Winterking (1987)

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.

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  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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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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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  “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