The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  “Printing metal,” said Jonathan. “Must be almost as heavy as lead. The boxes are small, so that a man can lift them. Now that’s what I call a real bit of luck! Let’s see if we can push it. Come on, harder! One, two, three, heave! Fine. Leave it there and we’ll try the hoist. It’ll be electric, but there might be a hand control to run the hook out. Tell me if anything moves.”

  He tugged levers without result, then began to turn a large wheel.

  “That’s it,” said Margaret excitedly, but still without any idea of what he was up to.

  “Good. Now those bits of iron at the end of the rails must be to stop the trolley flying out over that quay if there’s an accident, but there might be a way of moving them.”

  “Mine’s got a sort of hook this side.”

  “So’s mine, hang on, it’s stuck. Can you see anything to bang it with? Yes, that’ll do. Ouch! Don’t worry, I only grazed my knuckles. Done yours? Fine. Now, just let me work this out.”

  “But, Jo, even if you get them right under here, on the quay, you’ll only hit one or two, and …”

  Jonathan stopped sucking his ravaged knuckle to grin at her.

  “I’ve got a better idea. If it works,” he said.

  He looked outside, up at the hoist, back at the trolley, down at the drop. Then he wound the hook in, so that he could reach it. Then he made Margaret help him shove the trolley right to the giddy verge. Then he fetched the ropes which festooned the bronze soldier and spent several minutes contriving a lopsided sling from the hook to the trolley. Last of all he wound the hook out almost to the end of the girder and readjusted the ropes. Margaret suddenly saw what would happen if the trolley were pushed the last few inches over the edge—pushed with a rush: it would swing down and out, in a wide curve, trolley and boxes all moving together; but because the far end of the trolley was on longer ropes than the near end, the boxes would start to slide out forward, and when the swing of the ropes had reached its limit the boxes would all shoot on and be scattered right out across the ice, almost as far as Heartsease; and if the dogs could be lured onto the ice at the right moment … she knew what his next words were going to be before he said them.

  “You’ll have to be bait, I’m afraid.”

  “Bait?”

  “Yes, as soon as I’ve found a lever. I want them on the ice halfway between here and Heartsease—it’s the big ones that are the killers. Go down to the bottom, edge one door open, make quite sure you know how to shut it, slip through and shout. Look, they’re bored with the tug and they’re going back to where they were before, so you’ll know just how long it will take them to get across. Stick it out as long as you can, Marge, but get back inside when the first dog is halfway between the boat and the quay—I don’t want to drop a ton of lead on you. If I shout, you’ll know it’s not safe to open the door. All right?”

  “All right,” whispered Margaret, sick with terror. The stairs seemed longer going down, the rooms darker, the rustling of rats more obvious—perhaps they’d been scared into brief silence by the clamor of the dogs. Scrub and Caesar were restive: most ponies hate rats. She patted and talked to them both, until she realized she was only doing so to put off opening the door. She walked down between the rails and studied the bolt and the hook—the hook would be quite enough by itself. She was lifting it when she suddenly wondered whether she could hear him down all those stairs, supposing he was shouting to warn her of prowling hounds … come on, girl, of course you would—Jonathan wouldn’t have suggested it if it wasn’t going to work. She opened the door eight inches and slipped through the gap into the bitter daylight.

  The dogs were over by a warehouse on the far side of the ice, squabbling over something edible. She could hear distant snarlings.

  “Ahoy!” she called. Her voice was weak and thin.

  “Ahoy!” came Jonathan’s cheerful yell far above her head.

  She saw two or three dogs raise their muzzles and look across the ice. She pranced about on the quay, waving both arms to make sure she was seen, because most dogs have poor vision and the wind was blowing from them to her, so that no scent would reach them.

  At once it all became like the nightmares you have again and again: the same baying rose; the same swirl of color spilled down on the ice; the same dogs leaped yelping in front, their heads held the same way; the same panic lurched up inside her. She was yards from the door, after her prancing, and rushed madly for it, but when she reached it she saw that the dogs had barely come as far as the tug, so she still had to stand in the open, visible, edible, luring them on. Bait.

  But it was only seconds before the first dog reached the rumple in the ice she’d chosen as a mark, and she could slip back in and hook the door shut. As she closed out the last of sky she thought she glimpsed black blobs hurling down.

  Then there came a thud, a long, tearing crack, a lot of smaller hangings; the yelping changed its note, faltered and vanished; then there were only a few whimpers, mixed with a sucking and splashing. She unhooked the door, edged it open and poked her head out.

  The whole surface of the ice had changed—it had been nothing like as thick as she’d thought and was really only snow frozen together, without the bonding strength of ice. Now the under water had flooded out across a great stretch of it and the part between her and Heartsease was smashed into separate floes, overlapping in places and leaving a long passage of open water. The smaller dogs had not come far enough to be caught and were rushing away to the far quay, but most of the larger ones were struggling in the deadly water. As she watched, one which had been marooned on a floating island of ice shifted its position; the ice tilted and slid it sideways into the water; it tried to scrabble back but could find no hold; then it swam across to the fixed ice and tried there, but still there was nothing on the slippery surface for its front legs to grip while it hauled its sodden hindquarters out; it tried and tried. Margaret looked away, and saw several others making the same hopeless effort around the edges of the open water. In the middle two still shapes floated—dogs which had actually been hit by the falling boxes. She shut the door and went trembling up the stairs.

  Jonathan had shut his door and was sitting on a bale with his head between his hands. He looked white, even in the dimness.

  “It worked,” she said, “but I couldn’t go on looking.”

  “Nor could I,” he answered. “It’s not their fault they’re killers.”

  Margaret was surprised. She was so used, after five years of knowing him well, to his instant reaction to the needs of any happening that she hardly thought about it. Jo would say what to do, and he’d be right. Now, for the second time—the first had been when they’d crouched at the top of the stairs and listened to Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Aunt Anne—he’d buckled under the sudden load of his feelings. He felt the death of the dogs more than she did—she was only shocked, but he felt something deeper, more wounding, in his having done what he had to do. She put her hand under his arm and coaxed him to his feet.

  “The ponies are getting worried,” she said.

  He followed her listlessly down the dusty flights; the ponies were stamping fretfully in the shadows, but as much from boredom and strangeness as from fear—or perhaps the stress the children felt was making them kick the cobbles in that fretful way. Jonathan walked up to Caesar and slapped his well-padded shoulder.

  “Shut up, you fat idiot,” he said. “We could stick it out for months here. Corn for you and pineapples for me and a million rats to talk to.”

  Caesar enjoyed being spoken to like that. Margaret fondled Scrub’s nose and gently teased his ears until he was calm. Then she opened the door. The water was almost still now, though two dogs still paddled feebly at the far edge. A few more shapes floated in the middle of the water—the others must have got out somehow, or sunk when they drowned. As she looked, a hatch on Heartsease opened and a cautious head poked out—Lucy’s. Margaret stepped into the open and waved; an arm waved back. Jonathan came and stood beside her, with hi
s usual perky, cat-faced look.

  “If they used their pole to break the ice around her,” he said, “they could cast off the far hawser and we could haul her over.”

  “Scrub and Caesar could, anyway,” said Margaret.

  But it took five minutes of signaling and hallooing before Lucy grasped the idea and persuaded Tim to do the work. Meanwhile Margaret devised a makeshift connection between the near hawser and Scrub’s horsecollar, and an even more makeshift harness for Caesar to do his share of hauling in. Caesar didn’t mind, but the ramshackle and once-only nature of the whole contraption displeased Scrub’s conservative soul, and she had to bully him before he suddenly bent to his task like a pit-pony and began to haul the inert but frictionless mass across the dock. Margaret led the ponies back into the warehouse, so that they could pull straight.

  “Whoa!” shouted Jonathan from the quayside, and she hauled back on the bridles. The hawser deepened its curve until it lay like a basking snake along the floor, but it was many seconds before she heard the dull boom of the tug nudging up against the stonework. Three minutes later they had shut the ponies back in the warehouse and were standing on the deck, where Tim was cuddling a draggled yellow blob with a snarling black snout.

  “What’s he got?” said Margaret.

  “Puppy,” said Lucy. “He fished un off a bit of ice as the boat ran past. Come and see Otto. He’s better—in his mind, that is. He can’t move his legs still, and his side hurts him, but he’s better in his mind.”

  She led them below.

  Chapter 6

  WILL SHE GO?

  It was glorious to be out of the fingering wind.

  The cabin, an odd-shaped chamber with a tilting floor and walls which both curved and sloped, was beautifully warm and stuffy—warm from the round stove which crackled against the inner wall, stuffy from being lived in by three people. The witch lay in a corner, his feet down the slope of the floor, and watched them scramble down the ladder; the reflection of daylight from the open hatch made his eyes gleam bright as a robin’s. He looked thin, tired, ill—but not dying, not any longer.

  “Welcome to the resistance movement,” he said in his strange voice, slow and spoken half through his nose. “What you got there, Tim? Another patient?”

  Tim cooed happily and put his bundle on the floor, a wet, yellow, floppy pup, just big enough to have followed its mother with the pack but not big enough to fend for itself, nor to tilt off its patch of ice and drown. It snarled at them all and slashed at Tim’s hand; he didn’t snatch it away but let the puppy chew at it with sharp little teeth until Lucy handed him a mutton bone. The puppy took it ungraciously into the darkest corner and settled down to a private growling match.

  Otto laughed.

  “What shall we call him?” he said. “If it is a him.”

  “Davey,” said Margaret without thinking. The other two children looked at her, surprised.

  “Means something to you?” said Otto. “Okay, fine. What happened outside? We heard the noises but we couldn’t figure them out. At least you won your battle.”

  Jonathan told him what they had done in dry sentences, as though it had happened to someone else and was not very interesting anyway. Otto listened without a word and then lay silent, twitching his eyes from face to face.

  “Yeah,” he said at last. “I reckoned I’d just been mighty lucky till now. I didn’t know we had a thinker pulling for us.”

  “We can’t do it if we’re not lucky,” said Jonathan without emphasis.

  “Yes,” burst in Margaret, “but we couldn’t have got anywhere without Jo. He’s made all the luck work.”

  “The question is can we make the engines work,” said Jonathan.

  “What’s she got?” said Otto.

  “I think it must be diesel,” said Jonathan. “It’s very old; there’s a brass plate on the engine saying nineteen twenty-eight. I can’t see anywhere for a furnace, or for storing coal; and there are feed-pipes which look right for oil and wrong for water, and a big oil tank behind here.”

  He slapped the partition behind the stove. Otto whistled.

  “Nineteen twenty-eight!” he said. “A genuine vintage tub, then. Isn’t there anything newer?”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan, “the other tug, the one that’s not sunk I mean, looks much newer and much more complicated. But it’s in a mess, as though they were using it all the time just before the Changes came. But this one’s very tidy, with everything stowed away and covered up and tied down. I thought perhaps it was so old that they didn’t use it at all, but just kept it here, laid up. So they might have left it properly cared for, so that they’d be able to start it if they hadn’t tried for a long time.”

  “Yeah,” said Otto, “that they might. And another thing—a primitive engine is a simple engine—unsophisticated, not much to go wrong, provided she isn’t all seized up. I’ll get Tim to lug me along for a look-see as soon as my rib’s mended, three more weeks maybe. And where’ll you sail us then, captain?”

  “We’re in Gloucester Docks,” said Jonathan. “There’s a canal which goes down to the Bristol Channel. Margaret’s explored it. It’s about fifteen miles long, she thinks, and not many people live near it. The bridges over it open quite easily, though she didn’t try them all. There’s only one lock, out beyond the other docks at the far end. We thought we’d use the ponies to tow Heartsease right down there, and if anyone stopped us we could say it was a wicked machine and we wanted to get it away from our part of the canal—that would be a good argument in England now. And when we got there we could see if we could find enough fuel (or we could look for some here) and see if we can make the lock work. If we can we’ll try to start the engines and get out down the Bristol Channel, and if we can’t we’ll think of something else.”

  “Sharpness,” said Otto. “That’s the name of the port at the far end; I remember it from my briefing. And another thing I remember—that the Bristol Channel’s just about the trickiest water in Europe. Tide goes belting in and out, six knots each way, and drops thirty foot in two hours; then the river’s nothing but mud flats and a bit of stream winding through the middle. We’ll need charts.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Margaret.

  “Right,” said Otto. “Food first, action after. What’s on the menu?”

  “We’ve nigh on eaten all you brought last time, Master Jonathan,” said Lucy.

  “We’ve brought enough for another three days, I hope,” said Margaret.

  “Anyway,” said Jonathan, “the warehouse is absolutely full of cans.”

  “Given you can find a can opener,” said Otto.

  The shape of that forgotten tool was suddenly sharp in Margaret’s mind, like an image out of a lost dream.

  “I’ll look for an ironmonger’s,” said Jonathan, “after I’ve burgled the offices for charts.”

  While they ate the firm cheese and crisp-crusted bread (one thing about Rosie, she baked better than anyone else in the village) they talked a little and thought a lot. Margaret was dismayed to find that they were less than halfway through their job; the most dangerous part was still to come. And she alone knew how huge and immovable-seeming were the steel gates down at Sharpness. She distracted herself from her worries by watching Tim coax the puppy into trusting him, so gentle, so patient that it was difficult to remember that he hadn’t all his wits. The puppy was quite wild, but with generations of man-trust bred into it; savagery and hunger and fear fought with these older instincts, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. At last there came a moment when it took a fragment of bacon from Tim’s hand without snatching and running away, then stayed where it was to let him rub the back of its skull with his rough, dirty fingers.

  She looked around the cabin and saw that the others had been watching just as intently as she had, as though the fall of kingdoms depended on Tim’s winning.

  “He’s not so hungry now,” explained Jonathan with his dry laugh.

  “Tim, you’re marvelous,” said Ma
rgaret.

  “Why do you want to name him after Mr. Gordon, then, Miss Margaret?” said Lucy, soft and suspicious as of old.

  “I don’t know,” said Margaret. “Mr. Gordon’s a bit like that, I suppose, savage and doing what he does because something in him makes him. But I thought it might be lucky too, I don’t know how.”

  “Who’s Mr. Gordon?” said Otto.

  It was not comfortable to explain, because if Mr. Gordon had not lived in the village Otto might never have been stoned. Even so, they found themselves trying to make as good a case as they could for the terrible old man, partly for the honor of the village but partly for reasons they couldn’t put a name to.

  Otto’s good hand kept fingering the puckered tissues which were left after the healing of his smashed cheek.

  “To think of you kids living with all this and staying like you have,” he said when they’d finished.

  “It’s Aunt Anne, more than anything,” explained Margaret.

  “And that’s true,” whispered Lucy.

  Jonathan didn’t speak, but got up and climbed the ladder into the square of daylight. Margaret went with him and found that the tug had now drifted a few feet away from the quay. For the first time she really looked at Heartsease by daylight—a dirty old boat, black where it wasn’t rusty, about seventy feet long; the bulwarks curved out from the uptilted prow about knee-high, and became shallower as they reached the rounded stern; the cabin was at the fore end, its roof barely a foot above deck level; then a narrow strip of deck beneath which lay the fuel tank; then the wheelhouse, which was really just a windowed shed much too tall and wide for the proportions of the boat. Behind that stood the big funnel, with its silly little hat brim running around it just below the top—she could still see the lines of color which showed which shipping firm the tug had belonged to. The funnel rose from the top of a low, flat roof, along whose side ran tiny rectangular windows, which could only allow the skimpiest ration of light through to whatever was below. The engine room. Under there must lie the iron monster which Jonathan was going to try to wake; it was the monster’s weight which set the tug so much down by the stern, making it (even at rest) seem to tilt with an inward energy as though it were crouched to tackle huge seas. And last of all came an open area of deck rounded off by the curve of the bulwarks at the stern. This was what Margaret had been looking for—a place where she could tether Scrub when the time came.