The Merlin Conspiracy
The Merlin Conspiracy
Diana Wynne Jones
A bestselling fantasy adventure from Diana Wynne Jones. The companion novel to the novel Deep Secret.The story is narrated by two very different teenagers, who each inhabit two extraordinarily different worlds.Arianrhod Hyde's world (or Roddy, as she prefers to be called) is very much the world of magic, pageantry and ritual. Not unlike Britain in King Arthur's Day, Roddy is daughter of two Court Wizards and therefore part of the King's Progress, travelling round the Islands of Blest and ready to take part in whatever ritual or ceremony is required, as it occurs. Presiding over all, the most important person is the Merlin, who is entrusted with the magical health of the Isles of Blest.Nick Mallory's world is much more familiar – at least, it starts off being our own. But it soon transpires that Nick's not quite the ordinary 15 year old he seems, as he slips sideways into something he thinks is a dream – but in fact is another world entirely. Now, Nick's been on other worlds before (although never alone) but he's a confident type. Maybe a bit too confident…In Roddy's world, the current Merlin expires and a new one takes his place. Yet something is wrong – the rituals have been upset and nothing is going the way it should. Roddy needs help, and certain powers indicate that Nick is to be the one to help her. And Nick is cool about helping her – in theory… but it's a bit worrying that she seems to mistake him for a magic-user.Their stories unfold, side-by-side, each part leading into the next, and the Merlin Conspiracy thickens as the tales swirl around each other – twining, meeting and affecting each other, yet never completely combining until the very end chapters when all is finally revealed.Compelling, howlingly funny in places, mind-boggling – this is going to WOW DWJ fans all around the world (and probably in other universes too).
Diana Wynne Jones
The Merlin Conspiracy
ILLUSTRATED BY
DAVID WYATT
Dedication (#ulink_3f87038c-2e38-5423-a7bd-aaec5372d33d)
To Rowan Dalglish
Contents
Cover (#u50f3c8a6-3446-5a37-8e5d-1f43de28cc35)
Title Page (#u7d558dce-b42e-51d5-b772-fd6d3a049278)
Dedication (#uee120c27-2440-587e-bb2f-5ef7cff16f80)
1: Roddy
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2: Nick
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3: Roddy
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4: Nick
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5: Roddy
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6: Nick
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7: Nick continued
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8: Roddy
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9: Nick
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10: Roddy and Nick
1: Roddy
2: Nick
3: Roddy
4: Nick
11: Roddy and Nick
1: Roddy
2: Nick
3: Roddy
4: Nick
5: Roddy
6: Nick
12: Roddy and Nick
1: Roddy
2: Roddy
3: Roddy
4: Nick
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 Roddy (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King’s Progress.
I didn’t know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, “If you can’t do it, I will.” If you didn’t know Grundo, you’d think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like “inside” turning up as “sindie” and “story” as “otsyr.”
Anything but that! I thought. So I decided to start with Grundo – and me. I am Arianrhod Hyde, only I prefer people to call me Roddy, and I’ve looked after Grundo for years now, ever since Grundo was a small, pale, freckled boy in rompers, sitting completely silently in the back of the children’s bus. He was so miserable that he had wet himself. I was only about five myself at the time, but I somehow realised that he was too miserable even to cry. I got up and staggered through the bumping, rushing bus to the clothes lockers. I found some clean rompers and persuaded Grundo to get into them.
This wasn’t easy, because Grundo has always been very proud. While I was working at it, Grundo’s sister Alicia turned round from where she was sitting with the big ones. “What are you bothering with Cesspit for?” she said, tipping up her long, freckled nose. “There’s no point. He’s useless.” She was eight at the time, but she still looks just the same: straight fair hair, thick body, and an air of being the person, the one everyone else has to look up to. “And he’s ugly,” she said. “He’s got a long nose.”
“So have you got a long nose,” I said, “Lady Sneeze.” I always called her “Lady Sneeze” when I wanted to annoy her. If you say “Alicia” quickly it sounds just like a well-behaved sneeze – just like Alicia, in fact. I wanted to annoy her for calling Grundo Cesspit. She only said it because Sybil, her mother, called Grundo that. It was typical of the way they both treated him. Grundo’s father left Sybil before Grundo was born. Ever since I could remember, Sybil and Alicia had been thick as thieves together. Poor Grundo was nowhere.
It got worse when Grundo started lessons with us and turned out to be dyslexic. Sybil went around sighing, “He’s so stupid!” And Alicia chanted at him, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Alicia, of course, did everything well, whether it was maths, magic or horse-riding. She got chosen as a Court page when she was ten.
Our teachers knew Grundo was not stupid, but his inside out way of going on baffled them. They sighed too and called Grundo “Our young eccentric” and I was the one who taught Grundo to read and write. I think that was when I started calling him Grundo. I can’t quite remember why, except that it suited him better than his real name, which is Ambrose of all things! Before long, the entire Court called him Grundo. And while I was teaching him, I discovered that he had an unexpected amount of inside out magical talent.
“This book is boring,” he complained in his deep, solemn voice. “Why should I care if Jack and Jill go shopping? Or if Rover chases the ball?” While I was explaining to him that all reading books were like this, Grundo somehow turned the book into a comic book, all pictures and no words. It started at the back and finished at the front, and in the pictures the ball chased Rover and Jack and Jill were bought by the groceries. Only Grundo would think of two people being bought by a huge chunk of cheese.
He refused to turn the book back. He said it was more fun that way, and I couldn’t turn it back into a reading book whatever I tried. It’s probably still where I hid it, down inside the cover of the old teaching bus seat. Grundo is obstinate as well as proud.
You might say I adopted Grundo as my brother. We were both on our own. I am an only child and all the other Court wizards’ children were the same age as Alicia or older still. The other children our own age were sons and daughters of Court officials, who had no gift for magic. They were perfectly friendly – don’t get me wrong – but they just had a more normal outlook.
There were only about thirty of us young ones who travelled in the King’s Progress all the time. The rest only joined us for Christmas or for the other big religious ceremonies. Grundo and I always used to envy them. They didn’t have to wear neat clothes and remember Court manners all the time. They knew where they were going to be, instead of travelling through the nights and finding themselves suddenly in a flat field in Norfolk, or a remote Derbyshire valley, or a busy port somewhere next morning. They didn’t have to ride in buses in a heatwave. Above all, they could go for walks and explore places. We were never really in one place long enough to do any exploring. The most we got to do was look round the various castles and great houses where the King decided to stay.
We envied the princesses and the younger princes particularly. They were allowed to stay in Windsor most of the year. Court gossip said that the Queen, being foreign, had threatened to go back to Denmark unless she was allowed to stay in one place. Everyone pitied the Queen rather for not understanding that the King had to travel about in order to keep the realm healthy. Some said that the whole magic of the Islands of Blest – or maybe the entire world of Blest – depended on the King constantly moving about and visiting every acre of England.
I asked my Grandfather Hyde about this. He is a Magid and knows about the magics of countries and worlds and so on. And he said that there might be something in this, but he thought people were overstating the case. The magic of Blest was very important for all sorts of reasons, he said, but it was the Merlin who was really entrusted with keeping it healthy.
My mother did quite often talk of sending me to live with this grandfather in London. But this would have meant leaving Grundo to the mercies of Sybil and Alicia, so, whenever she suggested it, I told her I was proud to be a member of Court – which was quite true – and that I was getting the best possible education – which was partly quite true – and then I sort of went heavy at her and hoped she’d forget the idea. If she got really anxious and went on about this being no sort of life for a growing girl, I went on about the way Grandad grows dahlias. I really do hate dahlias as a way of life.
Mam had her latest worry session in Northumbria, in the rain. We were all camped in a steep, heathery valley waiting for the Scottish King to pay our King a formal visit. It was so bare that there was not even a house for the King. The canvas of the royal tent was turning a wet, dismal yellow just downhill from us, and we were slithering in shiny, wet sheep droppings while I went on about the way Grandad grows dahlias.
“Besides, it’s such a stupid thing for a powerful magician to do!” I said.
“I wish you didn’t feel like this about him,” Mam said. “You know he does a great deal more than simply grow flowers. He’s a remarkable man. And he’d be glad to have you as company for your cousin Toby.”
“My cousin Toby is a wimp who doesn’t mind being ordered to do the weeding,” I said. I looked up at Mam through the wet black wriggles of my hair and realised that my dahlia-ploy hadn’t worked the way it usually did. Mam continued to look anxious. She is a serious person, my mam, weighed down by her responsible job in the travelling Exchequer, but I can usually get her to laugh. When she laughs, she throws her head back and looks very like me. We both have rather long pink cheeks and a dimple in the same place, though her eyes are black and mine are blue.
I could see the rain was getting her down – having to keep the water out of her computer and having to go to the loo in a little wet flapping tent and all the rest – and I saw it was one of the times when she starts imagining me going down with rheumatic fever or pneumonia and dying of it. I realised I’d have to play my very strongest card or I’d be packed off down to London before lunch.
“Come off it, Mam!” I said. “Grandad’s not your father. He’s Dad’s. If you’re so anxious for me to be in the bosom of my family, why not send me to your father instead?”
She pulled her shiny waterproof cape around her and went back a step. “My father is Welsh,” she said. “If you went there, you’d be living in a foreign country. All right. If you feel you really can stand this awful, wandering existence, we’ll say no more.”
She went away. She always did if anyone talked about her father. I thought he must be terrifying. All I knew about my other grandfather was that Mam had had to run away from home in order to marry Dad, because her father had refused to let her marry anyone. Poor Mam. And I’d used that to send her away. I sighed with mixed relief and guilt. Then I went to find Grundo.
Grundo’s lot is always worse when we’re stopped anywhere for a while. Unless I think of an excuse to fetch him away, Sybil and Alicia haul him into Sybil’s tent and try to correct his faults. When I ducked into the dim, damp space, it was worse than usual. Sybil’s manfriend was in there, laughing his nasty, hissing laugh. “Give him to me, dear,” I heard him saying. “I’ll soon make a man of him.” Grundo was looking pale, even for him.
The only person at Court that I dislike more than Alicia is Sybil’s manfriend. His name is Sir James Spenser. He is very unpleasant. The astonishing thing is that the whole Court, including Sybil, knows he is nasty, but they pretend not to notice because Sir James is useful to the King. I don’t understand about this. But I have noticed the same thing happening with some of the businessmen who are useful to the King. The media are constantly suggesting these men are crooks, but nobody even thinks of arresting them. And it is the same with Sir James, although I have no idea in what way he is useful to the King.
He gave me a leer. “Checking that I haven’t eaten your sweetheart?” he said. “Why do you bother, Arianrhod? If I had your connections, I wouldn’t look twice at young Ambrose.”
I looked him in the face, at his big, pocky nose and the eyes too near on either side of it. “I don’t understand you,” I said in my best Court manner. Polite but stony. I didn’t think my connections were particularly aristocratic. My father is only the King’s weather wizard and much further down the order than Sybil, who is, after all, Earthmistress to England.
Sir James did his hissing laugh at me. Hs-ss-szz. “The aristocracy of magic, my dear child,” he said. “Look at your grandparents! I should think at the very least you’d be setting your sweet young adolescent cap at the next Merlin.”
Sybil said sharply, “What?” and Alicia gave a gasp. When I looked at her, she was speckled pink with indignation. Alicia has even more freckles than Grundo. Sybil’s long, jowly face was furious. Her pale blue eyes were popping at me.
I didn’t understand what made them so angry. I just thought, Bother! Now I shall have to be very polite – and rather stupid – and pretend I haven’t noticed. This was typical of Sir James. He loved making everyone around him angry. “But we’ve got a perfectly good Merlin!” I said.
“An old man, my dear,” Sir James said gleefully. “Old and frail.”
“Yes,” I said, truly puzzled. “But there’s no knowing who’ll be the next one, is there?”
He looked at me pityingly. “There are rumours, dear child. Or don’t you listen to gossip with your naïve little ears?”
“No,” I said. I’d had enough of his game, whatever it was. I turned, very politely, to Sybil. “Please would it be all right if I took Grundo to watch my father work?”
She shrugged her thick shoulders. “If Daniel wants to work in front of a staring child, that’s his funeral, I suppose. Yes, take him away. I’m sick of the sight of him. Grundo, be back here to put on Court clothing before lunch or you’ll be punished. Off you go.”
“There’s motherly love for you!” I said to Grundo as we hurried off into the rain.
He grinned. “We don’t need to go back. I’ve got Court clothes on under these. It’s warmer.”
I wished I’d thought of doing the same. It was so chilly that you wouldn’t have believed it was nearly Midsummer. Anyway, I’d got Grundo away. Now I just had to hope that Dad wouldn’t mind us watching him. He doesn’t always like being disturbed when he’s working.
When I cautiously lifted the flap of the weather tent, Dad was just getting ready. He had taken off his waterproof cape and was slipping off his heavy blue robe of office and rolling up his shirtsleeves. He looked all slim and upright like that, more like a soldier preparing for a duel than a wizard about to work on the weather.
“Over in that corner, both of you,” he said. “Don’t distract me or you’ll have the King after us in person. He’s given me very exact instructions for today.” He turned a grin on us as he said this, to show he didn’t at all mind having us there.
Grundo gave him one of his serious, deep looks. “Are we allowed to ask questions, sir?”
“Most probably not,” said my father. “That’s distracting. But I’ll describe what I’m doing as I go along, if you want. After all,” he added, with a wistful look at me, “one of you might wish to follow in my footsteps some day.”
I love my dad, though I never see very much of him. I think he really does hope that I might turn out to be a weather worker. I’m afraid I am going to be a great disappointment to him. Weather does fascinate me, but so does every other kind of magic too. That was true even then, when I didn’t know more than the magic they teach you in Court, and it’s more true than ever now.
But I loved watching Dad work. I found I was smiling lovingly as he stepped over to the weather table. At this stage it was unactivated and was simply a sort of framework made of gold and copper wires resting on stout legs that folded up for when we travelled. The whole thing folded away into a worn wooden box about four feet long which I had known for as long as I could remember. It smelt of ozone and cedarwood. Dad and that box went together somehow.
He stood beside the table with his head bent. It always looked as if he was nerving himself up for something. Actually, he was just working the preliminary magics, but when I was small I always thought that weather-working took great courage and I used to worry about him. But I’ve never lost the queer amazement you feel when the magic answers Dad’s call. Even that day, I gasped quietly as mistiness filled the framework. It was blue, green and white at first, but almost at once it became a perfect small picture of the Islands of Blest. There was England in all its various greens, except for the small brown stains of towns, with its backbone of the Pennines and its southern hills as a sort of hipbone. All the rivers were there as tiny blue-grey threads, and dark green clumps of woodlands – very important each of these, Dad tells me, because you bring the picture into being by thinking of water, wood and hill – but it still defeats me why I could even see the white cliffs in the south. And Scotland was there, too, browner, with travelling ridges of grey and white cloud crossing the brown. The fierce greyness at the top was a bad storm somewhere near John O’Groats. Wales lurked over to one side, showing only as dim greens under blue-grey clouds. But Ireland was entirely clear, living up to the name of Emerald Isle, and covered in big moving ripples of sunlight.
Dad walked round it all, bending over to look at the colours of the seas particularly. Then he stood back to see the patterns of the slanting, scudding clouds. “Hm,” he said. He pointed to the north-east of England, where the land was almost invisible under smoky, whitish mist. “Here’s the rain that’s presently being such a pest. As you see, it’s not moving much. The King wants it cleared up and, if possible, a blaze of sunlight when the Scottish King arrives. Now, look at Scotland. There’s very little clear sky there. They’re having sun and showers every ten minutes or so as those clouds ripple. I can’t get any good weather from there, not to make it last. Quite a problem.”
He walked slowly in among the green landscapes and the moving clouds, passing through the wires of the framework underneath as if they were not there. That part always gave me a shudder. How could a person walk through solid gold wire?
He stopped with his hand over dim, green Wales. “This is the real problem. I’m going to have to fetch the weather from Ireland without letting this lot drift in across us. That’s really appalling weather there in Wales at the moment. I shall have to try to get it to move away north and out to sea. Let’s see how the bigger currents are going.”
Up to his waist in moving, misty map, he gestured. The whole picture humped up a little and moved away sideways, first to show a curve of heaving grey ocean, ribbed like a tabby cat with strips of whitish cloud, and then, giddily, going the other way to show green-brown views of the Low Countries and the French kingdoms and more stripes of cloud there.
“Hm,” my father said again. “Not as bad as I feared. Everything is setting northwards, but only very slowly. I shall have to speed things up.”
He set to work, rather as a baker might roll dough along a board, pushing and kneading at clumps of cloud, steering ocean wisps with the flat of his hands, and shoving mightily at the weathers over Ireland and Wales. The dimness over Wales broke apart a little to show more green, but it didn’t move away. My father surveyed it with one hand to his chin.
“Sorry, everyone,” he said. “The only way with this is a well placed wind.”
We watched him moving around, sometimes up to his shoulders in land and cloud, creating winds. Most of them he made by blowing more or less softly, or even just opening his mouth and breathing, and they were never quite where you thought they ought to be. “It’s a little like sailing a boat,” he explained, seeing Grundo frowning. “The wind has to come sideways on to the canvas to make a boat move, and it’s the same here, except that weather always comes in swirls, so I have to be careful to set up a lighter breeze going the opposite way. There.” He set everything moving with a sharp breath that was almost a whistle and stood back out of the table to time it.
After a few minutes of looking from his big, complicated watch to the movements on the table, he walked away and picked up his robe. Weather-working is harder than it looks. Dad’s face was streaming with sweat and he was panting slightly as he fetched his portable far-speaker out of a pocket in the robe. He thought a moment, to remember that day’s codes, and punched in the one for the Waymaster Royal’s office.
“Daniel Hyde here,” he told the official who answered. “The rain will stop at twelve-oh-two, but I can’t promise any sunlight until one o’clock… Yes… Almost exactly, but it couldn’t be done without a wind, I’m afraid. Warn His Majesty that there may be half a gale blowing between eleven-thirty and midday. It’ll drop to a light wind around half past… Yes, we should have fine weather for some days after this.”
He put the speaker away and smiled at us while he put on his robe. “Fancy a visit to the Petty Viands bus?” he asked. “I could do with a cup of something hot and maybe a sticky cake or two.”
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
It was just as Dad predicted. We turned out for the Meeting of Kings in wet, howling wind that flapped velvet skirts and wrapped robes around legs. Those with headdresses held them in their hands until the last possible moment and then got very uncomfortable because, like the rest of us, they were trying to eat prettybread or pasties in one hand as we all went to our places. Sybil looked more dishevelled than anyone. Her yellow hair was streaming from her head and her hat was streaming green ribbons in her hand while she rushed about wailing cantrips and shouting at bad-luck carriers to get away behind the buses. She was barefoot, being an earth wizard, and she had kilted her velvet skirts up to her knees because of the wet in the grass. She had extremely thick legs.
“Looks just like a sack of sweetcorn balanced on two logs,” Dad said unkindly as he passed me on the way to the King’s tent. He disliked Sybil as much as I did. He used to say that it didn’t surprise him that Sybil’s husband had run away. And then he usually added, “They wanted the poor fellow to be the next Merlin, too. If it had been me, I’d have run away long before. Sybil and the worst job in the kingdom! Imagine!”
Unfortunately, Dad’s remark threw Mam into one of her rare fits of laughter and she breathed in a crumb of pastry. I was still thumping her back for her when word came round that the Scots were on their way. I had to run to my place beside Grundo. We were lined up with all the other children who weren’t pages in a row in front of the Royal Guards.
By this time, most of the tents were down except for the Royal Pavilion, and all the buses, vans, lorries and limousines were drawn up on three sides of an enormous square with the north-facing side left empty. The air was loud with the clapping of the household flags hoisted over them. The Royal Guards were drawn up inside that – poor fellows, they had been polishing kit and whitening belts since dawn, but they looked magnificent, a living line of scarlet and white. We of the Court were inside that again, like a bed of flowers in our Court clothes, shivering in the wind. Grundo said he envied the Household servants. They were allowed to stay in the buses and keep warm, and they had a much better view. They must have been able to see the Scottish Court advancing long before we could.
It was all timed perfectly. Hard-worked officials had been talking to one another on far-speakers all morning to make sure it was. The Scots appeared first. They seemed to come over the horizon and get larger and brighter as they came. They had pipers walking on both sides, solemnly stepping and skirling. I love the sound of bagpipes. It is the most exciting noise I know. I was quite sorry when our band started up and trumpets drowned the pipes out.
This was the signal for our King to come out of his tent and walk towards the Scots. When we stop in towns long enough for me to get talking to people, they always say enviously, “I suppose you see the King every day!” No. Actually, I don’t. He is nearly always away in the front of the Progress and I often don’t set eyes on him for weeks. When I do see him, it is usually like this, at a distance, as a tall figure in dark clothes, and the main way I recognise him is by his neat brown beard – and a sort of shiver of majesty he brings with him.
On this occasion he had Prince Edmund, the Prince Heir, with him too, also in sober, dark clothes. The Prince is eighteen now and he was travelling with his father that year to learn his duties. With them came the Merlin on one side and the Archbishop of York on the other, both old and stately in stiffly flapping robes, and after that a mixture of bishops and high officials and the wizards who are priests and priestesses of older powers. I’m supposed to know the order of them, but I keep forgetting. All I really know is that Sybil walked behind the Archbishop – with her skirts let down and her hat on by then – and my father was near the back, not being a priest.
I was looking at the Scots mostly anyway. Their King was quite young and he wasn’t the one I’d seen before. They have dozens of people who have claims to the throne of Scotland. Every so often, the clans back a new claimant, or three, and have a war and the King gets changed. This one, though he was new, didn’t look as if he’d get changed easily. He had a strong, eager look, and he walked as if he owned the earth, not just Scotland. He was wearing plaids, which made him stand out from the crowd of courtiers with him. They were very dressy. I have never seen so many styles and colours and French fashions. Their King looked like a hawk among parrots.
He left them behind and strode to embrace our King. For a brief minute, it was the friendliest possible Meeting. Prince Edmund was beckoned forward and introduced, and then a young woman in glorious rose pink silk who may have been the Scottish Queen – anyway the Scottish King grinned at her as if he knew her very well – and then it was the turn of the Archbishop and the Merlin to step forward and bless everyone. This was when the awful thing happened.
The Merlin spread his arms to call down benign magics. Dad says you don’t really need to spread your arms or do anything else physical to work magic. This is why he found Sybil so irritating, because she always acted about so, doing magic. But he says the Merlin had to show people what he was doing. So the poor old man held his arms up wide. His face, which was always rather pale, turned a strange colour. Even from where I was, I could see that the Merlin’s lips were sort of lilac-coloured where they showed through his white beard. He took his arms in hurriedly and hugged at himself. Then he slowly folded up and flopped down on the wet grass.
Everybody simply stared for an instant. And this was the instant that Dad’s fine weather arrived at last. The sun blazed out. It was suddenly damply, suffocatingly warm.
Dad got to the Merlin first. Dad had been spread out to the side when the two groups met and it only took him two strides to get there and kneel down. He swore to me afterwards that the Merlin was alive at that point, even though he had clearly had a bad heart attack. But Dad had to give way to Prince Edmund, who got there next. Prince Edmund put his hand out towards the Merlin’s chest and then snatched it back, looking aghast. He turned to the King and started to say something. Then he stopped, because Sybil swooped in almost at once and pulled the poor old man over on to his back. By that time he was definitely dead. I got a glimpse of his staring face among everybody’s legs and, as Grundo said, you couldn’t mistake it.
“Dead!” Sybil screamed. “My mentor and my master!” She put her head back so that her hat fell off and screamed again, towards the Scottish King. “Dead!”
She didn’t say any more. She just stood up with wet black patches on her velvet gown where she had knelt in the grass and stared at the Scottish King with her hands clasped to her chest.
Our King said icily to the Scottish King, “I believe Your Majesty was trained as a wizard?”
The Scottish King looked at him. After a moment he said, “I think this is the end of any friendship between us. I bid you good afternoon.”
He swung round in a swirl of tartan and walked away with all his people. He didn’t have to walk far. Vehicles came roaring over the brow of the hill almost at once, most of them military transports, and the royal party was scooped up into some of them, leaving the rest sitting in a threatening row on the Scottish border.
“We’ll move back a few miles,” our King said.
The rest of that week was a hot, moist chaos. Grundo and I, along with most of the children, were bundled here and there and sent about with messages because the royal pages were run off their feet, and it took us several days to find out what was happening.
It seemed that the media people had been filming the whole Meeting from their bus and they broadcast it as they filmed it. The Merlin’s death caused an outcry all over the country. The King had to go to the bus and assure people in another broadcast that it was an unfortunate accident, and that no one was accusing the Scottish King of anything. It didn’t help the situation that he said this in a grim way that made everyone think the opposite. At the same time, the whole Progress packed up double quick and moved south to the borders of Northumberland. The media bus was actually on the road while the King was grimly broadcasting. The rest of the buses had to keep drawing up on to the verges to make way for the army units rushing to take up defensive positions along the Scottish border, so all we knew of things were tilted views of hedges while green lorries thundered by in the road.
It turned out that the Scottish King broadcast too. He talked about an insult to Scotland and he sent army units to the border as well.
“But he must know it was simply an accident,” my mam said worriedly, when I did manage to see her and ask what was going on.
This was when we were finally camped around a village where the King could stay in a manor house that was big enough for the wizards to perform an autopsy on the Merlin. There, Grundo and I were sent hurrying with messages to other wizards, to the army HQ bus, the media tent, to the Waymaster’s Office and the Chamberlain’s, and after a day or so, to the village hall where the judicial enquiry was being held. So much was going on. There was a nationwide hunt for a new Merlin, with most of the wizards involved, while the rest were busy with the enquiry. It seemed that the post mortem had shown that there were traces of a spell hanging round the Merlin, but no one could tell what kind. It could even have been one of the Merlin’s own spells.
Dad was called into the enquiry. For a whole day, it looked as if he might be accused of murder. My heart seemed to be filling my ears and drumming in my chest that entire time. Mam went around white as a sheet whispering, “Oh, they can’t blame him, they can’t!” The trouble was, as she pointed out to me, everybody else who was close to the Merlin when he died was either royal or very important, so poor Dad got the full blast of the suspicion.
I can’t tell you how frantic everything was that day.
Then everything calmed down.
As far as I could tell, it was Grandad’s doing. He turned up that evening, shortly after Dad had come out of the village hall looking as if he had spent several sleepless weeks on a bare mountain. Grandad brought the new Merlin with him and they went straight to the King together. We didn’t see Grandad until quite late that night, when they all came out on to the village green: Grandad, the King, the Merlin, the judges, Prince Edmund, and a whole string of the wizards who had been tearing about and fussing over finding the new Merlin. The new Merlin was a skinny young man with a little pointed chin and a big Adam’s apple, who looked a bit stunned about his sudden jump to fame. Or maybe he was in a trance. Prince Edmund kept looking at him in an astonished, wondering way.
Meanwhile, the Waymaster’s Office had acted with its usual efficiency and cordoned off a big space on the green, while the Royal Guard jumped to it and built a bonfire in the centre of it. We were standing watching, waiting, wondering what was going to happen, when Grandad came up to us. Mam flung herself on him, more or less crying.
“Oh, Maxwell! It’s been so awful! Can you help?”
“Steady,” Grandad said. “All’s well. Dan’s in the clear now. Had to tackle it from the top, you see, on account of the family relationship.” He slapped Dad on the shoulder and gave me one of his quick, bony hugs. “Roddy. Hallo, Grundo,” he said. “I think I’ve got the whole mess sorted. Have to wait and see, of course, but I think they’ll end up deciding it was nobody’s fault. Lord! Poor old Merlin Landor must have been in his eighties at least! Bound to drop dead at some point. Just chose a bad moment to do it. No need for national hysteria about that.”
You know that marvellous moment when your mind goes quiet with relief. Everything was suddenly tranquil and acute with me. I could smell the trampled grass and motor fuel that I had not noticed before this, and the sweet, dusty scent of hay from beyond the village. I could hear the crackle of the bonfire as it caught and the twittering of birds in the trees around the green. The small, yellow flames climbing among the brushwood seemed unbelievably clear and meaningful, all of a sudden, and my mind went so peaceful and limpid that I found myself thinking that, yes, Grandad could be right. But Sir James had known the old Merlin was going to die. I looked round for Sir James, but he was not there. When I thought, I realised I had not seen him for some days, though Sybil was there, in among the other wizards.
As soon as the bonfire was blazing properly, the senior wizard stepped forward and announced that we were here to present the new Merlin to Court and country. Everyone cheered and the young Merlin looked more dazed than ever. Then one of the judges said that the question of the late Merlin’s death was now to be settled. He bowed to the King and stepped back.
The King said to the Merlin, “Are you prepared to prophesy for us?”
“I – I think so,” the Merlin said. He had rather a weak, high voice.
“Then,” said the King, “tell us who, or what, caused the death of the last Merlin.”
The young man clasped his hands together with his arms pointing straight down, rather as if he were pulling on a rope, and he began to sway, round and round. The bonfire seemed to imitate him. It broke into long pennants of orange flame that roared and crackled and sent a great spiral of smoke and burning blobs high into the evening sky. The extra light caught and glistened on tears pouring down the Merlin’s small, pointed face. He started to give out big gulping sobs.
“Oh, Lord! He’s a weeper!” Grandad said disgustedly. “I wish I’d known. I’d have stayed away.”
“A lot of the Merlins have cried when they prophesied,” Dad pointed out.
“I know. But I don’t have to like it, do I?” Grandad retorted.
The Merlin started to speak then, in high gasps, but what with the roaring and snapping from the bonfire and the way he was sobbing, it was hard to hear what he was saying. I think it was, “Blame is – where blame lies – blame rests – where dragon flies.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” my grandfather muttered irritably. “Is he accusing Wales now or what?”
While Grandad was mumbling, the King said in a polite, puzzled way, “And – er – then have you any words that might guide us for the future?”
This brought on a new bout of weeping from the Merlin. He bent this way and that, choking and sobbing, still with his hands clasped in that odd way. The bonfire gusted and swirled and golden sparks rained upwards. Eventually, the Merlin began gasping out words again and I found these even harder to catch. They sounded like, “Power flows – when Merlin goes – world sways – in dark ways – a lord is bound – power found – land falls – when alien calls – nothing right – till dragon’s flight.”
“I suppose this means something to him,” Grandad grumbled.
Several of the wizards were writing the words down. I believe they all wrote different versions. I can only put down what I thought I heard – and the creepy thing is that the prophecy was quite right, now that I understand what it was about.
After that, it seemed to be finished. The Merlin unclasped his hands, fetched out a handkerchief and dried his eyes on it in a most matter-of-fact way. The King said, “We thank you, Merlin,” looking as mystified as the rest of us. The bonfire fell back to burning in a more normal way.
The Household staff came round with glasses of warm spiced wine. I do take my hat off to these people. They have an awful job obeying all the instructions for camping that come from the Waymaster and the Chamberlain, or setting up house if the King decides to stay under a roof somewhere, and then providing meals fit for a King at all times and in all weathers, and they nearly always get it exactly right. That wine was exactly what everyone there needed. The fine weather that Dad had provided was still with us, but it came with a chilly wind and heavy dews at night.
We took our glasses and went to one of the benches at the edge of the green. From there, I could see the Merlin pacing awkwardly about near the bonfire while Prince Edmund talked earnestly to him. The Prince seemed fascinated by the Merlin. I suppose they were the same age, more or less, and this Merlin was likely to be the one the Prince would have to deal with all through his reign when he got to be King. I also noticed Alicia hanging about near them, looking very trim in her page’s uniform. She was making sure that the Merlin got twice as much of the wine and the snacks that were going round. Doing her duty. But, well, she was sixteen and quite near the Merlin’s age too – not that he seemed to notice her much. He was listening to the Prince mostly.
My parents were asking Grandad how he had managed to find the new Merlin when nobody else could, and he was making modest noises and grunting, “Magid methods. Not difficult. Had my eye on the chap for years.” I don’t quite understand what it means that Grandad is a Magid, not really. I think it means that he operates in other worlds besides ours and it also seems to mean that he has the power to settle things in a way that ordinary kings and wizards can’t. He went on to say, “I had to have a serious talk with the King – told him the same as I told the Scottish King. It’s vitally important that the Islands of Blest stay peaceful. Blest – and these islands in particular – keeps the balance of the magics in half the multiverse, you see.”
“How old is the Merlin?” I interrupted.
“Twenty-five. Older than he looks,” Grandad told me. “A powerful magic gift does that to some people. Roddy, do you mind taking Grundo and going off somewhere? We’ve got things to talk about here that aren’t for children.”
Grandad is like that. He never likes to talk about the interesting things in front of me. Grundo and I drifted off.
“He’s too old for Alicia, the Merlin,” I said to Grundo.
He was surprised. “Why should that stop her?” he asked.
2 Nick (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I thought it was a dream at first. It was really peculiar.
It happened when my dad took me with him to a writers’ conference in London. Dad is Ted Mallory and he is a writer. He does horror stories with demons in them, but this conference was for people who write detective stories. This is the strange thing about Dad. He reads detective stories all the time when he isn’t writing himself, and he really admires the people who write them, far more than the people who write his kind of thing. He was all excited because his favourite author was going to be speaking at the conference.
I didn’t want to go.
“Oh, yes you do,” Dad said. “I’m still shuddering at what happened when I left you alone here last Easter.”
“It was my friends who drank all your whisky,” I said.
“With you as a helpless onlooker while they broke the furniture and draped the kitchen in pasta, I know,” says Dad. “So here’s what I’m going to do, Nick. I’m going to book you in with me, and I’m going to go, and when I go, I’m going to lock up this house with you outside it. If you don’t choose to come with me, you can spend the weekend sitting in the street. Or the garden shed. I’ll leave that unlocked for you, if you like.”
He really meant this. He can be a real swine when he puts his mind to it. I thought about overpowering him and locking him in the garden shed. I’m bigger than he is, even though I won’t be fifteen until just before Christmas. But then I thought how he isn’t really my dad and how we’d both sort of adopted one another after Mum was killed because – usually – we like one another, and where would either of us be if that fell through?
While I was thinking this, Dad said, “Come on. You may even enjoy it. And you’ll be able to tell people later that you were present at one of the very rare appearances of Maxwell Hyde. This is only the third time he’s spoken in public – and my sense is that he’s a very interesting speaker.”
Maxwell Hyde is this favourite author of Dad’s. I could see I would be spoiling his fun if I didn’t let him take me along, so I gave in. He was ever so pleased and gave me one of this Maxwell Hyde’s books to read.
I don’t like detective stories. They’re dead boring. But Maxwell Hyde was worse than boring because his books were set in an alternate world. This is what Dad likes about them. He goes on about the self-consistency and wealth of otherworld detail in Maxwell Hyde’s Other-England – as far as I could see, this meant lots of boring description of the way things were different: how the King never stayed in one place and the parliament sat in Winchester and never did anything, and so forth – but what got to me was reading about another world that I couldn’t get to. By the time I’d read two pages, I was so longing to get to this other world that it was like sheets of flame flaring through me.
There are lots of worlds. I know, because I’ve been to some. My real parents come from one. But I can’t seem to get to any of them on my own. I always seem to have to have someone to take me. I’ve tried, and I keep trying, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me, even though I want to do it so much that I dream I’m doing it. There must be something I’m doing wrong. And I’d decided that I’d spend the whole first week of the summer holidays trying until I’d cracked it. Now here was Dad hauling me away to this conference instead. That was why I didn’t want to go. But I’d said I would, so I went.
It was even worse than I’d expected.
It was in a big, gloomy hotel full of soberly-dressed people who all thought they were important – apart from the one or two who thought they were God or Shakespeare or something, and went around with a crowd of power-dressed hangers-on to keep them from being talked to by ordinary people. There was a lecture every hour. Some of them were by police chiefs and lawyers, and I sat there trying so hard not to yawn that my eyes watered and my ears popped. But there was going to be one on the Sunday by a private detective. That was the only one I thought might be interesting.
None of the people had any time for a teenager like me. They kept giving my jeans disapproving looks and then glancing at my face as if they thought I must have got in there by mistake. But the thing that really got to me was how eager Dad was about it all. He had a big pile of various books he was trying to get signed, just as if he was a humble fan and not a world famous writer himself. It really hurt my feelings when one of the God-or-Shakespeare ones flourished a pen over the book Dad eagerly spread out for her and said, “Who?”
Dad said in a modest voice, “Ted Mallory. I write a bit myself.”
Mrs God-Shakespeare scrawled in the book, saying, “Do you write under another name? What have you written?”
“Horror stories mostly,” Dad admitted.
And she said, “Oh,” and pushed the book back to him as if it was contaminated.
Dad didn’t seem to notice. He was enjoying himself. Maxwell Hyde was giving the big talk on the Saturday evening and Dad kept saying he couldn’t wait. Then he got really excited because one of the nicer writers – who wore jeans like me – said he knew Maxwell Hyde slightly and he’d introduce Dad to him if we hung around with him.
Dad was blissed out. By that time I was yawning every time Dad’s back was turned and forcing my mouth shut when he looked at me. We went hurrying up and down corridors looking for Maxwell Hyde, pushing against crowds of people pushing the other way, and I kept thinking, If only I could just wheel round sideways and walk off into a different world! I was in a hotel when I did that the first time, which gave me the idea that hotels were probably a good place to step off from.
So I was daydreaming about that when we did at last catch up with Maxwell Hyde. By then it was just before his lecture, so he was in a hurry and people were streaming past us to get into the big hall, but he stopped quite politely when the nice writer said, “Oh, Maxwell, can you spare a moment for someone who’s dying to meet you?”
I didn’t really notice him much, except that he was one of those upright, silvery gentlemen, quite old-fashioned, with leather patches on his old tweed jacket. As he swung round to Dad, I could smell whisky. I remember thinking, Hey! He gets as nervous as Dad does before he has to give a talk! And I could tell he had had a drink to give himself some courage.
I was being bumped about by all the other people in the corridor and I had to keep shifting while Dad and Mr Hyde were shaking hands. I was right off at one side of them when Mr Hyde said, “Ted Mallory? Demons, isn’t it?”
Just then, one of the people bumping me – I didn’t see who, except that it was a man – said quietly, “Off you go then.” I stepped sideways again out of his way.
This was when I thought it was a dream.
I was outside, on an airfield of some kind. It must have been early morning, because it was chilly and dark, but getting lighter all the time, and there was pink mist across the stretch of grass I could see. But I couldn’t see much, because there were things I thought were helicopters blocking my view one way – tall, dark brown things – and the other way was a crowd of men who all seemed pretty impatient about something. I was sort of squashed between the men and the helicopters. The man nearest me, who was wearing a dirty, pale suede jacket and trousers and smoking a cigarette in long, impatient drags, turned round to throw his cigarette down on the grass and saw me.
“Oh, there you are!” he said. “Why didn’t you say you’d got here?” He turned back to the rest of them and called out, “It’s all right, messieurs! The novice finally got here. We can go.”
They all sort of groaned with relief and one of them began talking into a cellphone. “This is Perimeter Security, monsieur,” I heard him say, “reporting that our numbers are now complete. You can tell the Prince that it’s safe to embark now.” And after the phone had done some angry quacking, he said, “Very good, monsieur. I’ll pass that on to the culprit,” and then he waved at the rest of us.
Everyone began crowding up the ladder into the nearest helicopter-thing. The man who had spoken to me pushed me up ahead of him and swung on to the ladder after me. This must have put his face up against my legs, because he said angrily, “Didn’t the academy tell you to wear your leathers for this?”
I thought I knew then. I was sure this was one of my dreams about getting into another world and that it had got mixed up with the sort of dream where you’re on a bus with no clothes on, or talking to a girl you fancy with the front of your trousers missing. So I wasn’t particularly bothered. I just said, “No, they didn’t tell me anything.”
He made an irritated noise. “You’re supposed to be skyclad for official workings. They should know that!” he said. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?” He sounded quite scandalised about it.
“No,” I said. Dad and I had been going to have supper after we’d listened to Maxwell Hyde. I was quite hungry, now I thought of it.
“Well, that’s a relief!” he said, pushing me forward into the inside of the flyer. “You have to be fasting for a major working like this. Yours is the pull-down seat at the back there.”
It would be! I thought. There were nice padded seats all round under the windows, but the one at the back was just a kind of slab. Everyone else was settling into the good seats and snapping seat belts around them, so I found the belts that went with the slab and did them up. I’d just got the buckles sussed when I looked up to find the man with the cellphone leaning over me.
“You,” he said, “were late. Top brass is not pleased. You kept the Prince waiting for nearly twenty minutes and HRH is not a patient man.”
“Sorry,” I said. But he went on and on, leaning over me and bawling me out. I didn’t need to listen to it much because the engines started then, roaring and clattering, and everything shook. Some of the noise was from the other fliers. I could see them sideways beyond his angry face, rising up into the air one after another, about six of them, and I wondered what made them fly. They didn’t have wings or rotors.
Eventually, a warning ping sounded. The bawling man gave me a menacing look and went to strap himself in beside his mates. They were all wearing some kind of uniform, sort of like soldiers, and the one who had bawled at me had coloured stripes round his sleeves. I supposed he was the officer. The men nearest me, four of them, were all dressed in dirty pale suede. Skyclad, I thought. Whatever that meant.
Then we were rising up into the air and roaring after the other fliers. I leaned over to the window and looked down, trying to see where this was. I saw the Thames winding underneath among crowds of houses, so I knew we were over London, but in a dreamlike way there was no London Eye, though I spotted the Tower and Tower Bridge, and where I thought St Paul’s ought to be there was a huge white church with three square towers and a steeple. After that we went tilting away southwards and I was looking down on misty green fields. Not long after that we were over the sea.
About then, the noise seemed to get less – or maybe I got used to it – and I could hear what the men in suede were saying. Mostly it was just grumbles about having to get up so early and how they were hungry already, along with jokes I didn’t understand, but I gathered that the one who had talked to me was Dave and the big one with the foreign accent was Arnold. The other two were Chick and Pierre. None of them took any notice of me.
Dave was still irritated. He said angrily, “I can sympathise with his passion for cricket, but why does he have to play it in Marseilles, for the powers’ sake?”
Pierre said, slightly shocked, “That’s where England are playing. HRH is a world-class batsman, you know.”
“But,” Dave said, “until last night he wasn’t going to be in the team.”
“He changed his mind. Royal privilege,” said Arnold with the foreign accent.
“That’s our Geoff for you!” Chick said, laughing.
“I know. That worries me,” Dave answered. “What’s he going to be like when he’s King?”
“Oh, give him the right advisors and he’ll be all right,” Chick said soothingly. “His royal dad was just the same when he was Crown Prince, they say.”
This is a really mad dream, I thought. Cricket in France!
We droned on for ages. The sun came up and glared in through the left-hand windows. Pretty soon all the soldiers down the other end had their jackets off and were playing some sort of card game, in a slow, bored way. The men in suede didn’t seem to be allowed to take their jackets off. They sweated. It got quite niffy down my end. And I’d been assuming that they weren’t allowed to smoke in the flier, but that turned out to be wrong. The soldiers all lit up and so did Dave. The air soon became thick with smoke on top of the smell of sweat. It got worse when Arnold lit up a thin, black thing that smelt like a wet bonfire.
“Yik!” said Pierre. “Where did you get hold of that?”
“Aztec Empire,” Arnold said, peacefully puffing out brown clouds.
I shall wake up from this dream with cancer! I thought. The slab seat was hard. I shifted about and ached. Most of the people fell asleep after an hour or so, but I couldn’t. I supposed at the time that it was because I was asleep already. I know that seems silly, but it was all so strange and I’d been so used to dreaming, for months now, that I had found my way into another world that I really and truly believed that this was just another of those dreams. I sat and sweated while we droned on, and even that didn’t alert me to the fact that this might be real. Dreams usually sort of fast-forward long journeys and things like that, but I didn’t think of that. I just thought the journey was the dream.
At last, there was another of those warning pings. The officer reached into his jacket for his phone and talked to it for a short while. Then he put the jacket on and came towards the men in suede, who were all stretching and yawning and looking bleary.
“Messieurs,” he said, “you’ll have twenty minutes. The royal flit will circle during that time under the protection of the Prince’s personal mages and then put down on the pavilion roof. You’re expected to have the stadium secured by then. All right?”
“All right,” Arnold agreed. “Thanks, monsieur.” Then, when the officer had gone back to the other soldiers, he said, “Bloody powers!”
“Going to have to hustle, aren’t we?” Chick said. He jerked his head towards me. “What do we do about him? He’s not skyclad.”
Arnold was the one in charge. He blinked slowly at me as if he’d noticed me for the first time. “Not really a problem,” he said. “He’ll have to keep out of the circle, that’s all. We’ll put him on boundary patrol.” Then he actually spoke to me. “You, mon gars,” he said, “will do exactly as we say at all times, and if you set so much as a toe over the wardings, I’ll have your guts for garters. That clear?”
I nodded. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t the faintest idea what we were supposed to be doing, but I didn’t quite like to. Anyway the flier – flit or whatever – started making a great deal more noise and going downwards in jerks, hanging in the air and then jerking sickeningly down again. I swallowed and sat back, thinking that it would probably all be obvious what to do, the way it is in dreams, and took a look out of the window. I had just time to see a big oval of green stadium surrounded by banks of seats crowded with people, and blue, blue sea somewhere beyond that, before we came down with a grinding thump and everyone leapt up.
The soldiers went racing and clattering off to take up positions round the roof we’d landed on. They were carrying rifles. It was serious security. We clattered off after them into scalding sunlight and I found myself ducking as the flier roared off into the air again just above my head, covering us in an instant of deep blue shadow. As it did, the others bent over some kind of compass that Dave had fetched out.
“North’s up the narrow end opposite,” Dave said, “pretty exactly.”
“Right,” said Arnold. “Then we go the quickest way.” And he led us rushing down some stairs at the corner of the roof. We clattered along boards then, somewhere high up along the front of the pavilion, and raced on down much steeper stairs with crowds of well-dressed people on either side. They all turned to stare at us. “Ceux sont les sorciers,” I heard someone say, and again, when we got to the smart white gate at the bottom of the stairs and a wrinkled old fellow in a white coat opened it for us, he turned to someone and said knowingly, “Ah. Les sorciers.” I reckon it meant, Those are the mages, you know.
We rushed out into the enormous stadium, hurrying across acres of green, green grass with blurred banks of faces all round and all staring at us. It really was exactly like my worst dreams. I felt about an inch high as Arnold led us trotting straight towards the opposite end of the oval. I could see he was going to take us right across the square of even greener grass where the wicket was laid out, flat and brownish, right in front of us.
Now, I’m not much for cricket myself, but I did know that you were never, ever supposed to run on the sacred wicket. I wondered whether to say something. I was quite relieved when Pierre panted out, “Er – Arnold – not on the wicket – really.”
“What? Oh. Yes,” Arnold said, and he took a small curve, so that we went trotting just beside the strip of bare rolled turf.
Pierre turned his eyes up and murmured to Chick, “He’s from Schleswig-Holstein. What can you expect?”
“Empire’s full of barbarians,” Chick panted back in a whisper.
We hastened on to the end of the stadium, where we had to do another detour, around the sightscreen. There was a grille behind it blocking an archway under the seating. Soldiers let us through and we plunged into chilly, concrete gloom beyond, where we really got busy. We were in the space underneath the seats there, which ran right round the stadium like a concrete underpass, including under the pavilion. I know it did, because I was forced to rush all round it three times.
Arnold dumped down the bag he was carrying on the spot Dave said was the exact North and snatched out of it five big sugar-shakers full of water. “Ready blessed,” he said, jamming one into my hand. Then they shoved me behind them and stood in a row gabbling some kind of incantation. After that, they were off, shouting at me to come along and stop dossing, pelting down the arched concrete space, madly sprinkling water as they ran and shoving me repeatedly so that I didn’t tread inside the wet line, until Dave said, “East.” They stopped and gabbled another invocation, and then they charged on, sprinkling again, until Dave said, “South,” where they stopped and gabbled too. Then we pelted off once more to gabble at West, then on round to North again. The water just lasted.
I hoped that was it then, but no. We dumped the empty water-shakers and Arnold fetched out five things that looked like lighted candles but were really electric torches. Neat things. They must have had strange batteries, because they flickered and flared just like real candles as we raced around to East once more with our feet booming echoes out of the concrete corridor. This time when Dave said “East”, Chick slammed his candle-torch down on the floor and stood gabbling. I nearly got left behind there because I was staring at Chick drawing what looked like a belt-knife and pulling it out as if it were toffee or something so that it was like a sword, which he stood holding point upwards in front of his face. I had to sprint to catch the others up, and I only reached them as Dave was singing out, “South!” They shed Pierre and his candle there and, as we pelted off, Pierre was pulling a knife out into a sword too.
At West, it was Dave’s turn to stand pulling a knife into a sword and gabbling. Arnold and I rushed on together to North. Luckily, Arnold was so big he was not much of a runner and I could keep up. I’d no breath left by then. When we got round to Arnold’s bag again, he plonked down his candle and remarked, “I hold North because I’m the strongest. It’s the most dangerous ward of all.” Then, instead of drawing his belt-knife, he took my candle-torch away and passed me a gigantic salt-shaker.
I stared at it.
“All round again with this,” Arnold said. “Make sure it’s a continuous line and that you keep outside the line.”
It’s one of those dreams, I thought. I sighed. I grabbed the salt and set off the other way to make a change.
“No, no!” he howled. “Not widdershins, you fool! Deosil! And run. You’ve got to get round before the Prince lands!”
“Making my third four-minute mile,” I said.
“Pretty well,” he agreed. “Go!”
So off I went, pouring salt and stumbling over my own feet as I tried to see where I was pouring it, past Chick standing with his sword like a statue, past soldiers I was almost too busy to notice, who were on guard about every fifty feet, and on round to Pierre, also standing like a statue. When I got to him, I could hear the nearby blatting of a flier and cheering in the distance. Pierre shot me an angry, urgent look. Obviously, this Prince had more or less landed by then. I sped on, frantically sprinkling salt, getting better at it now. Even so, it seemed an age before I got round to Dave, and another age before I got back to Arnold again. The cheering overhead was like thunder by then.
“Just about made it,” Arnold said. He had a sword by now and was standing like the others, looking sort of remote, behind his candle-thing. “Make sure the line of salt joins up behind me, then put the shaker back in the bag and get on guard.”
“Er…” I said. “I’m not sure—”
He more or less roared at me. “Didn’t they teach you anything at the academy? I shall lodge a complaint.” Then he seemed to pull himself together and sort of recited at me, the way you might tell a total idiot how to dial 999 in an emergency, “Choose your spot, go into a light trance, enter the otherwhere, pick up your totem beast and go on patrol with it. If you see anything out of the ordinary – anything at all – come and tell me. Now go and get on with it!”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.” I threw the salt-shaker into the bag and wandered away. Now what? I thought. It was fairly clear to me that what we had been doing in such a hurry was casting a circle of magic protection around this French cricket stadium, but it struck me as pretty boring, mass-produced sort of magic. I couldn’t see how it could possibly work, but I supposed it kept them happy, them and this Prince of theirs. The stupid thing was that I had been dying to learn magic. Part of the way I kept trying to walk to other worlds was to do with my wanting, above anything else, to be a proper magician, to know magic and be able to work it for myself. Now here was this dream making it seem just boring. And probably useless.
That’s dreams for you, I thought, wandering on through the tunnel under the seats. Since I had no idea how to do the stuff Arnold had told me, the only thing I could do was to keep out of his sight, and out of Chick’s sight too, on round the curve in the East. I trudged past the first soldier on guard and, as soon as the curve of the passage hid him from sight, I simply sat down with my back to the outside wall.
It was a pretty dismal place, full of gritty, gloomy echoes and gritty, gloomy concrete smells. People had used it to pee in too, which didn’t help. It felt damp. As I was soaked with sweat from all that running, I began to feel clammy almost at once. At least it wasn’t dark. There were orange striplights in the concrete ceiling and holes in the concrete back wall. The holes were high up and covered with grids, but they did let in slants of bright sun that cut through the gritty air in regular white slices.
Not much to look at except a line of salt, I thought. At least I was better off than Arnold and the rest. I didn’t have to keep staring at a sword. And for the first time, I began to wonder how long we’d all have to stay here. For the whole time it took this Prince to play in a Test Match? Those could go on for days. And the frustrating thing about this dream, I thought, as I heard clapping far away over my head, was the way I never set eyes on this Prince all the fuss was about.
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I think I went to sleep. It made sense to think so. I was quite jet-lagged by then, given I’d set off before supper, arrived at dawn and then flown all the way to the south of France, followed by running round the stadium three times.
But it didn’t quite feel like sleep. I felt as if I got up, leaving myself sitting there, and walked off along an inviting, bluish, shady path I’d suddenly noticed. This path led upwards and sort of sideways from the concrete passage, out of the smells and clamminess, into a cool, rustling wood. This was such a relief that I didn’t feel tired any more. I stretched and snuffed up the cool green smells – pine trees and a sharp, gummy scent from head high ferns, and bark and leaves and bushes that smelt almost like incense – and I kept on walking, deeper into the wood and uphill.
The incense bushes in front of me started rustling. Then the ferns swayed.
I stopped. I kept very still. I could feel my heart banging. Something was definitely coming. But I was still not prepared for it when it did.
The ferns parted and a smooth black head slid out and stared me in the face with huge yellow eyes. For just one instant I was nose to nose with an enormous black panther.
Then I was up a tree, the tallest tree I could find.
In between was a blur of absolute terror. If I think about it, carefully, I think the panther sort of said Oh, hallo in wordless panther talk, and I’m fairly sure I screamed. And I do, slightly, remember staring around with tremendous speed to choose the best tree, and then listening to my own breath coming in sort of shrieks while I shot up this tree, and I even remember yelling “Ouch!” when I peeled one of my nails back on the way up.
Then it all stops with me sitting shakily astride a branch watching the panther coming up after me.
“Bugger!” I said. “I forgot panthers could climb trees!”
Naturally we can, it said. It settled on the branch opposite mine with one great paw hanging and its tail swinging. What are we doing up here? it asked. Hunting?
There was no doubt it was talking to me. Well, I thought, this was a dream. So I gave in to it and answered, “No. I’m supposed to be keeping watch in case anything supernatural attacks the Prince.”
The panther yawned. It was as if its head split open into a bright pink maw fringed with long, white fangs. Boring, it said. I hoped you might want to go hunting.
“Let’s do that in a bit,” I said. I was feeling weak with terror still. “I agree,” I said, hoping to persuade it to go away, “keeping watch is really boring. I may have to be here for hours.”
Oh, well, the panther said. It let down its three other huge paws, put its black chin on the branch and went to sleep.
After a while when I couldn’t look away from it in case it went for my throat, and another while when I didn’t dare move in case it woke up and went for my throat, I sort of got used to the fact that I was sitting in a tree facing a big, black, sleeping panther, and I began to look about. Carefully and slowly. Arnold had said “pick up your totem beast” and I supposed that this panther might be my totem beast, but I didn’t believe this, not really. As far as I knew, totem beasts were a part of a shamanistic magician’s mind, which meant they were not really real, and I could see the panther was as real as I was. Anyway, I wasn’t going to take a chance on it. I sat and turned my head very slowly.
I was looking out over the tops of trees, but that was only the ordinary part of wherever I was. Tilted away sideways from the wood was – well, it was a bit like a diagram in lights. The nearest part of the diagram was a low-key misty map of a town and, beyond that, was a sparkling, electric hugeness that seemed to be sea. Nearer to me, at the edge of the lines and blobs that made the town, I could see a striking, turquoise oval. It was like a lighted jewel and it had a blob of whiter light at each end of it and two more blobs in the middle of each side.
“Oh!” I said, out loud without thinking. “Their magic did work! Those blobs must be them – Arnold and Dave and his mates!”
The panther twitched and made a noise in its throat. I didn’t know if it was a growl, or a snore, or its way of agreeing with me, but I shut up at once. I went on staring without speaking. It was fascinating, that lighted diagram. Little bright sparkles moved inside the turquoise oval of the stadium, and one brighter one stood still quite near the middle. I wondered if that was the Prince. But it could have been one of the umpires. After a bit, I noticed moving smudges of light out in the sea that were probably ships, and one or two quicker ones moving in straight lines that I thought were aircraft, because some of them made lines across the town. They were all in the most beautiful colours. None of them struck me as dangerous. But then I wouldn’t have known what a threat to the Prince looked like if it came up and hit me.
Anyway, I was stuck in this tree until the panther decided to leave. So I simply sat and stared, and listened to the rustlings and birdcalls in the wood, and felt as peaceful as anyone could be stuck up a tree a yard away from a lethal black panther.
The panther suddenly woke up.
I flinched, but it wasn’t attending to me. Someone coming, it remarked, head up and all four paws on the branch again. Then, like a big slide of black oil, it went noiselessly slithering away down the tree.
My forehead got wet with relief. I listened, but I couldn’t hear a thing. So, rather cautiously, I let myself down from branch to branch, until I could see the panther crouched along one of the very lowest boughs below me. Below that, I could see bare, pine-needled ground stretching away to bushes. Another animal was walking across the pine needles, another big cat, only this one was a spotted one, with long legs and a small head. This cat was so full of muscles that it seemed almost to walk on tiptoe. Its ugly, spotted tail was lashing. So was the panther’s, only more elegantly. The cat looked up, past the panther, and straight at me. Its eyes were wide and green and most uncomfortably knowing. When it got near the tree, it simply sat down and went on staring, jeeringly.
Then a man came out of the bushes after it.
He’s a hunter, I thought. This was because of the way he walked, sort of light and tense and leaning forward ready for trouble, and because of the deep tan on his narrow face. But I couldn’t help noticing that he was dressed in the same kind of suede that Arnold and his pals were wearing, except that his leathers were so old and greasy and baggy that you could hardly see they were suede. Hunters can dress in leather too, I thought. But I wondered.
He came up beside the ugly spotted cat and put his hand on its head, between its round, tufted ears. Then he looked slowly up through the tree until he saw me. “Nick Mallory?” he said quietly.
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say my name was really Nichothodes Koryfoides, which is true. But Nick Mallory was what I had chosen to be when Dad and I adopted one another. “Yes,” I said. I meant it to sound cautious and adult, but it came out weak and defiant and resentful.
“Then come down here,” said the man.
As soon as he said it, I was down, standing on the pine needles under the tree, only a couple of feet away from him and his cat. That close, I could tell he was some kind of magic user, and one of the strongest I’d ever come across, too. Magics fair sizzled off him, and he felt full of strange skills and strong craft and deep, deep knowledge. He knew how to bring me down from the tree with just a word. And he’d brought the panther down with me, I realised. The poor beast was busy abasing itself, crawling on its belly among the pine needles, and pressing itself against my leg as if I could help it, absolutely terrified of that spotted cat. The cat was studying it contemptuously.
“I had quite a bit of trouble locating you,” the man said to me. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m supposed to watch the boundaries for anything that threatens the Prince,” I said. My throat had gone choky with fright. I had to cough before I could say, “You’re threatening him, aren’t you?”
He shrugged and looked around as if he was getting his bearings. To my surprise, although there were trees all round us, I could still see the lighted turquoise oval of the stadium and the sea shimmering beyond it. It seemed like something on a different wavelength from the wood. But the chief thing I noticed was that the man’s profile was like a zigzag of lightning. I’d never seen anything more dangerous – unless it was that spotted cat. I kept as still as I could.
“Oh, the Plantagenate Empire,” the man said. “I’ve no need to threaten that Prince. He’s going to lose the French part of his empire, and most of his German holdings too, as soon as he comes to the throne, and he’ll be dead a couple of years after that. No, it was you I wanted. I’ve been offered a fee to eliminate you.”
My knees went wobbly. I tried to say that I wasn’t a threat to anyone. I’d said I didn’t want to be Emperor. My father was Emperor of the Koryfonic Empire, you see, many worlds away from here. But I just harmlessly wanted to be a Magid and walk into other worlds. I opened my mouth to tell the man this, but my tongue sort of dried to one side of my mouth and only a surprised sort of grunt came out.
“Yes,” the man said, staring at me with his dreadful, keen eyes. They were the kind of brown that is almost yellow. “Yes, it surprises me too, now I see you. Perhaps it’s because of something you might do later. You strike me as completely useless at the moment, but you must have some fairly strong potential or that panther there wouldn’t have befriended you.”
Befriended! I thought. What befriending? I was so indignant that my tongue came unstuck and I managed to husk out, “I – he’s not real. He’s my totem animal.”
The man looked surprised. “You think she’s what? What gave you that idea?”
“They told me to go into a light trance and look for my totem in the otherwhere,” I said. “It’s the only explanation.”
The man gave an impatient sigh. “What nonsense. These Plantagenate mages do irritate me. All their magic is this kind of rule-of-thumb half-truth! You shouldn’t believe a word they say, unless you can get it confirmed by an independent source. Magic is wide, various and big. If you really think that animal is just a mind-product, touch her. Put your hand on her head.”
When that man told you to do something, you found yourself doing it. Before I could even be nervous, I found myself bending sideways and putting my hand on the panther, on the broad part of her head between her flattened ears. She didn’t like it. She flinched all over, but she let me do it. She was warm and domed there and her black hair wasn’t soft like a cat’s; it was harsh, with a prickly end to each hair. She was as real as I was. I don’t think I’d ever felt such a fool. The man was looking at me with real contempt and on top of it all I hadn’t noticed that the panther was a female.
But perhaps, I thought as I straightened up, I’m not very real here after all, because my body has to be in a trance back at the stadium. Then I thought, I keep having to do what this man tells me. In a minute, he’s going to say Go on, die. And I shall do that wherever I am.
I said, “So he – she’s not a totem.”
“I didn’t say that,” the man said. “She wouldn’t have come to you if she wasn’t. I simply meant that she’s as much flesh and blood as Slatch is.” He reached out and rubbed the head of the spotted cat. His hand was thin and all sinews, the sort of strong, squarish hand I’d always wished I had, full of power. The cat gazed at me from under it sarcastically. See? it seemed to say.
I knew it was only seconds before he was going to tell me to die and I started to play for time like anything. “And this wood,” I said. “Is this wood real then?”
His thin black eyebrows went up, irritably. “All the paths and places beyond the worlds have substance,” he said.
“Even…” I made a careful gesture towards the turquoise oval, making it slow in order not to annoy that spotted cat. “Even if you can see that from here? They can’t both be real.”
“Why not?” he more or less snapped. “You have a very limited notion of what’s real, don’t you? Will it make you any happier to be somewhere you regard as real?”
“I don’t kn—” I began to say. Then I choked it off because we were suddenly back in the concrete passage under the seats of the stadium and a little patter of applause was coming from overhead. I was standing in front of this man and his killer cat, exactly as I had been under the tree, but the black panther wasn’t there. She must be relieved! I thought, and I took a quick look round for my body, which I was sure had to be sitting against the wall in a trance.
It wasn’t there. I could see the place where it had been by the scuff marks that my heels had made on the floor. But I was the only one of me there. The time seemed to be much later. The light coming in from the grids slanted the other way and looked more golden. I could feel that the patter of clapping was faint and tired overhead, at the end of a long day.
This is only a dream! I told myself in a panic. Someone can’t have made off with my body! Can they?
“You were in the wood in your body too,” the man told me, as if I was almost too stupid for him to bother with. In here, he seemed even more powerful. He wasn’t much taller than me, and a lot skinnier, but he was like a nuclear bomb standing in that passage, ready to go off and destroy everything for miles. His cat was pure semtex. It stared up at me and despised me, and its eyes were deep and glassy in the orange light.
“If you’re going to kill me,” I said, “you might as well tell me who you are and who hired you. And why. You owe me that.”
“I owe you nothing,” he said. “I was interested to know why someone thought you worth eliminating, that’s all. And I don’t think you are. You’re too ignorant to be a danger to anyone. I shall tell them that when I refuse the commission. That should make them lose interest in you – but if they send anyone else after you, you’d better come to me. I’ll teach you enough to protect yourself. We can settle the fee when you arrive.”
He sort of settled his weight a different way. I could tell he was ready to leave. I was all set to burst with relief – but the spotted cat was not pleased at all. Its tail swished grittily against the floor and I just hoped the man could control it. It was a big creature. Its head came almost up to my chest and its muscles were out in lumps on its neck. I knew it was longing to tear my throat out.
Then the man settled his weight towards me again. I was so terrified I felt as if I was melting. His eyes were so yellow and cutting. “One other thing,” he said. “What are you doing here in a world that has nothing to do with you, masquerading as a mage?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This is a dream really.”
One of his eyebrows went up. He had been pretty contemptuous of me all along. Now he really despised me. “It is?” he said and shrugged his leather-covered shoulders. “People’s capacity to deceive themselves always amazes me. If you want to live past the age of twenty, you’d be well advised to learn to see the truth at all times. I’ll tell you that for nothing,” he said. Then he did turn and go. He swung round and he walked away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me any longer. The cat rose up on its musclebound tiptoes and walked after him, swinging its tail rudely.
“Wait a moment!” I called after him. “Who are you, for heaven’s sake?”
I’d expected him just to go on walking away, but he stopped and looked over his shoulder, giving me the benefit of his lightning-strike profile again. “Since you put it like that,” he said, “I’m generally known as Romanov. Ask your little mages about me if you like.”
Then he turned his head away and went on walking, and the cat after him, round the curve of the corridor and out of sight. In spite of the way he’d made me feel, I nearly laughed. He and that cat – they both walked the same way.
I hoped they’d run into the soldier on guard round there, but I knew they wouldn’t. The soldier would have come off worst anyway.
3 Roddy (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
Grandad must have done the trick. Though there was a coldness between England and Scotland after this – and there still is – both armies moved back from the border and nobody talked about the Scottish King much or even mentioned the poor old Merlin. Instead, the Court and the media began worrying about the Meeting of Kings that was due to happen on the Welsh border soon. Will Logres and the Pendragon meet in peace? That sort of thing. In between, they went back to being angry about Flemish trading practices, just as usual.
Nobody seemed to be suspecting Dad any more. Grandad only stayed with the Court until the King had spared a moment to have a friendly chat with Dad, and then he left, saying he had a book to finish. The new Merlin left too. Part of his duties at the start of his tenure was to visit every place of power in the country, and a few in Wales too, and attune himself to them. I think he was hoping that Grandad would go with him and advise him. He looked wistful when Grandad left. This Merlin was one of those who get what they want by looking wistful, but that never works with Grandad, so he was on his own. He climbed wistfully into the little brown car Grandad had helped him buy and chugged away.
We went back to normal. That is to say, we were rumbling along in buses most of the time, with rumours flying about where we were going next – although nobody ever knows that until a few hours before we get to wherever-it-is. The King likes to keep the Court and the country on its toes.
The unusual thing was the exceptionally fine weather. When I asked Dad about it, he said the King had asked him to keep it that way until the Meeting of Kings at the edge of Wales. So at least we were warm.
We spent three unexpected days in Leeds. I think the King wanted to inspect some factories there, but after the usual flustered greeting by the City Council it was blissful. We stayed in houses. Mam squeezed some money out of Sybil and took me and Grundo shopping. We got new clothes. There was time. We had civilised lessons in the mornings, sitting at tables in a room, and we could explore the city in the afternoons. I even enjoyed the riding lessons – which I don’t much usually – out on the moorlands in the hot sun, riding past the carefully repaired green places where there had been mines and quarries.
“I’m going to be Mayor of Leeds when I grow up,” Grundo announced, as we rode against the sky one morning. “I shall live in a house with a bathroom.” He meant this so much that his voice went right down deep on the word bathroom. We both hate the bath-tents, even though the arrangements are quite efficient and there is usually hot water from the boiler-lorry and towels from the laundry-bus. But you get out of your canvas bath to stand shivering on wet grass, and there is always wind getting into the tent from somewhere.
We were sad when we had to leave. Off we went, the whole procession of the Court. We spread for miles. The King is often half a day ahead in his official car, with his security and his wizards and advisors beside him. These are followed by all sorts of Court cars, everything from the big square limousine with tinted windows belonging to the Duke of Devonshire to the flashy blue model driven by Sir James – Sir James had turned up again when we were leaving Leeds. The media bus hurries along after the cars, trying to keep up with events, and a whole string of administrative buses follows the media – with Mam in one of them, too busy even to look out of a window – and then the various lorries lumber after the buses. Some lorries are steaming with food or hot water, in case these are needed when we stop, and some are carrying tents and soldiers and things. The buses for the unimportant people follow the lorries. We are always last.
It often takes a whole day to go twenty miles. Parliament is always proposing that fine new roads get built so that the King – and other people – could travel more easily, but the King is not in favour of this so they don’t get done. There are only two King’s Roads in the entire country, one between London and York and the other between London and Winchester. We spend most of our journeys groaning round corners or grinding along between hedges that clatter on both sides of our bus.
It was like that for the two days after we left Leeds. The roads seemed to get narrower and, on the second day, the countryside beyond the windows became greener and greener, until we were grinding among hills that were an almost incredible dense, emerald colour. By the evening, we were rumbling through small lanes, pushing our way past foamy banks of white cow-parsley. Our bus got stuck crossing a place where a small river ran across the lane and we arrived quite a while after the rest of the Court.
There was a castle there, on a hill. It belonged to Sir James and the King was staying in it. Although it looked quite big, we were told that most of it was rooms of state and there was no space in it for anyone except the King’s immediate circle. Everyone else was in a camp in fields just below the gardens. By the time we got there, it looked as if the camp had been there for days. In the office-tents, Mam and her colleagues were hard at work on their laptops, making the most of the daylight, and Dad was in the wizards’ tent being briefed about what magic would be needed. And the teachers were looking for us to give that day’s lessons.
“We must get a look inside that castle,” Grundo said to me as we were marched off to the teaching-bus.
“Let’s try after lessons,” I said.
But during lessons we discovered that the King had one of his ritual duties that night. Everyone with any magical abilities was required to attend. This meant Grundo and me, as well as Alicia and the old Merlin’s grandchildren and six of the other children.
“Bother!” I said. I was really frustrated.
Then at supper someone said that we were going to be here at Castle Belmont for days. The King liked the place, and it was near enough to the Welsh border that he could go to meet the Welsh King in a week’s time without needing to move on.
I said that was good news. Grundo said morosely, “Maybe. That’s the worst of arriving late. Nobody tells you things.”
Nobody had told us anything about the ritual duty, except that it began at sunset somewhere called the Inner Garden. After we’d changed into good clothes, we followed everyone else as they went there and hoped someone would tell us what to do when we got to the place. We straggled after the line of robed wizards and people in Court dress, past beds of flowers and a long yew hedge, and then on a path across a lawn towards a tall, crumbly stone wall with frondy creepers trailing along its top.
“I know I’m going to hate this,” Grundo said. Rituals don’t agree with him. I think this is because his magic is back-to-front. Magical ceremonies often make him dizzy, and once or twice he has disgracefully thrown up in holy places of power.
“Keep swallowing,” I warned him as we went in under the old stone gateway.
Inside, it was all new and fresh and different. There was a garden inside the old walls – a garden inside a garden – cupped inside its own small valley and as old and green as the hills. There was ancient stonework everywhere, worn flagstones overhung with flowering bushes or isolated arches beside stately old trees. There were lawns that seemed even greener than the lawns outside. Above all, it was alive with water. Strange, fresh-smelling water that ran in conduits of old stone and gushed from stone pipes into strange, lopsided stone pools, or cascaded in hidden places behind old walls.
“This is lovely!” I said.
“I think I agree,” Grundo said. He sounded quite surprised.
“Fancy someone like Sir James owning a place like this!” I said.
It was hard to tell how big this Inner Garden was. You hardly noticed all the finely dressed people crowding into it. It seemed to absorb them, so that they vanished away among the watery lawns and got shadowy under the trees. You felt that twice as many people would hardly be noticed in here.
But that was before Sybil took charge and began passing out candles to the pages. “Everyone take a candle – you too, Your Majesty – and everyone who can must conjure flame to them. Pages will light the others for those who can’t,” she instructed, bustling about barefoot, with her green velvet skirts hitched up. She bustled up to the King and personally called fire to his candle. The Merlin lit Prince Edmund’s for him. I was interested to see that the Merlin was back. He looked much less stunned and wistful than he had before. But, as light after light flared up, sending the surrounding garden dark and blue, I found I was not liking this at all. It seemed to me that this place was intended to be dusky and secret, and only to be lit by the sunset light coming softly off the waters. The candles made it all glittery.
Grundo and I looked at one another. We didn’t either of us say anything, but we both pretended we were finding it hard to call light. Because we knew Sybil knew we never had any problems with fire, we backed away into some bushes and behind a broken wall and hoped she would forget we were there.
Luckily, she was busy after that, far too busy to notice us. She was always very active doing any working, but I had never known her as active as she was then. She spread her arms wide, she raised her hands high and bent herself backwards, she bent herself forwards and made great beckonings, she made huge galloping leaps, and she raised loud cries to the spirit of the garden to come and vitalise us all. Then she twirled off, with her arms swooping this way and that, to the place where the nearest water came gushing out of a stone animal’s head, where she snatched up a silver goblet and held it under the water until it overflowed in all directions. She held it up to the sky; she held it to her lips.
“Ah!” she cried out. “The virtue in this water! The power of it!” With her hair swirling and wrapping itself across her sweating face, she brought the goblet to the King. “Drink, Sire!” she proclaimed. “Soak up the energy, immerse yourself, revel in the bounty of these healing waters! And everyone will do the same after you!”
The King took the goblet and sipped politely. As soon as he had, the Merlin filled another goblet and presented it to Prince Edmund.
“Drink, everyone!” Sybil carolled. “Take what is so freely given!” She began filling goblets and passing them around as if she was in a frenzy. Everyone caught the frenzy and seized the goblets and downed them as if they were dying of thirst.
This is all wrong! I thought. Some magics do require a frenzy, I know, but I was fairly sure this garden was not one of them. It was a quiet place. You were supposed to – supposed to – I remember searching in my head for what the garden was really like, and having a hard job to think, because Sybil’s workings had set up such a loud shout of enchantment that it drowned out most other thoughts – you were supposed to dwell with the garden, that was it. You were supposed to let the garden come to you, not suck it up in a greedy riot like this. It was a small island of otherwhere and full of strength. But it was quiet strength, enclosed in a great bend of the River Severn, which meant that it certainly belonged to the Lady of Severn who also ruled the great crescent of forest to the south. It seemed to me that this garden might even be her most secret place. It ought to have been hushed and holy. Sir James – I could see him in the distance half-lit by candles, tipping up his goblet and smacking his lips – Sir James must be supposed to guard the secret place, not open it to frantic magic-making, not even for the King.
I don’t know how I knew all this, but I was sure of it. I murmured to Grundo, “I’m not doing any of this drinking.”
“She’s doctored the waters somehow,” he answered unhappily.
Grundo usually knew what his mother had been up to. I believed him. “Why?” I whispered.
“No idea,” he said, “but I’m going to have to drink some of it. She’ll know if I don’t.”
“Then let’s go and see if there’s a place higher up where she hasn’t got at it,” I said.
We moved off quietly sideways, in the direction the water was coming from, clutching our unlit candles and trying to keep out of sight. Nobody noticed us. They were all waving candles and passing goblets about, laughing. People were shouting out, “Oh! It’s so refreshing! I can feel it doing me good!” almost as if they were all drunk. It was easy to keep in the shadows and follow the waters. The waters flowed down in several stone channels – I had a feeling that each channel was supposed to give you some different goodness – that spread from one of the lopsided pools near the top of the slope.
“How about this?” I asked Grundo beside this pool. It was very calm there and twilit, with just a few birds twittering and a tree nearby breathing out some strong, quiet scent. I could see Grundo’s head as a lightness, gloomily shaking.
“She’s been here too.”
The pond was filling from another animal head in the bank above and there were stone steps up the bank, leading under black, black trees. It became very secret. This is where it’s all coming from! I thought, and I led the way up the steps into a little flagstoned space under the black trees. It was so dark that we had to stand for a moment to let our eyes adjust. Then we were able to see that there was a well there, with a wooden cover over it, almost beside our feet. The gentlest of trickling sounded from under the cover, and there was a feeling of strength coming from it, such as I had never met before.
“Is this all right?” I whispered.
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to take the cover off in order to know,” Grundo replied.
We knelt down and tried to pull the cover up, but it was so dark we couldn’t see how. We stuffed our candles into our pockets and tried again with both hands. As we did, we heard a burst of chatter and laughter from below, which faded quickly off into the distance as everyone left the garden. That gave us the courage to heave much more heartily. We discovered that the wooden lid had hinges at one side, so we put our fingers under the opposite edge and we heaved. The cover came up an inch or so and gave me a gust of the strongest magic I’d ever known, cool and still, and so deep that it seemed to come from the roots of the world.
There were voices, and footsteps, on the steps beyond the trees.
“Stop!” whispered Grundo.
We dropped the lid back down as quietly as we could, then sprang up and bundled one another on tiptoe in among the trees beyond the well. The earth was cloggy there. There were roots and we stumbled, but luckily the trees were bushy as well as very black and we had managed to back ourselves thoroughly inside them by the time Sybil came storming merrily into the flagged space, waving her flaring candle.
“No, no, it went very well!” she was calling out. “Now, as long as we can keep the Scottish King at odds with England, we’ll be fine!” There was a rustic wooden seat at the other end of the space and she threw herself down on it with a thump. “Ooh, I’m tired!”
“I wish we could do the same with the Welsh King,” Sir James said, ducking down to sit beside her, “but I can’t see any way to contrive that. So you’ve got everyone drinking out of your hand. Will it work?”
“Oh, it has to,” Sybil said. “I ran myself into the ground to make it work. What do you think?” she asked the Merlin, who came very slowly in under the trees and held up his candle to look around.
“Very well, as far as it goes,” he said in his weak, high voice. “You’ve got the King and his Court…”
“And all the other wizards. Don’t forget them,” Sybil put in pridefully.
Sir James chuckled. “None of them suspecting a thing!” he said. “They should be dancing to her tune now, shouldn’t they?”
“Yes. For a while,” the Merlin agreed, still looking around. “Is this where you put the spell on?”
“Well, no. It’s a bit strong here,” Sybil admitted. “I didn’t have time for the working it would take to do it here. I worked from the pool below the steps. That’s the first cistern the well flows out to, you see, and it feeds all the other channels from there.”
The Merlin went, “Hm.” He squatted down like a grasshopper beside the well and put his candle down by one of his gawky, bent legs. “Hm,” he went again. “I see.” Then he pulled open the lid over the well.
Grundo and I felt the power from where we stood. We found it hard not to sway. The Merlin got up and staggered backwards. Behind him, Sir James said, “Ouch!” and covered his face.
“You see?” said Sybil.
“I do,” said Sir James. “Put the lid back, man!”
The Merlin dropped the lid back with a bang. “I hadn’t realised,” he said. “That’s strong. If we’re going to use it, we’ll have to conjure some other Power to help us. Are there any available?”
“Plenty,” said Sir James. “Over in Wales particularly.” He turned to Sybil. The candlelight made his profile into a fleshy beak with pouty lips. “How about it? Can you do a working now? We ought to have this Power in and consolidate our advantage now we’ve got it.”
Sybil had pouty lips too. They put her chin in shadow as she said, “James, I’m exhausted! I’ve worked myself to the bone this evening and I can’t do any more! Even going barefoot all the time, it’ll be three days before I’ve recouped my powers.”
“How long before you can do a strong working?” the Merlin asked, picking his candle up. “My friend James is right. We do need to keep up our momentum.”
“If we both help you?” Sir James asked coaxingly.
Sybil hung her head and her hair down and thought, with her big arms planted along her large thighs. “I need three days,” she said at last, rather sulkily. “Whoever helps me, I’m not going to be able to tackle something as strong as this well before that. It won’t take just a minor Power to bespell the thing. We’ll have to summon something big.”
“But will the effect of the drink last until we do?” Sir James asked, rather tensely.
Sybil looked up at the Merlin. He said, “It struck me as firm enough for the moment. I don’t see it wearing off for at least a week, and we’ll be able to reinforce it before that.”
“Good enough.” Sir James sprang up, relieved and jolly. “Let’s get this place locked up again then and go and have a proper drink. Who fancies champagne?” He pulled keys out of his pocket and strode away down the steps, jingling them and lighting the trees to a glinting black with his candle.
“Champagne. Lovely!” said Sybil. She heaved to her feet and shoved the Merlin playfully down the steps in front of her. “Off you go, stranger boy!”
Grundo and I realised we were likely to get locked inside the garden. We nearly panicked. The moment Sybil was out of sight we surged out on to the flagstones and then realised that the only way out was down those same stone steps to the lopsided pool. That was almost the worst part of the whole thing. We had to wait for Sir James, Sybil and then the Merlin to get ahead, then follow them, and then try to get ahead of them before they got to the gate in the wall.
We were helped a lot by the queer way the space in the garden seemed to spread, and by all the stone walls and conduits and bushes. We could see Sir James and the other two easily by the light of their flickering candles – and hear them too, most of the time, talking and laughing. Sybil obviously was tired. She went quite slowly and the others waited for her. We were able to scud along behind lavender and tall, toppling flowers, or crouch down and scurry past pieces of old wall – though we couldn’t go really fast because it was quite dark by then – and finally we got in front of them and raced out through the gate just before they came merrily along under a rose arch.
I was a nervous wreck by then. It must have been even worse for Grundo, knowing his mother was part of a conspiracy. We went on running beside a dim path and neither of us stopped until we were well out into the lawns in the main garden and could see our camp in the distance, twinkling beyond the fence.
“What do we do now?” I panted at Grundo. “Tell my Dad?”
“Don’t be stupid!” he said. “He was there drinking with the other wizards. He’s not going to listen to you for at least a fortnight.”
“The King then,” I suggested wildly.
“He was the first one to drink,” Grundo said. “You’re not tracking.” He was right. Everything was all about in my head. I tried to pull myself together, not very successfully, while Grundo stood with his head bent and thought. “Your grandfather,” he said after a bit. “He’s the one to tell. Do you have his speaker code?”
“Oh. Right,” I said. “Mam will have his number. I can ask Dad to lend me his speaker at least, can’t I?”
Unfortunately, when we got to the camp we discovered that both Mam and Dad were up at the castle attending on the King. Though I could have asked all sorts of people to lend me a speaker, it was no good unless I knew the code. Grandad’s number is not in the directory lists.
“We’ll just have to wait till tomorrow,” I said miserably.
I spent a lot of that night tossing in my bunk in the girls’ bus, wondering how the new Merlin came to join with Sybil and Sir James, and how to explain to Grandad that he had chosen the wrong man for the post. It really worried me that Grandad had chosen this Merlin. Grandad doesn’t usually make mistakes. It worried me even more that I didn’t know what this conspiracy was up to. It had to be high treason. As far as I knew, bespelling the King was high treason anyway, and it was obvious that they meant to go on and do something worse.
I tossed and turned and tossed and thought, until Alicia suddenly sprang up and shouted, “Roddy, if you don’t stop jigging about this moment, I’ll turn you into a statue, so help me Powers Above!”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and then, even lower, “Sneeze!” If Alicia hadn’t been there, I might have tried telling the other girls in the bus, but Alicia would go straight to Sybil. And Alicia had drunk that enchanted water along with the other pages. Heigh ho, I thought. Wait till tomorrow.
So I waited helplessly until it was too late.
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I overslept. I dragged myself up and over to the food-tent, yawning. I had just got myself some juice and a cold, waxy-looking fried egg, when Grundo appeared, looking worried.
“There you are!” he said. “There’s a message for you from the chamberlain”.
The Chamberlain had never noticed my existence before. Before I got over my surprise enough to ask Grundo what the message was, Mam dashed up to me from the other side. “Oh, there you are, Roddy! We’ve been hunting for you all over! Your grandfather wants you. He’s sent a car for you. It’s waiting for you now outside the castle.”
My first thought was that this was an answer to my prayers. Then I looked up at Mam’s face. She was so white that her eyes looked like big black holes. The hand she put on my shoulder was quivering. “Which grandfather?” I said.
“My father, of course,” she said. “It’s just like him to send a demand for you to the Chamberlain. I’m surprised he didn’t send it straight to the King! Oh, Roddy, I’m sorry! He’s insisting that you go and stay with him in that dreadful manse of his and I daren’t refuse! He’s already been dreadfully rude to the Chamberlain over the speaker. He’ll do worse than that if I don’t let you go. He’ll probably insult the King next. Forgive me.”
Poor Mam. She looked absolutely desperate. My stomach plunged about just at the sight of her. “Why does he want me?”
“Because he’s never met you, and you’re near enough to Wales here for him to send and fetch you,” Mam answered distractedly. “He’s told the entire Chamberlain’s Office that I’ve no right to keep his only grandchild from him. You’ll have to go, my love – the Chamberlain’s insisting – but be polite to him. For my sake. It’ll only be for a few days, until the Progress moves on after the Meeting of Kings. He says the car will bring you back then.”
“I see,” I said, the way you say things just to gain time. I looked at my fried egg. It looked back like a big, dead, yellow eye. Ugh. I thought of Grundo all on his own here, and Sybil discovering that he hadn’t drunk her charmed water. “I’ll go if I can take Grundo,” I said.
“Oh, really, my love, I don’t think…” Mam began. “Listen, Mam,” I said. “Your problem was that he’s a widower and you were all on your own with him…”
“Well, that wasn’t quite…” she began again.
“…so you ought to allow me to take some moral support with me,” I said. As she wavered, I added, “Or I shall go to the Chamberlain’s Office and use their speaker to tell him I won’t go.”
This so horrified Mam that she gave in. “All right. But I don’t dare think what he’ll say – Grundo, do you mind being dragged along to see a fearsome old man?”
“Not really,” Grundo said. “I can always use the speaker in his manse to ask for help, can’t I?”
“Then go and pack,” Mam told him frantically. “Take old clothes. He’ll make you go for walks, or even ride – Hurry up, Roddy! He’s sent his same old driver who hates to be kept waiting!”
I didn’t see why Mam needed to be scared of her father’s driver as well as her father, but I drained my juice, snatched a piece of toast and rushed off eating it. Mam rushed with me, distractedly reminding me to remember a sweater, a toothbrush, walking shoes, a comb, my address book, everything… It wasn’t exactly the right moment to start telling her of plots and treason, but I did honestly try, after I had rammed things into a bag and we were rushing up the steep path to the castle, with stones spurting from under our feet and clattering down on Grundo, who was bent over under a huge bag behind us.
“Are you listening to me?” I panted, when I’d told her what we’d overheard.
She was so upset and feeling so strongly for me getting into the clutches of her terrible old father that I don’t think she did listen, even though she nodded. I just had to hope she would remember it later.
The car was drawn up in front of the main door of the castle, as if the driver, or Mam’s father, imagined that I was staying in there with the King. It was black and uncomfortably like a hearse. The “same old driver”, who looked as if he had been carved out of a block of something white and heavy and then dressed in navy blue, got out when he saw us coming and held out his big stony hand for my bag.
“Good morning,” I panted. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”
He didn’t say a word, just took my bag and stowed it in the boot. Then he took Grundo’s bag with the same carved stone look. After that, he opened the rear door and stood there holding it. I saw a little what Mam meant.
“Nice morning,” I said defiantly. No answer. I turned to Mam and hugged her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a very strong character myself and so is Grundo. We’ll see you soon.”
We climbed into the back seat of the hearse and were driven away, both of us feeling a little dizzy at the speed of events.
Then we drove and drove and drove, until we were dizzy with that too. I still have not the least idea where we went. Grundo says he lost his sense of direction completely. All we knew were astonishingly green hills towering above grey, winding roads, grey stone walls like cross-hatching on the hillsides, grey slides of rock, and woods hanging over us from time to time like dark, lacy tunnels. Dad’s good weather was getting better and better, so there was blue, blue sky with a brisk wind sliding white clouds across it, and sliding their shadows over the green hills in strange, shaggy shapes. Under the shadows, we saw heather darken and turn purple again, gorse blaze and then look a mere modest yellow, and sun and shade pass swiftly across small roaring rivers half hidden in ravines.
It was all very beautiful, but it went on so long, winding us further and further into the heart of the green mountains – until we finally began winding upwards among them. Then it was all green and grey again, with cloud shadows, and we had no sense of getting anywhere. We both jumped with surprise when the car rolled to a stop on a flat green stretch near the top of a mountain.
The stone-faced driver got out and opened the door on my side.
This obviously meant Get out now, so we scrambled to the stony green ground and stood staring about. Below us, a cleft twisted among the emerald sides of mountains until it was blue-green with distance, and beyond those green slopes were blue and grey and black peaks, peak after peak. The air was the chilliest and clearest I have ever breathed. Everything was silent. It was so quiet, I could almost hear the silence. And I realised that, up to then, I had lived my entire life close to people and their noise. It was strange to have it taken away.
The only house in sight was the manse. It was built backed against the nearest green peak, but below the top of the mountain, for shelter, though its dark chimneys stood almost as high as the green summit. It was dark and upright and squeezed into itself, all high narrow arches. You looked at it and wondered if it was a house built like a chapel, or a chapel built like a house and then squeezed narrower. There was no sign of any garden, just that house backed into the hillside and a drystone wall sticking out from one end of it.
The stone driver was trudging across the grass with our bags to the narrow, arched front door. We followed him, through the door and into a tall, dark hallway. He had gone somewhere else by the time we got indoors. But we had only been standing a moment wondering what to do now, when a door banged echoingly further down the hall and my mother’s father came towards us.
He was tall and stiff and cold as a monument on a tomb. His black clothes – he was a priest of course – made his white face look pale as death, but his hair was black, without a trace of grey. I noticed his hair particularly because he put a chilly hand on each of my shoulders and turned me to the light from the narrow front door. His eyes were deep and black, with dark skin round them, but I saw he was a very handsome man.
“So you are the young Arianrhod,” he said, deep and solemn. “At last.” His voice made echoes in the hall and brought me out in gooseflesh. I began to feel very sorry for Mam. “You have quite a look of my Annie,” he said. “Did she let you go willingly?”
“Yes,” I said, trying not to let my teeth chatter. “I said I’d come provided my friend Gr—er… Ambrose Temple could come too. I hope you can find room for him.”
He looked at Grundo then. Grundo gave him a serious freckled stare and said “How do you do?” politely.
“I see he would be lonely without you,” my grandfather said.
He was welcome to think that, I thought, if only he would let Grundo stay. I was very relieved when he said, “Come with me, both of you, and I will show you to your rooms.”
We followed him up steep, dark stairs, where his gown flowed over the wooden treads behind his straight back, and then along dark, wooden corridors. I had a queer feeling that we were walking right into the hill at the back of the house, but the two rooms he showed us to had windows looking out over the winding green hills and they were both obviously prepared for visitors, the beds made up and water steaming in big bowls on the washstands. As if my grandfather had known I would be bringing Grundo. My bag was in one room and Grundo’s was in the other.
“Lunch will be ready any moment,” my grandfather said, “and you will wish to wash and tidy yourselves first. But if you want a bath…” He opened the next door along and showed us a huge bathroom, where a bath stood on clawed animal feet in the middle of bare floorboards. “I hope you will give warning when you do,” he said. “Olwen has to bring up buckets from the copper.” Then he went away downstairs again.
“No taps,” said Grundo. “As bad as the bath-tent.”
We washed and got ready quickly. When we met in the corridor again, we discovered that we had both put on the warmest clothes we had with us. We would have laughed about it, but it was not the kind of house you liked to laugh in. Instead, we went demurely downstairs, to where my grandfather was waiting in a tall, chilly dining room, standing at the head of a tall, black table.
He looked at us, pointed to two chairs and said grace in Welsh. It was all rolling, thundering language. I was suddenly very ashamed not to understand a word of it. Grundo looked on calmly, almost as if he did understand, and sat quietly down when it was finished, still looking intently at my grandfather.
I was looking at the door, where a fat, stone faced woman was coming in with a tureen. I was famished by then and it smelled wonderful.
It was a very good lunch, though almost silent at first. There was the leek soup, enough for two helpings each, followed by pancakes rolled round meat in sauce. After that, there were heaps of little hot griddle cakes covered in sugar. Grundo ate so many of those that the woman had to keep making more. She seemed to like that. She almost had a smile when she brought in the third lot.
“Pancakes,” my grandfather said, deep and hollow, “are a traditional part of our diet in this country.”
I was thinking, Well, at least he didn’t starve my mother! But why is he so stiff and stern? Why doesn’t he smile at all? I’m sure my mother used to ask herself the same things several times a day. I was sorrier for her than ever.
“I know this is an awkward question,” I said, “but what should we call you?”
He looked at me in stern surprise. “My name is Gwyn,” he said.
“Should I call you Grandfather Gwyn then?” I asked.
“If you wish,” he said, not seeming to care.
“Might I call you that too, please?” Grundo asked.
He looked at Grundo long and thoughtfully, almost as if he was asking himself what Grundo’s heredity was. “I suppose you have a right to,” he said at last. “Now tell me, what do either of you know of Wales?”
The truthful answer, as far as I was concerned, was Not a lot. But I could hardly say that. Grundo came to my rescue – I was extremely glad he was there. Because Grundo has such trouble reading, he listens in lessons far more than I ever do. So he knows things. “It’s divided into cantrevs,” he said, “each with its lesser kings, and the Pendragon is High King over them all. The Pendragon rules the Laws. I know you have a different system of laws here, but I don’t know how they work.”
My grandfather looked almost approving. “And the meaning of the High King’s title?” he asked.
It felt just like having a test during lessons, but I thought I knew the answer to that. “Son of the dragon,” I said. “Because there is said to be a dragon roosting in the heart of Wales.”
This didn’t seem to be right. My grandfather said frigidly, “After a fashion. Pendragon is a title given to him by the English. By rights, it should be the title of the English King, but the English have forgotten about their dragons.”
“There aren’t any dragons in England!” I said.
He turned a face full of stern disapproval on me. “That is not true. Have you never heard of the red dragon and the white? There were times in the past when there were great battles between the two, in the days before the Islands of Blest were at peace.”
I couldn’t seem to stop saying the wrong thing, somehow. I protested, “But that’s just a way of saying the Welsh and the English fought one another.”
His black eyebrows rose slightly in his marble face. I had never known so much scorn expressed with so little effort. He turned away from me and back to Grundo. “There are several dragons in England,” he said to him. “The white is only the greatest. There are said to be more in Scotland, both in the waters and in the mountains, but I have no personal knowledge of these.”
Grundo looked utterly fascinated. “What about Ireland?” he asked.
“Ireland,” said my grandfather, “is in most places low and green and unsuitable for dragons. If there were any, Saint Patrick expelled them. But to go back to the Laws of Wales. We do not have Judges, as you do. Courts are called when necessary…”
He went into a long explanation. Grundo was still fascinated. I sat and watched their two profiles as they talked, Grundo’s all pale, long nose and freckles, and my grandfather’s like a statue from classical antiquity. My grandfather had quite a long nose too, but his face was so perfectly proportioned that you hardly noticed. They both had great, deep voices, though where Grundo’s grated and grunted, my grandfather’s voice rolled and boomed.
Soulmates! I thought. I was glad I’d brought Grundo.
At the same time, I began to see some more of my mother’s problem. If my grandfather had been simply cold and strict and distant, it would have been easy to hate him and stop there. But the trouble was that he was also one of those people you wanted to please. There was a sort of grandness to him that made you ache to have him think well of you. Before long, I was quite desperate for him to stop talking just to Grundo and notice me – or at least not disapprove of me so much. Mam must have felt exactly the same. But I could see that, no matter how hard she tried, Mam was too soft-hearted and emotional for her father, and so he treated her with utter scorn. He scorned me for different reasons. I sat at the tall table almost in pain, because I knew I was a courtier born and bred, and that I was smart and good-mannered and used to summing people up so that I could take advantage of their faults, and I could see that my grandfather had nothing but contempt for people like me. It really hurt. Grundo may have been peculiar, but he was not like that and my grandfather liked him.
It was an enormous relief to me when we were allowed to get up from the table and leave the tall cold room. My grandfather took us outside, through the front door, into a blast of sunlight and cold, clean air. While I stood blinking, he said to us, “Now, where would you say the red dragon lies?”
Grundo and I looked at one another. Then we pointed, hesitating a bit, to the most distant brown mountains, lying against the horizon in a misty, jagged row.
“Correct,” said my grandfather. “That is a part of his back. He is asleep for now. He will only arouse in extreme need, to those who know how to call him, and he does not like to be roused. The consequences are usually grave. The same is true of the white dragon of England. You call him too at your peril.” The way he said this made us shiver. Then he said, in a much more normal way, “You will want to explore now. Go anywhere you like, but don’t try to ride the mare and be back at six. We have tea then, not the dinner you are used to. I’ll see you at tea. I have work to do before then.”
He went back into the house. He had a study at the back of the hall, as we learnt later, though we never saw inside it. It was a bit puzzling really. We never saw him do any religious duties or see parishioners – there were no other houses for miles anyway – but as Grundo said, dubiously, we were not there on a Sunday or any other holy day, so how could we know?
We did find the chapel. It was downhill to the left of the house, very tiny and grey, with a little arch of stone on its roof with a bell hanging in it. It was surrounded in green, and there was a hump of green turf beside it like a big beehive, that had water trickling inside it. The whole place gave us an awed, uncertain feeling, so we went uphill again and round to the back of the house, where we came upon a stone shed with the car inside it. Beyond that, things were normal.
We found a kitchen garden there, fringed with those orange flowers that grow in sprays, and a yard behind the house with a well in it. The water had to be pumped from the well by a handle in the kitchen. Olwen, the fat housekeeper, showed us how to do that. It was hard work. Then we went out beyond the yard to a couple of hidden meadows. One meadow had a pair of cows and a calf in it, and the other had a placid, chunky grey horse.
By this time, our feelings of strangeness had worn off. We were used to being in new, unknown places and we began to feel almost at home. We leant on the gate and looked at the placid mare, who raised her chalky-white face to look back at us and then went calmly on with grazing.
I think her lack of interest irritated Grundo. He went into one of his impish moods. “I’m going to try riding her,” he said, grinning at me.
“Your funeral,” I said. To confess the truth, I almost looked forward to seeing Grundo in trouble with my grandfather. I was feeling mean, and depressed about my personality.
Grundo looks soft, but he is surprisingly wiry and this makes him a much better rider than I am. I have never got much beyond the basics. In a soft-hearted way that is annoyingly like Mam’s, I am sorry for the horse for having me sit on its back making it do things. Grundo says this is silly. It’s what horses are bred for. He can make most horses do what he wants.
He nipped over the gate and went calmly across to the mare. She took a quick glance at him and lost interest again. She took no notice at all when Grundo put his hands on her. She was not very tall. Grundo had no difficulty hoisting himself on to her back, where he sat and clicked his tongue at her to make her go. She swung her head round then and looked at him in astonishment. Then… I have no idea what she did then, and Grundo says he doesn’t know either. She sort of walked out from underneath him. I swear that for one moment Grundo was sitting on her back, and for another moment Grundo was sitting up in the air, on nothing, looking absolutely stunned, and the next moment the mare was ten feet away and going back to grazing. Grundo came down on the grass on his back with a thump.
He picked himself up and came hobbling over to the gate, saying seriously, “I don’t think I’ll try again. You can see by all the white on her that she’s very old.”
That made me scream with laughter. Grundo was very offended and explained that the mare was old enough to have learnt lots of tricks, which only made me laugh more. And after a bit, Grundo began to see the funny side of it too. He said it felt very odd, being left sitting on nothing, and he kept wondering how the mare did it. We went scrambling up to the top of the hill behind the manse, laughing about it.
There were mountains all round as far as we could see up there. The peaks we had thought might be a dragon were lost among all the others.
“Do you think they really are part of a dragon?” I asked, while we went sliding and crouching down the other side of the summit. “It was rather mad, the way he said it.” The thought that my grandfather might be mad really worried me. But it would certainly explain why my mother was so terrified of him.
“He’s not mad,” Grundo said decidedly. “Everyone’s heard of the Welsh dragon.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “He doesn’t behave at all the way people usually do.”
“No, but he behaves like I would behave if I hadn’t been brought up at Court,” Grundo said. “I sort of recognised him. He’s like me underneath.”
This made me feel much better. There was a huge, heathery moor beyond the manse hill, and we rushed out into it with the wind clapping our hair about and cloud shadows racing across us. There was the soft smell of water everywhere. And no roads, no buses, no people, and only the occasional large, high bird. We found a place where water bubbled out of the ground in a tiny fountain that spread into a pool covered with lurid green weeds. Neither of us had seen a natural spring before and we were delighted with it. We tried blocking it with our hands, but it just spouted up between our fingers, cold as ice.
“I suppose,” Grundo said, “that the well in Sir James’s Inner Garden must fill from a spring like this. Only I don’t think this one’s magic.”
“Oh, don’t!” I cried out. “I don’t want to remember all that! It’s not as if we can do a thing about it, whatever they’re plotting to do.” I spread my arms into the watery smelling wind. “I feel free for the first time in a hundred years!” I said. “Don’t spoil it.”
Grundo stood with his feet sinking into squashy marsh plants and considered me. “I wish you wouldn’t exaggerate,” he said. “It annoys me. But you do look better. When we’re with the Progress you always remind me of an ice-puddle someone’s stamped in. All icy white edges. I’m afraid of getting cut on you sometimes.”
I was astonished. “What should I be like then?”
Grundo shrugged. “I can’t explain. More like – like a good sort of tree.”
“A tree!” I exclaimed.
“Something that grew naturally, I mean,” Grundo grunted. “A warm thing.” He moved his feet with such appalling sucking noises that I had to laugh.
“You’re the one who’s rooted to the spot!” I said, and we wandered on, making for a topple of rock in the distance. When we got there, we sat on the side that was in the sun and away from the wind. After a long time, I said, “I didn’t mean that about not wanting to remember Sir James’s garden – it’s just I feel so helpless.”
Grundo said, “Me too. I keep wondering if the old Merlin might have been killed so that the new one could take over in time to go to the garden.”
“That’s an awful thing to think!” I said. But now Grundo had said it, I found I was thinking it too. “But the Merlin’s supposed to be incorruptible,” I said. “Grandad found him.”
“He could have been deceived,” Grundo said. “Your Grandfather Hyde’s only human, even if he is a Magid. Why don’t you try telling this grandfather?”
“Grandfather Gwyn?” I said. “What could he do? Besides, he’s Welsh”.
“Well, he made a fair old fuss to the Chamberlain’s Office just to get you here,” Grundo replied. “He knows how to raise a stink. Think about it.”
I did think about it as we wandered on, but not all that much because, after what seemed a very short while, we saw that the sun was going down and looked at our watches and realised it was after five o’clock. We turned back and got lost. The moor was surrounded by green knobs that were the tops of mountains and they all looked the same. When we finally found the right knob and slid down the side of it to the manse, there was only just time to get cleaned up before tea was ready.
“I love this food!” Grundo grunted.
The table was crowded with four different kinds of bread, two cakes, six kinds of jam in matching dishes, cheese, butter and cream. Olwen followed us into the dining room with a vast teapot and, as soon as my grandfather had thundered out his grace, she came back with plates of sausage and fried potatoes. Grundo beamed and prepared to be very greedy. I had to stop before the cakes, but Grundo kept right on packing food in for nearly an hour and drinking cup after cup of tea. While he ate, he talked cheerfully, just as if my grandfather was a normal person.
My grandfather watched Grundo eat with a slightly astonished look, but he did not seem to mind being talked to. He even answered Grundo with a few deep words every so often. I was fairly sure Grundo was being this chatty so that I could join in and tell Grandfather Gwyn what we had overheard in Sir James’s Inner Garden. But I couldn’t. I knew he would give me that look with his eyebrows up and not believe a word. I seemed to curl up inside just thinking of speaking.
I was wondering how often my Mam had sat silent like this at meals, when Grundo helped himself to a third slice of cake, seriously measuring off the exact amount. “I have room for twenty-five degrees more cake,” he explained, “and then I shall go back to soda bread and jam. Does Olwen do your cooking for you because you’re a widower?”
At this, my grandfather turned to me. I could tell he was not pleased. It breathed off him like cold from a frozen pond. “Did Annie tell you I was a widower?” he asked me.
“She said she had never known her mother,” I said.
“I am glad to hear her so truthful,” my grandfather replied. I thought that was all he was going to say, but he seemed to think again and make an extra effort. “There has been,” he said, and paused, and made another effort, “a separation.”
I could feel him hurting, making the effort to say this. I was suddenly furious. “Oh!” I cried out. “I hate all this divorcing and separating! My Grandfather Hyde is separated from his wife and I’ve never even seen her or the aunt who lives with her. And that aunt’s divorced, and so’s the aunt who lives with Grandad, which is awfully hard on my cousin Toby. Half the Court is divorced! The King is separated from the Queen most of the time! Why do people do it?”
Grandfather Gwyn was giving me an attentive look. It was the sort of look you can feel. I felt as if his deep, dark eyes were opening me up, prising apart pieces of my brain. He said thoughtfully, “Often the very nature of people, the matter that brought them together, causes the separation later.”
“Oh, probably,” I said angrily. “But it doesn’t stop them hurting. Ask Grundo. His parents are separated.”
“Divorced,” Grundo growled. “My father left.”
“Now that’s one person I don’t blame!” I said. “Leaving Sybil was probably the most sensible thing he ever did. But he ought to have taken you with him.”
“Well now,” said Grandfather Gwyn. He sounded nearly amused. “The ice of Arianrhod has melted at last, it seems.”
I could feel my face bursting into a red flush, right to the top of my hair and down my neck, because my grandfather had so obviously seen me the same way as Grundo did. So I was a puddle of ice, was I? I was so wrought up by then that I snapped at him, just as if he had been Alicia. “You can talk! If ever I saw a marble iceberg, it’s you!”
Now he looked really amused. His face relaxed and he very nearly smiled.
“It’s not funny!” I snarled at him. “I can see you made my mother terrified of you by behaving like this! Most of the time you’d make her think she wasn’t worth noticing, and then you’d make fun of her!”
Then I gave a gasp and tried to hold my breath – but I couldn’t because I was panting with rage – knowing that a strict person like my grandfather was bound to jump to his feet and order me thunderously out of the room.
In fact, he just said musingly, “Something of that, but Annie brought her own difficulties to the situation, you know.” The mild way he said it surprised me. I was even more surprised when he said, “Come now, Arianrhod. Tell me what is really upsetting you so.”
I almost burst into tears. But I didn’t, because I suspected that Mam would have done and Grandfather Gwyn would have hated it. “If you must know,” I blurted out, “there’s a plot – in England – and most of the Court have been given bespelled water, even the King. The Merlin’s in it!”
“I know,” he said. “This is why I asked for you to come here, before the balance of magic is disturbed even further.”
For a second, I was thoroughly astonished. Then I thought, Oh! He’s a wizard! And that made me feel much better. I could tell by the way Grundo’s face snapped round to look at Grandfather Gwyn, and then went much pinker, that Grundo had had the same thought.
“Tell me in detail,” my grandfather said to us, “every word and sign and act that you remember.”
So we told him. It took a while and Grundo absent-mindedly ate two more pieces of cake while we talked. He probably needed to. It couldn’t have been pleasant for Grundo, having to describe what his mother did. Otherwise, I’d have called him a pig. Grandfather Gwyn leant forward with one forearm stiffly among the tea-things and seemed to drink in everything we said.
“Can you help at all?” Grundo said at last.
To our dismay, my grandfather slowly shook his head. “Unfortunately not,” he said. “I am about to become vulnerable, in a way I very much resent, and will be able to do nothing directly for a while. You have just shown me the way of it. But there is something you can do, Arianrhod, if you think you have the courage. You will have to work out most of it for yourself, I am afraid. It is magic that is not mine to deal in, and it is something your mother never could have brought herself to do. But, if you think you are able, I can put you in the way of it tomorrow.”
I sat in silence in that tall, cold room, staring at his intent white face across the plates and crumbs. Grundo looked to be holding his breath. “I – I suppose I’d better,” I said, when the chills had almost stopped scurrying up and down my back. “Someone has to do something.”
My Grandfather Gwyn could smile, after all. It was an unexpectedly warm, kind smile. It helped. A little. Actually, I was terrified.
4 Nick (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I sat down again after Romanov had gone. For some reason, I fitted myself carefully into the exact place I had been in before, with my back against the wall and my heels in the scuff marks. I suppose I wanted Arnold and Co to think I’d been sitting there all the time. But I wasn’t really attending. I was shaking all over and I pretty well wanted to cry.
I was full of hurt and paranoia and plain terror that someone had wanted me killed. I kept thinking, But I told them in the Empire I wasn’t going to be Emperor! They’d taken me there into those worlds and I’d signed things – sort of abdicated – so that my half-brother Rob could be Emperor instead. It didn’t make sense.
I was full of hurt and paranoia too at the way Romanov had despised me. A lot of people had called me selfish. I’d been working on it, I thought. I’d looked after Dad and been really considerate, I thought. But I could tell Romanov saw through all that, to the way I really felt. And of course I still felt selfish, in spite of the way I behaved. All the same, I was trying, and it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t fair either that Romanov had despised me for being ignorant too! I’d been working on that as well. I’d been reading everything I could lay hands on about magic and trying to get to other worlds – and trying every way I could to persuade the bunch of people who govern the Magids – they call them the Upper Room for some reason – to let me train as a Magid too. It wasn’t my fault they wouldn’t.
Then I thought about Romanov himself. I would never, if I lived to be a thousand, meet anyone else as powerfully magic as Romanov. It was shattering. I’d met quite a few Magids, and they seemed quite humdrum now, compared with the stuff I’d felt coming from Romanov. It was awesome, it was just not fair, for someone to be as strong as that. Razor-edge, lightning-strike strong. It shook me to my bones.
And those big cats shook me to my bones too. When I found they were real…
Hang on, I thought. This is a dream. You always put yourself through seriously nasty experiences in bad dreams. This is just a nightmare.
Then I felt a whole heap better. I looked up and saw that the overhead lights were getting stronger orange, while the gridded holes in the walls were growing pink. It looked as if the whole day had passed. Well, I thought, dreams do like to fast-forward things. I wasn’t really surprised when, about five minutes later, Arnold came pounding up to me carrying his bag of tricks. His thick, fair face looked white and exhausted.
“Up you get. Time to go,” he said. “The Prince’s own mages handle security overnight.”
I got up, thinking in a dreamlike way that it was rather a waste that we were all taking so much trouble to guard a Prince who was going to lose his Empire and be dead before long. How had Romanov known that anyway? But dreams are like that.
I was still thinking about this when we passed the first soldier. He looked at us enviously. “Poor beggars stay here all night in case anyone plants a bomb,” Arnold remarked. Then we came up to Chick and Arnold said, “Time up. Hotel first or eat and drink?”
“Food!” Chick said, collapsing his sword to a knife and then stretching his arms out. “I’m so hungry I could eat that novice.”
“I’d prefer a horse, personally,” Arnold said and we went on round to underneath the pavilion. Dave and Pierre were already there, waiting. Arnold asked them too, “Hotel first, or food?”
“Food!” they both said and Dave added, “And wine. Then some hotspots. Anyone know this town – know where’s good to go?”
I watched them as they stood around discussing this. After Romanov, they struck me as simply normal people, jumped up a bit. I was a bit bored by them.
None of them did know where to go in Marseilles, as it turned out. Nor did I, when they asked me as a last resort. So we all went out through the guarded doors underneath the pavilion into the street and Arnold hailed a taxi. “Condweerie noo a yune bong plass a monjay,” he told the driver as we all piled in. I think he meant, Take us to a good place to eat, but it sounded like Zulu with a German accent.
The driver seemed to understand though. He drove off downhill towards the sea with a tremendous rattle. Even allowing for the way the streets were cobbled and how old that taxi was, I think the way its engine worked was quite different from the cars I was used to. It was ten times louder.
But it got us there. Before long, it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “Voila, messieurs. A whole street of eateries for your honours.” Clearly, he had us spotted as English – or, considering Arnold and perhaps Chick too, not French anyway. The place he’d brought us to was a row of little cafés, and they all had big hand-done notices in their windows. SCARMBLED EGG, one said, and SNALES was another. LEG OF FROG WITH CHEEPS and STAKE OR OLDAY BREKFA said others.
We all cracked up. It had been a long day and it felt good to be able to scream with laughter. “I am not,” howled Dave, staggering about on the cobbles and wiping tears off his face, “repeat not, going to eat cheeping frog legs!”
“Let’s go for the scarmbled egg,” laughed Chick. “I want to know what they do to it.”
So, in spite of Arnold saying he rather fancied the stake, we went into the SCARMBLED EGG one. We charged in, still laughing, and snatched up menus. I think the proprietors found us a bit alarming. They brought us a huge carafe of wine straightaway, as if they were trying to placate us, and then looked quite frightened when we all discovered we needed to visit the gents and surged up to our feet again.
There was only one of it, out in the back yard past the telephone and the kitchen, where a large fat French lady glowered suspiciously at us as we waited for our turns. I was last, being only the novice, so I had to stand a lot of the glare.
But when we came back to our table, things were almost perfect. We swigged the wine and ordered vast meals, some of it weirdly spelt and the rest in French, so that we had no idea what would be coming, and then we ate and ate, until we got to the cheese and sticky pastry stage, where we all slowed down cheerfully. Dave began saying that he wanted to look at the nightlife very soon.
“In a while,” Arnold said. “I suppose I’d better take your reports first.” He lit one of his horrible Aztec smokes and took out a notebook. “Chick? Any attempts to break through the East? Any threats?”
“Negative,” said Chick. “I’ve never known the otherwheres calmer.”
The others both said the same. Then Arnold looked at me. “How about your patrol? What’s your name, by the way?”
They’ve finally asked! I thought. “Nick.”
Arnold frowned. “Funny. I thought it was something like Maurice.”
“That’s my surname,” I said, quick as a flash. “And I do have something to report. A fellow called Romanov turned up and he…”
That caused a real sensation. “Romanov!” they all shouted. They were awed and scared and thoroughly surprised. Arnold added suspiciously, “Are you sure it was Romanov?”
“That’s who he said he was,” I said. “Who is he? I never met anyone so powerful.”
“Only the magical supremo,” Chick said. “Romanov can do things most magic users in most worlds only dream of doing.”
“He can do some things most of us never even thought of,” said Pierre. “They say he charges the earth for them too.”
“If you can find him,” Arnold said wryly.
“I’ve heard,” said Dave, “that he lives on an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries. Went there to escape his missus.”
“Sensible fellow,” murmured Arnold.
“He escapes there to avoid being pestered to do magic,” Pierre said. “I’d heard he was self-taught. Is that true?”
“Yes – that’s the amazing thing about him,” Dave said. “According to what I heard, he was born in a gutter on quite a remote world – Thule, I think, or maybe Blest – and he pulled himself out of poverty by teaching himself to do magic. Very unorthodox. But he had a gift for it and discovered things no one else knew how to do, so he charged high and got rich quick. He could probably buy our entire Empire now. And nobody’d dare say he couldn’t.”
“Yes, but,” Arnold said doggedly, “was it really Romanov that Nick Maurice met?” He turned and puffed his awful smoke at me, staring through the brown clouds of it with big, earnest blue eyes. “If you were doing as you were told, you’d have been able to see his totem animal. What was it like?”
“I’d heard it was a sabre-tooth tiger,” Chick put in.
“No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean, hunting cat, sort of cream with dark grey blodges. It had tufts on its ears and sarcastic green eyes and he said it was female. It came up to my waist, easily. I was scared stiff of it.”
Arnold nodded. “Then it was Romanov.” I could see they were, all four, really impressed. “Did he tell you why he was there?” Arnold asked me. “Was he looking for the Prince?”
“I asked him that,” I said. “And he seemed to think the Prince would make his own trouble, without any magical interference. When he was King, he said.”
They exchanged worried glances at that. Dave muttered, “Could be right. By what I’ve heard, some of Romanov’s island is thirty years in the future.”
“They say he never bothers to lie,” Chick agreed.
I was relieved. I hoped I’d given them enough to think of to stop them thinking any more about me. From the moment Arnold said he thought my name was Maurice, it was like a whole train of pennies dropping in my head. This was not a dream. It was real. I’d no idea how it happened, but I knew that somehow I’d done the thing I’d been longing to do and crossed over into another universe. A real other world. And when I did, I’d turned up beside those fliers while they had all been waiting for the novice to arrive, and they had thought I was him.
This meant that, somewhere back in that other London, there was the real Maurice.
If this Maurice was my age, he wasn’t going to like having gone without breakfast and then finding they’d all left without him. He was going to go back to this academy he came from, or phone there, and tell them. If I was really lucky, them at the academy would just shrug and say serve him right for being late.
But I couldn’t count on it.
What was much more likely, since this cricket match was a Test and going to go on for several days, was that the academy people were going to make arrangements for the real Maurice to get to Marseilles later that same day. Then they were going to phone someone in the Prince’s Security team to say Maurice was on his way. In fact, it was just amazing luck that they hadn’t phoned while I was sitting in that concrete passage thinking it was all a dream. I would have had a rude awakening. Perhaps it took them a long time to arrange the journey. But they could well have phoned by now. Or Maurice could even have got here.
It was probably only the fact that the mages had been starving hungry and gone off with me in that taxi without saying where they were going that had stopped me getting arrested a couple of hours ago.
They would arrest me. They’d do that in my own world if I accidentally got in among Security for the Queen. But this world was so paranoid that it had to have a charmed circle round a cricket field, and I’d got in on that too. These people were going to accuse me of magical terrorism or something. I knew they were. I had to get away.
But at that moment they were still sort of attending to me, even though they were now discussing totem beasts and the way the animals reflected a mage’s personality. So I kept a humble, eager, novice-like look on my face. When they asked me if I thought Romanov’s totem beast reflected Romanov’s personality, I said, “Yes. It walked exactly like him.”
They laughed. Then Chick said, puzzled, “But didn’t he say anything else to you?”
I said, “He called me ignorant and went away in disgust.” As I said it, I wondered if it was Maurice’s academy that had sent Romanov to stop me before I did any acts of terrorism. But I saw that couldn’t be right. Romanov had known my name. I hadn’t told anyone here my name until just now.
“Just passing through, I suppose,” Arnold said dubiously. “Odd though. I’d better report it as soon as we get to the hotel. Nick, you must be ready to give a detailed account to the Prince’s mages.”
“Sure,” I said and thought that I’d better give them the slip on the way there.
Then Arnold said, “Call for the bill, Dave. Ladeeshun or whatever they say. Everyone got enough cash for this blowout?”
The four of them began fetching out money. One glance was enough to show me that it wasn’t anything like the couple of ten pound notes in my back pocket. Their notes were kind of white, with black writing on them, like legal documents, and the coins were vast heavy things that rang down on the table like church bells. I knew I had to get out now.
I stood up. I said, “I have to go to the gents again.”
“Trying to get out of paying your share?” Pierre said, laughing.
The others laughed too and Chick said, “Hey, Nick, you never told us what your totem beast is. Or is it a state secret?”
“No… It’s a black panther,” I said, edging off.
“Go on!” said Dave. “That would make you a high adept!”
“That was a joke,” I said hurriedly. “Just a joke.” And I marched off, followed by jolly shouts and more laughter. I felt bad. They were quite nice fellows really.
I didn’t dare run, but I walked quite fast, down the passage past the huge Frenchwoman – she glowered at me again – and opened the door into the yard. It was a narrow door and I had to turn half round to get through it. That was how I happened to see the officer from the flier just coming in through the front door of the café. He was waving his cellphone and looking pretty agitated. You could see he had been hunting all over for us.
I shut the door very gently behind me and raced through the yard to the back entrance. There was an alley there full of rubbish bins. But no soldiers. Yet. I think the officer hadn’t been sure enough of finding us to have the place surrounded. But I was sure he must have a squad outside the front. I ran.
I ran for my life, out of that alley and then through several others, always turning uphill away from that street when I could. That may have been a mistake. For one thing, it got steeper, so that there were steps in some places. For another thing, there were more and more people about, lovers walking, or people just sitting in doorways, so that when I began to hear shouts and police whistles and lots of feet climbing up behind me, I didn’t dare run. The ones who saw me running would point me out to the police.
Then things got worse. Arnold’s voice suddenly spoke, sounding like it was somewhere inside of me. Nick, Nicholas Maurice. Come here. We want to ask you a few questions. I’d forgotten they were mages. They were probably tracking me by magic.
Dave’s voice spoke too. Come on, Nick. Don’t be a fool. Nicholas Maurice, there’s a full security alert and you can’t get away.
My name’s not Nicholas! I thought frantically. It’s really Nichothodes Euthandor Timosus Benigedy Koryfoides. It was the first time I’d ever been glad of having this string of outlandish names. They seemed to cover up the voices. I recited them over and over again and climbed the hill until I’d no breath left and was hot as a furnace. I pounded up another set of steps, saying a name for each step, “Nichothodes – puff – Euthandor – puff – Timosus – gasp – Benigedy – pant – Koryfoides!” And the voices faded away as I burst out into bright lights, shops and crowds of people.
Thank goodness! I thought. I can get lost in these crowds!
It was proper city life there. Nobody spared me a glance as I went past tables on a pavement packed with people eating and drinking, and then crossed the road among a bunch of happy folk having a night out. They were all much better dressed than me, but nobody looked at me anyway. I got my breath back wandering along that side of the street, looking into expensive shop windows, and I was just beginning to feel safer when both ends of the road filled with uniforms. Police and soldiers were stopping everyone from leaving, and squads were coming down towards me asking everyone to show their ID.
I bolted up the nearest alley. There was some kind of big church up the other end and I stopped dead when I saw it. There were a couple of soldiers with rifles standing outside its door. Perhaps in this world you really could kneel holding the altar and shouting “Sanctuary!” and be safe. And they didn’t want me doing that. I leant against the alley wall wondering what to do. I knew what I should do, and that was simply walk on into another world, or back into my own. But I couldn’t seem to do that, however hard I pushed my shoulders at that wall, no more than I could do it when I’d tried at home. I didn’t know what to do.
Then, Hang on! I thought. I spent most of today up a tree somewhere quite different. That should be safe enough, if I can get there. I’ll try that.
So I looked around. And I could hardly believe my eyes. Paths to that wood, and to all sorts of other places, more or less radiated out from where I was standing. They looked dim and blue and at odd sort of angles to that alley, but they looked as real as Romanov had said they were. I bolted up the nearest path.
It was night there too and fairly dark, but before I had gone very far I could see the oval of turquoise light that was the cricket stadium. I took my bearings from that and trotted round and along into the wood. It was pitchy dark there, full of uncanny rustlings and birds hooting, but I refused to let that bother me and kept on trotting. I’ll find that panther, I thought, then climb a tree and let her protect me. That should do it.
While I was shoving through the next clump of bushes, I smelt a butcherish sort of smell and heard the most tremendous grating and cracking, like teeth on bone, and I realised I had found the panther. It was the extra blackness under the next bush. But before I could say anything, she gave a hideous, fruity growl.
Go away. Busy. Eating. MINE.
I got out of those bushes fast. I could tell she would add a piece of me to her meal if I didn’t leave her alone. There was no way that panther was a tame totem-thing. It shook me up and made me feel horribly lonely to realise that. I’d been relying on beastly protection. But as that wasn’t on, I thought I’d climb a tree anyway and blundered on until I came to one that seemed easy to climb. I had my arms round its trunk and one foot up on the lowest branch, when I heard voices again.
Nicholas Maurice, we know you’re here. Come on out.
I froze. I looked where the voices were coming from, and there were two things like shining yellowish ghosts drifting along among the trees about a foot in the air. They were over in the direction of the turquoise oval, but much nearer, following a path there. Inside the ghost-shapes I could just recognise Chick and Pierre. This was another thing I’d forgotten they could do.
I took a look down at myself. I seemed to be quite dark and solid. The only parts of me I could really see were my pale hands, clutching the tree. But for all I knew, Chick and Pierre looked dark and solid to themselves and I was the one who shone like a ghost to them. I didn’t know enough, that was the problem. All I knew was that they hadn’t seen me yet.
Nicholas Maurice! they fluted beguilingly.
Nichothodes! I said to myself and began backing gently away, reciting my names again. I backed, and crept, and bumped into several trees and a spiky bush, and watched the ghosts drifting along, more and more distant, until I backed right round behind the spiky bush and couldn’t see them any more. Then I looked around and saw another path winding its dim, blue way up to my right, and I fair pelted up it.
This path was rocky and wet, with wet cliffs bulging up on both sides, and it was horribly uneven. I kept stumbling as I ran, but I didn’t stop until the light from the turquoise stadium faded away entirely and I couldn’t see it at all. I was looking over my shoulder, checking on it, when I whanged into a piece of cliff and fell down.
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I stayed down for quite a while. Here I was, I thought, once again sitting in a state of terror and paranoia, only this time was worse. Add to that the way my knee hurt from ramming the cliff and the fact that my rear felt as if I was sitting in a puddle and you have the recipe for true misery. And it was dark.
There wasn’t any way that I could see of getting home to Dad. I seemed to have a choice of going back to the wood and giving myself up to the ghostly shapes of Chick and Pierre, or going on along this path, or choosing another. There didn’t seem to be any future in any of those choices.
I felt vile. And guilty. Let’s face it, I had deceived a whole security team. I hadn’t exactly meant to, but I had been so set on the idea that this was all a dream that I was having that I hadn’t even tried to say, “Excuse me. I’m not your novice.” Maybe this was because, underneath, I might have had a small sense of self-preservation which told me that, if I did, I was likely to be arrested and interrogated anyway. But I knew why I hadn’t said anything really. It was because I had actually – really and truly – got to another world on my own, just as I’d been longing to do. And it was too good to spoil.
Now I was in a real mess. And so were the mages I’d deceived. It was no wonder that Arnold and Dave had been tracking me hard in Marseilles and that Chick and Pierre were in a trance searching the wood. They were in bad trouble. If they didn’t find me, they’d almost certainly be arrested themselves.
I was not surprised someone had hired Romanov to terminate me. I was getting to be a real menace. It was for something I was going to do later, he said. Romanov must have known I was going to go from bad to worse – and all only because I’d set my heart on being a Magid. Magids were strong magicians. They guided the flow of magic from world to world. They were trouble-shooters too. Most of them were dealing with problems – really exciting problems – in several worlds at once, using all sorts of different magical skills to do it. I wanted to do that. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything. But the people who ran the Magids – the Upper Room – wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t let me have any training. So it was no wonder I was blundering ignorantly around, getting into this sort of mess. Romanov had been right to despise me.
This set me thinking of Romanov again. I still had the idea he was more powerful than any Magid. Romanov, I thought. That’s the name of the old Czars of Russia. And he probably was a Czar, a magics supremo, the magics Czar, the way we have drugs Czars in England. I wished I could talk to him about the mess I was in. I knew he could tell me how to get back to my own world.
This was where the odd thing happened.
It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t smelling, or feeling, but it was like both things. It was also like there was a tiny breeze blowing from the path ahead, as if thinking of Romanov set it off. But there was no breeze. The air was perfectly still and wet. All the same I could suddenly smell-feel that Romanov had gone along this very path on his way back to wherever his home was.
“He said come to him if anyone else came after me,” I said out loud. “OK. I will.”
I got up and began feeling my way along the path.
For I don’t know how long, it was quite awful. It was so dark. I could see sky up above, between the rock walls, but it was almost as dark as the path. There were no stars in it – nothing – and it didn’t help me to see at all. I could just pick out my hands, the right one trailing along the wet, lumpy rocks, and the left one stretched out in front in a shaky sort of way, in case I hit a spur or a corner of cliff. I didn’t want to think what else I might hit. There were noises, squelshy sounds that made me sure my fingers were going to plunge into something big and slimy any second, and creaking noises, and dry flappings that were worst of all. Every time the flapping happened, the hairs on my neck came up and dragged on my collar as if it were velcro.
The ground was uneven too. My feet kicked stones I couldn’t see, or staggered and slipped on slopes of rock. Several times I stubbed my toe really hard, but I never knew what I’d hit. I sloshed into puddles and crunched through muddy pebbles until my feet were soaked and sore and frozen, and I never knew what was coming next.
Then it began to rain. “That’s all I need!” I moaned. It was cold, drenching rain that had me wet through in seconds, with water chasing down my face and bringing my hair down in sharp points into my eyes. My teeth started chattering, it was so cold. But, believe it or not, that rain was actually an improvement. The noises stopped, as if the creatures making them didn’t like the rain any more than I did, and before long all I could hear was the rain drilling down, splashing in puddles and trickling off the rocks. And the fact that the rocks were so wet meant that they sort of picked up a glisten from the sky and the puddles glinted a bit, so I could see a bit of what was coming next. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and got on faster.
The rain slacked off to a drizzle at last and I began to think there was a bit more light. I could actually see the way winding ahead like a sort of cleft in the rocks, with all the edges just faintly traced in silvery blue. Then I began to hear noises ahead. Not the noises I’d heard before. This was a sort of booming and yelling.
I began going very slowly and cautiously, sliding my feet one behind the other and keeping one shoulder against the right-hand wall so that I could look round each bend as I came to it. There was something big and alive along there, yelling its head off.
After about three bends, I could hear words in the yelling. “We plough the fields and scatter the dynamite on the land!” I heard. And then, after another bend, “Good King Wencis last looked out – when did he first look out then? – on the feast of Stephen!”
I almost laughed, but I still went very cautiously, and the light kept getting stronger and the yelling went on. You couldn’t call it singing. It was too out of tune. And finally I edged round another bend and saw the person making the din.
He was a skinny, white-haired old drunk and he was leaning against a bulge of rock singing his head off. When I peeped round the bend at him, he was yelling about “Rock of Ages, cleft for meeee!” and holding up a little blue flame in both shaky old hands. The flame lit his clothes shiny and blazed off the wet rocks and his wrinkled, yelling face. He held the flame higher up as I peeped at him and shouted, “Come on, come on, both of you! Or am I just seeing double? Come out where I can see all the pair of you! Don’t lurk!”
I came round in front of him. There didn’t seem any harm in him. I’d never seen anyone so drunk, not even my friends after they’d drunk all Dad’s whisky. He couldn’t have hurt anyone in that state. He had trouble just seeing me. He wavered about, holding the little flame out towards me, and blinked and peered. I’d been thinking this flame was some kind of outdoor candle, or a torch like Arnold and Co had used, but it wasn’t. It was a little curl of blue light standing on his hands, blazing away out of nothing.
“I’m drunk,” he said to me. “Night as a tute. Can’t ever come this way unless I get drunk first. Too scared. Tell me, are you scared?”
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off that little flame. It was one of the most extraordinary things I’d ever seen. “Doesn’t that burn you?”
“Not at all, notatall, notatall,” he shouted. He was too drunk to talk quietly. “Being of one substance with my flesh, you know, it can’t hurt. Litchwight, I mean witchlight, they call it. Not even hot, dear lad. Not even warm. So, well then, out with it, out with it!”
“Out with what?” I said.
“Whatever you need or want, of course. You have to meet three folk in need in this place and give them what help you can, before you can get where you’re going. You’re my third!” he shouted, waving his little flame backwards and forwards more or less under my nose, “so I’m naturally anxious to get you done and dealt with and get on. So out with it. What do you want?”
I should have asked him how to find Romanov. I see that now. A lot of things would have been different if I had. But I was so amazed by that little blue flame that I leant backwards to get its light out of my eyes and pointed to it. “Can I do that? Can you show me how to do it?”
He wavered forward from his rock, peering at me, and nearly fell down. “Amazing,” he said, hastily getting his back to the rock again. “Amazing. You’re here, but you can’t do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can’t. Why not?”
“No one ever showed me how,” I said.
He swayed about, looking solemn. “I quote,” he said. “I’m very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools? Know where that comes from?”
“One of the Narnia books,” I said. “The one where Narnia begins. Can you show me how to make a light like that?”
“Tell you,” he corrected me, looking even more solemn. “I can’t show you because it comes from inside yourself, see. What you do is find your centre – can you do that?”
“My navel, you mean?” I said.
“No, no!” he howled. “You’re not a woman! Or are you? Confess I can’t see you too well, but your voice sounds like teenage male to me. Is that what you are?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And a plumb ignorant one too,” he grumbled. “Fancy not knowing – Well, your centre is here!”
He plunged towards me and took me completely by surprise by jabbing me hard just under my breastbone. What with that, and the blast of alcohol that came with the jab, I went staggering backwards into the rocks on the other side of the path. He overbalanced. He snatched at my knees as he went down, missed, and ended in a heap by my feet. The blue light seemed to splash all over the ground. Then it climbed one of his arms and settled on his shiny wet shoulder.
“Polar sexus,” he said sadly. “That’s where it is, polar sexus.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
He raised his soaking grey head. “There is,” he said, “a special angel appointed to watch over those under the inkerfluence of eight over the one. That, young man, is why I had to imbibe before coming here. It all hangs together. Now do you understand how to summon light?”
“No,” I said frankly.
“Don’t you even know where your solar plexus is?” he demanded.
“I thought you said polar sexus,” I said.
He went up on to his hands and knees and shook his head sadly. Water flew off as if he was a wet dog. “Now you’re making fun of me. But I shall be forbearing,” he said, “though mostly for the reason that I shan’t get out of this place if I’m not. And I may add, young man, that your attitude towards the elderly is less than respectful. Polar sexus indeed!” He started fumbling around on the ground in front of my feet. “Where is it? Where did I put my damn light?”
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Diana Wynne Jones
A bestselling fantasy adventure from Diana Wynne Jones. The companion novel to the novel Deep Secret.The story is narrated by two very different teenagers, who each inhabit two extraordinarily different worlds.Arianrhod Hyde's world (or Roddy, as she prefers to be called) is very much the world of magic, pageantry and ritual. Not unlike Britain in King Arthur's Day, Roddy is daughter of two Court Wizards and therefore part of the King's Progress, travelling round the Islands of Blest and ready to take part in whatever ritual or ceremony is required, as it occurs. Presiding over all, the most important person is the Merlin, who is entrusted with the magical health of the Isles of Blest.Nick Mallory's world is much more familiar – at least, it starts off being our own. But it soon transpires that Nick's not quite the ordinary 15 year old he seems, as he slips sideways into something he thinks is a dream – but in fact is another world entirely. Now, Nick's been on other worlds before (although never alone) but he's a confident type. Maybe a bit too confident…In Roddy's world, the current Merlin expires and a new one takes his place. Yet something is wrong – the rituals have been upset and nothing is going the way it should. Roddy needs help, and certain powers indicate that Nick is to be the one to help her. And Nick is cool about helping her – in theory… but it's a bit worrying that she seems to mistake him for a magic-user.Their stories unfold, side-by-side, each part leading into the next, and the Merlin Conspiracy thickens as the tales swirl around each other – twining, meeting and affecting each other, yet never completely combining until the very end chapters when all is finally revealed.Compelling, howlingly funny in places, mind-boggling – this is going to WOW DWJ fans all around the world (and probably in other universes too).
Diana Wynne Jones
The Merlin Conspiracy
ILLUSTRATED BY
DAVID WYATT
Dedication (#ulink_3f87038c-2e38-5423-a7bd-aaec5372d33d)
To Rowan Dalglish
Contents
Cover (#u50f3c8a6-3446-5a37-8e5d-1f43de28cc35)
Title Page (#u7d558dce-b42e-51d5-b772-fd6d3a049278)
Dedication (#uee120c27-2440-587e-bb2f-5ef7cff16f80)
1: Roddy
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2: Nick
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3: Roddy
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4: Nick
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5: Roddy
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6: Nick
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7: Nick continued
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8: Roddy
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9: Nick
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10: Roddy and Nick
1: Roddy
2: Nick
3: Roddy
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11: Roddy and Nick
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2: Nick
3: Roddy
4: Nick
5: Roddy
6: Nick
12: Roddy and Nick
1: Roddy
2: Roddy
3: Roddy
4: Nick
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 Roddy (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King’s Progress.
I didn’t know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, “If you can’t do it, I will.” If you didn’t know Grundo, you’d think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like “inside” turning up as “sindie” and “story” as “otsyr.”
Anything but that! I thought. So I decided to start with Grundo – and me. I am Arianrhod Hyde, only I prefer people to call me Roddy, and I’ve looked after Grundo for years now, ever since Grundo was a small, pale, freckled boy in rompers, sitting completely silently in the back of the children’s bus. He was so miserable that he had wet himself. I was only about five myself at the time, but I somehow realised that he was too miserable even to cry. I got up and staggered through the bumping, rushing bus to the clothes lockers. I found some clean rompers and persuaded Grundo to get into them.
This wasn’t easy, because Grundo has always been very proud. While I was working at it, Grundo’s sister Alicia turned round from where she was sitting with the big ones. “What are you bothering with Cesspit for?” she said, tipping up her long, freckled nose. “There’s no point. He’s useless.” She was eight at the time, but she still looks just the same: straight fair hair, thick body, and an air of being the person, the one everyone else has to look up to. “And he’s ugly,” she said. “He’s got a long nose.”
“So have you got a long nose,” I said, “Lady Sneeze.” I always called her “Lady Sneeze” when I wanted to annoy her. If you say “Alicia” quickly it sounds just like a well-behaved sneeze – just like Alicia, in fact. I wanted to annoy her for calling Grundo Cesspit. She only said it because Sybil, her mother, called Grundo that. It was typical of the way they both treated him. Grundo’s father left Sybil before Grundo was born. Ever since I could remember, Sybil and Alicia had been thick as thieves together. Poor Grundo was nowhere.
It got worse when Grundo started lessons with us and turned out to be dyslexic. Sybil went around sighing, “He’s so stupid!” And Alicia chanted at him, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Alicia, of course, did everything well, whether it was maths, magic or horse-riding. She got chosen as a Court page when she was ten.
Our teachers knew Grundo was not stupid, but his inside out way of going on baffled them. They sighed too and called Grundo “Our young eccentric” and I was the one who taught Grundo to read and write. I think that was when I started calling him Grundo. I can’t quite remember why, except that it suited him better than his real name, which is Ambrose of all things! Before long, the entire Court called him Grundo. And while I was teaching him, I discovered that he had an unexpected amount of inside out magical talent.
“This book is boring,” he complained in his deep, solemn voice. “Why should I care if Jack and Jill go shopping? Or if Rover chases the ball?” While I was explaining to him that all reading books were like this, Grundo somehow turned the book into a comic book, all pictures and no words. It started at the back and finished at the front, and in the pictures the ball chased Rover and Jack and Jill were bought by the groceries. Only Grundo would think of two people being bought by a huge chunk of cheese.
He refused to turn the book back. He said it was more fun that way, and I couldn’t turn it back into a reading book whatever I tried. It’s probably still where I hid it, down inside the cover of the old teaching bus seat. Grundo is obstinate as well as proud.
You might say I adopted Grundo as my brother. We were both on our own. I am an only child and all the other Court wizards’ children were the same age as Alicia or older still. The other children our own age were sons and daughters of Court officials, who had no gift for magic. They were perfectly friendly – don’t get me wrong – but they just had a more normal outlook.
There were only about thirty of us young ones who travelled in the King’s Progress all the time. The rest only joined us for Christmas or for the other big religious ceremonies. Grundo and I always used to envy them. They didn’t have to wear neat clothes and remember Court manners all the time. They knew where they were going to be, instead of travelling through the nights and finding themselves suddenly in a flat field in Norfolk, or a remote Derbyshire valley, or a busy port somewhere next morning. They didn’t have to ride in buses in a heatwave. Above all, they could go for walks and explore places. We were never really in one place long enough to do any exploring. The most we got to do was look round the various castles and great houses where the King decided to stay.
We envied the princesses and the younger princes particularly. They were allowed to stay in Windsor most of the year. Court gossip said that the Queen, being foreign, had threatened to go back to Denmark unless she was allowed to stay in one place. Everyone pitied the Queen rather for not understanding that the King had to travel about in order to keep the realm healthy. Some said that the whole magic of the Islands of Blest – or maybe the entire world of Blest – depended on the King constantly moving about and visiting every acre of England.
I asked my Grandfather Hyde about this. He is a Magid and knows about the magics of countries and worlds and so on. And he said that there might be something in this, but he thought people were overstating the case. The magic of Blest was very important for all sorts of reasons, he said, but it was the Merlin who was really entrusted with keeping it healthy.
My mother did quite often talk of sending me to live with this grandfather in London. But this would have meant leaving Grundo to the mercies of Sybil and Alicia, so, whenever she suggested it, I told her I was proud to be a member of Court – which was quite true – and that I was getting the best possible education – which was partly quite true – and then I sort of went heavy at her and hoped she’d forget the idea. If she got really anxious and went on about this being no sort of life for a growing girl, I went on about the way Grandad grows dahlias. I really do hate dahlias as a way of life.
Mam had her latest worry session in Northumbria, in the rain. We were all camped in a steep, heathery valley waiting for the Scottish King to pay our King a formal visit. It was so bare that there was not even a house for the King. The canvas of the royal tent was turning a wet, dismal yellow just downhill from us, and we were slithering in shiny, wet sheep droppings while I went on about the way Grandad grows dahlias.
“Besides, it’s such a stupid thing for a powerful magician to do!” I said.
“I wish you didn’t feel like this about him,” Mam said. “You know he does a great deal more than simply grow flowers. He’s a remarkable man. And he’d be glad to have you as company for your cousin Toby.”
“My cousin Toby is a wimp who doesn’t mind being ordered to do the weeding,” I said. I looked up at Mam through the wet black wriggles of my hair and realised that my dahlia-ploy hadn’t worked the way it usually did. Mam continued to look anxious. She is a serious person, my mam, weighed down by her responsible job in the travelling Exchequer, but I can usually get her to laugh. When she laughs, she throws her head back and looks very like me. We both have rather long pink cheeks and a dimple in the same place, though her eyes are black and mine are blue.
I could see the rain was getting her down – having to keep the water out of her computer and having to go to the loo in a little wet flapping tent and all the rest – and I saw it was one of the times when she starts imagining me going down with rheumatic fever or pneumonia and dying of it. I realised I’d have to play my very strongest card or I’d be packed off down to London before lunch.
“Come off it, Mam!” I said. “Grandad’s not your father. He’s Dad’s. If you’re so anxious for me to be in the bosom of my family, why not send me to your father instead?”
She pulled her shiny waterproof cape around her and went back a step. “My father is Welsh,” she said. “If you went there, you’d be living in a foreign country. All right. If you feel you really can stand this awful, wandering existence, we’ll say no more.”
She went away. She always did if anyone talked about her father. I thought he must be terrifying. All I knew about my other grandfather was that Mam had had to run away from home in order to marry Dad, because her father had refused to let her marry anyone. Poor Mam. And I’d used that to send her away. I sighed with mixed relief and guilt. Then I went to find Grundo.
Grundo’s lot is always worse when we’re stopped anywhere for a while. Unless I think of an excuse to fetch him away, Sybil and Alicia haul him into Sybil’s tent and try to correct his faults. When I ducked into the dim, damp space, it was worse than usual. Sybil’s manfriend was in there, laughing his nasty, hissing laugh. “Give him to me, dear,” I heard him saying. “I’ll soon make a man of him.” Grundo was looking pale, even for him.
The only person at Court that I dislike more than Alicia is Sybil’s manfriend. His name is Sir James Spenser. He is very unpleasant. The astonishing thing is that the whole Court, including Sybil, knows he is nasty, but they pretend not to notice because Sir James is useful to the King. I don’t understand about this. But I have noticed the same thing happening with some of the businessmen who are useful to the King. The media are constantly suggesting these men are crooks, but nobody even thinks of arresting them. And it is the same with Sir James, although I have no idea in what way he is useful to the King.
He gave me a leer. “Checking that I haven’t eaten your sweetheart?” he said. “Why do you bother, Arianrhod? If I had your connections, I wouldn’t look twice at young Ambrose.”
I looked him in the face, at his big, pocky nose and the eyes too near on either side of it. “I don’t understand you,” I said in my best Court manner. Polite but stony. I didn’t think my connections were particularly aristocratic. My father is only the King’s weather wizard and much further down the order than Sybil, who is, after all, Earthmistress to England.
Sir James did his hissing laugh at me. Hs-ss-szz. “The aristocracy of magic, my dear child,” he said. “Look at your grandparents! I should think at the very least you’d be setting your sweet young adolescent cap at the next Merlin.”
Sybil said sharply, “What?” and Alicia gave a gasp. When I looked at her, she was speckled pink with indignation. Alicia has even more freckles than Grundo. Sybil’s long, jowly face was furious. Her pale blue eyes were popping at me.
I didn’t understand what made them so angry. I just thought, Bother! Now I shall have to be very polite – and rather stupid – and pretend I haven’t noticed. This was typical of Sir James. He loved making everyone around him angry. “But we’ve got a perfectly good Merlin!” I said.
“An old man, my dear,” Sir James said gleefully. “Old and frail.”
“Yes,” I said, truly puzzled. “But there’s no knowing who’ll be the next one, is there?”
He looked at me pityingly. “There are rumours, dear child. Or don’t you listen to gossip with your naïve little ears?”
“No,” I said. I’d had enough of his game, whatever it was. I turned, very politely, to Sybil. “Please would it be all right if I took Grundo to watch my father work?”
She shrugged her thick shoulders. “If Daniel wants to work in front of a staring child, that’s his funeral, I suppose. Yes, take him away. I’m sick of the sight of him. Grundo, be back here to put on Court clothing before lunch or you’ll be punished. Off you go.”
“There’s motherly love for you!” I said to Grundo as we hurried off into the rain.
He grinned. “We don’t need to go back. I’ve got Court clothes on under these. It’s warmer.”
I wished I’d thought of doing the same. It was so chilly that you wouldn’t have believed it was nearly Midsummer. Anyway, I’d got Grundo away. Now I just had to hope that Dad wouldn’t mind us watching him. He doesn’t always like being disturbed when he’s working.
When I cautiously lifted the flap of the weather tent, Dad was just getting ready. He had taken off his waterproof cape and was slipping off his heavy blue robe of office and rolling up his shirtsleeves. He looked all slim and upright like that, more like a soldier preparing for a duel than a wizard about to work on the weather.
“Over in that corner, both of you,” he said. “Don’t distract me or you’ll have the King after us in person. He’s given me very exact instructions for today.” He turned a grin on us as he said this, to show he didn’t at all mind having us there.
Grundo gave him one of his serious, deep looks. “Are we allowed to ask questions, sir?”
“Most probably not,” said my father. “That’s distracting. But I’ll describe what I’m doing as I go along, if you want. After all,” he added, with a wistful look at me, “one of you might wish to follow in my footsteps some day.”
I love my dad, though I never see very much of him. I think he really does hope that I might turn out to be a weather worker. I’m afraid I am going to be a great disappointment to him. Weather does fascinate me, but so does every other kind of magic too. That was true even then, when I didn’t know more than the magic they teach you in Court, and it’s more true than ever now.
But I loved watching Dad work. I found I was smiling lovingly as he stepped over to the weather table. At this stage it was unactivated and was simply a sort of framework made of gold and copper wires resting on stout legs that folded up for when we travelled. The whole thing folded away into a worn wooden box about four feet long which I had known for as long as I could remember. It smelt of ozone and cedarwood. Dad and that box went together somehow.
He stood beside the table with his head bent. It always looked as if he was nerving himself up for something. Actually, he was just working the preliminary magics, but when I was small I always thought that weather-working took great courage and I used to worry about him. But I’ve never lost the queer amazement you feel when the magic answers Dad’s call. Even that day, I gasped quietly as mistiness filled the framework. It was blue, green and white at first, but almost at once it became a perfect small picture of the Islands of Blest. There was England in all its various greens, except for the small brown stains of towns, with its backbone of the Pennines and its southern hills as a sort of hipbone. All the rivers were there as tiny blue-grey threads, and dark green clumps of woodlands – very important each of these, Dad tells me, because you bring the picture into being by thinking of water, wood and hill – but it still defeats me why I could even see the white cliffs in the south. And Scotland was there, too, browner, with travelling ridges of grey and white cloud crossing the brown. The fierce greyness at the top was a bad storm somewhere near John O’Groats. Wales lurked over to one side, showing only as dim greens under blue-grey clouds. But Ireland was entirely clear, living up to the name of Emerald Isle, and covered in big moving ripples of sunlight.
Dad walked round it all, bending over to look at the colours of the seas particularly. Then he stood back to see the patterns of the slanting, scudding clouds. “Hm,” he said. He pointed to the north-east of England, where the land was almost invisible under smoky, whitish mist. “Here’s the rain that’s presently being such a pest. As you see, it’s not moving much. The King wants it cleared up and, if possible, a blaze of sunlight when the Scottish King arrives. Now, look at Scotland. There’s very little clear sky there. They’re having sun and showers every ten minutes or so as those clouds ripple. I can’t get any good weather from there, not to make it last. Quite a problem.”
He walked slowly in among the green landscapes and the moving clouds, passing through the wires of the framework underneath as if they were not there. That part always gave me a shudder. How could a person walk through solid gold wire?
He stopped with his hand over dim, green Wales. “This is the real problem. I’m going to have to fetch the weather from Ireland without letting this lot drift in across us. That’s really appalling weather there in Wales at the moment. I shall have to try to get it to move away north and out to sea. Let’s see how the bigger currents are going.”
Up to his waist in moving, misty map, he gestured. The whole picture humped up a little and moved away sideways, first to show a curve of heaving grey ocean, ribbed like a tabby cat with strips of whitish cloud, and then, giddily, going the other way to show green-brown views of the Low Countries and the French kingdoms and more stripes of cloud there.
“Hm,” my father said again. “Not as bad as I feared. Everything is setting northwards, but only very slowly. I shall have to speed things up.”
He set to work, rather as a baker might roll dough along a board, pushing and kneading at clumps of cloud, steering ocean wisps with the flat of his hands, and shoving mightily at the weathers over Ireland and Wales. The dimness over Wales broke apart a little to show more green, but it didn’t move away. My father surveyed it with one hand to his chin.
“Sorry, everyone,” he said. “The only way with this is a well placed wind.”
We watched him moving around, sometimes up to his shoulders in land and cloud, creating winds. Most of them he made by blowing more or less softly, or even just opening his mouth and breathing, and they were never quite where you thought they ought to be. “It’s a little like sailing a boat,” he explained, seeing Grundo frowning. “The wind has to come sideways on to the canvas to make a boat move, and it’s the same here, except that weather always comes in swirls, so I have to be careful to set up a lighter breeze going the opposite way. There.” He set everything moving with a sharp breath that was almost a whistle and stood back out of the table to time it.
After a few minutes of looking from his big, complicated watch to the movements on the table, he walked away and picked up his robe. Weather-working is harder than it looks. Dad’s face was streaming with sweat and he was panting slightly as he fetched his portable far-speaker out of a pocket in the robe. He thought a moment, to remember that day’s codes, and punched in the one for the Waymaster Royal’s office.
“Daniel Hyde here,” he told the official who answered. “The rain will stop at twelve-oh-two, but I can’t promise any sunlight until one o’clock… Yes… Almost exactly, but it couldn’t be done without a wind, I’m afraid. Warn His Majesty that there may be half a gale blowing between eleven-thirty and midday. It’ll drop to a light wind around half past… Yes, we should have fine weather for some days after this.”
He put the speaker away and smiled at us while he put on his robe. “Fancy a visit to the Petty Viands bus?” he asked. “I could do with a cup of something hot and maybe a sticky cake or two.”
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
It was just as Dad predicted. We turned out for the Meeting of Kings in wet, howling wind that flapped velvet skirts and wrapped robes around legs. Those with headdresses held them in their hands until the last possible moment and then got very uncomfortable because, like the rest of us, they were trying to eat prettybread or pasties in one hand as we all went to our places. Sybil looked more dishevelled than anyone. Her yellow hair was streaming from her head and her hat was streaming green ribbons in her hand while she rushed about wailing cantrips and shouting at bad-luck carriers to get away behind the buses. She was barefoot, being an earth wizard, and she had kilted her velvet skirts up to her knees because of the wet in the grass. She had extremely thick legs.
“Looks just like a sack of sweetcorn balanced on two logs,” Dad said unkindly as he passed me on the way to the King’s tent. He disliked Sybil as much as I did. He used to say that it didn’t surprise him that Sybil’s husband had run away. And then he usually added, “They wanted the poor fellow to be the next Merlin, too. If it had been me, I’d have run away long before. Sybil and the worst job in the kingdom! Imagine!”
Unfortunately, Dad’s remark threw Mam into one of her rare fits of laughter and she breathed in a crumb of pastry. I was still thumping her back for her when word came round that the Scots were on their way. I had to run to my place beside Grundo. We were lined up with all the other children who weren’t pages in a row in front of the Royal Guards.
By this time, most of the tents were down except for the Royal Pavilion, and all the buses, vans, lorries and limousines were drawn up on three sides of an enormous square with the north-facing side left empty. The air was loud with the clapping of the household flags hoisted over them. The Royal Guards were drawn up inside that – poor fellows, they had been polishing kit and whitening belts since dawn, but they looked magnificent, a living line of scarlet and white. We of the Court were inside that again, like a bed of flowers in our Court clothes, shivering in the wind. Grundo said he envied the Household servants. They were allowed to stay in the buses and keep warm, and they had a much better view. They must have been able to see the Scottish Court advancing long before we could.
It was all timed perfectly. Hard-worked officials had been talking to one another on far-speakers all morning to make sure it was. The Scots appeared first. They seemed to come over the horizon and get larger and brighter as they came. They had pipers walking on both sides, solemnly stepping and skirling. I love the sound of bagpipes. It is the most exciting noise I know. I was quite sorry when our band started up and trumpets drowned the pipes out.
This was the signal for our King to come out of his tent and walk towards the Scots. When we stop in towns long enough for me to get talking to people, they always say enviously, “I suppose you see the King every day!” No. Actually, I don’t. He is nearly always away in the front of the Progress and I often don’t set eyes on him for weeks. When I do see him, it is usually like this, at a distance, as a tall figure in dark clothes, and the main way I recognise him is by his neat brown beard – and a sort of shiver of majesty he brings with him.
On this occasion he had Prince Edmund, the Prince Heir, with him too, also in sober, dark clothes. The Prince is eighteen now and he was travelling with his father that year to learn his duties. With them came the Merlin on one side and the Archbishop of York on the other, both old and stately in stiffly flapping robes, and after that a mixture of bishops and high officials and the wizards who are priests and priestesses of older powers. I’m supposed to know the order of them, but I keep forgetting. All I really know is that Sybil walked behind the Archbishop – with her skirts let down and her hat on by then – and my father was near the back, not being a priest.
I was looking at the Scots mostly anyway. Their King was quite young and he wasn’t the one I’d seen before. They have dozens of people who have claims to the throne of Scotland. Every so often, the clans back a new claimant, or three, and have a war and the King gets changed. This one, though he was new, didn’t look as if he’d get changed easily. He had a strong, eager look, and he walked as if he owned the earth, not just Scotland. He was wearing plaids, which made him stand out from the crowd of courtiers with him. They were very dressy. I have never seen so many styles and colours and French fashions. Their King looked like a hawk among parrots.
He left them behind and strode to embrace our King. For a brief minute, it was the friendliest possible Meeting. Prince Edmund was beckoned forward and introduced, and then a young woman in glorious rose pink silk who may have been the Scottish Queen – anyway the Scottish King grinned at her as if he knew her very well – and then it was the turn of the Archbishop and the Merlin to step forward and bless everyone. This was when the awful thing happened.
The Merlin spread his arms to call down benign magics. Dad says you don’t really need to spread your arms or do anything else physical to work magic. This is why he found Sybil so irritating, because she always acted about so, doing magic. But he says the Merlin had to show people what he was doing. So the poor old man held his arms up wide. His face, which was always rather pale, turned a strange colour. Even from where I was, I could see that the Merlin’s lips were sort of lilac-coloured where they showed through his white beard. He took his arms in hurriedly and hugged at himself. Then he slowly folded up and flopped down on the wet grass.
Everybody simply stared for an instant. And this was the instant that Dad’s fine weather arrived at last. The sun blazed out. It was suddenly damply, suffocatingly warm.
Dad got to the Merlin first. Dad had been spread out to the side when the two groups met and it only took him two strides to get there and kneel down. He swore to me afterwards that the Merlin was alive at that point, even though he had clearly had a bad heart attack. But Dad had to give way to Prince Edmund, who got there next. Prince Edmund put his hand out towards the Merlin’s chest and then snatched it back, looking aghast. He turned to the King and started to say something. Then he stopped, because Sybil swooped in almost at once and pulled the poor old man over on to his back. By that time he was definitely dead. I got a glimpse of his staring face among everybody’s legs and, as Grundo said, you couldn’t mistake it.
“Dead!” Sybil screamed. “My mentor and my master!” She put her head back so that her hat fell off and screamed again, towards the Scottish King. “Dead!”
She didn’t say any more. She just stood up with wet black patches on her velvet gown where she had knelt in the grass and stared at the Scottish King with her hands clasped to her chest.
Our King said icily to the Scottish King, “I believe Your Majesty was trained as a wizard?”
The Scottish King looked at him. After a moment he said, “I think this is the end of any friendship between us. I bid you good afternoon.”
He swung round in a swirl of tartan and walked away with all his people. He didn’t have to walk far. Vehicles came roaring over the brow of the hill almost at once, most of them military transports, and the royal party was scooped up into some of them, leaving the rest sitting in a threatening row on the Scottish border.
“We’ll move back a few miles,” our King said.
The rest of that week was a hot, moist chaos. Grundo and I, along with most of the children, were bundled here and there and sent about with messages because the royal pages were run off their feet, and it took us several days to find out what was happening.
It seemed that the media people had been filming the whole Meeting from their bus and they broadcast it as they filmed it. The Merlin’s death caused an outcry all over the country. The King had to go to the bus and assure people in another broadcast that it was an unfortunate accident, and that no one was accusing the Scottish King of anything. It didn’t help the situation that he said this in a grim way that made everyone think the opposite. At the same time, the whole Progress packed up double quick and moved south to the borders of Northumberland. The media bus was actually on the road while the King was grimly broadcasting. The rest of the buses had to keep drawing up on to the verges to make way for the army units rushing to take up defensive positions along the Scottish border, so all we knew of things were tilted views of hedges while green lorries thundered by in the road.
It turned out that the Scottish King broadcast too. He talked about an insult to Scotland and he sent army units to the border as well.
“But he must know it was simply an accident,” my mam said worriedly, when I did manage to see her and ask what was going on.
This was when we were finally camped around a village where the King could stay in a manor house that was big enough for the wizards to perform an autopsy on the Merlin. There, Grundo and I were sent hurrying with messages to other wizards, to the army HQ bus, the media tent, to the Waymaster’s Office and the Chamberlain’s, and after a day or so, to the village hall where the judicial enquiry was being held. So much was going on. There was a nationwide hunt for a new Merlin, with most of the wizards involved, while the rest were busy with the enquiry. It seemed that the post mortem had shown that there were traces of a spell hanging round the Merlin, but no one could tell what kind. It could even have been one of the Merlin’s own spells.
Dad was called into the enquiry. For a whole day, it looked as if he might be accused of murder. My heart seemed to be filling my ears and drumming in my chest that entire time. Mam went around white as a sheet whispering, “Oh, they can’t blame him, they can’t!” The trouble was, as she pointed out to me, everybody else who was close to the Merlin when he died was either royal or very important, so poor Dad got the full blast of the suspicion.
I can’t tell you how frantic everything was that day.
Then everything calmed down.
As far as I could tell, it was Grandad’s doing. He turned up that evening, shortly after Dad had come out of the village hall looking as if he had spent several sleepless weeks on a bare mountain. Grandad brought the new Merlin with him and they went straight to the King together. We didn’t see Grandad until quite late that night, when they all came out on to the village green: Grandad, the King, the Merlin, the judges, Prince Edmund, and a whole string of the wizards who had been tearing about and fussing over finding the new Merlin. The new Merlin was a skinny young man with a little pointed chin and a big Adam’s apple, who looked a bit stunned about his sudden jump to fame. Or maybe he was in a trance. Prince Edmund kept looking at him in an astonished, wondering way.
Meanwhile, the Waymaster’s Office had acted with its usual efficiency and cordoned off a big space on the green, while the Royal Guard jumped to it and built a bonfire in the centre of it. We were standing watching, waiting, wondering what was going to happen, when Grandad came up to us. Mam flung herself on him, more or less crying.
“Oh, Maxwell! It’s been so awful! Can you help?”
“Steady,” Grandad said. “All’s well. Dan’s in the clear now. Had to tackle it from the top, you see, on account of the family relationship.” He slapped Dad on the shoulder and gave me one of his quick, bony hugs. “Roddy. Hallo, Grundo,” he said. “I think I’ve got the whole mess sorted. Have to wait and see, of course, but I think they’ll end up deciding it was nobody’s fault. Lord! Poor old Merlin Landor must have been in his eighties at least! Bound to drop dead at some point. Just chose a bad moment to do it. No need for national hysteria about that.”
You know that marvellous moment when your mind goes quiet with relief. Everything was suddenly tranquil and acute with me. I could smell the trampled grass and motor fuel that I had not noticed before this, and the sweet, dusty scent of hay from beyond the village. I could hear the crackle of the bonfire as it caught and the twittering of birds in the trees around the green. The small, yellow flames climbing among the brushwood seemed unbelievably clear and meaningful, all of a sudden, and my mind went so peaceful and limpid that I found myself thinking that, yes, Grandad could be right. But Sir James had known the old Merlin was going to die. I looked round for Sir James, but he was not there. When I thought, I realised I had not seen him for some days, though Sybil was there, in among the other wizards.
As soon as the bonfire was blazing properly, the senior wizard stepped forward and announced that we were here to present the new Merlin to Court and country. Everyone cheered and the young Merlin looked more dazed than ever. Then one of the judges said that the question of the late Merlin’s death was now to be settled. He bowed to the King and stepped back.
The King said to the Merlin, “Are you prepared to prophesy for us?”
“I – I think so,” the Merlin said. He had rather a weak, high voice.
“Then,” said the King, “tell us who, or what, caused the death of the last Merlin.”
The young man clasped his hands together with his arms pointing straight down, rather as if he were pulling on a rope, and he began to sway, round and round. The bonfire seemed to imitate him. It broke into long pennants of orange flame that roared and crackled and sent a great spiral of smoke and burning blobs high into the evening sky. The extra light caught and glistened on tears pouring down the Merlin’s small, pointed face. He started to give out big gulping sobs.
“Oh, Lord! He’s a weeper!” Grandad said disgustedly. “I wish I’d known. I’d have stayed away.”
“A lot of the Merlins have cried when they prophesied,” Dad pointed out.
“I know. But I don’t have to like it, do I?” Grandad retorted.
The Merlin started to speak then, in high gasps, but what with the roaring and snapping from the bonfire and the way he was sobbing, it was hard to hear what he was saying. I think it was, “Blame is – where blame lies – blame rests – where dragon flies.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” my grandfather muttered irritably. “Is he accusing Wales now or what?”
While Grandad was mumbling, the King said in a polite, puzzled way, “And – er – then have you any words that might guide us for the future?”
This brought on a new bout of weeping from the Merlin. He bent this way and that, choking and sobbing, still with his hands clasped in that odd way. The bonfire gusted and swirled and golden sparks rained upwards. Eventually, the Merlin began gasping out words again and I found these even harder to catch. They sounded like, “Power flows – when Merlin goes – world sways – in dark ways – a lord is bound – power found – land falls – when alien calls – nothing right – till dragon’s flight.”
“I suppose this means something to him,” Grandad grumbled.
Several of the wizards were writing the words down. I believe they all wrote different versions. I can only put down what I thought I heard – and the creepy thing is that the prophecy was quite right, now that I understand what it was about.
After that, it seemed to be finished. The Merlin unclasped his hands, fetched out a handkerchief and dried his eyes on it in a most matter-of-fact way. The King said, “We thank you, Merlin,” looking as mystified as the rest of us. The bonfire fell back to burning in a more normal way.
The Household staff came round with glasses of warm spiced wine. I do take my hat off to these people. They have an awful job obeying all the instructions for camping that come from the Waymaster and the Chamberlain, or setting up house if the King decides to stay under a roof somewhere, and then providing meals fit for a King at all times and in all weathers, and they nearly always get it exactly right. That wine was exactly what everyone there needed. The fine weather that Dad had provided was still with us, but it came with a chilly wind and heavy dews at night.
We took our glasses and went to one of the benches at the edge of the green. From there, I could see the Merlin pacing awkwardly about near the bonfire while Prince Edmund talked earnestly to him. The Prince seemed fascinated by the Merlin. I suppose they were the same age, more or less, and this Merlin was likely to be the one the Prince would have to deal with all through his reign when he got to be King. I also noticed Alicia hanging about near them, looking very trim in her page’s uniform. She was making sure that the Merlin got twice as much of the wine and the snacks that were going round. Doing her duty. But, well, she was sixteen and quite near the Merlin’s age too – not that he seemed to notice her much. He was listening to the Prince mostly.
My parents were asking Grandad how he had managed to find the new Merlin when nobody else could, and he was making modest noises and grunting, “Magid methods. Not difficult. Had my eye on the chap for years.” I don’t quite understand what it means that Grandad is a Magid, not really. I think it means that he operates in other worlds besides ours and it also seems to mean that he has the power to settle things in a way that ordinary kings and wizards can’t. He went on to say, “I had to have a serious talk with the King – told him the same as I told the Scottish King. It’s vitally important that the Islands of Blest stay peaceful. Blest – and these islands in particular – keeps the balance of the magics in half the multiverse, you see.”
“How old is the Merlin?” I interrupted.
“Twenty-five. Older than he looks,” Grandad told me. “A powerful magic gift does that to some people. Roddy, do you mind taking Grundo and going off somewhere? We’ve got things to talk about here that aren’t for children.”
Grandad is like that. He never likes to talk about the interesting things in front of me. Grundo and I drifted off.
“He’s too old for Alicia, the Merlin,” I said to Grundo.
He was surprised. “Why should that stop her?” he asked.
2 Nick (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I thought it was a dream at first. It was really peculiar.
It happened when my dad took me with him to a writers’ conference in London. Dad is Ted Mallory and he is a writer. He does horror stories with demons in them, but this conference was for people who write detective stories. This is the strange thing about Dad. He reads detective stories all the time when he isn’t writing himself, and he really admires the people who write them, far more than the people who write his kind of thing. He was all excited because his favourite author was going to be speaking at the conference.
I didn’t want to go.
“Oh, yes you do,” Dad said. “I’m still shuddering at what happened when I left you alone here last Easter.”
“It was my friends who drank all your whisky,” I said.
“With you as a helpless onlooker while they broke the furniture and draped the kitchen in pasta, I know,” says Dad. “So here’s what I’m going to do, Nick. I’m going to book you in with me, and I’m going to go, and when I go, I’m going to lock up this house with you outside it. If you don’t choose to come with me, you can spend the weekend sitting in the street. Or the garden shed. I’ll leave that unlocked for you, if you like.”
He really meant this. He can be a real swine when he puts his mind to it. I thought about overpowering him and locking him in the garden shed. I’m bigger than he is, even though I won’t be fifteen until just before Christmas. But then I thought how he isn’t really my dad and how we’d both sort of adopted one another after Mum was killed because – usually – we like one another, and where would either of us be if that fell through?
While I was thinking this, Dad said, “Come on. You may even enjoy it. And you’ll be able to tell people later that you were present at one of the very rare appearances of Maxwell Hyde. This is only the third time he’s spoken in public – and my sense is that he’s a very interesting speaker.”
Maxwell Hyde is this favourite author of Dad’s. I could see I would be spoiling his fun if I didn’t let him take me along, so I gave in. He was ever so pleased and gave me one of this Maxwell Hyde’s books to read.
I don’t like detective stories. They’re dead boring. But Maxwell Hyde was worse than boring because his books were set in an alternate world. This is what Dad likes about them. He goes on about the self-consistency and wealth of otherworld detail in Maxwell Hyde’s Other-England – as far as I could see, this meant lots of boring description of the way things were different: how the King never stayed in one place and the parliament sat in Winchester and never did anything, and so forth – but what got to me was reading about another world that I couldn’t get to. By the time I’d read two pages, I was so longing to get to this other world that it was like sheets of flame flaring through me.
There are lots of worlds. I know, because I’ve been to some. My real parents come from one. But I can’t seem to get to any of them on my own. I always seem to have to have someone to take me. I’ve tried, and I keep trying, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me, even though I want to do it so much that I dream I’m doing it. There must be something I’m doing wrong. And I’d decided that I’d spend the whole first week of the summer holidays trying until I’d cracked it. Now here was Dad hauling me away to this conference instead. That was why I didn’t want to go. But I’d said I would, so I went.
It was even worse than I’d expected.
It was in a big, gloomy hotel full of soberly-dressed people who all thought they were important – apart from the one or two who thought they were God or Shakespeare or something, and went around with a crowd of power-dressed hangers-on to keep them from being talked to by ordinary people. There was a lecture every hour. Some of them were by police chiefs and lawyers, and I sat there trying so hard not to yawn that my eyes watered and my ears popped. But there was going to be one on the Sunday by a private detective. That was the only one I thought might be interesting.
None of the people had any time for a teenager like me. They kept giving my jeans disapproving looks and then glancing at my face as if they thought I must have got in there by mistake. But the thing that really got to me was how eager Dad was about it all. He had a big pile of various books he was trying to get signed, just as if he was a humble fan and not a world famous writer himself. It really hurt my feelings when one of the God-or-Shakespeare ones flourished a pen over the book Dad eagerly spread out for her and said, “Who?”
Dad said in a modest voice, “Ted Mallory. I write a bit myself.”
Mrs God-Shakespeare scrawled in the book, saying, “Do you write under another name? What have you written?”
“Horror stories mostly,” Dad admitted.
And she said, “Oh,” and pushed the book back to him as if it was contaminated.
Dad didn’t seem to notice. He was enjoying himself. Maxwell Hyde was giving the big talk on the Saturday evening and Dad kept saying he couldn’t wait. Then he got really excited because one of the nicer writers – who wore jeans like me – said he knew Maxwell Hyde slightly and he’d introduce Dad to him if we hung around with him.
Dad was blissed out. By that time I was yawning every time Dad’s back was turned and forcing my mouth shut when he looked at me. We went hurrying up and down corridors looking for Maxwell Hyde, pushing against crowds of people pushing the other way, and I kept thinking, If only I could just wheel round sideways and walk off into a different world! I was in a hotel when I did that the first time, which gave me the idea that hotels were probably a good place to step off from.
So I was daydreaming about that when we did at last catch up with Maxwell Hyde. By then it was just before his lecture, so he was in a hurry and people were streaming past us to get into the big hall, but he stopped quite politely when the nice writer said, “Oh, Maxwell, can you spare a moment for someone who’s dying to meet you?”
I didn’t really notice him much, except that he was one of those upright, silvery gentlemen, quite old-fashioned, with leather patches on his old tweed jacket. As he swung round to Dad, I could smell whisky. I remember thinking, Hey! He gets as nervous as Dad does before he has to give a talk! And I could tell he had had a drink to give himself some courage.
I was being bumped about by all the other people in the corridor and I had to keep shifting while Dad and Mr Hyde were shaking hands. I was right off at one side of them when Mr Hyde said, “Ted Mallory? Demons, isn’t it?”
Just then, one of the people bumping me – I didn’t see who, except that it was a man – said quietly, “Off you go then.” I stepped sideways again out of his way.
This was when I thought it was a dream.
I was outside, on an airfield of some kind. It must have been early morning, because it was chilly and dark, but getting lighter all the time, and there was pink mist across the stretch of grass I could see. But I couldn’t see much, because there were things I thought were helicopters blocking my view one way – tall, dark brown things – and the other way was a crowd of men who all seemed pretty impatient about something. I was sort of squashed between the men and the helicopters. The man nearest me, who was wearing a dirty, pale suede jacket and trousers and smoking a cigarette in long, impatient drags, turned round to throw his cigarette down on the grass and saw me.
“Oh, there you are!” he said. “Why didn’t you say you’d got here?” He turned back to the rest of them and called out, “It’s all right, messieurs! The novice finally got here. We can go.”
They all sort of groaned with relief and one of them began talking into a cellphone. “This is Perimeter Security, monsieur,” I heard him say, “reporting that our numbers are now complete. You can tell the Prince that it’s safe to embark now.” And after the phone had done some angry quacking, he said, “Very good, monsieur. I’ll pass that on to the culprit,” and then he waved at the rest of us.
Everyone began crowding up the ladder into the nearest helicopter-thing. The man who had spoken to me pushed me up ahead of him and swung on to the ladder after me. This must have put his face up against my legs, because he said angrily, “Didn’t the academy tell you to wear your leathers for this?”
I thought I knew then. I was sure this was one of my dreams about getting into another world and that it had got mixed up with the sort of dream where you’re on a bus with no clothes on, or talking to a girl you fancy with the front of your trousers missing. So I wasn’t particularly bothered. I just said, “No, they didn’t tell me anything.”
He made an irritated noise. “You’re supposed to be skyclad for official workings. They should know that!” he said. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?” He sounded quite scandalised about it.
“No,” I said. Dad and I had been going to have supper after we’d listened to Maxwell Hyde. I was quite hungry, now I thought of it.
“Well, that’s a relief!” he said, pushing me forward into the inside of the flyer. “You have to be fasting for a major working like this. Yours is the pull-down seat at the back there.”
It would be! I thought. There were nice padded seats all round under the windows, but the one at the back was just a kind of slab. Everyone else was settling into the good seats and snapping seat belts around them, so I found the belts that went with the slab and did them up. I’d just got the buckles sussed when I looked up to find the man with the cellphone leaning over me.
“You,” he said, “were late. Top brass is not pleased. You kept the Prince waiting for nearly twenty minutes and HRH is not a patient man.”
“Sorry,” I said. But he went on and on, leaning over me and bawling me out. I didn’t need to listen to it much because the engines started then, roaring and clattering, and everything shook. Some of the noise was from the other fliers. I could see them sideways beyond his angry face, rising up into the air one after another, about six of them, and I wondered what made them fly. They didn’t have wings or rotors.
Eventually, a warning ping sounded. The bawling man gave me a menacing look and went to strap himself in beside his mates. They were all wearing some kind of uniform, sort of like soldiers, and the one who had bawled at me had coloured stripes round his sleeves. I supposed he was the officer. The men nearest me, four of them, were all dressed in dirty pale suede. Skyclad, I thought. Whatever that meant.
Then we were rising up into the air and roaring after the other fliers. I leaned over to the window and looked down, trying to see where this was. I saw the Thames winding underneath among crowds of houses, so I knew we were over London, but in a dreamlike way there was no London Eye, though I spotted the Tower and Tower Bridge, and where I thought St Paul’s ought to be there was a huge white church with three square towers and a steeple. After that we went tilting away southwards and I was looking down on misty green fields. Not long after that we were over the sea.
About then, the noise seemed to get less – or maybe I got used to it – and I could hear what the men in suede were saying. Mostly it was just grumbles about having to get up so early and how they were hungry already, along with jokes I didn’t understand, but I gathered that the one who had talked to me was Dave and the big one with the foreign accent was Arnold. The other two were Chick and Pierre. None of them took any notice of me.
Dave was still irritated. He said angrily, “I can sympathise with his passion for cricket, but why does he have to play it in Marseilles, for the powers’ sake?”
Pierre said, slightly shocked, “That’s where England are playing. HRH is a world-class batsman, you know.”
“But,” Dave said, “until last night he wasn’t going to be in the team.”
“He changed his mind. Royal privilege,” said Arnold with the foreign accent.
“That’s our Geoff for you!” Chick said, laughing.
“I know. That worries me,” Dave answered. “What’s he going to be like when he’s King?”
“Oh, give him the right advisors and he’ll be all right,” Chick said soothingly. “His royal dad was just the same when he was Crown Prince, they say.”
This is a really mad dream, I thought. Cricket in France!
We droned on for ages. The sun came up and glared in through the left-hand windows. Pretty soon all the soldiers down the other end had their jackets off and were playing some sort of card game, in a slow, bored way. The men in suede didn’t seem to be allowed to take their jackets off. They sweated. It got quite niffy down my end. And I’d been assuming that they weren’t allowed to smoke in the flier, but that turned out to be wrong. The soldiers all lit up and so did Dave. The air soon became thick with smoke on top of the smell of sweat. It got worse when Arnold lit up a thin, black thing that smelt like a wet bonfire.
“Yik!” said Pierre. “Where did you get hold of that?”
“Aztec Empire,” Arnold said, peacefully puffing out brown clouds.
I shall wake up from this dream with cancer! I thought. The slab seat was hard. I shifted about and ached. Most of the people fell asleep after an hour or so, but I couldn’t. I supposed at the time that it was because I was asleep already. I know that seems silly, but it was all so strange and I’d been so used to dreaming, for months now, that I had found my way into another world that I really and truly believed that this was just another of those dreams. I sat and sweated while we droned on, and even that didn’t alert me to the fact that this might be real. Dreams usually sort of fast-forward long journeys and things like that, but I didn’t think of that. I just thought the journey was the dream.
At last, there was another of those warning pings. The officer reached into his jacket for his phone and talked to it for a short while. Then he put the jacket on and came towards the men in suede, who were all stretching and yawning and looking bleary.
“Messieurs,” he said, “you’ll have twenty minutes. The royal flit will circle during that time under the protection of the Prince’s personal mages and then put down on the pavilion roof. You’re expected to have the stadium secured by then. All right?”
“All right,” Arnold agreed. “Thanks, monsieur.” Then, when the officer had gone back to the other soldiers, he said, “Bloody powers!”
“Going to have to hustle, aren’t we?” Chick said. He jerked his head towards me. “What do we do about him? He’s not skyclad.”
Arnold was the one in charge. He blinked slowly at me as if he’d noticed me for the first time. “Not really a problem,” he said. “He’ll have to keep out of the circle, that’s all. We’ll put him on boundary patrol.” Then he actually spoke to me. “You, mon gars,” he said, “will do exactly as we say at all times, and if you set so much as a toe over the wardings, I’ll have your guts for garters. That clear?”
I nodded. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t the faintest idea what we were supposed to be doing, but I didn’t quite like to. Anyway the flier – flit or whatever – started making a great deal more noise and going downwards in jerks, hanging in the air and then jerking sickeningly down again. I swallowed and sat back, thinking that it would probably all be obvious what to do, the way it is in dreams, and took a look out of the window. I had just time to see a big oval of green stadium surrounded by banks of seats crowded with people, and blue, blue sea somewhere beyond that, before we came down with a grinding thump and everyone leapt up.
The soldiers went racing and clattering off to take up positions round the roof we’d landed on. They were carrying rifles. It was serious security. We clattered off after them into scalding sunlight and I found myself ducking as the flier roared off into the air again just above my head, covering us in an instant of deep blue shadow. As it did, the others bent over some kind of compass that Dave had fetched out.
“North’s up the narrow end opposite,” Dave said, “pretty exactly.”
“Right,” said Arnold. “Then we go the quickest way.” And he led us rushing down some stairs at the corner of the roof. We clattered along boards then, somewhere high up along the front of the pavilion, and raced on down much steeper stairs with crowds of well-dressed people on either side. They all turned to stare at us. “Ceux sont les sorciers,” I heard someone say, and again, when we got to the smart white gate at the bottom of the stairs and a wrinkled old fellow in a white coat opened it for us, he turned to someone and said knowingly, “Ah. Les sorciers.” I reckon it meant, Those are the mages, you know.
We rushed out into the enormous stadium, hurrying across acres of green, green grass with blurred banks of faces all round and all staring at us. It really was exactly like my worst dreams. I felt about an inch high as Arnold led us trotting straight towards the opposite end of the oval. I could see he was going to take us right across the square of even greener grass where the wicket was laid out, flat and brownish, right in front of us.
Now, I’m not much for cricket myself, but I did know that you were never, ever supposed to run on the sacred wicket. I wondered whether to say something. I was quite relieved when Pierre panted out, “Er – Arnold – not on the wicket – really.”
“What? Oh. Yes,” Arnold said, and he took a small curve, so that we went trotting just beside the strip of bare rolled turf.
Pierre turned his eyes up and murmured to Chick, “He’s from Schleswig-Holstein. What can you expect?”
“Empire’s full of barbarians,” Chick panted back in a whisper.
We hastened on to the end of the stadium, where we had to do another detour, around the sightscreen. There was a grille behind it blocking an archway under the seating. Soldiers let us through and we plunged into chilly, concrete gloom beyond, where we really got busy. We were in the space underneath the seats there, which ran right round the stadium like a concrete underpass, including under the pavilion. I know it did, because I was forced to rush all round it three times.
Arnold dumped down the bag he was carrying on the spot Dave said was the exact North and snatched out of it five big sugar-shakers full of water. “Ready blessed,” he said, jamming one into my hand. Then they shoved me behind them and stood in a row gabbling some kind of incantation. After that, they were off, shouting at me to come along and stop dossing, pelting down the arched concrete space, madly sprinkling water as they ran and shoving me repeatedly so that I didn’t tread inside the wet line, until Dave said, “East.” They stopped and gabbled another invocation, and then they charged on, sprinkling again, until Dave said, “South,” where they stopped and gabbled too. Then we pelted off once more to gabble at West, then on round to North again. The water just lasted.
I hoped that was it then, but no. We dumped the empty water-shakers and Arnold fetched out five things that looked like lighted candles but were really electric torches. Neat things. They must have had strange batteries, because they flickered and flared just like real candles as we raced around to East once more with our feet booming echoes out of the concrete corridor. This time when Dave said “East”, Chick slammed his candle-torch down on the floor and stood gabbling. I nearly got left behind there because I was staring at Chick drawing what looked like a belt-knife and pulling it out as if it were toffee or something so that it was like a sword, which he stood holding point upwards in front of his face. I had to sprint to catch the others up, and I only reached them as Dave was singing out, “South!” They shed Pierre and his candle there and, as we pelted off, Pierre was pulling a knife out into a sword too.
At West, it was Dave’s turn to stand pulling a knife into a sword and gabbling. Arnold and I rushed on together to North. Luckily, Arnold was so big he was not much of a runner and I could keep up. I’d no breath left by then. When we got round to Arnold’s bag again, he plonked down his candle and remarked, “I hold North because I’m the strongest. It’s the most dangerous ward of all.” Then, instead of drawing his belt-knife, he took my candle-torch away and passed me a gigantic salt-shaker.
I stared at it.
“All round again with this,” Arnold said. “Make sure it’s a continuous line and that you keep outside the line.”
It’s one of those dreams, I thought. I sighed. I grabbed the salt and set off the other way to make a change.
“No, no!” he howled. “Not widdershins, you fool! Deosil! And run. You’ve got to get round before the Prince lands!”
“Making my third four-minute mile,” I said.
“Pretty well,” he agreed. “Go!”
So off I went, pouring salt and stumbling over my own feet as I tried to see where I was pouring it, past Chick standing with his sword like a statue, past soldiers I was almost too busy to notice, who were on guard about every fifty feet, and on round to Pierre, also standing like a statue. When I got to him, I could hear the nearby blatting of a flier and cheering in the distance. Pierre shot me an angry, urgent look. Obviously, this Prince had more or less landed by then. I sped on, frantically sprinkling salt, getting better at it now. Even so, it seemed an age before I got round to Dave, and another age before I got back to Arnold again. The cheering overhead was like thunder by then.
“Just about made it,” Arnold said. He had a sword by now and was standing like the others, looking sort of remote, behind his candle-thing. “Make sure the line of salt joins up behind me, then put the shaker back in the bag and get on guard.”
“Er…” I said. “I’m not sure—”
He more or less roared at me. “Didn’t they teach you anything at the academy? I shall lodge a complaint.” Then he seemed to pull himself together and sort of recited at me, the way you might tell a total idiot how to dial 999 in an emergency, “Choose your spot, go into a light trance, enter the otherwhere, pick up your totem beast and go on patrol with it. If you see anything out of the ordinary – anything at all – come and tell me. Now go and get on with it!”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.” I threw the salt-shaker into the bag and wandered away. Now what? I thought. It was fairly clear to me that what we had been doing in such a hurry was casting a circle of magic protection around this French cricket stadium, but it struck me as pretty boring, mass-produced sort of magic. I couldn’t see how it could possibly work, but I supposed it kept them happy, them and this Prince of theirs. The stupid thing was that I had been dying to learn magic. Part of the way I kept trying to walk to other worlds was to do with my wanting, above anything else, to be a proper magician, to know magic and be able to work it for myself. Now here was this dream making it seem just boring. And probably useless.
That’s dreams for you, I thought, wandering on through the tunnel under the seats. Since I had no idea how to do the stuff Arnold had told me, the only thing I could do was to keep out of his sight, and out of Chick’s sight too, on round the curve in the East. I trudged past the first soldier on guard and, as soon as the curve of the passage hid him from sight, I simply sat down with my back to the outside wall.
It was a pretty dismal place, full of gritty, gloomy echoes and gritty, gloomy concrete smells. People had used it to pee in too, which didn’t help. It felt damp. As I was soaked with sweat from all that running, I began to feel clammy almost at once. At least it wasn’t dark. There were orange striplights in the concrete ceiling and holes in the concrete back wall. The holes were high up and covered with grids, but they did let in slants of bright sun that cut through the gritty air in regular white slices.
Not much to look at except a line of salt, I thought. At least I was better off than Arnold and the rest. I didn’t have to keep staring at a sword. And for the first time, I began to wonder how long we’d all have to stay here. For the whole time it took this Prince to play in a Test Match? Those could go on for days. And the frustrating thing about this dream, I thought, as I heard clapping far away over my head, was the way I never set eyes on this Prince all the fuss was about.
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I think I went to sleep. It made sense to think so. I was quite jet-lagged by then, given I’d set off before supper, arrived at dawn and then flown all the way to the south of France, followed by running round the stadium three times.
But it didn’t quite feel like sleep. I felt as if I got up, leaving myself sitting there, and walked off along an inviting, bluish, shady path I’d suddenly noticed. This path led upwards and sort of sideways from the concrete passage, out of the smells and clamminess, into a cool, rustling wood. This was such a relief that I didn’t feel tired any more. I stretched and snuffed up the cool green smells – pine trees and a sharp, gummy scent from head high ferns, and bark and leaves and bushes that smelt almost like incense – and I kept on walking, deeper into the wood and uphill.
The incense bushes in front of me started rustling. Then the ferns swayed.
I stopped. I kept very still. I could feel my heart banging. Something was definitely coming. But I was still not prepared for it when it did.
The ferns parted and a smooth black head slid out and stared me in the face with huge yellow eyes. For just one instant I was nose to nose with an enormous black panther.
Then I was up a tree, the tallest tree I could find.
In between was a blur of absolute terror. If I think about it, carefully, I think the panther sort of said Oh, hallo in wordless panther talk, and I’m fairly sure I screamed. And I do, slightly, remember staring around with tremendous speed to choose the best tree, and then listening to my own breath coming in sort of shrieks while I shot up this tree, and I even remember yelling “Ouch!” when I peeled one of my nails back on the way up.
Then it all stops with me sitting shakily astride a branch watching the panther coming up after me.
“Bugger!” I said. “I forgot panthers could climb trees!”
Naturally we can, it said. It settled on the branch opposite mine with one great paw hanging and its tail swinging. What are we doing up here? it asked. Hunting?
There was no doubt it was talking to me. Well, I thought, this was a dream. So I gave in to it and answered, “No. I’m supposed to be keeping watch in case anything supernatural attacks the Prince.”
The panther yawned. It was as if its head split open into a bright pink maw fringed with long, white fangs. Boring, it said. I hoped you might want to go hunting.
“Let’s do that in a bit,” I said. I was feeling weak with terror still. “I agree,” I said, hoping to persuade it to go away, “keeping watch is really boring. I may have to be here for hours.”
Oh, well, the panther said. It let down its three other huge paws, put its black chin on the branch and went to sleep.
After a while when I couldn’t look away from it in case it went for my throat, and another while when I didn’t dare move in case it woke up and went for my throat, I sort of got used to the fact that I was sitting in a tree facing a big, black, sleeping panther, and I began to look about. Carefully and slowly. Arnold had said “pick up your totem beast” and I supposed that this panther might be my totem beast, but I didn’t believe this, not really. As far as I knew, totem beasts were a part of a shamanistic magician’s mind, which meant they were not really real, and I could see the panther was as real as I was. Anyway, I wasn’t going to take a chance on it. I sat and turned my head very slowly.
I was looking out over the tops of trees, but that was only the ordinary part of wherever I was. Tilted away sideways from the wood was – well, it was a bit like a diagram in lights. The nearest part of the diagram was a low-key misty map of a town and, beyond that, was a sparkling, electric hugeness that seemed to be sea. Nearer to me, at the edge of the lines and blobs that made the town, I could see a striking, turquoise oval. It was like a lighted jewel and it had a blob of whiter light at each end of it and two more blobs in the middle of each side.
“Oh!” I said, out loud without thinking. “Their magic did work! Those blobs must be them – Arnold and Dave and his mates!”
The panther twitched and made a noise in its throat. I didn’t know if it was a growl, or a snore, or its way of agreeing with me, but I shut up at once. I went on staring without speaking. It was fascinating, that lighted diagram. Little bright sparkles moved inside the turquoise oval of the stadium, and one brighter one stood still quite near the middle. I wondered if that was the Prince. But it could have been one of the umpires. After a bit, I noticed moving smudges of light out in the sea that were probably ships, and one or two quicker ones moving in straight lines that I thought were aircraft, because some of them made lines across the town. They were all in the most beautiful colours. None of them struck me as dangerous. But then I wouldn’t have known what a threat to the Prince looked like if it came up and hit me.
Anyway, I was stuck in this tree until the panther decided to leave. So I simply sat and stared, and listened to the rustlings and birdcalls in the wood, and felt as peaceful as anyone could be stuck up a tree a yard away from a lethal black panther.
The panther suddenly woke up.
I flinched, but it wasn’t attending to me. Someone coming, it remarked, head up and all four paws on the branch again. Then, like a big slide of black oil, it went noiselessly slithering away down the tree.
My forehead got wet with relief. I listened, but I couldn’t hear a thing. So, rather cautiously, I let myself down from branch to branch, until I could see the panther crouched along one of the very lowest boughs below me. Below that, I could see bare, pine-needled ground stretching away to bushes. Another animal was walking across the pine needles, another big cat, only this one was a spotted one, with long legs and a small head. This cat was so full of muscles that it seemed almost to walk on tiptoe. Its ugly, spotted tail was lashing. So was the panther’s, only more elegantly. The cat looked up, past the panther, and straight at me. Its eyes were wide and green and most uncomfortably knowing. When it got near the tree, it simply sat down and went on staring, jeeringly.
Then a man came out of the bushes after it.
He’s a hunter, I thought. This was because of the way he walked, sort of light and tense and leaning forward ready for trouble, and because of the deep tan on his narrow face. But I couldn’t help noticing that he was dressed in the same kind of suede that Arnold and his pals were wearing, except that his leathers were so old and greasy and baggy that you could hardly see they were suede. Hunters can dress in leather too, I thought. But I wondered.
He came up beside the ugly spotted cat and put his hand on its head, between its round, tufted ears. Then he looked slowly up through the tree until he saw me. “Nick Mallory?” he said quietly.
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say my name was really Nichothodes Koryfoides, which is true. But Nick Mallory was what I had chosen to be when Dad and I adopted one another. “Yes,” I said. I meant it to sound cautious and adult, but it came out weak and defiant and resentful.
“Then come down here,” said the man.
As soon as he said it, I was down, standing on the pine needles under the tree, only a couple of feet away from him and his cat. That close, I could tell he was some kind of magic user, and one of the strongest I’d ever come across, too. Magics fair sizzled off him, and he felt full of strange skills and strong craft and deep, deep knowledge. He knew how to bring me down from the tree with just a word. And he’d brought the panther down with me, I realised. The poor beast was busy abasing itself, crawling on its belly among the pine needles, and pressing itself against my leg as if I could help it, absolutely terrified of that spotted cat. The cat was studying it contemptuously.
“I had quite a bit of trouble locating you,” the man said to me. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m supposed to watch the boundaries for anything that threatens the Prince,” I said. My throat had gone choky with fright. I had to cough before I could say, “You’re threatening him, aren’t you?”
He shrugged and looked around as if he was getting his bearings. To my surprise, although there were trees all round us, I could still see the lighted turquoise oval of the stadium and the sea shimmering beyond it. It seemed like something on a different wavelength from the wood. But the chief thing I noticed was that the man’s profile was like a zigzag of lightning. I’d never seen anything more dangerous – unless it was that spotted cat. I kept as still as I could.
“Oh, the Plantagenate Empire,” the man said. “I’ve no need to threaten that Prince. He’s going to lose the French part of his empire, and most of his German holdings too, as soon as he comes to the throne, and he’ll be dead a couple of years after that. No, it was you I wanted. I’ve been offered a fee to eliminate you.”
My knees went wobbly. I tried to say that I wasn’t a threat to anyone. I’d said I didn’t want to be Emperor. My father was Emperor of the Koryfonic Empire, you see, many worlds away from here. But I just harmlessly wanted to be a Magid and walk into other worlds. I opened my mouth to tell the man this, but my tongue sort of dried to one side of my mouth and only a surprised sort of grunt came out.
“Yes,” the man said, staring at me with his dreadful, keen eyes. They were the kind of brown that is almost yellow. “Yes, it surprises me too, now I see you. Perhaps it’s because of something you might do later. You strike me as completely useless at the moment, but you must have some fairly strong potential or that panther there wouldn’t have befriended you.”
Befriended! I thought. What befriending? I was so indignant that my tongue came unstuck and I managed to husk out, “I – he’s not real. He’s my totem animal.”
The man looked surprised. “You think she’s what? What gave you that idea?”
“They told me to go into a light trance and look for my totem in the otherwhere,” I said. “It’s the only explanation.”
The man gave an impatient sigh. “What nonsense. These Plantagenate mages do irritate me. All their magic is this kind of rule-of-thumb half-truth! You shouldn’t believe a word they say, unless you can get it confirmed by an independent source. Magic is wide, various and big. If you really think that animal is just a mind-product, touch her. Put your hand on her head.”
When that man told you to do something, you found yourself doing it. Before I could even be nervous, I found myself bending sideways and putting my hand on the panther, on the broad part of her head between her flattened ears. She didn’t like it. She flinched all over, but she let me do it. She was warm and domed there and her black hair wasn’t soft like a cat’s; it was harsh, with a prickly end to each hair. She was as real as I was. I don’t think I’d ever felt such a fool. The man was looking at me with real contempt and on top of it all I hadn’t noticed that the panther was a female.
But perhaps, I thought as I straightened up, I’m not very real here after all, because my body has to be in a trance back at the stadium. Then I thought, I keep having to do what this man tells me. In a minute, he’s going to say Go on, die. And I shall do that wherever I am.
I said, “So he – she’s not a totem.”
“I didn’t say that,” the man said. “She wouldn’t have come to you if she wasn’t. I simply meant that she’s as much flesh and blood as Slatch is.” He reached out and rubbed the head of the spotted cat. His hand was thin and all sinews, the sort of strong, squarish hand I’d always wished I had, full of power. The cat gazed at me from under it sarcastically. See? it seemed to say.
I knew it was only seconds before he was going to tell me to die and I started to play for time like anything. “And this wood,” I said. “Is this wood real then?”
His thin black eyebrows went up, irritably. “All the paths and places beyond the worlds have substance,” he said.
“Even…” I made a careful gesture towards the turquoise oval, making it slow in order not to annoy that spotted cat. “Even if you can see that from here? They can’t both be real.”
“Why not?” he more or less snapped. “You have a very limited notion of what’s real, don’t you? Will it make you any happier to be somewhere you regard as real?”
“I don’t kn—” I began to say. Then I choked it off because we were suddenly back in the concrete passage under the seats of the stadium and a little patter of applause was coming from overhead. I was standing in front of this man and his killer cat, exactly as I had been under the tree, but the black panther wasn’t there. She must be relieved! I thought, and I took a quick look round for my body, which I was sure had to be sitting against the wall in a trance.
It wasn’t there. I could see the place where it had been by the scuff marks that my heels had made on the floor. But I was the only one of me there. The time seemed to be much later. The light coming in from the grids slanted the other way and looked more golden. I could feel that the patter of clapping was faint and tired overhead, at the end of a long day.
This is only a dream! I told myself in a panic. Someone can’t have made off with my body! Can they?
“You were in the wood in your body too,” the man told me, as if I was almost too stupid for him to bother with. In here, he seemed even more powerful. He wasn’t much taller than me, and a lot skinnier, but he was like a nuclear bomb standing in that passage, ready to go off and destroy everything for miles. His cat was pure semtex. It stared up at me and despised me, and its eyes were deep and glassy in the orange light.
“If you’re going to kill me,” I said, “you might as well tell me who you are and who hired you. And why. You owe me that.”
“I owe you nothing,” he said. “I was interested to know why someone thought you worth eliminating, that’s all. And I don’t think you are. You’re too ignorant to be a danger to anyone. I shall tell them that when I refuse the commission. That should make them lose interest in you – but if they send anyone else after you, you’d better come to me. I’ll teach you enough to protect yourself. We can settle the fee when you arrive.”
He sort of settled his weight a different way. I could tell he was ready to leave. I was all set to burst with relief – but the spotted cat was not pleased at all. Its tail swished grittily against the floor and I just hoped the man could control it. It was a big creature. Its head came almost up to my chest and its muscles were out in lumps on its neck. I knew it was longing to tear my throat out.
Then the man settled his weight towards me again. I was so terrified I felt as if I was melting. His eyes were so yellow and cutting. “One other thing,” he said. “What are you doing here in a world that has nothing to do with you, masquerading as a mage?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This is a dream really.”
One of his eyebrows went up. He had been pretty contemptuous of me all along. Now he really despised me. “It is?” he said and shrugged his leather-covered shoulders. “People’s capacity to deceive themselves always amazes me. If you want to live past the age of twenty, you’d be well advised to learn to see the truth at all times. I’ll tell you that for nothing,” he said. Then he did turn and go. He swung round and he walked away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me any longer. The cat rose up on its musclebound tiptoes and walked after him, swinging its tail rudely.
“Wait a moment!” I called after him. “Who are you, for heaven’s sake?”
I’d expected him just to go on walking away, but he stopped and looked over his shoulder, giving me the benefit of his lightning-strike profile again. “Since you put it like that,” he said, “I’m generally known as Romanov. Ask your little mages about me if you like.”
Then he turned his head away and went on walking, and the cat after him, round the curve of the corridor and out of sight. In spite of the way he’d made me feel, I nearly laughed. He and that cat – they both walked the same way.
I hoped they’d run into the soldier on guard round there, but I knew they wouldn’t. The soldier would have come off worst anyway.
3 Roddy (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
Grandad must have done the trick. Though there was a coldness between England and Scotland after this – and there still is – both armies moved back from the border and nobody talked about the Scottish King much or even mentioned the poor old Merlin. Instead, the Court and the media began worrying about the Meeting of Kings that was due to happen on the Welsh border soon. Will Logres and the Pendragon meet in peace? That sort of thing. In between, they went back to being angry about Flemish trading practices, just as usual.
Nobody seemed to be suspecting Dad any more. Grandad only stayed with the Court until the King had spared a moment to have a friendly chat with Dad, and then he left, saying he had a book to finish. The new Merlin left too. Part of his duties at the start of his tenure was to visit every place of power in the country, and a few in Wales too, and attune himself to them. I think he was hoping that Grandad would go with him and advise him. He looked wistful when Grandad left. This Merlin was one of those who get what they want by looking wistful, but that never works with Grandad, so he was on his own. He climbed wistfully into the little brown car Grandad had helped him buy and chugged away.
We went back to normal. That is to say, we were rumbling along in buses most of the time, with rumours flying about where we were going next – although nobody ever knows that until a few hours before we get to wherever-it-is. The King likes to keep the Court and the country on its toes.
The unusual thing was the exceptionally fine weather. When I asked Dad about it, he said the King had asked him to keep it that way until the Meeting of Kings at the edge of Wales. So at least we were warm.
We spent three unexpected days in Leeds. I think the King wanted to inspect some factories there, but after the usual flustered greeting by the City Council it was blissful. We stayed in houses. Mam squeezed some money out of Sybil and took me and Grundo shopping. We got new clothes. There was time. We had civilised lessons in the mornings, sitting at tables in a room, and we could explore the city in the afternoons. I even enjoyed the riding lessons – which I don’t much usually – out on the moorlands in the hot sun, riding past the carefully repaired green places where there had been mines and quarries.
“I’m going to be Mayor of Leeds when I grow up,” Grundo announced, as we rode against the sky one morning. “I shall live in a house with a bathroom.” He meant this so much that his voice went right down deep on the word bathroom. We both hate the bath-tents, even though the arrangements are quite efficient and there is usually hot water from the boiler-lorry and towels from the laundry-bus. But you get out of your canvas bath to stand shivering on wet grass, and there is always wind getting into the tent from somewhere.
We were sad when we had to leave. Off we went, the whole procession of the Court. We spread for miles. The King is often half a day ahead in his official car, with his security and his wizards and advisors beside him. These are followed by all sorts of Court cars, everything from the big square limousine with tinted windows belonging to the Duke of Devonshire to the flashy blue model driven by Sir James – Sir James had turned up again when we were leaving Leeds. The media bus hurries along after the cars, trying to keep up with events, and a whole string of administrative buses follows the media – with Mam in one of them, too busy even to look out of a window – and then the various lorries lumber after the buses. Some lorries are steaming with food or hot water, in case these are needed when we stop, and some are carrying tents and soldiers and things. The buses for the unimportant people follow the lorries. We are always last.
It often takes a whole day to go twenty miles. Parliament is always proposing that fine new roads get built so that the King – and other people – could travel more easily, but the King is not in favour of this so they don’t get done. There are only two King’s Roads in the entire country, one between London and York and the other between London and Winchester. We spend most of our journeys groaning round corners or grinding along between hedges that clatter on both sides of our bus.
It was like that for the two days after we left Leeds. The roads seemed to get narrower and, on the second day, the countryside beyond the windows became greener and greener, until we were grinding among hills that were an almost incredible dense, emerald colour. By the evening, we were rumbling through small lanes, pushing our way past foamy banks of white cow-parsley. Our bus got stuck crossing a place where a small river ran across the lane and we arrived quite a while after the rest of the Court.
There was a castle there, on a hill. It belonged to Sir James and the King was staying in it. Although it looked quite big, we were told that most of it was rooms of state and there was no space in it for anyone except the King’s immediate circle. Everyone else was in a camp in fields just below the gardens. By the time we got there, it looked as if the camp had been there for days. In the office-tents, Mam and her colleagues were hard at work on their laptops, making the most of the daylight, and Dad was in the wizards’ tent being briefed about what magic would be needed. And the teachers were looking for us to give that day’s lessons.
“We must get a look inside that castle,” Grundo said to me as we were marched off to the teaching-bus.
“Let’s try after lessons,” I said.
But during lessons we discovered that the King had one of his ritual duties that night. Everyone with any magical abilities was required to attend. This meant Grundo and me, as well as Alicia and the old Merlin’s grandchildren and six of the other children.
“Bother!” I said. I was really frustrated.
Then at supper someone said that we were going to be here at Castle Belmont for days. The King liked the place, and it was near enough to the Welsh border that he could go to meet the Welsh King in a week’s time without needing to move on.
I said that was good news. Grundo said morosely, “Maybe. That’s the worst of arriving late. Nobody tells you things.”
Nobody had told us anything about the ritual duty, except that it began at sunset somewhere called the Inner Garden. After we’d changed into good clothes, we followed everyone else as they went there and hoped someone would tell us what to do when we got to the place. We straggled after the line of robed wizards and people in Court dress, past beds of flowers and a long yew hedge, and then on a path across a lawn towards a tall, crumbly stone wall with frondy creepers trailing along its top.
“I know I’m going to hate this,” Grundo said. Rituals don’t agree with him. I think this is because his magic is back-to-front. Magical ceremonies often make him dizzy, and once or twice he has disgracefully thrown up in holy places of power.
“Keep swallowing,” I warned him as we went in under the old stone gateway.
Inside, it was all new and fresh and different. There was a garden inside the old walls – a garden inside a garden – cupped inside its own small valley and as old and green as the hills. There was ancient stonework everywhere, worn flagstones overhung with flowering bushes or isolated arches beside stately old trees. There were lawns that seemed even greener than the lawns outside. Above all, it was alive with water. Strange, fresh-smelling water that ran in conduits of old stone and gushed from stone pipes into strange, lopsided stone pools, or cascaded in hidden places behind old walls.
“This is lovely!” I said.
“I think I agree,” Grundo said. He sounded quite surprised.
“Fancy someone like Sir James owning a place like this!” I said.
It was hard to tell how big this Inner Garden was. You hardly noticed all the finely dressed people crowding into it. It seemed to absorb them, so that they vanished away among the watery lawns and got shadowy under the trees. You felt that twice as many people would hardly be noticed in here.
But that was before Sybil took charge and began passing out candles to the pages. “Everyone take a candle – you too, Your Majesty – and everyone who can must conjure flame to them. Pages will light the others for those who can’t,” she instructed, bustling about barefoot, with her green velvet skirts hitched up. She bustled up to the King and personally called fire to his candle. The Merlin lit Prince Edmund’s for him. I was interested to see that the Merlin was back. He looked much less stunned and wistful than he had before. But, as light after light flared up, sending the surrounding garden dark and blue, I found I was not liking this at all. It seemed to me that this place was intended to be dusky and secret, and only to be lit by the sunset light coming softly off the waters. The candles made it all glittery.
Grundo and I looked at one another. We didn’t either of us say anything, but we both pretended we were finding it hard to call light. Because we knew Sybil knew we never had any problems with fire, we backed away into some bushes and behind a broken wall and hoped she would forget we were there.
Luckily, she was busy after that, far too busy to notice us. She was always very active doing any working, but I had never known her as active as she was then. She spread her arms wide, she raised her hands high and bent herself backwards, she bent herself forwards and made great beckonings, she made huge galloping leaps, and she raised loud cries to the spirit of the garden to come and vitalise us all. Then she twirled off, with her arms swooping this way and that, to the place where the nearest water came gushing out of a stone animal’s head, where she snatched up a silver goblet and held it under the water until it overflowed in all directions. She held it up to the sky; she held it to her lips.
“Ah!” she cried out. “The virtue in this water! The power of it!” With her hair swirling and wrapping itself across her sweating face, she brought the goblet to the King. “Drink, Sire!” she proclaimed. “Soak up the energy, immerse yourself, revel in the bounty of these healing waters! And everyone will do the same after you!”
The King took the goblet and sipped politely. As soon as he had, the Merlin filled another goblet and presented it to Prince Edmund.
“Drink, everyone!” Sybil carolled. “Take what is so freely given!” She began filling goblets and passing them around as if she was in a frenzy. Everyone caught the frenzy and seized the goblets and downed them as if they were dying of thirst.
This is all wrong! I thought. Some magics do require a frenzy, I know, but I was fairly sure this garden was not one of them. It was a quiet place. You were supposed to – supposed to – I remember searching in my head for what the garden was really like, and having a hard job to think, because Sybil’s workings had set up such a loud shout of enchantment that it drowned out most other thoughts – you were supposed to dwell with the garden, that was it. You were supposed to let the garden come to you, not suck it up in a greedy riot like this. It was a small island of otherwhere and full of strength. But it was quiet strength, enclosed in a great bend of the River Severn, which meant that it certainly belonged to the Lady of Severn who also ruled the great crescent of forest to the south. It seemed to me that this garden might even be her most secret place. It ought to have been hushed and holy. Sir James – I could see him in the distance half-lit by candles, tipping up his goblet and smacking his lips – Sir James must be supposed to guard the secret place, not open it to frantic magic-making, not even for the King.
I don’t know how I knew all this, but I was sure of it. I murmured to Grundo, “I’m not doing any of this drinking.”
“She’s doctored the waters somehow,” he answered unhappily.
Grundo usually knew what his mother had been up to. I believed him. “Why?” I whispered.
“No idea,” he said, “but I’m going to have to drink some of it. She’ll know if I don’t.”
“Then let’s go and see if there’s a place higher up where she hasn’t got at it,” I said.
We moved off quietly sideways, in the direction the water was coming from, clutching our unlit candles and trying to keep out of sight. Nobody noticed us. They were all waving candles and passing goblets about, laughing. People were shouting out, “Oh! It’s so refreshing! I can feel it doing me good!” almost as if they were all drunk. It was easy to keep in the shadows and follow the waters. The waters flowed down in several stone channels – I had a feeling that each channel was supposed to give you some different goodness – that spread from one of the lopsided pools near the top of the slope.
“How about this?” I asked Grundo beside this pool. It was very calm there and twilit, with just a few birds twittering and a tree nearby breathing out some strong, quiet scent. I could see Grundo’s head as a lightness, gloomily shaking.
“She’s been here too.”
The pond was filling from another animal head in the bank above and there were stone steps up the bank, leading under black, black trees. It became very secret. This is where it’s all coming from! I thought, and I led the way up the steps into a little flagstoned space under the black trees. It was so dark that we had to stand for a moment to let our eyes adjust. Then we were able to see that there was a well there, with a wooden cover over it, almost beside our feet. The gentlest of trickling sounded from under the cover, and there was a feeling of strength coming from it, such as I had never met before.
“Is this all right?” I whispered.
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to take the cover off in order to know,” Grundo replied.
We knelt down and tried to pull the cover up, but it was so dark we couldn’t see how. We stuffed our candles into our pockets and tried again with both hands. As we did, we heard a burst of chatter and laughter from below, which faded quickly off into the distance as everyone left the garden. That gave us the courage to heave much more heartily. We discovered that the wooden lid had hinges at one side, so we put our fingers under the opposite edge and we heaved. The cover came up an inch or so and gave me a gust of the strongest magic I’d ever known, cool and still, and so deep that it seemed to come from the roots of the world.
There were voices, and footsteps, on the steps beyond the trees.
“Stop!” whispered Grundo.
We dropped the lid back down as quietly as we could, then sprang up and bundled one another on tiptoe in among the trees beyond the well. The earth was cloggy there. There were roots and we stumbled, but luckily the trees were bushy as well as very black and we had managed to back ourselves thoroughly inside them by the time Sybil came storming merrily into the flagged space, waving her flaring candle.
“No, no, it went very well!” she was calling out. “Now, as long as we can keep the Scottish King at odds with England, we’ll be fine!” There was a rustic wooden seat at the other end of the space and she threw herself down on it with a thump. “Ooh, I’m tired!”
“I wish we could do the same with the Welsh King,” Sir James said, ducking down to sit beside her, “but I can’t see any way to contrive that. So you’ve got everyone drinking out of your hand. Will it work?”
“Oh, it has to,” Sybil said. “I ran myself into the ground to make it work. What do you think?” she asked the Merlin, who came very slowly in under the trees and held up his candle to look around.
“Very well, as far as it goes,” he said in his weak, high voice. “You’ve got the King and his Court…”
“And all the other wizards. Don’t forget them,” Sybil put in pridefully.
Sir James chuckled. “None of them suspecting a thing!” he said. “They should be dancing to her tune now, shouldn’t they?”
“Yes. For a while,” the Merlin agreed, still looking around. “Is this where you put the spell on?”
“Well, no. It’s a bit strong here,” Sybil admitted. “I didn’t have time for the working it would take to do it here. I worked from the pool below the steps. That’s the first cistern the well flows out to, you see, and it feeds all the other channels from there.”
The Merlin went, “Hm.” He squatted down like a grasshopper beside the well and put his candle down by one of his gawky, bent legs. “Hm,” he went again. “I see.” Then he pulled open the lid over the well.
Grundo and I felt the power from where we stood. We found it hard not to sway. The Merlin got up and staggered backwards. Behind him, Sir James said, “Ouch!” and covered his face.
“You see?” said Sybil.
“I do,” said Sir James. “Put the lid back, man!”
The Merlin dropped the lid back with a bang. “I hadn’t realised,” he said. “That’s strong. If we’re going to use it, we’ll have to conjure some other Power to help us. Are there any available?”
“Plenty,” said Sir James. “Over in Wales particularly.” He turned to Sybil. The candlelight made his profile into a fleshy beak with pouty lips. “How about it? Can you do a working now? We ought to have this Power in and consolidate our advantage now we’ve got it.”
Sybil had pouty lips too. They put her chin in shadow as she said, “James, I’m exhausted! I’ve worked myself to the bone this evening and I can’t do any more! Even going barefoot all the time, it’ll be three days before I’ve recouped my powers.”
“How long before you can do a strong working?” the Merlin asked, picking his candle up. “My friend James is right. We do need to keep up our momentum.”
“If we both help you?” Sir James asked coaxingly.
Sybil hung her head and her hair down and thought, with her big arms planted along her large thighs. “I need three days,” she said at last, rather sulkily. “Whoever helps me, I’m not going to be able to tackle something as strong as this well before that. It won’t take just a minor Power to bespell the thing. We’ll have to summon something big.”
“But will the effect of the drink last until we do?” Sir James asked, rather tensely.
Sybil looked up at the Merlin. He said, “It struck me as firm enough for the moment. I don’t see it wearing off for at least a week, and we’ll be able to reinforce it before that.”
“Good enough.” Sir James sprang up, relieved and jolly. “Let’s get this place locked up again then and go and have a proper drink. Who fancies champagne?” He pulled keys out of his pocket and strode away down the steps, jingling them and lighting the trees to a glinting black with his candle.
“Champagne. Lovely!” said Sybil. She heaved to her feet and shoved the Merlin playfully down the steps in front of her. “Off you go, stranger boy!”
Grundo and I realised we were likely to get locked inside the garden. We nearly panicked. The moment Sybil was out of sight we surged out on to the flagstones and then realised that the only way out was down those same stone steps to the lopsided pool. That was almost the worst part of the whole thing. We had to wait for Sir James, Sybil and then the Merlin to get ahead, then follow them, and then try to get ahead of them before they got to the gate in the wall.
We were helped a lot by the queer way the space in the garden seemed to spread, and by all the stone walls and conduits and bushes. We could see Sir James and the other two easily by the light of their flickering candles – and hear them too, most of the time, talking and laughing. Sybil obviously was tired. She went quite slowly and the others waited for her. We were able to scud along behind lavender and tall, toppling flowers, or crouch down and scurry past pieces of old wall – though we couldn’t go really fast because it was quite dark by then – and finally we got in front of them and raced out through the gate just before they came merrily along under a rose arch.
I was a nervous wreck by then. It must have been even worse for Grundo, knowing his mother was part of a conspiracy. We went on running beside a dim path and neither of us stopped until we were well out into the lawns in the main garden and could see our camp in the distance, twinkling beyond the fence.
“What do we do now?” I panted at Grundo. “Tell my Dad?”
“Don’t be stupid!” he said. “He was there drinking with the other wizards. He’s not going to listen to you for at least a fortnight.”
“The King then,” I suggested wildly.
“He was the first one to drink,” Grundo said. “You’re not tracking.” He was right. Everything was all about in my head. I tried to pull myself together, not very successfully, while Grundo stood with his head bent and thought. “Your grandfather,” he said after a bit. “He’s the one to tell. Do you have his speaker code?”
“Oh. Right,” I said. “Mam will have his number. I can ask Dad to lend me his speaker at least, can’t I?”
Unfortunately, when we got to the camp we discovered that both Mam and Dad were up at the castle attending on the King. Though I could have asked all sorts of people to lend me a speaker, it was no good unless I knew the code. Grandad’s number is not in the directory lists.
“We’ll just have to wait till tomorrow,” I said miserably.
I spent a lot of that night tossing in my bunk in the girls’ bus, wondering how the new Merlin came to join with Sybil and Sir James, and how to explain to Grandad that he had chosen the wrong man for the post. It really worried me that Grandad had chosen this Merlin. Grandad doesn’t usually make mistakes. It worried me even more that I didn’t know what this conspiracy was up to. It had to be high treason. As far as I knew, bespelling the King was high treason anyway, and it was obvious that they meant to go on and do something worse.
I tossed and turned and tossed and thought, until Alicia suddenly sprang up and shouted, “Roddy, if you don’t stop jigging about this moment, I’ll turn you into a statue, so help me Powers Above!”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and then, even lower, “Sneeze!” If Alicia hadn’t been there, I might have tried telling the other girls in the bus, but Alicia would go straight to Sybil. And Alicia had drunk that enchanted water along with the other pages. Heigh ho, I thought. Wait till tomorrow.
So I waited helplessly until it was too late.
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I overslept. I dragged myself up and over to the food-tent, yawning. I had just got myself some juice and a cold, waxy-looking fried egg, when Grundo appeared, looking worried.
“There you are!” he said. “There’s a message for you from the chamberlain”.
The Chamberlain had never noticed my existence before. Before I got over my surprise enough to ask Grundo what the message was, Mam dashed up to me from the other side. “Oh, there you are, Roddy! We’ve been hunting for you all over! Your grandfather wants you. He’s sent a car for you. It’s waiting for you now outside the castle.”
My first thought was that this was an answer to my prayers. Then I looked up at Mam’s face. She was so white that her eyes looked like big black holes. The hand she put on my shoulder was quivering. “Which grandfather?” I said.
“My father, of course,” she said. “It’s just like him to send a demand for you to the Chamberlain. I’m surprised he didn’t send it straight to the King! Oh, Roddy, I’m sorry! He’s insisting that you go and stay with him in that dreadful manse of his and I daren’t refuse! He’s already been dreadfully rude to the Chamberlain over the speaker. He’ll do worse than that if I don’t let you go. He’ll probably insult the King next. Forgive me.”
Poor Mam. She looked absolutely desperate. My stomach plunged about just at the sight of her. “Why does he want me?”
“Because he’s never met you, and you’re near enough to Wales here for him to send and fetch you,” Mam answered distractedly. “He’s told the entire Chamberlain’s Office that I’ve no right to keep his only grandchild from him. You’ll have to go, my love – the Chamberlain’s insisting – but be polite to him. For my sake. It’ll only be for a few days, until the Progress moves on after the Meeting of Kings. He says the car will bring you back then.”
“I see,” I said, the way you say things just to gain time. I looked at my fried egg. It looked back like a big, dead, yellow eye. Ugh. I thought of Grundo all on his own here, and Sybil discovering that he hadn’t drunk her charmed water. “I’ll go if I can take Grundo,” I said.
“Oh, really, my love, I don’t think…” Mam began. “Listen, Mam,” I said. “Your problem was that he’s a widower and you were all on your own with him…”
“Well, that wasn’t quite…” she began again.
“…so you ought to allow me to take some moral support with me,” I said. As she wavered, I added, “Or I shall go to the Chamberlain’s Office and use their speaker to tell him I won’t go.”
This so horrified Mam that she gave in. “All right. But I don’t dare think what he’ll say – Grundo, do you mind being dragged along to see a fearsome old man?”
“Not really,” Grundo said. “I can always use the speaker in his manse to ask for help, can’t I?”
“Then go and pack,” Mam told him frantically. “Take old clothes. He’ll make you go for walks, or even ride – Hurry up, Roddy! He’s sent his same old driver who hates to be kept waiting!”
I didn’t see why Mam needed to be scared of her father’s driver as well as her father, but I drained my juice, snatched a piece of toast and rushed off eating it. Mam rushed with me, distractedly reminding me to remember a sweater, a toothbrush, walking shoes, a comb, my address book, everything… It wasn’t exactly the right moment to start telling her of plots and treason, but I did honestly try, after I had rammed things into a bag and we were rushing up the steep path to the castle, with stones spurting from under our feet and clattering down on Grundo, who was bent over under a huge bag behind us.
“Are you listening to me?” I panted, when I’d told her what we’d overheard.
She was so upset and feeling so strongly for me getting into the clutches of her terrible old father that I don’t think she did listen, even though she nodded. I just had to hope she would remember it later.
The car was drawn up in front of the main door of the castle, as if the driver, or Mam’s father, imagined that I was staying in there with the King. It was black and uncomfortably like a hearse. The “same old driver”, who looked as if he had been carved out of a block of something white and heavy and then dressed in navy blue, got out when he saw us coming and held out his big stony hand for my bag.
“Good morning,” I panted. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”
He didn’t say a word, just took my bag and stowed it in the boot. Then he took Grundo’s bag with the same carved stone look. After that, he opened the rear door and stood there holding it. I saw a little what Mam meant.
“Nice morning,” I said defiantly. No answer. I turned to Mam and hugged her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a very strong character myself and so is Grundo. We’ll see you soon.”
We climbed into the back seat of the hearse and were driven away, both of us feeling a little dizzy at the speed of events.
Then we drove and drove and drove, until we were dizzy with that too. I still have not the least idea where we went. Grundo says he lost his sense of direction completely. All we knew were astonishingly green hills towering above grey, winding roads, grey stone walls like cross-hatching on the hillsides, grey slides of rock, and woods hanging over us from time to time like dark, lacy tunnels. Dad’s good weather was getting better and better, so there was blue, blue sky with a brisk wind sliding white clouds across it, and sliding their shadows over the green hills in strange, shaggy shapes. Under the shadows, we saw heather darken and turn purple again, gorse blaze and then look a mere modest yellow, and sun and shade pass swiftly across small roaring rivers half hidden in ravines.
It was all very beautiful, but it went on so long, winding us further and further into the heart of the green mountains – until we finally began winding upwards among them. Then it was all green and grey again, with cloud shadows, and we had no sense of getting anywhere. We both jumped with surprise when the car rolled to a stop on a flat green stretch near the top of a mountain.
The stone-faced driver got out and opened the door on my side.
This obviously meant Get out now, so we scrambled to the stony green ground and stood staring about. Below us, a cleft twisted among the emerald sides of mountains until it was blue-green with distance, and beyond those green slopes were blue and grey and black peaks, peak after peak. The air was the chilliest and clearest I have ever breathed. Everything was silent. It was so quiet, I could almost hear the silence. And I realised that, up to then, I had lived my entire life close to people and their noise. It was strange to have it taken away.
The only house in sight was the manse. It was built backed against the nearest green peak, but below the top of the mountain, for shelter, though its dark chimneys stood almost as high as the green summit. It was dark and upright and squeezed into itself, all high narrow arches. You looked at it and wondered if it was a house built like a chapel, or a chapel built like a house and then squeezed narrower. There was no sign of any garden, just that house backed into the hillside and a drystone wall sticking out from one end of it.
The stone driver was trudging across the grass with our bags to the narrow, arched front door. We followed him, through the door and into a tall, dark hallway. He had gone somewhere else by the time we got indoors. But we had only been standing a moment wondering what to do now, when a door banged echoingly further down the hall and my mother’s father came towards us.
He was tall and stiff and cold as a monument on a tomb. His black clothes – he was a priest of course – made his white face look pale as death, but his hair was black, without a trace of grey. I noticed his hair particularly because he put a chilly hand on each of my shoulders and turned me to the light from the narrow front door. His eyes were deep and black, with dark skin round them, but I saw he was a very handsome man.
“So you are the young Arianrhod,” he said, deep and solemn. “At last.” His voice made echoes in the hall and brought me out in gooseflesh. I began to feel very sorry for Mam. “You have quite a look of my Annie,” he said. “Did she let you go willingly?”
“Yes,” I said, trying not to let my teeth chatter. “I said I’d come provided my friend Gr—er… Ambrose Temple could come too. I hope you can find room for him.”
He looked at Grundo then. Grundo gave him a serious freckled stare and said “How do you do?” politely.
“I see he would be lonely without you,” my grandfather said.
He was welcome to think that, I thought, if only he would let Grundo stay. I was very relieved when he said, “Come with me, both of you, and I will show you to your rooms.”
We followed him up steep, dark stairs, where his gown flowed over the wooden treads behind his straight back, and then along dark, wooden corridors. I had a queer feeling that we were walking right into the hill at the back of the house, but the two rooms he showed us to had windows looking out over the winding green hills and they were both obviously prepared for visitors, the beds made up and water steaming in big bowls on the washstands. As if my grandfather had known I would be bringing Grundo. My bag was in one room and Grundo’s was in the other.
“Lunch will be ready any moment,” my grandfather said, “and you will wish to wash and tidy yourselves first. But if you want a bath…” He opened the next door along and showed us a huge bathroom, where a bath stood on clawed animal feet in the middle of bare floorboards. “I hope you will give warning when you do,” he said. “Olwen has to bring up buckets from the copper.” Then he went away downstairs again.
“No taps,” said Grundo. “As bad as the bath-tent.”
We washed and got ready quickly. When we met in the corridor again, we discovered that we had both put on the warmest clothes we had with us. We would have laughed about it, but it was not the kind of house you liked to laugh in. Instead, we went demurely downstairs, to where my grandfather was waiting in a tall, chilly dining room, standing at the head of a tall, black table.
He looked at us, pointed to two chairs and said grace in Welsh. It was all rolling, thundering language. I was suddenly very ashamed not to understand a word of it. Grundo looked on calmly, almost as if he did understand, and sat quietly down when it was finished, still looking intently at my grandfather.
I was looking at the door, where a fat, stone faced woman was coming in with a tureen. I was famished by then and it smelled wonderful.
It was a very good lunch, though almost silent at first. There was the leek soup, enough for two helpings each, followed by pancakes rolled round meat in sauce. After that, there were heaps of little hot griddle cakes covered in sugar. Grundo ate so many of those that the woman had to keep making more. She seemed to like that. She almost had a smile when she brought in the third lot.
“Pancakes,” my grandfather said, deep and hollow, “are a traditional part of our diet in this country.”
I was thinking, Well, at least he didn’t starve my mother! But why is he so stiff and stern? Why doesn’t he smile at all? I’m sure my mother used to ask herself the same things several times a day. I was sorrier for her than ever.
“I know this is an awkward question,” I said, “but what should we call you?”
He looked at me in stern surprise. “My name is Gwyn,” he said.
“Should I call you Grandfather Gwyn then?” I asked.
“If you wish,” he said, not seeming to care.
“Might I call you that too, please?” Grundo asked.
He looked at Grundo long and thoughtfully, almost as if he was asking himself what Grundo’s heredity was. “I suppose you have a right to,” he said at last. “Now tell me, what do either of you know of Wales?”
The truthful answer, as far as I was concerned, was Not a lot. But I could hardly say that. Grundo came to my rescue – I was extremely glad he was there. Because Grundo has such trouble reading, he listens in lessons far more than I ever do. So he knows things. “It’s divided into cantrevs,” he said, “each with its lesser kings, and the Pendragon is High King over them all. The Pendragon rules the Laws. I know you have a different system of laws here, but I don’t know how they work.”
My grandfather looked almost approving. “And the meaning of the High King’s title?” he asked.
It felt just like having a test during lessons, but I thought I knew the answer to that. “Son of the dragon,” I said. “Because there is said to be a dragon roosting in the heart of Wales.”
This didn’t seem to be right. My grandfather said frigidly, “After a fashion. Pendragon is a title given to him by the English. By rights, it should be the title of the English King, but the English have forgotten about their dragons.”
“There aren’t any dragons in England!” I said.
He turned a face full of stern disapproval on me. “That is not true. Have you never heard of the red dragon and the white? There were times in the past when there were great battles between the two, in the days before the Islands of Blest were at peace.”
I couldn’t seem to stop saying the wrong thing, somehow. I protested, “But that’s just a way of saying the Welsh and the English fought one another.”
His black eyebrows rose slightly in his marble face. I had never known so much scorn expressed with so little effort. He turned away from me and back to Grundo. “There are several dragons in England,” he said to him. “The white is only the greatest. There are said to be more in Scotland, both in the waters and in the mountains, but I have no personal knowledge of these.”
Grundo looked utterly fascinated. “What about Ireland?” he asked.
“Ireland,” said my grandfather, “is in most places low and green and unsuitable for dragons. If there were any, Saint Patrick expelled them. But to go back to the Laws of Wales. We do not have Judges, as you do. Courts are called when necessary…”
He went into a long explanation. Grundo was still fascinated. I sat and watched their two profiles as they talked, Grundo’s all pale, long nose and freckles, and my grandfather’s like a statue from classical antiquity. My grandfather had quite a long nose too, but his face was so perfectly proportioned that you hardly noticed. They both had great, deep voices, though where Grundo’s grated and grunted, my grandfather’s voice rolled and boomed.
Soulmates! I thought. I was glad I’d brought Grundo.
At the same time, I began to see some more of my mother’s problem. If my grandfather had been simply cold and strict and distant, it would have been easy to hate him and stop there. But the trouble was that he was also one of those people you wanted to please. There was a sort of grandness to him that made you ache to have him think well of you. Before long, I was quite desperate for him to stop talking just to Grundo and notice me – or at least not disapprove of me so much. Mam must have felt exactly the same. But I could see that, no matter how hard she tried, Mam was too soft-hearted and emotional for her father, and so he treated her with utter scorn. He scorned me for different reasons. I sat at the tall table almost in pain, because I knew I was a courtier born and bred, and that I was smart and good-mannered and used to summing people up so that I could take advantage of their faults, and I could see that my grandfather had nothing but contempt for people like me. It really hurt. Grundo may have been peculiar, but he was not like that and my grandfather liked him.
It was an enormous relief to me when we were allowed to get up from the table and leave the tall cold room. My grandfather took us outside, through the front door, into a blast of sunlight and cold, clean air. While I stood blinking, he said to us, “Now, where would you say the red dragon lies?”
Grundo and I looked at one another. Then we pointed, hesitating a bit, to the most distant brown mountains, lying against the horizon in a misty, jagged row.
“Correct,” said my grandfather. “That is a part of his back. He is asleep for now. He will only arouse in extreme need, to those who know how to call him, and he does not like to be roused. The consequences are usually grave. The same is true of the white dragon of England. You call him too at your peril.” The way he said this made us shiver. Then he said, in a much more normal way, “You will want to explore now. Go anywhere you like, but don’t try to ride the mare and be back at six. We have tea then, not the dinner you are used to. I’ll see you at tea. I have work to do before then.”
He went back into the house. He had a study at the back of the hall, as we learnt later, though we never saw inside it. It was a bit puzzling really. We never saw him do any religious duties or see parishioners – there were no other houses for miles anyway – but as Grundo said, dubiously, we were not there on a Sunday or any other holy day, so how could we know?
We did find the chapel. It was downhill to the left of the house, very tiny and grey, with a little arch of stone on its roof with a bell hanging in it. It was surrounded in green, and there was a hump of green turf beside it like a big beehive, that had water trickling inside it. The whole place gave us an awed, uncertain feeling, so we went uphill again and round to the back of the house, where we came upon a stone shed with the car inside it. Beyond that, things were normal.
We found a kitchen garden there, fringed with those orange flowers that grow in sprays, and a yard behind the house with a well in it. The water had to be pumped from the well by a handle in the kitchen. Olwen, the fat housekeeper, showed us how to do that. It was hard work. Then we went out beyond the yard to a couple of hidden meadows. One meadow had a pair of cows and a calf in it, and the other had a placid, chunky grey horse.
By this time, our feelings of strangeness had worn off. We were used to being in new, unknown places and we began to feel almost at home. We leant on the gate and looked at the placid mare, who raised her chalky-white face to look back at us and then went calmly on with grazing.
I think her lack of interest irritated Grundo. He went into one of his impish moods. “I’m going to try riding her,” he said, grinning at me.
“Your funeral,” I said. To confess the truth, I almost looked forward to seeing Grundo in trouble with my grandfather. I was feeling mean, and depressed about my personality.
Grundo looks soft, but he is surprisingly wiry and this makes him a much better rider than I am. I have never got much beyond the basics. In a soft-hearted way that is annoyingly like Mam’s, I am sorry for the horse for having me sit on its back making it do things. Grundo says this is silly. It’s what horses are bred for. He can make most horses do what he wants.
He nipped over the gate and went calmly across to the mare. She took a quick glance at him and lost interest again. She took no notice at all when Grundo put his hands on her. She was not very tall. Grundo had no difficulty hoisting himself on to her back, where he sat and clicked his tongue at her to make her go. She swung her head round then and looked at him in astonishment. Then… I have no idea what she did then, and Grundo says he doesn’t know either. She sort of walked out from underneath him. I swear that for one moment Grundo was sitting on her back, and for another moment Grundo was sitting up in the air, on nothing, looking absolutely stunned, and the next moment the mare was ten feet away and going back to grazing. Grundo came down on the grass on his back with a thump.
He picked himself up and came hobbling over to the gate, saying seriously, “I don’t think I’ll try again. You can see by all the white on her that she’s very old.”
That made me scream with laughter. Grundo was very offended and explained that the mare was old enough to have learnt lots of tricks, which only made me laugh more. And after a bit, Grundo began to see the funny side of it too. He said it felt very odd, being left sitting on nothing, and he kept wondering how the mare did it. We went scrambling up to the top of the hill behind the manse, laughing about it.
There were mountains all round as far as we could see up there. The peaks we had thought might be a dragon were lost among all the others.
“Do you think they really are part of a dragon?” I asked, while we went sliding and crouching down the other side of the summit. “It was rather mad, the way he said it.” The thought that my grandfather might be mad really worried me. But it would certainly explain why my mother was so terrified of him.
“He’s not mad,” Grundo said decidedly. “Everyone’s heard of the Welsh dragon.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “He doesn’t behave at all the way people usually do.”
“No, but he behaves like I would behave if I hadn’t been brought up at Court,” Grundo said. “I sort of recognised him. He’s like me underneath.”
This made me feel much better. There was a huge, heathery moor beyond the manse hill, and we rushed out into it with the wind clapping our hair about and cloud shadows racing across us. There was the soft smell of water everywhere. And no roads, no buses, no people, and only the occasional large, high bird. We found a place where water bubbled out of the ground in a tiny fountain that spread into a pool covered with lurid green weeds. Neither of us had seen a natural spring before and we were delighted with it. We tried blocking it with our hands, but it just spouted up between our fingers, cold as ice.
“I suppose,” Grundo said, “that the well in Sir James’s Inner Garden must fill from a spring like this. Only I don’t think this one’s magic.”
“Oh, don’t!” I cried out. “I don’t want to remember all that! It’s not as if we can do a thing about it, whatever they’re plotting to do.” I spread my arms into the watery smelling wind. “I feel free for the first time in a hundred years!” I said. “Don’t spoil it.”
Grundo stood with his feet sinking into squashy marsh plants and considered me. “I wish you wouldn’t exaggerate,” he said. “It annoys me. But you do look better. When we’re with the Progress you always remind me of an ice-puddle someone’s stamped in. All icy white edges. I’m afraid of getting cut on you sometimes.”
I was astonished. “What should I be like then?”
Grundo shrugged. “I can’t explain. More like – like a good sort of tree.”
“A tree!” I exclaimed.
“Something that grew naturally, I mean,” Grundo grunted. “A warm thing.” He moved his feet with such appalling sucking noises that I had to laugh.
“You’re the one who’s rooted to the spot!” I said, and we wandered on, making for a topple of rock in the distance. When we got there, we sat on the side that was in the sun and away from the wind. After a long time, I said, “I didn’t mean that about not wanting to remember Sir James’s garden – it’s just I feel so helpless.”
Grundo said, “Me too. I keep wondering if the old Merlin might have been killed so that the new one could take over in time to go to the garden.”
“That’s an awful thing to think!” I said. But now Grundo had said it, I found I was thinking it too. “But the Merlin’s supposed to be incorruptible,” I said. “Grandad found him.”
“He could have been deceived,” Grundo said. “Your Grandfather Hyde’s only human, even if he is a Magid. Why don’t you try telling this grandfather?”
“Grandfather Gwyn?” I said. “What could he do? Besides, he’s Welsh”.
“Well, he made a fair old fuss to the Chamberlain’s Office just to get you here,” Grundo replied. “He knows how to raise a stink. Think about it.”
I did think about it as we wandered on, but not all that much because, after what seemed a very short while, we saw that the sun was going down and looked at our watches and realised it was after five o’clock. We turned back and got lost. The moor was surrounded by green knobs that were the tops of mountains and they all looked the same. When we finally found the right knob and slid down the side of it to the manse, there was only just time to get cleaned up before tea was ready.
“I love this food!” Grundo grunted.
The table was crowded with four different kinds of bread, two cakes, six kinds of jam in matching dishes, cheese, butter and cream. Olwen followed us into the dining room with a vast teapot and, as soon as my grandfather had thundered out his grace, she came back with plates of sausage and fried potatoes. Grundo beamed and prepared to be very greedy. I had to stop before the cakes, but Grundo kept right on packing food in for nearly an hour and drinking cup after cup of tea. While he ate, he talked cheerfully, just as if my grandfather was a normal person.
My grandfather watched Grundo eat with a slightly astonished look, but he did not seem to mind being talked to. He even answered Grundo with a few deep words every so often. I was fairly sure Grundo was being this chatty so that I could join in and tell Grandfather Gwyn what we had overheard in Sir James’s Inner Garden. But I couldn’t. I knew he would give me that look with his eyebrows up and not believe a word. I seemed to curl up inside just thinking of speaking.
I was wondering how often my Mam had sat silent like this at meals, when Grundo helped himself to a third slice of cake, seriously measuring off the exact amount. “I have room for twenty-five degrees more cake,” he explained, “and then I shall go back to soda bread and jam. Does Olwen do your cooking for you because you’re a widower?”
At this, my grandfather turned to me. I could tell he was not pleased. It breathed off him like cold from a frozen pond. “Did Annie tell you I was a widower?” he asked me.
“She said she had never known her mother,” I said.
“I am glad to hear her so truthful,” my grandfather replied. I thought that was all he was going to say, but he seemed to think again and make an extra effort. “There has been,” he said, and paused, and made another effort, “a separation.”
I could feel him hurting, making the effort to say this. I was suddenly furious. “Oh!” I cried out. “I hate all this divorcing and separating! My Grandfather Hyde is separated from his wife and I’ve never even seen her or the aunt who lives with her. And that aunt’s divorced, and so’s the aunt who lives with Grandad, which is awfully hard on my cousin Toby. Half the Court is divorced! The King is separated from the Queen most of the time! Why do people do it?”
Grandfather Gwyn was giving me an attentive look. It was the sort of look you can feel. I felt as if his deep, dark eyes were opening me up, prising apart pieces of my brain. He said thoughtfully, “Often the very nature of people, the matter that brought them together, causes the separation later.”
“Oh, probably,” I said angrily. “But it doesn’t stop them hurting. Ask Grundo. His parents are separated.”
“Divorced,” Grundo growled. “My father left.”
“Now that’s one person I don’t blame!” I said. “Leaving Sybil was probably the most sensible thing he ever did. But he ought to have taken you with him.”
“Well now,” said Grandfather Gwyn. He sounded nearly amused. “The ice of Arianrhod has melted at last, it seems.”
I could feel my face bursting into a red flush, right to the top of my hair and down my neck, because my grandfather had so obviously seen me the same way as Grundo did. So I was a puddle of ice, was I? I was so wrought up by then that I snapped at him, just as if he had been Alicia. “You can talk! If ever I saw a marble iceberg, it’s you!”
Now he looked really amused. His face relaxed and he very nearly smiled.
“It’s not funny!” I snarled at him. “I can see you made my mother terrified of you by behaving like this! Most of the time you’d make her think she wasn’t worth noticing, and then you’d make fun of her!”
Then I gave a gasp and tried to hold my breath – but I couldn’t because I was panting with rage – knowing that a strict person like my grandfather was bound to jump to his feet and order me thunderously out of the room.
In fact, he just said musingly, “Something of that, but Annie brought her own difficulties to the situation, you know.” The mild way he said it surprised me. I was even more surprised when he said, “Come now, Arianrhod. Tell me what is really upsetting you so.”
I almost burst into tears. But I didn’t, because I suspected that Mam would have done and Grandfather Gwyn would have hated it. “If you must know,” I blurted out, “there’s a plot – in England – and most of the Court have been given bespelled water, even the King. The Merlin’s in it!”
“I know,” he said. “This is why I asked for you to come here, before the balance of magic is disturbed even further.”
For a second, I was thoroughly astonished. Then I thought, Oh! He’s a wizard! And that made me feel much better. I could tell by the way Grundo’s face snapped round to look at Grandfather Gwyn, and then went much pinker, that Grundo had had the same thought.
“Tell me in detail,” my grandfather said to us, “every word and sign and act that you remember.”
So we told him. It took a while and Grundo absent-mindedly ate two more pieces of cake while we talked. He probably needed to. It couldn’t have been pleasant for Grundo, having to describe what his mother did. Otherwise, I’d have called him a pig. Grandfather Gwyn leant forward with one forearm stiffly among the tea-things and seemed to drink in everything we said.
“Can you help at all?” Grundo said at last.
To our dismay, my grandfather slowly shook his head. “Unfortunately not,” he said. “I am about to become vulnerable, in a way I very much resent, and will be able to do nothing directly for a while. You have just shown me the way of it. But there is something you can do, Arianrhod, if you think you have the courage. You will have to work out most of it for yourself, I am afraid. It is magic that is not mine to deal in, and it is something your mother never could have brought herself to do. But, if you think you are able, I can put you in the way of it tomorrow.”
I sat in silence in that tall, cold room, staring at his intent white face across the plates and crumbs. Grundo looked to be holding his breath. “I – I suppose I’d better,” I said, when the chills had almost stopped scurrying up and down my back. “Someone has to do something.”
My Grandfather Gwyn could smile, after all. It was an unexpectedly warm, kind smile. It helped. A little. Actually, I was terrified.
4 Nick (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
1 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I sat down again after Romanov had gone. For some reason, I fitted myself carefully into the exact place I had been in before, with my back against the wall and my heels in the scuff marks. I suppose I wanted Arnold and Co to think I’d been sitting there all the time. But I wasn’t really attending. I was shaking all over and I pretty well wanted to cry.
I was full of hurt and paranoia and plain terror that someone had wanted me killed. I kept thinking, But I told them in the Empire I wasn’t going to be Emperor! They’d taken me there into those worlds and I’d signed things – sort of abdicated – so that my half-brother Rob could be Emperor instead. It didn’t make sense.
I was full of hurt and paranoia too at the way Romanov had despised me. A lot of people had called me selfish. I’d been working on it, I thought. I’d looked after Dad and been really considerate, I thought. But I could tell Romanov saw through all that, to the way I really felt. And of course I still felt selfish, in spite of the way I behaved. All the same, I was trying, and it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t fair either that Romanov had despised me for being ignorant too! I’d been working on that as well. I’d been reading everything I could lay hands on about magic and trying to get to other worlds – and trying every way I could to persuade the bunch of people who govern the Magids – they call them the Upper Room for some reason – to let me train as a Magid too. It wasn’t my fault they wouldn’t.
Then I thought about Romanov himself. I would never, if I lived to be a thousand, meet anyone else as powerfully magic as Romanov. It was shattering. I’d met quite a few Magids, and they seemed quite humdrum now, compared with the stuff I’d felt coming from Romanov. It was awesome, it was just not fair, for someone to be as strong as that. Razor-edge, lightning-strike strong. It shook me to my bones.
And those big cats shook me to my bones too. When I found they were real…
Hang on, I thought. This is a dream. You always put yourself through seriously nasty experiences in bad dreams. This is just a nightmare.
Then I felt a whole heap better. I looked up and saw that the overhead lights were getting stronger orange, while the gridded holes in the walls were growing pink. It looked as if the whole day had passed. Well, I thought, dreams do like to fast-forward things. I wasn’t really surprised when, about five minutes later, Arnold came pounding up to me carrying his bag of tricks. His thick, fair face looked white and exhausted.
“Up you get. Time to go,” he said. “The Prince’s own mages handle security overnight.”
I got up, thinking in a dreamlike way that it was rather a waste that we were all taking so much trouble to guard a Prince who was going to lose his Empire and be dead before long. How had Romanov known that anyway? But dreams are like that.
I was still thinking about this when we passed the first soldier. He looked at us enviously. “Poor beggars stay here all night in case anyone plants a bomb,” Arnold remarked. Then we came up to Chick and Arnold said, “Time up. Hotel first or eat and drink?”
“Food!” Chick said, collapsing his sword to a knife and then stretching his arms out. “I’m so hungry I could eat that novice.”
“I’d prefer a horse, personally,” Arnold said and we went on round to underneath the pavilion. Dave and Pierre were already there, waiting. Arnold asked them too, “Hotel first, or food?”
“Food!” they both said and Dave added, “And wine. Then some hotspots. Anyone know this town – know where’s good to go?”
I watched them as they stood around discussing this. After Romanov, they struck me as simply normal people, jumped up a bit. I was a bit bored by them.
None of them did know where to go in Marseilles, as it turned out. Nor did I, when they asked me as a last resort. So we all went out through the guarded doors underneath the pavilion into the street and Arnold hailed a taxi. “Condweerie noo a yune bong plass a monjay,” he told the driver as we all piled in. I think he meant, Take us to a good place to eat, but it sounded like Zulu with a German accent.
The driver seemed to understand though. He drove off downhill towards the sea with a tremendous rattle. Even allowing for the way the streets were cobbled and how old that taxi was, I think the way its engine worked was quite different from the cars I was used to. It was ten times louder.
But it got us there. Before long, it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “Voila, messieurs. A whole street of eateries for your honours.” Clearly, he had us spotted as English – or, considering Arnold and perhaps Chick too, not French anyway. The place he’d brought us to was a row of little cafés, and they all had big hand-done notices in their windows. SCARMBLED EGG, one said, and SNALES was another. LEG OF FROG WITH CHEEPS and STAKE OR OLDAY BREKFA said others.
We all cracked up. It had been a long day and it felt good to be able to scream with laughter. “I am not,” howled Dave, staggering about on the cobbles and wiping tears off his face, “repeat not, going to eat cheeping frog legs!”
“Let’s go for the scarmbled egg,” laughed Chick. “I want to know what they do to it.”
So, in spite of Arnold saying he rather fancied the stake, we went into the SCARMBLED EGG one. We charged in, still laughing, and snatched up menus. I think the proprietors found us a bit alarming. They brought us a huge carafe of wine straightaway, as if they were trying to placate us, and then looked quite frightened when we all discovered we needed to visit the gents and surged up to our feet again.
There was only one of it, out in the back yard past the telephone and the kitchen, where a large fat French lady glowered suspiciously at us as we waited for our turns. I was last, being only the novice, so I had to stand a lot of the glare.
But when we came back to our table, things were almost perfect. We swigged the wine and ordered vast meals, some of it weirdly spelt and the rest in French, so that we had no idea what would be coming, and then we ate and ate, until we got to the cheese and sticky pastry stage, where we all slowed down cheerfully. Dave began saying that he wanted to look at the nightlife very soon.
“In a while,” Arnold said. “I suppose I’d better take your reports first.” He lit one of his horrible Aztec smokes and took out a notebook. “Chick? Any attempts to break through the East? Any threats?”
“Negative,” said Chick. “I’ve never known the otherwheres calmer.”
The others both said the same. Then Arnold looked at me. “How about your patrol? What’s your name, by the way?”
They’ve finally asked! I thought. “Nick.”
Arnold frowned. “Funny. I thought it was something like Maurice.”
“That’s my surname,” I said, quick as a flash. “And I do have something to report. A fellow called Romanov turned up and he…”
That caused a real sensation. “Romanov!” they all shouted. They were awed and scared and thoroughly surprised. Arnold added suspiciously, “Are you sure it was Romanov?”
“That’s who he said he was,” I said. “Who is he? I never met anyone so powerful.”
“Only the magical supremo,” Chick said. “Romanov can do things most magic users in most worlds only dream of doing.”
“He can do some things most of us never even thought of,” said Pierre. “They say he charges the earth for them too.”
“If you can find him,” Arnold said wryly.
“I’ve heard,” said Dave, “that he lives on an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries. Went there to escape his missus.”
“Sensible fellow,” murmured Arnold.
“He escapes there to avoid being pestered to do magic,” Pierre said. “I’d heard he was self-taught. Is that true?”
“Yes – that’s the amazing thing about him,” Dave said. “According to what I heard, he was born in a gutter on quite a remote world – Thule, I think, or maybe Blest – and he pulled himself out of poverty by teaching himself to do magic. Very unorthodox. But he had a gift for it and discovered things no one else knew how to do, so he charged high and got rich quick. He could probably buy our entire Empire now. And nobody’d dare say he couldn’t.”
“Yes, but,” Arnold said doggedly, “was it really Romanov that Nick Maurice met?” He turned and puffed his awful smoke at me, staring through the brown clouds of it with big, earnest blue eyes. “If you were doing as you were told, you’d have been able to see his totem animal. What was it like?”
“I’d heard it was a sabre-tooth tiger,” Chick put in.
“No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean, hunting cat, sort of cream with dark grey blodges. It had tufts on its ears and sarcastic green eyes and he said it was female. It came up to my waist, easily. I was scared stiff of it.”
Arnold nodded. “Then it was Romanov.” I could see they were, all four, really impressed. “Did he tell you why he was there?” Arnold asked me. “Was he looking for the Prince?”
“I asked him that,” I said. “And he seemed to think the Prince would make his own trouble, without any magical interference. When he was King, he said.”
They exchanged worried glances at that. Dave muttered, “Could be right. By what I’ve heard, some of Romanov’s island is thirty years in the future.”
“They say he never bothers to lie,” Chick agreed.
I was relieved. I hoped I’d given them enough to think of to stop them thinking any more about me. From the moment Arnold said he thought my name was Maurice, it was like a whole train of pennies dropping in my head. This was not a dream. It was real. I’d no idea how it happened, but I knew that somehow I’d done the thing I’d been longing to do and crossed over into another universe. A real other world. And when I did, I’d turned up beside those fliers while they had all been waiting for the novice to arrive, and they had thought I was him.
This meant that, somewhere back in that other London, there was the real Maurice.
If this Maurice was my age, he wasn’t going to like having gone without breakfast and then finding they’d all left without him. He was going to go back to this academy he came from, or phone there, and tell them. If I was really lucky, them at the academy would just shrug and say serve him right for being late.
But I couldn’t count on it.
What was much more likely, since this cricket match was a Test and going to go on for several days, was that the academy people were going to make arrangements for the real Maurice to get to Marseilles later that same day. Then they were going to phone someone in the Prince’s Security team to say Maurice was on his way. In fact, it was just amazing luck that they hadn’t phoned while I was sitting in that concrete passage thinking it was all a dream. I would have had a rude awakening. Perhaps it took them a long time to arrange the journey. But they could well have phoned by now. Or Maurice could even have got here.
It was probably only the fact that the mages had been starving hungry and gone off with me in that taxi without saying where they were going that had stopped me getting arrested a couple of hours ago.
They would arrest me. They’d do that in my own world if I accidentally got in among Security for the Queen. But this world was so paranoid that it had to have a charmed circle round a cricket field, and I’d got in on that too. These people were going to accuse me of magical terrorism or something. I knew they were. I had to get away.
But at that moment they were still sort of attending to me, even though they were now discussing totem beasts and the way the animals reflected a mage’s personality. So I kept a humble, eager, novice-like look on my face. When they asked me if I thought Romanov’s totem beast reflected Romanov’s personality, I said, “Yes. It walked exactly like him.”
They laughed. Then Chick said, puzzled, “But didn’t he say anything else to you?”
I said, “He called me ignorant and went away in disgust.” As I said it, I wondered if it was Maurice’s academy that had sent Romanov to stop me before I did any acts of terrorism. But I saw that couldn’t be right. Romanov had known my name. I hadn’t told anyone here my name until just now.
“Just passing through, I suppose,” Arnold said dubiously. “Odd though. I’d better report it as soon as we get to the hotel. Nick, you must be ready to give a detailed account to the Prince’s mages.”
“Sure,” I said and thought that I’d better give them the slip on the way there.
Then Arnold said, “Call for the bill, Dave. Ladeeshun or whatever they say. Everyone got enough cash for this blowout?”
The four of them began fetching out money. One glance was enough to show me that it wasn’t anything like the couple of ten pound notes in my back pocket. Their notes were kind of white, with black writing on them, like legal documents, and the coins were vast heavy things that rang down on the table like church bells. I knew I had to get out now.
I stood up. I said, “I have to go to the gents again.”
“Trying to get out of paying your share?” Pierre said, laughing.
The others laughed too and Chick said, “Hey, Nick, you never told us what your totem beast is. Or is it a state secret?”
“No… It’s a black panther,” I said, edging off.
“Go on!” said Dave. “That would make you a high adept!”
“That was a joke,” I said hurriedly. “Just a joke.” And I marched off, followed by jolly shouts and more laughter. I felt bad. They were quite nice fellows really.
I didn’t dare run, but I walked quite fast, down the passage past the huge Frenchwoman – she glowered at me again – and opened the door into the yard. It was a narrow door and I had to turn half round to get through it. That was how I happened to see the officer from the flier just coming in through the front door of the café. He was waving his cellphone and looking pretty agitated. You could see he had been hunting all over for us.
I shut the door very gently behind me and raced through the yard to the back entrance. There was an alley there full of rubbish bins. But no soldiers. Yet. I think the officer hadn’t been sure enough of finding us to have the place surrounded. But I was sure he must have a squad outside the front. I ran.
I ran for my life, out of that alley and then through several others, always turning uphill away from that street when I could. That may have been a mistake. For one thing, it got steeper, so that there were steps in some places. For another thing, there were more and more people about, lovers walking, or people just sitting in doorways, so that when I began to hear shouts and police whistles and lots of feet climbing up behind me, I didn’t dare run. The ones who saw me running would point me out to the police.
Then things got worse. Arnold’s voice suddenly spoke, sounding like it was somewhere inside of me. Nick, Nicholas Maurice. Come here. We want to ask you a few questions. I’d forgotten they were mages. They were probably tracking me by magic.
Dave’s voice spoke too. Come on, Nick. Don’t be a fool. Nicholas Maurice, there’s a full security alert and you can’t get away.
My name’s not Nicholas! I thought frantically. It’s really Nichothodes Euthandor Timosus Benigedy Koryfoides. It was the first time I’d ever been glad of having this string of outlandish names. They seemed to cover up the voices. I recited them over and over again and climbed the hill until I’d no breath left and was hot as a furnace. I pounded up another set of steps, saying a name for each step, “Nichothodes – puff – Euthandor – puff – Timosus – gasp – Benigedy – pant – Koryfoides!” And the voices faded away as I burst out into bright lights, shops and crowds of people.
Thank goodness! I thought. I can get lost in these crowds!
It was proper city life there. Nobody spared me a glance as I went past tables on a pavement packed with people eating and drinking, and then crossed the road among a bunch of happy folk having a night out. They were all much better dressed than me, but nobody looked at me anyway. I got my breath back wandering along that side of the street, looking into expensive shop windows, and I was just beginning to feel safer when both ends of the road filled with uniforms. Police and soldiers were stopping everyone from leaving, and squads were coming down towards me asking everyone to show their ID.
I bolted up the nearest alley. There was some kind of big church up the other end and I stopped dead when I saw it. There were a couple of soldiers with rifles standing outside its door. Perhaps in this world you really could kneel holding the altar and shouting “Sanctuary!” and be safe. And they didn’t want me doing that. I leant against the alley wall wondering what to do. I knew what I should do, and that was simply walk on into another world, or back into my own. But I couldn’t seem to do that, however hard I pushed my shoulders at that wall, no more than I could do it when I’d tried at home. I didn’t know what to do.
Then, Hang on! I thought. I spent most of today up a tree somewhere quite different. That should be safe enough, if I can get there. I’ll try that.
So I looked around. And I could hardly believe my eyes. Paths to that wood, and to all sorts of other places, more or less radiated out from where I was standing. They looked dim and blue and at odd sort of angles to that alley, but they looked as real as Romanov had said they were. I bolted up the nearest path.
It was night there too and fairly dark, but before I had gone very far I could see the oval of turquoise light that was the cricket stadium. I took my bearings from that and trotted round and along into the wood. It was pitchy dark there, full of uncanny rustlings and birds hooting, but I refused to let that bother me and kept on trotting. I’ll find that panther, I thought, then climb a tree and let her protect me. That should do it.
While I was shoving through the next clump of bushes, I smelt a butcherish sort of smell and heard the most tremendous grating and cracking, like teeth on bone, and I realised I had found the panther. It was the extra blackness under the next bush. But before I could say anything, she gave a hideous, fruity growl.
Go away. Busy. Eating. MINE.
I got out of those bushes fast. I could tell she would add a piece of me to her meal if I didn’t leave her alone. There was no way that panther was a tame totem-thing. It shook me up and made me feel horribly lonely to realise that. I’d been relying on beastly protection. But as that wasn’t on, I thought I’d climb a tree anyway and blundered on until I came to one that seemed easy to climb. I had my arms round its trunk and one foot up on the lowest branch, when I heard voices again.
Nicholas Maurice, we know you’re here. Come on out.
I froze. I looked where the voices were coming from, and there were two things like shining yellowish ghosts drifting along among the trees about a foot in the air. They were over in the direction of the turquoise oval, but much nearer, following a path there. Inside the ghost-shapes I could just recognise Chick and Pierre. This was another thing I’d forgotten they could do.
I took a look down at myself. I seemed to be quite dark and solid. The only parts of me I could really see were my pale hands, clutching the tree. But for all I knew, Chick and Pierre looked dark and solid to themselves and I was the one who shone like a ghost to them. I didn’t know enough, that was the problem. All I knew was that they hadn’t seen me yet.
Nicholas Maurice! they fluted beguilingly.
Nichothodes! I said to myself and began backing gently away, reciting my names again. I backed, and crept, and bumped into several trees and a spiky bush, and watched the ghosts drifting along, more and more distant, until I backed right round behind the spiky bush and couldn’t see them any more. Then I looked around and saw another path winding its dim, blue way up to my right, and I fair pelted up it.
This path was rocky and wet, with wet cliffs bulging up on both sides, and it was horribly uneven. I kept stumbling as I ran, but I didn’t stop until the light from the turquoise stadium faded away entirely and I couldn’t see it at all. I was looking over my shoulder, checking on it, when I whanged into a piece of cliff and fell down.
2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)
I stayed down for quite a while. Here I was, I thought, once again sitting in a state of terror and paranoia, only this time was worse. Add to that the way my knee hurt from ramming the cliff and the fact that my rear felt as if I was sitting in a puddle and you have the recipe for true misery. And it was dark.
There wasn’t any way that I could see of getting home to Dad. I seemed to have a choice of going back to the wood and giving myself up to the ghostly shapes of Chick and Pierre, or going on along this path, or choosing another. There didn’t seem to be any future in any of those choices.
I felt vile. And guilty. Let’s face it, I had deceived a whole security team. I hadn’t exactly meant to, but I had been so set on the idea that this was all a dream that I was having that I hadn’t even tried to say, “Excuse me. I’m not your novice.” Maybe this was because, underneath, I might have had a small sense of self-preservation which told me that, if I did, I was likely to be arrested and interrogated anyway. But I knew why I hadn’t said anything really. It was because I had actually – really and truly – got to another world on my own, just as I’d been longing to do. And it was too good to spoil.
Now I was in a real mess. And so were the mages I’d deceived. It was no wonder that Arnold and Dave had been tracking me hard in Marseilles and that Chick and Pierre were in a trance searching the wood. They were in bad trouble. If they didn’t find me, they’d almost certainly be arrested themselves.
I was not surprised someone had hired Romanov to terminate me. I was getting to be a real menace. It was for something I was going to do later, he said. Romanov must have known I was going to go from bad to worse – and all only because I’d set my heart on being a Magid. Magids were strong magicians. They guided the flow of magic from world to world. They were trouble-shooters too. Most of them were dealing with problems – really exciting problems – in several worlds at once, using all sorts of different magical skills to do it. I wanted to do that. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything. But the people who ran the Magids – the Upper Room – wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t let me have any training. So it was no wonder I was blundering ignorantly around, getting into this sort of mess. Romanov had been right to despise me.
This set me thinking of Romanov again. I still had the idea he was more powerful than any Magid. Romanov, I thought. That’s the name of the old Czars of Russia. And he probably was a Czar, a magics supremo, the magics Czar, the way we have drugs Czars in England. I wished I could talk to him about the mess I was in. I knew he could tell me how to get back to my own world.
This was where the odd thing happened.
It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t smelling, or feeling, but it was like both things. It was also like there was a tiny breeze blowing from the path ahead, as if thinking of Romanov set it off. But there was no breeze. The air was perfectly still and wet. All the same I could suddenly smell-feel that Romanov had gone along this very path on his way back to wherever his home was.
“He said come to him if anyone else came after me,” I said out loud. “OK. I will.”
I got up and began feeling my way along the path.
For I don’t know how long, it was quite awful. It was so dark. I could see sky up above, between the rock walls, but it was almost as dark as the path. There were no stars in it – nothing – and it didn’t help me to see at all. I could just pick out my hands, the right one trailing along the wet, lumpy rocks, and the left one stretched out in front in a shaky sort of way, in case I hit a spur or a corner of cliff. I didn’t want to think what else I might hit. There were noises, squelshy sounds that made me sure my fingers were going to plunge into something big and slimy any second, and creaking noises, and dry flappings that were worst of all. Every time the flapping happened, the hairs on my neck came up and dragged on my collar as if it were velcro.
The ground was uneven too. My feet kicked stones I couldn’t see, or staggered and slipped on slopes of rock. Several times I stubbed my toe really hard, but I never knew what I’d hit. I sloshed into puddles and crunched through muddy pebbles until my feet were soaked and sore and frozen, and I never knew what was coming next.
Then it began to rain. “That’s all I need!” I moaned. It was cold, drenching rain that had me wet through in seconds, with water chasing down my face and bringing my hair down in sharp points into my eyes. My teeth started chattering, it was so cold. But, believe it or not, that rain was actually an improvement. The noises stopped, as if the creatures making them didn’t like the rain any more than I did, and before long all I could hear was the rain drilling down, splashing in puddles and trickling off the rocks. And the fact that the rocks were so wet meant that they sort of picked up a glisten from the sky and the puddles glinted a bit, so I could see a bit of what was coming next. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and got on faster.
The rain slacked off to a drizzle at last and I began to think there was a bit more light. I could actually see the way winding ahead like a sort of cleft in the rocks, with all the edges just faintly traced in silvery blue. Then I began to hear noises ahead. Not the noises I’d heard before. This was a sort of booming and yelling.
I began going very slowly and cautiously, sliding my feet one behind the other and keeping one shoulder against the right-hand wall so that I could look round each bend as I came to it. There was something big and alive along there, yelling its head off.
After about three bends, I could hear words in the yelling. “We plough the fields and scatter the dynamite on the land!” I heard. And then, after another bend, “Good King Wencis last looked out – when did he first look out then? – on the feast of Stephen!”
I almost laughed, but I still went very cautiously, and the light kept getting stronger and the yelling went on. You couldn’t call it singing. It was too out of tune. And finally I edged round another bend and saw the person making the din.
He was a skinny, white-haired old drunk and he was leaning against a bulge of rock singing his head off. When I peeped round the bend at him, he was yelling about “Rock of Ages, cleft for meeee!” and holding up a little blue flame in both shaky old hands. The flame lit his clothes shiny and blazed off the wet rocks and his wrinkled, yelling face. He held the flame higher up as I peeped at him and shouted, “Come on, come on, both of you! Or am I just seeing double? Come out where I can see all the pair of you! Don’t lurk!”
I came round in front of him. There didn’t seem any harm in him. I’d never seen anyone so drunk, not even my friends after they’d drunk all Dad’s whisky. He couldn’t have hurt anyone in that state. He had trouble just seeing me. He wavered about, holding the little flame out towards me, and blinked and peered. I’d been thinking this flame was some kind of outdoor candle, or a torch like Arnold and Co had used, but it wasn’t. It was a little curl of blue light standing on his hands, blazing away out of nothing.
“I’m drunk,” he said to me. “Night as a tute. Can’t ever come this way unless I get drunk first. Too scared. Tell me, are you scared?”
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off that little flame. It was one of the most extraordinary things I’d ever seen. “Doesn’t that burn you?”
“Not at all, notatall, notatall,” he shouted. He was too drunk to talk quietly. “Being of one substance with my flesh, you know, it can’t hurt. Litchwight, I mean witchlight, they call it. Not even hot, dear lad. Not even warm. So, well then, out with it, out with it!”
“Out with what?” I said.
“Whatever you need or want, of course. You have to meet three folk in need in this place and give them what help you can, before you can get where you’re going. You’re my third!” he shouted, waving his little flame backwards and forwards more or less under my nose, “so I’m naturally anxious to get you done and dealt with and get on. So out with it. What do you want?”
I should have asked him how to find Romanov. I see that now. A lot of things would have been different if I had. But I was so amazed by that little blue flame that I leant backwards to get its light out of my eyes and pointed to it. “Can I do that? Can you show me how to do it?”
He wavered forward from his rock, peering at me, and nearly fell down. “Amazing,” he said, hastily getting his back to the rock again. “Amazing. You’re here, but you can’t do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can’t. Why not?”
“No one ever showed me how,” I said.
He swayed about, looking solemn. “I quote,” he said. “I’m very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools? Know where that comes from?”
“One of the Narnia books,” I said. “The one where Narnia begins. Can you show me how to make a light like that?”
“Tell you,” he corrected me, looking even more solemn. “I can’t show you because it comes from inside yourself, see. What you do is find your centre – can you do that?”
“My navel, you mean?” I said.
“No, no!” he howled. “You’re not a woman! Or are you? Confess I can’t see you too well, but your voice sounds like teenage male to me. Is that what you are?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And a plumb ignorant one too,” he grumbled. “Fancy not knowing – Well, your centre is here!”
He plunged towards me and took me completely by surprise by jabbing me hard just under my breastbone. What with that, and the blast of alcohol that came with the jab, I went staggering backwards into the rocks on the other side of the path. He overbalanced. He snatched at my knees as he went down, missed, and ended in a heap by my feet. The blue light seemed to splash all over the ground. Then it climbed one of his arms and settled on his shiny wet shoulder.
“Polar sexus,” he said sadly. “That’s where it is, polar sexus.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
He raised his soaking grey head. “There is,” he said, “a special angel appointed to watch over those under the inkerfluence of eight over the one. That, young man, is why I had to imbibe before coming here. It all hangs together. Now do you understand how to summon light?”
“No,” I said frankly.
“Don’t you even know where your solar plexus is?” he demanded.
“I thought you said polar sexus,” I said.
He went up on to his hands and knees and shook his head sadly. Water flew off as if he was a wet dog. “Now you’re making fun of me. But I shall be forbearing,” he said, “though mostly for the reason that I shan’t get out of this place if I’m not. And I may add, young man, that your attitude towards the elderly is less than respectful. Polar sexus indeed!” He started fumbling around on the ground in front of my feet. “Where is it? Where did I put my damn light?”
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Diana Jones
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детская фантастика
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A bestselling fantasy adventure from Diana Wynne Jones. The companion novel to the novel Deep Secret.The story is narrated by two very different teenagers, who each inhabit two extraordinarily different worlds.Arianrhod Hyde′s world (or Roddy, as she prefers to be called) is very much the world of magic, pageantry and ritual. Not unlike Britain in King Arthur′s Day, Roddy is daughter of two Court Wizards and therefore part of the King′s Progress, travelling round the Islands of Blest and ready to take part in whatever ritual or ceremony is required, as it occurs. Presiding over all, the most important person is the Merlin, who is entrusted with the magical health of the Isles of Blest.Nick Mallory′s world is much more familiar – at least, it starts off being our own. But it soon transpires that Nick′s not quite the ordinary 15 year old he seems, as he slips sideways into something he thinks is a dream – but in fact is another world entirely. Now, Nick′s been on other worlds before (although never alone) but he′s a confident type. Maybe a bit too confident…In Roddy′s world, the current Merlin expires and a new one takes his place. Yet something is wrong – the rituals have been upset and nothing is going the way it should. Roddy needs help, and certain powers indicate that Nick is to be the one to help her. And Nick is cool about helping her – in theory… but it′s a bit worrying that she seems to mistake him for a magic-user.Their stories unfold, side-by-side, each part leading into the next, and the Merlin Conspiracy thickens as the tales swirl around each other – twining, meeting and affecting each other, yet never completely combining until the very end chapters when all is finally revealed.Compelling, howlingly funny in places, mind-boggling – this is going to WOW DWJ fans all around the world (and probably in other universes too).