The Power of Five Oblivion

before, when I was eight, travelling down the river on a houseboat pulled by a black-and-white cross-shire horse. That makes him sound like some sort of gypsy, and he might well have been, but there was something more to him that he always kept concealed. He was about forty with dark, intelligent eyes that refused to meet your own and he had a habit of never being quite where you expected him to be. In many ways he reminded me of an actor. I had seen pictures of performers in the time of Shakespeare and he had that same look, the same confidence. He had the right voice for it too. When he spoke, you wanted to listen.
    There were some who said he’d been in government, others said the army or the air force, but nobody knew for sure. He had come down the river on that houseboat of his – Lady Jane was its name – and of course he had been pulled out and arrested the moment he showed his face. Half the village wanted to expel him and the other half weren’t a great deal more welcoming. There were plenty who would have liked to have strung him up from a tree in case he told anyone about us, how many of us there were, how many supplies we had. But the Traveller had used that voice of his to talk his way out of trouble. He had talked to the whole village and after that they had put it to the vote and decided to take him in.
    How had he done it? Well, first of all there were all the supplies on the boat – the food and the medicine which he could have hidden upriver but which he chose instead to share. He even had a dozen bottles of whisky, which made him a lot of friends. And then there was his horse, which was put to work for a while but which quickly ended up providing fresh meat for most of the population. I don’t like horse myself. It’s tough and chewy and has a nasty smell – but after an almost non-stop diet of vegetables and herbs, anything with a bone in it is to be welcomed. The Traveller gave the village everything he had except his name. That he kept to himself. He moored his boat about a quarter of a mile down the river and lived there on his own. He never came to Assemblies. On the other hand, he was a good craftsman and helped mend the roofs that had been damaged in the storms of the winter before. Almost single-handedly, he rebuilt the wall at the bottom of the pig field. It had been in a state of collapse for years. People still didn’t trust him completely, but he kept himself to himself and made no enemies and so they let him stay.
    But what he had done now was against all the rules. He had been inside the church during a meeting of the Council and if eavesdropping wasn’t bad enough, he had actually made himself known, joining in the discussion, giving his opinion where it wasn’t wanted. And he was still at it, moving forward in that dark way of his, passing me and facing the Council members but at the same time examining Jamie Tyler out of the corner of his eye and smiling to himself, as if he’d been waiting to meet him and had come here expressly for that purpose.
    “This is a disgrace,” Sir Ian exclaimed in the sort of tone he might once have used in court. “Traveller, you have absolutely no right to be here…”
    “He was spying on us!” Dolan said. Spying. Suddenly it was everyone’s favourite word.
    “And we did not ask for your opinion,” Sir Ian went on.
    “But you’re going to get it anyway.”
    Reade and Dolan were already moving towards the Traveller with violence in their eyes. I had no doubt that they were going to grab hold of him and throw him out of the church – perhaps into prison too. There was a pit in the garage that was used for exactly that purpose, a square hole covered in wire mesh. It hadn’t been used since Jack Hawes, the undertaker, had attacked his neighbour in a dispute over cabbages. He had been sent there for six weeks but he had been let out after three because Mrs Draper had suddenly died and nobody else could be bothered to dig her grave.
    “Wait a minute!” Mr Flint had got to his feet and put himself between the three men. He was a small, neat man with wavy grey hair and if a fight had broken out he would have been squashed in an instant. But a fight was exactly what he was trying to avoid. “The Traveller is here,” he said. “The damage is done. We might as well hear what he’s got to say.”
    Reade and Dolan looked ugly – not difficult for them – but all eyes turned back to Sir Ian, awaiting his decision. Meanwhile, I