by Paul Hazel
who climbed out unfolded his umbrella. He looked up at the
barn. After a moment, quite likely by accident, something
brushed Harwood’s arm.
“Your Grace,” the man said.
The Duke looked around silently. There had been no
introduction.
The little man returned the pipe to his teeth and,
maneuvering his umbrella, lifted a small dry hand toward
Harwood.
“Holmes,” the man said.
Mistrustfully, Harwood held out his own. “George
Harwood.”
“So His Grace wrote me.” There was a slight movement
behind the man’s eyes. “Professor of—” he started.
“Assistant professor,” Harwood admitted, “of Awanux.”
Holmes looked at him oddly. “You realize, I hope, that
you couldn’t— ”
“No.” This time, overcome by dejection, the Duke had
not bothered to turn. “He doesn’t. And 1 haven’t told him.”
No one, in fact, had told Harwood anything. “Some one
had better,” he sputtered. Just then the Duke gave a heave to
the door.
A wedge of murky light was cast suddenly into the
distant rafters. His Grace gave a second great push. The door
rumbled and he stepped over the track.
Harwood walked ahead stiffly. The barn was cpiiet. At
the far end, past the stalls where the track ended, he could
make out the barest suggestion of another door. He lifted his
head. It was Holmes who saw the indignation in his face.
“For the love of Christ,” Holmes whispered, “hadn’t it
ever occurred to you that you should be? That you are,”
Holmes corrected himself.
F aces in the Earth
133
Harwood glanced down resentfully. “I fail to see.”
“Details,” the Duke couldn’t help saying.
“What?”
“English,” the Duke said, more bitterly than he had
intended. “Shouldn’t you be a professor of English?”
Harwood only looked blank.
The Duke scowled with vexation. It was obvious once he
started to look. The problem was to see it in the first place.
Without Holmes, he knew, without seeing the photograph,
he would have been just as stupid. Nonetheless he was
nettled.
“We live,” the Duke said with patronizing coolness. “We
live, I am afraid, Mr. Harwood, at a very peculiar moment in
history.”
By then Holmes had left them and was scuffling alone
through the hay. A channel for removing urine and excrement
ran at his feet. He found a stick. Leaning sideways, he thrust
it into the channel. But the stick encountered only dry stone.
Unsatisfied, he wandered among the stalls. He rubbed his
hands on the posts and, becoming less squeamish, poked into
barrels. The walls were hung with straps and bridles. Advancing, he took each one and examined it. At a loss, he looked back. “There is nothing,” he shouted. Under the
rafters his small reedy voice echoed queerly.
Away from the door, in the brownish haze swarming with
motes and the dust of hay, it had become increasingly difficult
for Harwood to see anything clearly.
“What details?” he repeated uncomfortably.
“Names.”
“Which— ”
The Duke compressed his lips. Yet there was nothing to
do but go forward. “W'hich are not,” he said bluntly. “Although they should be. And were before the world started changing.”
It scarcely mattered that he had struggled with it himself.
“Names,” he continued, “like Awanux, which are but
should never have been. Since they are logically quite impossible. Like New Awanux particularly. The first English would never have called it that. They would have called it New
Holborn.”
At the far end of the barn Holmes was opening the door.
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WINTERKING
The Duke felt his voice stiffen. ‘‘Or New Kingston more
probably,” he said. "Or New Thames.”
They had both stopped.
The barn was filled again with the urgent beating of the
rain. Holmes stood up ahead against the sky’s blackness. He
was straining into the wind.
“You had better have a look at this,” he called back.
The Duke stayed where he was. “Are you certain there is
nothing inside?”
The little man turned. “It is not like that. All those
years. . . Someone was certain to have looked.” But there was
a sparkling flash. The barn was suddenly rocked by thunder.
“Not in here,” Holmes cried, trying to be heard. But the
thunder blunted his words and the wind blew them back in
his teeth. “Just to be loaded,” he shouted. “Only that.”
“What?”
“Not inside!”
The Duke cupped his ears. Hearing only a buzz, he
lurched forward. As his right leg pitched in front of him,
Holmes caught his arm.
Beyond the door the yard vanished. At his feet an
immense pit opened. Its sides were a nest of roots, thick as a
man but blasted. On the bottom the slippery wood was
cracked, torn through as though something of astonishing
girth had been wrenched from the ground.
The Duke knew what he saw but his mind rejected it.
“It was a horse,” he said obstinately.
Holmes shook his head. “When you looked. And apparently when Houseman did. What I saw was an oak.”
But it was Harwood who, no longer earing to look, saw
their peril. He was tired of their gibberish and wanted
merely to return to the college. He looked over the rim
without interest. He saw the tangle of wood. There were
stones as well, he; noticed, halfway down, boulders really,
gripped lretween the gross fingers of the wood as though by
pincers. He did not examine them closely. The pit was black
and the boulders merely outlines. But at the same moment
there was a searing light. For an instant, as starkly as in the
woodcut that hung in his study, he saw against the bands of
wood the perfect whiteness of the stone. It was enough.
Before the darkness closed again and there came the hideous
boom of thunder, he saw the chance that what was stone
Faces in the Earth
1 3 5
might also be a thing that watched him. Shadows became
eyes, cracks reproving mouths. Legs, that seemed too thick
to move, bent their ponderous knees and climbed. Five tall
figures rose, cast before them the carnage of the tree, and
clambered up. Beneath, three others were advancing.
He saw their crowns, fire-gold and gleaming. But as he
saw them Harwood blinked. And then they were no longer
kings hut eight bare stones. Black clouds rolled overhead.
Halted on the brink of the chasm, the huge blank stones, now
silent, were slathered by rain.
5.
« 6 j n t ut when we came down upon the carcasses,” the crow
JLaPsaid, “Duinn drove us away.”
“The dead are his.”
The crow fluttered down beside Wykeham’s shoulder.
“Ah, but what 1 wished, lord, was so little,” the crow
rasped. “I might have been sa
tisfied to pick at a bone.”
Wykeham stared into space. He was accustomed to the
crow’s bitterness. “You will find no comfort,” he said. “You
are always hungry.”
“One small knuckle,” it said. “Where is there harm? In
Black Wood there are dead enough.”
Wykeham frowned. “They are Duinn’s.”
“To the least strand of hair?”
“Yes.”
“And the nails?”
“Even nails.”
“And memory?”
He was being drawn into the old argument, and on the
wrong side. “All that was given,” Wykeham said softly, mouthing
the words he had ceased to believe.
They had crossed the boggy meadow into the wood. The
storm that had come up from the sea in the evening had gone
before dawn. Despite briars and the dampness, he was
dressed in one of his better suits. But though she was the
cause of this attention, for the time being, he put Janie
Hawleyville out of his mind. He thought instead of the
Pope-Hartford.
Through the trees he could still see the roof of the old
stable where the car waited. Wykeham grinned. He imagined
himself hurtling down steep roads into the morning. He
136
F a ce s in the Earth
1 3 7
could almost hear the roar of the engine, almost feel the
roughness of the rain-washed air prickling into his eyes.
He thought, it is the nature of crows to grumble.
Looking back over the yard, Wykeham felt his heart
lifted. He was in love, now, after nearly half a century.
No, he would not listen to the crow.
His house and his grounds, the green meadows and the
deep woods of Greenchurch, lay all around him. Changed
but unchanging, they provided the background before which,
one life to the next, he moved. They would pass. One after
another they would vanish. Everything vanished. But something always sprang up in its place. Under the trees the dark air flickered. Spots of sunlight seeped through the foliage.
Wykeham smiled.
Always there was something new to touch, something
new to see and feel. He thought, not even an ageless man can
hope to live long enough.
On the spur of the moment he decided to take Nora with
him.
He owed her that much. Twice already he had promised
to take her to Bristol. It would not greatly matter if she went
along to the school. Her presence, although it meant the
dress shop first and alterations done on the spot, might even
reassure the headmistress.
He had been to a shop. He was trying to remember just
where among the streets and alleys he had found it, when he
saw the loose, weedy slabs of stone, tumbled down from the
tower.
Wykeham looked around uncomfortably.
He had not intended to go into Black Wood. Yet he had
only himself to blame for that. Out of habit, he went to bed
late and rose too early.
While it was still dark he had washed and dressed. He
had polished his own boots in the empty kitchen. Finding his
solitude unnerving, he had gone to his desk and begun a
letter to the Duke of West Redding. Ostensibly the letter was
about the cost of ladders and scaffolding, a request for advice
on a fair price for roofing the rotted patch over the library. In
fact, he had written at the beginning of the month, a more
necessary letter, which after rather longer than was customary the Duke had somehow not as yet answered. It had
1 3 8
WINTERKING
seemed untidy. Perhaps His Grace was simply getting older.
Nevertheless, it paid to be certain.
The last drops of rain had skiddered across the window
pane. At the edge of the world the bold light had risen. Light
flooded into the valley, drowning the hills and farms.
His mind had been restless and he had found himself
staring idly at the paper, daydreaming about the girl. He had
put the unfinished letter aside and had gone onto the porch
and then down the steps into the yard. In his mind he had
been rehearsing his speech to the headmistress.
Fortunately, Janie’s father was to be detained for some
weeks by his business. He had already advised the school
that his daughter would need to stay on at the academy for
part of the summer. He should not, therefore, provided the
headmistress agreed, prove overly difficult.
Wykeham had entered the meadow. The crow had come
down to him and, together, they had drifted into the wood.
With an almost palpable sense of regret, Wykeham
realized that he was not where he wanted to be.
He was less than a mile from the house. Yet when he
came under the trees, the little path shriveled. The oak
boughs, meeting overhead, thickened, turning the underwood moldy and dark. He was not surprised. The darkness had been deliberate. He had planted the grove himself, back
in the sixteen hundreds, on the folded slope of the hill to
conceal the huge stones. Even then the shoulder of the hill
had closed around the base of the tower. Only the last heap of
stones had risen above the ridge. Now, in less than four
hundred years, whole new sections had fallen.
Wykeham went up to it. What was left of the tower
leaned drunkenly. Unhappily, he lifted his neck.
Once there had been rooms without number, chambers
and high vaulted halls, cocklofts and armories. The passages
twisting between them had run out onto the walls. On the
walls themselves there had been heralds and, under the open
sky, yards filled with horsemen.
He had been a boy then, eager and dissatisfied by turns,
frightened and waiting for something to happen. Like a
child’s, his eyes had flashed open with wonder.
Once the fair land undersea had been shining.
When he had ridden into the city, Lord Duinn beside
him, all the colors of the harbor had danced on the stone. But
F aces in the Earth
1 3 9
the whiteness of the Great Horse Duinn rode had been more
dazzling. Stunned, he had turned his head. He had looked
very hard at the walls and the towers. He had looked
everywhere except at the Stallion. Still his boy’s fingers had
ached to touch the white mane. In his heart he had already
been a thief.
Out of a long pale face Duinn’s deep sea-black eyes had
watched him cunningly. He knew, Wykeham thought, even
then.
It had been another time. Except for the scattered
islands, all the West had been ocean.
Wykeham surveyed the rock. The great door, high above
the ground, and the many shuttered windows were now no
more than a few ragged holes. The flights of broad stairs,
after years beyond counting, were merely a jumble of stones.
The old griefs boiled up in him. He waited for the crow
to speak, knowing it must and not wishing to listen.
“And the Horse?” the crow said.
Turning aside, Wykeham began to climb up on the
tower. He struggled over the boulders, for the handholds
were gone. Blackness gave way to grayness. He grunted. The
crow flew up to him easily. Wykeham pushed on through
the branches and dug between thorns. At last he came out of the
shadow and stood on the head stone, looking over the drive.
The house and the stables were below him. In the distance,
obscured by the green of the wood and the green of the
meadow, there were two other towers, two more of the nine.
But their rough mounds were broken, their stones carted off
by farmers for back steps and cellars, remade into foundations
and dry walls.
The crow settled down beside him and tilted its head.
“Since the world began changing, I have kept it,” Wykeham
said with conviction.
From where he stood he watched the women come out
onto the porch. It was his porch. He had set the posts. He
had planted the hawthorn whose branches wound into the
railings.
“Well, perhaps nothing will happen for a while,” the
crow said.
Wykeham considered all that he had made and done.
Now more than ever he did not wish to part with it.
“I am going to marry,” he said.
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WINTERKIMG
“Do you not fear him, lord?” the crow whispered.
“Always.”
“He will come for her.”
For a little while Wykeham was silent. “There are other
worlds,” he said.
The crow laughed. “And he has gone into all of them,”
Wykeham stood in the sunlight and thought. Before him,
in the lines of the walls, the squares of the meadows, he saw
the spare ordered beauty of his own hand. The wide, windless landscape, the large country house at its center, was a picture he had fashioned, had marked with his longing and
fixed with his thought. What had been before, what was
Duinn’s, eroded, was now nearly lost. It did not matter he
had come to the tower. It was passing; all that had been, the
ancient, violent warring world, would vanish.
Wykeham looked out, almost seeing the world that would
be.
“With each day I grow stronger,” he said. “Soon there
will be a new land, a land which he never entered.”
The crow looked at him.
“Indeed, lord,” it asked quietly, “how will that be?”
Wykeham reached down and scratched it under the beak