The Chrestomanci Series

by Jones, Diana Wynne

  “Yes – I hope,” Cat said, wishing it was a better idea. “At least, I think I know someone you could ask. I met a man in your wood here who I think could help. He was awfully wise.”

  Marianne felt truly let down. “A man,” she said disbelievingly. “In the wood.”

  “Really wise,” Cat said rather desperately. “Dwimmer wise. And he had a unicorn.”

  Marianne supposed Cat was speaking the truth. If he was, then a unicorn did make a difference. If househobs were real, then might not unicorns be real too? A unicorn was part of the Pinhoe coat of arms and could – surely? – be expected to be on her side. And they were in such a mess, she and the Pinhoes and the Farleighs, that anything was worth a try.

  “All right,” she said. “How do I find them?”

  “I’ll have to take you,” Cat said. “There was a queer barrier in the way. Do you want to come now?”

  “Yes, please,” Marianne said.

  Outside, beyond the conservatory, Mr Adams was leaning against Syracuse with his arms round Syracuse’s neck, amid a strong smell of peppermint. Positively canoodling, Cat thought, rather jealously. But then, Cat thought, looking at Mr Adams closely, besides seeming as if he had gnome in his ancestry – or was it househob? – Mr Adams had more than a little of this strange thing called dwimmer. He was bound to get on with Syracuse, because Syracuse had it too.

  Mr Adams, however much he was enjoying Syracuse, was only too ready to hand Syracuse over and go in for his lunch. “There’s no doubt,” he said, in his talkative way, “that working a garden gives you an appetite. I’ve never been so hungry as I am since I moved here.”

  He went on talking. He talked all the time he was helping Cat heave Klartch up across Syracuse’s saddle. He talked while he checked the girths. He talked while he carefully cleaned his spade. But eventually he talked his way through the archway in the wall and round to the kitchen door. They could hear him begin talking to Jane James as he opened it. As soon as the door shut, Marianne put Nutcase secretly down in the beech hedge. “You go on home to Furze Cottage,” she told him. “You know the way.”

  “Not happy,” Klartch said plaintively from the saddle.

  Cat could see Klartch was uncomfortable, but he said, “It’s your own fault. You would follow me. You can’t walk fast enough to keep up, so stay up there and I’ll let you down when we find the road.”

  He and Marianne set off, Cat leading Syracuse, across the stubbly lawn to the row of lilacs at the back. There they found the small rickety gate Cat had come in by. It was green with mildew and almost falling apart with age and they had to shove it hard to get it open again.

  “I’d forgotten this was here,” Marianne said, as they went through into the empty, rustling wood. “Gaffer used to call it his secret escape route. Which way do we go?”

  “Keep straight on, I think,” Cat said.

  There was no path, but Cat set his mind on the whereabouts of that barrier and led the way, over shoals of fallen leaves, past brambles and through hazel thickets, deeper and deeper among the trees. Some of the time he was dragged through bushes by Syracuse, who was getting very excited by the wood and wanted to throw Klartch off and run. Poor Klartch was jogged and jigged and bounced and was less happy than ever. “Down!” he said.

  “Soon,” Cat told him.

  They came to the barrier quite unexpectedly on the other side of a holly bush. It stretched as far as either of them could see in both directions, rusting, ramshackle and overgrown. Marianne looked at it in astonishment.

  “What’s this? I never saw this before!”

  “You didn’t know to look for it, I expect,” Cat said.

  “It’s a mess!” Marianne said. “Creepers and nettles and rusty wire. Who put it up?”

  “I don’t know,” Cat said. “But it’s made of magic really. Do you think you could help me take it down? We won’t get Syracuse past it the way I got in last time.”

  “I can try, I suppose,” Marianne said. “How do you suggest?”

  Cat thought about it for a moment and then conjured the nearest clothesline from Ulverscote. It came with a row of someone’s pants pegged on it, which made them both struggle not to give shrieks of laughter. Each of them had the feeling that loud laughter might fetch the person who made the barrier here. From then on, they spoke in low voices, to be on the safe side.

  While Marianne carefully unpegged the pants and put them in a pile by the nearest tree, Cat fastened each end of the rope to the back of the saddle on Syracuse, using a thick blob of magic to fix it there. Klartch reared up and watched with interest as Cat took the rest of the clothesline and stretched high to loop it along the ragged top of the barrier. Klartch was an actual help here. Because Klartch was attending to the barrier, Cat somehow knew that it was mostly unreal. It had been made out of two small pieces of chicken wire and one length of corrugated iron, plus a charm to make the weeds grow over it, and then stretched by magic to become the long, impenetrable thing it was now. This meant that the clothesline was going to slide straight through it and come loose, if Cat was not careful.

  “Thanks, Klartch,” Cat said. As soon as the rope was jammed in along the ragged spikes of rusty iron, he fixed it there with a truly enormous slab of magic. He jerked it to test it. It was quite solid. “You take one side and pull hard when I say,” Cat murmured to Marianne, and took hold of the rope on the other side.

  “What charm do I use when I pull?” Marianne asked.

  “Nothing particularly,” Cat said, surprised that she should ask. Ulverscote witchcraft must be very different from enchanter’s magic. “Just think hard of the barrier coming down.”

  Marianne’s eyebrows went up, but she obediently took hold of the rope on her side. She was terribly obedient, Cat thought. He remembered Janet once telling him that he was too obedient, and he knew that had been the result of the way his sister always despised him. He was suddenly, firmly decided that, however much Marianne protested, he was going to tell Chrestomanci about her.

  “Right,” Cat said to Syracuse, in a low voice. “Work, Syracuse. Walk on.”

  Syracuse turned his head and stared at Cat. Me, work? said every line of him. And he simply planted himself and stood there, whatever Cat said.

  “You can have another peppermint,” Cat said. “Just walk. We need your strength.”

  Syracuse put his ears back and simply stood.

  “Oh, lord!” Marianne said. “He’s as bad as Nutcase. You go and lead him and I’ll pull on both halves of the rope.” She collected Cat’s side of the rope and stood in the middle, holding both lengths of clothesline.

  If Syracuse decided to kick out, he could hurt Marianne there. Cat hurried round to Syracuse’s head and took hold of his bridle. He found a slightly furry peppermint in one of his pockets and held it out at arm’s length in front of Syracuse’s nose, before he dared pull on the bridle. “Now come on, Syracuse! Peppermint!”

  Syracuse’s ears came up and he rolled an eye at Cat, to say he knew exactly what Cat was up to.

  “Yes,” Cat said to him. “It’s because we really need you.”

  Syracuse snorted. Then, when Cat was ready to give up, and to his huge relief, Syracuse started to trudge forward, stirring up clouds of broken dead leaves that got into Cat’s eyes and his mouth and down his boots and even somehow down his neck. Cat blinked and blew and urged Syracuse and encouraged him and willed at the barrier. He could feel Marianne behind them, willing too with surprising power, as she pulled on the clothesline like someone in two tug-of-wars at once.

  The barrier rustled, grated, groaned, and keeled slowly over in front of Marianne. When Cat turned to tell Syracuse he was a good horse and to feed him the peppermint, he could see the long line of metal and creepers in both directions, slowly falling flat, piece by piece, rather like a wave breaking on a beach. He could hear metal screaming and branches snapping, off into the distance both ways. Cat was rather surprised. He had not expected to bring the whole thing down.
But he supposed it must be because the barrier had been made out of just the one small piece really.

  “Hooray!” Marianne said quietly, letting go of the rope.

  Though the barrier now looked like a pile of nettles, brambles and broken creepers, there was still jagged metal underneath. Cat flicked the rope loose from it and undid the fastenings from Syracuse and, while Marianne busily pegged the pants back on to the rope, he tried growing a mat of ivy over the barrier, to make it safer for Syracuse to walk on. Chrestomanci was always telling him that he should never waste magic, so Cat fed the slab of magic that had fastened the rope back into the fallen creepers.

  This was quite as startling as the way the whole barrier had come down. Ivy surged and spread and gnarled and tangled, a mature and glossy dark green, in a whispering rush, that put out yellowish flowers and then black fruits in seconds, not just in one place as Cat had intended, but off along the fallen barrier in both directions. By the time Marianne had turned round with the pants pegged back on the clothesline, the barrier was a long mound of ivy as far as she could see both ways. It looked as if it had been growing there for years.

  “My!” she said. “You do have dwimmer, don’t you!”

  “It may be the magic in this wood,” Cat said. He sent the clothesline back where it had come from, then he turned Syracuse round and led him carefully over the ivy bank and down into the mossy road beyond. While Marianne crunched her way across after them, Cat stopped and got Klartch down. Klartch immediately became hugely happy. He gave out whistling squeaks and went lolloping off towards the nearest bend in the road. The mossy surface seemed perfect for his clawed feet. Syracuse felt it was perfect for hooves too. He bounded and waltzed and tried to take off after Klartch so determinedly that Cat was dragged along in great hopping bounds, with Marianne pelting after them.

  They whirled round the bend in the road with Klartch in the lead. The old cart was there, parked in a new place on the verge, with the seeming old white mare grazing beside it. Beyond that, the old man looked up in amazement from his panful of mushrooms and bacon. He just managed to let the pan go and brace himself, before Marianne rushed up and hurled herself on him.

  “Gaffer!” she screamed. “Oh, Gaffer, you’re not dead after all!” She pushed her face into the old man’s tattered jacket and burst into tears.

  Syracuse stopped dead when he saw the old unicorn. She raised her head from the grass and looked at him enquiringly. A ray of sun, slanting between the trees, caught her horn and lit it into pearly creams and greens and blues. Or was that blue and green and white, like the tiles in Woods House, Cat wondered. Syracuse tiptoed respectfully towards her and put out his nose. Graciously, the old unicorn touched her nose to his.

  “He’s got unicorn blood in him somewhere,” she remarked softly to Cat. “I wonder how that happened.”

  Beyond her, Klartch was creeping towards the pan of mushrooms and bacon with his beak out. Cat thought he ought to go and drag him away. But Marianne was kneeling in the old man’s arms, sobbing out what seemed to be private things, and Cat was embarrassed about interrupting. However, while Cat hesitated, the old man swivelled himself round and spared an arm from Marianne in order to tap Klartch firmly on the beak. “Wait,” Cat heard him say. “You shall have some presently.” And he went back to listening attentively to Marianne.

  “Do you understand a little more about dwimmer now?” the unicorn said conversationally to Cat.

  “I – think so,” Cat said. “Irene has it. Marianne keeps saying I’ve got it too. Have I?”

  “You have. Even more strongly than my old Gaffer,” the unicorn told him. “Didn’t you just grow several miles of ivy?”

  Nearly a year ago now, Cat had been forced to accept that he was a nine-lifed enchanter. That had been hard to do, but he supposed it made it easier to accept having dwimmer too. He grinned, thinking of himself stuffed full of every kind of magic – except, he thought, Joe Pinhoe’s kind. But then, when he thought about it, he knew that Joe had been using dwimmer to animate that stuffed ferret of his. How muddling. “Yes,” he said. “Can you tell me what I ought to be doing with it?”

  “We all hoped you might ask me that,” said the unicorn. “You can do many thousands of folk the same favour that Irene did for her househob, if you want.”

  “Oh,” said Cat. “Where are these people?”

  Syracuse nudged up to the unicorn and snorted impatiently.

  “I’ll have a long talk with you in a moment,” she said to him. “Why don’t you graze on this tasty bank for a while?”

  Syracuse looked at her questioningly. She stumped forward a step or so and flicked her horn affectionately along his mane. All his tack vanished, saddle, bit, reins, everything, leaving him without so much as a halter. He looked much better like that to Cat’s eyes. Syracuse twitched all over with relief, before he bent his head and started tearing up mouthfuls of grass and little fragrant plants.

  “If you can taste it through all the peppermint you’ve eaten,” the unicorn remarked dryly.

  She said to Cat, “I’ll put it all back later. The folks are here. Hidden behind. Imprisoned for no fault that I can see, except that they scare humans. Can’t you feel this?”

  Cat examined the wood with his thoughts. It was quiet, too quiet, and the silence was not peace. It was the same emptiness that he had felt whenever he rode out with Syracuse, by the river and on the heath, and behind the emptiness was misery, and longing. It was the same thing that he had felt in Home Wood when he first encountered Mr Farleigh. As for this wood, he remembered Chrestomanci saying, rather irritably, what a dreary, empty place it was. But here there seemed to be no rack of dead animals to act as a gate between the emptiness and the misery in the distance behind.

  “I don’t know what to do about it,” he told the unicorn. He had not managed to do anything in Home Wood, even with a gate. What did you do here, against complete blankness? “You can’t clean a wood the way Irene cleaned those tiles.”

  “You can make an opening, though,” the unicorn suggested quietly. “Make a road between the background and the foreground. That’s how roads usually go.”

  “I’ll try.” Cat stood and thought. If he thought of it as like stage scenery, he supposed he could make the empty wood seem like a solid sort of curtain that had been drawn across the real scenery, the blue distance behind, and then tightly fixed. “Draw it like a curtain?” he asked the unicorn.

  “If you want,” she answered.

  The trouble was, it was only the one curtain. There was no opening, the way there was with window curtains, where you take hold of the two sides and pull them apart. Cat could not see himself tearing trees and grass and bushes in two. Even if he could, it would kill everything. No. The only thing to do seemed to be to find the edge of the curtain, wherever that was, and pull it from there.

  He looked for the edge. There was miles of this curtain. Like a sheet of rubbery gauze, it stretched and stretched, out across the country, out across the continent, over the oceans, right to the edges of the world. He had to stretch and stretch himself to get near it, and the rubbery edge kept slipping away from his imaginary clutching fingers. Cat clenched his teeth and stretched himself more, just that little bit further. And at last his reaching left hand closed on the thin, slippery edge of it. He put both hands to it and hauled. It would hardly budge. Someone had pegged it down really firmly. Even when the unicorn came and rested her horn gently on Cat’s shoulder, Cat could only move the thing an inch or so.

  “Try asking the prisoners to help,” the unicorn murmured.

  “Good idea,” Cat panted. Still hanging on to the distant end of the curtain, he pushed his mind into the empty blue distance behind it, and it was not empty. The ones inside were all swarming, drifting and anxiously clustering towards the other side of the curtain. “Pull, pull!” he whispered to them. “Help me pull!” It was so like making Syracuse pull down the barrier that he almost offered them peppermint.

  Bu
t they needed no bribery. They were frantic to get out now. They swooped on the place where Cat’s imaginary hands were clutched, in a storm of small, fierce strangenesses, and fastened on beside Cat and heaved. Beside Cat, the unicorn put her horn down and heaved too.

  The curtain tore. First it came away in a long strip across the middle, making Cat stagger back into the unicorn. Then it tore downwards, then diagonally, as more and more eager creatures inside clawed and hauled and pulled at it. Finally it began flopping down in wobbly dead heaps, which folded in on themselves and melted. Cat could actually smell it as it melted. The smell was remarkably like the disinfectant spell Euphemia had used on the stairs. But this smell was overwhelmed almost at once by a sweet, wild scent from the myriad beings who came whirring out past Cat’s face and fled away into the landscape. Cat thought it was, just a little, like the incense smell from the meadows by the river.

  “Done it, I think!” he gasped at the unicorn. He slid down her hairy side and sat on the bank with a bump. He was weak with effort. But he was glad to see that the trees of the wood were still there. It would have been a mistake to have tried to tear the wood in half.

  “You have,” the unicorn said. “Thank you.” Her horn gently touched Cat’s forehead. It smelt like the meadows too.

  When Cat recovered and sat up properly, he saw that the old man was still talking earnestly with Marianne. But he knew what had been going on. His bright brown eyes kept turning appreciatively to the woods, although he now had the pan on his knees and was feeding a soothing mushroom to Marianne and then some bacon to Klartch, as if there was no difference between them.

  “But, Gaffer,” Cat heard Marianne say, “if you’ve been trapped here all these years, where do you get your bacon from?”

  “Your Uncle Cedric puts it through the barrier for me,” Gaffer said. “And eggs. They all know I’m here, you know, but Cedric’s the only one who thinks I might need feeding.”