Read Online The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online Page A

punctuated by chests of drawers, and three blue cots with transfers of bunnies on the woodwork. With two huge old Victorian wardrobes at either end, the furniture left precious little floor space. The effect was more like a dorm in Fifth-Form Ballet or Martian at St. Monica’s than anything else.
    Pibble prowled around. The farthest wall was a partition behind which was a double bathroom and three lavatory cubicles. There were dirty clothes in a container, but no bloodstains. Nothing hidden, either. He came back into the main room.
    â€œWhich is your bed, Leah?”
    â€œThis by the door. Before I sleep, I move it across, so that none can open the door.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œIt is the custom. The men’s hut must be tabu to the women, and the women’s to the men, lest either defile the other.”
    â€œBut would anyone want to?”
    â€œBy accident, perhaps. We have thought it best to keep what customs we can, so that the Kus remain one together. Without our customs we are lost, we are nothing.”
    â€œI thought I saw two of you learning to read.”
    â€œYou saw that. It is not good if our children have skills that we lack. Moreover, if we are to stay in this land, it is foolish not to read. Moreover, the Reverend Mackenzie would have wished it.”
    â€œAre the men learning as well?”
    â€œThey are unwilling—they hold more strongly to the customs than the women. We will keep a custom if it agrees with our comfort of living, but the men try to make their lives agree with the customs. They dream of the village, and the days when they were wild Kus in the jungle.”
    â€œThere are more beds than women, I think.”
    â€œThe children sleep with us—the girls always, the boys until their balls drop and they are ripe to go to the men.”
    â€œDid Aaron want to go back to the village?”
    â€œHalf of him wished to go. Half of him wished to stay, because Eve wished it.”
    â€œAre you sure of that, if the women and men keep apart so much?”
    â€œAaron was my husband.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œIt is nothing. He is with God. Will you search now?”
    It did not take long. All the drawers and cupboards contained clothes. Somebody had an unusual liking for a shade of electric violet. The ritual objects were all together in one drawer—intricately patterned gourds, ultra-chunky necklaces of polished wood and shells, flute-like pipes, and pots of brilliant pigment (make-up for feast days, Leah said). No one seemed to have any possessions of his own except the children, by each of whose beds was a box with two or three toys in it. There was a shelf of battered children’s books, too, and a Bible by every bed. The effect on Pibble was of small lives lived bleakly.
    â€œDo you spend all your time here?”
    â€œWe sleep and pray here, and those who are unclean stay here for the days of their uncleanness. Most of our life we live in the women’s kitchen, or in the senior common room.”
    Pibble did the double take Graham had hankered for. This black beldame spoke an English as precise as any High Table could desire, but if. . .
    â€œI think it is a joke of Eve’s,” said Leah. “What you would call the nursery we call the junior common room. It is difficult to know with Eve. He is not like the rest of us.”
    â€œNo, no, of course not. Do the men use the senior common room as much as the women?”
    â€œWhen there is television, they come, but at other times they stay in the men’s hut. And they come for feast days, naturally.”
    â€œAh. Um. Thank you, Leah. I’d better ask Melchizedek to let me see the men’s hut now, I suppose.”
    Something had happened in Eve’s room. The impassive school-photo groups had lost their poise and become a mob, a silent race riot, clustered around Paul’s desk. Not quite silent—little grunts and breathings came from them as