set upright. It had corroded into white spots, the way aluminium does. Idly, he tried to pull it out, but it stuck fast. And it wasn’t a bricklayer’s trowel; too slim and pointed. Intrigued, he pulled out two more stones. But the thing still wouldn’t budge. He could tell from the way it moved, grated against the stones, that there was a lot more of it, down inside. He pulled away more stones, laying them down careful and handy: wouldn’t take long to rebuild the cairn …

After ten minutes he’d revealed two more feet of yellowish metal; a long pointed blade, with a thin tapered shaft below. Was it an ancient spear? But knights had used iron spears, which would’ve rusted. And he remembered from school the Romans used bronze. And it was definitely fixed, to something deep inside. He looked in distress at the topless cairn, at the stones now scattered in all directions. He looked at his watch; his lunch-hour had run out. And the rain was coming …

But he couldn’t bear not to know now. Oh, well … he could work late … get wet.

After another half an hour, four feet of spear was showing, immovable as ever. Except … it definitely wasn’t a spear … too whippy, modern. Not a metal he’d ever seen before. Too yellow for aluminium, too pale for brass. And the lower shaft, where it had been protected from the weather by the cairn, glistened strangely. He thought of the wireless-aerial of a tank …

The dogs, aware their usual routine had been broken, had come back from their search for lunch and were lying watching, heads cocked. He felt guilty about his boss; he felt guilty about the cairn. But he had to know. Maybe it was something for the Ministry of Defence, like the big radio-towers over towards Middleton-in-Teesdale way. But then, why hide it? Was it the Russians? He attacked the cairn with renewed vigour, appalled at his own powers of destruction.

Finally his hand, delving round another stone, touched something smooth and cool and rounded. He pulled away the stone and saw something a bit like a car windscreen. Darkness inside, and something inside the darkness. Now he was throwing away stones any old how, making the dogs back away to safety.

He cleared a foot of windscreen, and saw something metallic and complicated inside; lying on … a fur rug? He cleared more stones; saw more of the metallic thing, more fur rug. Under a glass dome; well, more like Perspex, and shaped like a cigar. Was it the Russians? His belly crept …

He snatched away one more stone; half the side of the cairn collapsed.

Then he realized it wasn’t just a fur rug in there. Under the rug … was the shape … of a leg … and a shoulder. Still half-hidden, a bump that must be . . a head.

Quite still, under the glass.

A coffin.

He leapt back. Staring at the wild, spreading destruction of the cairn, he knew he had done a dreadful thing. He stared around fearfully, expecting punishment. But no punishment came, and he felt terribly alone. He looked at the dogs, but they just looked back, puzzled why he didn’t get back to work. He felt even more alone. Then he decided, if he put all the stones back very, very carefully, under that indifferent blue sky, no one would ever know and he would not be punished.

That was best.

But when he went back (careful not to look at the man wrapped inside the striped fur rug) he noticed that the coffin was in two halves, a top and a bottom. Hinged together. And at the side were three things a bit like the locks on a suitcase. Funny-shaped and far too thin, of the same yellowish metal; but he thought he could see how they worked.

One peep? Surely that wouldn’t do any harm? He wrestled with his conscience; began to replace the stones.

Then undid the locks with a rush: one, two, three. They snapped back, making the coffin resound like a drum. He raised the lid a fraction.

There was no smell of foulness, like what lingered inside the sheep’s skulls lying by the wire. A gentle smell, like the ointment Mam used to put on his knee when he grazed it. A safe smell. It gave him the courage to lift the lid, tip it back.

The snarling behind brought him out in a cold sweat.

But it was only the dogs, backing away, bellies pressed to the ground, ears flat to their skulls and the skin of their lips puckered up showing long teeth, brown at the roots. The hair on their backs was standing up in arched ridges, and their tails were bushed-up and looked enormous. And always they retreated further and further. That scared him badly; made him stop, and stand a long while motionless in the sunlight. But his nosiness was too strong. In the end, he shrugged … the dogs would get over it …

He turned back to the coffin, still reassured by the safe smell. Who was it, wrapped in the fur rug … if he pulled it away a little …

But as soon as he touched it, he realized it wasn’t a man wrapped in a fur rug. It was only a striped, furry animal buried there. He laughed to himself a little; he’d seen plenty of dead animals …

But what animal? Six feet long, curled up on its side. A big cat. Like a tiger, only the stripes were fainter and narrower, brown. Too slim for a tiger. A cheetah? … that kind of frailty and gentleness. No, too big for a cheetah. And the forepaws long and delicate, like human hands. And the hind-legs made up half the length of the whole body.

He got in close and peered at the dead face. The closed eyes had been huge, but the closed mouth quite small, less frightening than a dog’s. He touched the shoulder. The fur was soft, dense, fine. The muscles were soft and supple, but intensely cold.

Then he saw the belt it was wearing, woven from the yellow metal. And the circular medallion hung round its neck. And he somehow knew it had walked upright like a man. And thought like a man. And it had never walked this earth …

Well, not born here …

Somehow he had done a dreadful thing. He just stood and shook and watched his dogs, tiny black spots now, turn on their heels and run away over the rim of the fell, heading for home.

The dogs knew he had done a dreadful thing.

He looked up at the blue sky. The blue sky looked back, indifferent. Were they up there somewhere, hidden behind the sun? Watching? Would they come? Punish?

He might have stood there shaking for ever, if his eye hadn’t lit on the top of the spear, still standing upright from the coffin. He saw it with great clarity, against the blue sky; the marks of corrosion on it. It had been there a long, long time. The grave was old, old. As old as the cairn, which his grandfather had sat on as a boy. Whoever they’d been, they were gone, light-years across space.

He relaxed; his sin was his own. He could undo it, when he put back the cairn. . .