“So what’s the news?” Harry Pinhoe asked, puffing fine blue clouds. “I hear the Family came back.”
“Yes, and bought a horse,” Joss Callow said. “Got diddled properly over it.” Harry and Arthur laughed. “Me included,” Joss admitted. “Wizard who sold it put half a hundred spells on it to make it seem manageable, see. About the only one who can ride it is the boy they’re training up to be the next Big Man, and he gets on with it a treat. Odd, though. He doesn’t seem to use any magic on it that I can see. But what I was getting round to with this was about Gaffer Farleigh. He turned up when I was out with the boy in Home Wood and gave us both a proper warning off. Seemed to think the boy was likely to interfere with our work. What do you think?”
Harry and Arthur exchanged looks. “Some of that may be about the row he had with Gammer,” Arthur suggested, “before Gammer got took strange. All us Pinhoes are dirt to the Farleighs at the moment.”
“They’ll get over it,” Harry said placidly. “But we can’t have that boy riding all over the country. We’ll have to stop that.”
“Oh, I will,” Joss assured him. “He’s not going out without me any day soon.”
Harry chuckled. “If he does, the road workings will take care of it.” They drank beer peacefully for a while, until Harry asked, “Anything else, Joss?”
“Not much. Usual stuff,” said Joss. “The Big Man got straight back to work when he wasn’t buying horses and bicycles – magical swindle in London, some coven in the Midlands giving trouble, Scottish witches fussing about funds for Hallowe’en, row of some kind two worlds away over the new tax on dragon’s blood – business as usual. Oh, I nearly forgot! That enchanter’s back from collecting plants all over the Related Worlds. The young one that used to be so thick with Old Gaffer. Jason Yeldham. He was asking after Gaffer. How much of an eye ought I to keep on him?”
“Shouldn’t think he’d be much trouble,” Harry said, emptying vile black dottle from his pipe into the ashtray. He scraped round the pipe bowl and thought about it. He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s not likely to come bothering us here now Gaffer’s gone all these years ago. I mean, it’s all studying and book-learning with him, isn’t it? It’s not like he uses the herbs the way we do. No need to interfere with him. But stay alert, if you follow me.”
“Will do,” said Joss.
They asked Arthur for more beer and refreshed themselves with pork pies and pickled onions for a while. After a bit, Harry remembered to ask, “How’s Joe doing then?”
Joss shrugged. “All right, I suppose. I scarcely ever see him.”
“Good. Then he’s not in trouble yet,” Harry said.
Then Joss remembered to ask, “And how’s Gammer settling in?”
“She’s fine,” Harry said. “Dinah looks after her a treat. She sits there and no one can get any sense out of her, not even our Marianne, but there you go, she’s happy. She makes Marianne go round there every day and tells Marianne she has to look after that cat of hers every time, but that’s all. It’s all peace this end, really.”
“I’d better go and pay my respects to her,” Joss said. “She’s bound to find out I was here if I don’t.” He drained off the rest of his beer and stood up. “See you later, Harry, Arthur.”
He picked up his bicycle from the yard and coasted his way downhill through the village, nodding to the occasional Pinhoe who called out a greeting, shaking his head at the piles of brick and earth where the table had run into the Post Office wall. Wondering why nobody had done anything yet about mending that wall, he turned into Dell Lane and shortly arrived at the smallholding, where geese, ducks and hens ran noisily out of his way as he went to knock at the front door.
“Come to see Gammer,” he said to Dinah when she opened it.
“Now there’s an odd thing!” Dinah exclaimed. “She’s been on about you all this morning. She’s said to me over and over, ‘When Joss Callow comes, you’re to show him straight in,’ she said, and I’d no idea you were even coming to Ulverscote!” She dived back in and opened the door on the right of the tiny hallway. “Gammer, guess who! It’s Joss Callow come to see you!”
“Well, they all say that,” Gammer’s voice answered. “They look and they spy on me all the time.”
Joss Callow paused in the front doorway. Partly he was wondering what you said to that, and partly he was shaken by the strength of the spells Harry Pinhoe had put up to stop Gammer getting out. He pulled himself together and pushed his way through into the tiny front room, full of teapots and vases and boxes that people had thought Gammer might want. Gammer was sitting in an upright armchair with wings that almost hid her ruined face and tousled white hair, with her hands folded on the knee of her clean, clean skirt. “How are you today then, Gammer?” he said heartily.
“Not so wide as a barn door, but enough to let chickens in,” Gammer answered. “Thank you very much, Joss Callow. But it was Edgar and Lester who did it, you know.”
“Oh?” said Joss. “Really?”
While he was wondering what else to say, whether to give her news from the Castle or talk about the weather, Gammer said sharply, “And now you’re here at last, you can go and fetch me Joe here at once.”
“Joe?” Joss said. “But I can give you news of the Castle just as well, Gammer.”
“I don’t want news, I want Joe,” Gammer insisted. “I know as well as you do where he is and I want him here. Or don’t you call me Gammer any more?”
“Yes, of course I do,” Joss said, and tried to change the subject. “It’s a bit grey today, but —”
“Don’t you try to put me off, Joss Callow,” Gammer interrupted. “I’ve told you to fetch me Joe here and I mean it.”
“But quite warm – a bit warm for cycling really,” Joss said.
“Who cares about the weather?” Gammer said. “I said to fetch Joe here. Go and get him at once and stop trying to humour me!”
This seemed quite definite and perfectly sane to Joss. He sighed at the thought of a lost afternoon at the Pinhoe Arms, chatting to Arthur and maybe playing darts with Charles. “You want me to cycle all the way back to Helm St Mary and tell Joe to come here, do you?”
“Yes. You should have done it yesterday,” Gammer said. “I don’t know what you young ones are coming to, arguing with the orders I give. Go and fetch Joe. Now. Tell him I want to speak to him and he’s not to tell anyone else. Go on. Off you go.”
Such was the awe all the Pinhoe family felt for Gammer that Joss didn’t argue and didn’t dare mention the weather again. He said, “All right then,” and went.
With Syracuse fighting to go faster, faster! Cat rode along the grass verge, while Roger pedalled beside them on the road. They were quite evenly matched going along the level, but whenever they came to a hill, Syracuse sailed up it, shaking his head and trying to gallop, and Roger stood on his pedals and worked furiously, puffing like a train. Roger’s chubby face became the colour of raspberries and he still got left far behind.
They could see the woods they were making for, tantalisingly only two hills away, a spill of dark green trees with already one or two dashes of pure, sunlit yellow, that signalled autumn coming. Every time Cat looked – usually while he was at the top of a hill waiting for Roger – those trees seemed further and further off, and more away to the left, and still two hills away. Cat began to think they had missed a turning, or perhaps even taken the wrong road to start with.
When Roger caught up next time, with his face beyond raspberry into strawberry colour, Cat said, “We ought to take the next left turn.”
Roger was too much out of breath to do anything but nod. So Cat took the lead and swung Syracuse into a nice broad road leading away left. SHALLOWHELM the signpost said. UPHELM.
About half a mile later, when he could speak, Roger said, “This road can’t be right. It should take us back to the Castle.”
Cat could still see the wood, still in the same place, so he kept on. The road bent about among nothin
g but empty countryside for what seemed miles, up and down, until Roger was more the colour of a peony than anything else. Then it swung round a corner and went up a truly enormous hill.
Roger let out a wail at the sight of it. “I can’t! I’ll have to get off and push.”
“No, don’t,” Cat said. “Let me give you a tow.”
He used the same spell he had used to keep Julia from falling off Syracuse and flung it round Roger’s bicycle. They went on, fast at first, because Syracuse still regarded every hill as a challenge to gallop, then slower – even when Cat allowed Syracuse to try to gallop – and then slower still. Halfway up, when Syracuse’s front hooves were digging and digging, and his back ones were scrambling, it dawned on Syracuse what was going on. He looked across at Roger and the bicycle, so uncannily keeping beside him. Then he threw Cat in the ditch and scrambled through the hedge into the stubble field beyond.
Roger only just saved himself and the bicycle from falling in the ditch too. “That horse,” he said, kneeling in the grass beside his spinning front wheel, “is too clever by half. Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Cat said, but he stayed sitting in the squashy weeds at the bottom of the ditch. It was not so much the fall. It was that Syracuse had broken the spell quite violently. This had never happened to Cat before. He discovered that it hurt. “In a moment,” he added.
Roger looked anxiously from Cat’s white face to Syracuse pounding happily about in the field above them. “I wish I was old enough to drive a car,” he said. “Or I wish that there was some way of moving this bike without having to pedal.”
“Couldn’t you invent a way?” Cat asked, to take his mind off hurting.
They were both sitting thinking about this, when a boy on a bicycle came past them up the hill. He was riding an ordinary bike, but he was humming smoothly upwards at a good speed and he was not pedalling at all. Roger and Cat stared after him with their mouths open. Cat was so amazed that it took him several seconds to recognise Joe Pinhoe. Roger was simply amazed. They both began shouting at once.
“Hey, Joe!” Cat shouted.
“Hey you!” Roger shouted.
And they both yelled in chorus, “Can you stop a minute! Please!”
For a moment, it looked as if Joe was not going to stop. He had hummed his way about twenty yards uphill before he seemed to change his mind. He shrugged a bit. Then his hand went down to a box on his crossbar, where he appeared to move a switch of some kind, after which he turned in a smooth curve and came coasting back down the hill to them.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, propping himself on the bank with one boot. “Want me to help catch the horse?” He nodded at Syracuse, who was now watching them across the hedge with great interest.
“No, no!” Cat and Roger said at once. “It’s not the horse,” Cat added.
Roger said, “We wanted to know how you make your bike go uphill without pedalling like that. It’s brilliant!”
Joe was clearly very gratified. He grinned. But, being Joe, he also hung his head and looked sulky. “I only use it on hills,” he said guardedly.
“That’s what’s so brilliant,” Roger said. “How do you do it?”
Joe hesitated.
Roger could see Joe was very proud of his device, whatever it was, and was itching to show it off, really. He asked coaxingly, “Did you invent it yourself?”
Joe nodded, grinning his sulky grin again.
“Then you must be a brilliant inventor,” Roger said. “I like inventing things too, but I’ve never come up with anything this useful. I’m Roger, by the way. Don’t you work in the Castle? I know I’ve seen you there.”
“Boot boy,” said Joe. “I’m Joe.” He nodded at Cat. “I’ve met him.”
“Jason Yeldham used to be boot boy there too,” Roger said. “It must go with brilliance.”
“Herbs, I know,” Joe said. “It’s machines I like really. But this box – it’s more of a dwimmer thing, see.” His hand went out to the box on his crossbar, and stopped. “What’s in it for me, if I do show you?” he asked suspiciously.
Roger was commercially minded too. He sympathised with Joe completely. The problem was that he had no money on him and he knew Cat had none either. And Joe could be offended at being offered money anyway. “I wouldn’t tell anyone else about it,” he said, while he thought. “And Cat won’t either. I tell you what – when we get back to the Castle, I’ll give you the address of the Magics Patent Office. You register your invention with them and everyone has to pay you if they want to use it too.”
Joe’s face gleamed with cautious greed. “Don’t I have to be grown up to do that?”
“No,” said Roger. “I sent for the forms when I invented a magic mirror game last year, and they don’t ask your age at all. They ask for a fifty pound fee, though.”
Cat wondered whether to point out that he, and not Roger, had invented the mirror game by accident. But he said nothing, because he was quite as interested in the box as Roger was.
Joe had a distant, calculating look. “I could be earning that much this summer,” he decided. “They pay quite well at the Castle. All right. I’ll show you.”
Grinning his sulky grin, Joe carefully unhooked the small latch that held the box on his crossbar shut. Cat craned out of the ditch – and then recoiled. The hinged lid dropped downwards to show, of all things, a stuffed ferret! The bent yellow body had bits of wire and twisted stalks of plants leading from its head and its paws to the place where the box met the crossbar.
“Metal to metal,” Joe explained, pointing to the join. “That’s machinery, see. The dwimmer part is to use the right herbs for life. You have to use something that has once been alive, see. Then you can get the life-power running through the frame and turning the wheels.”
“Brilliant!” Roger said reverently, peering in at the ferret. Its glass eyes seemed to glare sharply back at him. “But how do you get the life-power to flow? Is that a spell, or what?”
“It’s some old words we sometimes use in the woods,” Joe said. “But the trick is the herbs that go with the wires. Took me ages to find the right ones. You got to blend them, see.”
Roger bent even closer. “Oh, I see. Clever.”
Cat got up out of the ditch and went to catch Syracuse. He knew, now he had seen the box, that he could almost certainly make Roger one this evening, probably without needing a stuffed ferret.
But he knew Roger would hate that. Cat’s kind of magic made some things too easy. Roger would be wanting to make a box by himself, however long it took. As Cat pushed his way through the hedge, he wondered exactly what Joe’s word “dwimmer” meant. Was it an old word for magic? It sounded more specialised than that. It must mean a special sort of magic, probably.
Syracuse was not very hard to catch. He was quite tired after hauling Roger uphill, and a little bored by now in the wide, empty stubble field. But when Cat finally had the reins in his hands again, he discovered that Syracuse only had three shoes. One shoe must have torn off while Syracuse was plunging through the hedge.
Finding the shoe was not a problem. Cat simply held his hand out and asked. The missing horseshoe whirled up out of a clump of grass, where no one would have found it for years in the ordinary way, and slapped itself into Cat’s hand. The real problem was that Cat knew Joss Callow would be outraged if Cat tried sticking the shoe back on by magic. It was bound to go on wrong somehow. And Joss would be truly angry if Cat tried to ride Syracuse with one uneven foot. Cat sighed. He was going to have to levitate Syracuse all the way home, or conjure him along in short bursts, or – knowing how much Syracuse hated magic – most likely just walk. Bother.
He found a gate and led Syracuse out through it and down the hill where Joe and Roger were sitting side by side on the bank, talking eagerly. Cat could see they were now fast friends. Well, they clearly had a lot in common.
“That’s women’s work, a machine for washing dishes,” Joe was saying. “We can do better than t
hat. If you get any good notions, you better come and tell me. I get in trouble if I wander round the Castle. You can find me in the boot room.”
He looked up as he heard Syracuse’s uneven footfalls. “I have to be going,” he said. “I’ve an errand to run for our Gammer, down in Helm St Mary.” He got up off the bank and picked up his bicycle. “And you’ll never guess what it is,” he said. “Take a look.” He pulled a large glass jar with a lid on out of the basket on the front of his bicycle and held it up. “I’m to tip this in their village pond there,” he said.
Cat and Roger leant to look at the murky, greenish water in the jar. A few fat black things with tails were wiggling slowly around in it.
“Tadpoles?” said Roger. “A bit late in the year, isn’t it?”
“Quite big ones,” Cat said.
“I know,” Joe said. “I could only find six and some of those have their legs already. Know what they’re for?” They shook their heads. “This is not a jar of tadpoles,” Joe said. “It’s a declaration of war, this is.” He put the jar back in his basket and got astride his bike.
“Wait a moment,” Cat said. “Do you know how far it is to Chrestomanci Castle?”
Joe shot him a slightly guilty look. “You can see it from the top of this hill,” he said. “Got turned around, didn’t you? Not my fault. But the Farleighs don’t like people wandering around in their country, so they do this to the roads. See you.”
He switched the toggle at the side of his box and went purring smoothly away up the hill.
Not surprisingly, Cat got back to the Castle a long time after Joe or Roger did. Syracuse resisted Cat’s attempt to levitate him and started to stamp and panic at the mere hint of teleportation. Cat was too much afraid he would split the unshod hoof to try either spell more than just the once. He could hardly bear to think of what Joss Callow would say if he brought Syracuse in with an injury. So he was reduced to plodding along by the grass verge, with Syracuse breathing playfully on his hair, happy that Cat was not trying to use magic any more. That wizard who sold Syracuse, Cat thought glumly, must have frightened the horse badly by slamming spells on him. Cat would have liked to slam a few spells back on the wizard.
The Chrestomanci Series Page 124