The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  “Home, boy,” she said, and he immediately turned away from the unclimbable hull. Margaret gripped the saddle as hard as she could, twisted in the water and raised her left arm to wave; she thought she saw an answering wave through the misted glass of the wheelhouse before she allowed herself to slide down into the sea, clasped the pommel of the saddle with her left hand and trailed her legs out behind to offer the least resistance to the water while at the same time it carried as much of her weight as possible.

  Scrub swam steadily, his feet kicking below the impulse of the waves, his head arched high like a sea serpent’s. Margaret could do nothing but trust him; she was in a blind world where she could sometimes see a few feet of the wrinkled upslope of a disappearing wave, sometimes snatch a full breath, but mostly was hard put to it to keep her eyes open and the burning salty water out of her nose and throat. The only constant thing was the sturdy beat of the legs moving against her ribs, the slippery leather of the saddle and the roughness of the living hide. Once, looking back from the top of a wave, she caught a glimpse of Heartsease, end on to her: she thought Jonathan had decided to come and pick her up, though she knew he wouldn’t attempt anything so impossible—it wasn’t his style. But next time she saw them the tug was bow on to the weather and tide, still almost level with her. Tim was holding Otto up so that he could watch the shore—Jonathan must have circled perilously upstream so as to be certain that she had come safe to land. At that moment Scrub’s swimming motion hesitated, stopped, and he rose six inches out of the water. The waves were lower here, and Scrub had been moving with them, but now they began to stream past. He must be standing on firm land.

  She heaved herself onto his back, to lessen the resistance to the hurrying torrent; the shore seemed very close, and the tug, when she looked back, far away. She raised her hand and waved. Otto and Tim waved back. She felt a sudden choking pang that she had not said even this remote kind of good-bye to Lucy.

  As Scrub battled shoreward Heartsease began to wheel side on to the tide again. There was something about the smell of the storm that made her believe it was ending, though the clouds seemed no less dark—but perhaps that was the real night. Up in the wind the water in her clothes chilled and chilled; a cold like death felt its way toward her bones.

  Scrub had to swim across two narrow channels before at last they were really riding out of the waves to the true shore, with water streaming from her thighs and calves and her whole body shuddering like a twanged wire. On the pebbly beach, under low cliffs, she wrung the water out of the clothes in her bundle, stripped and changed. She hid the jeans and jerseys in a cranny between two boulders, then piled pebbles into the gap until no shred of cloth could be seen. Her ears were singing and her head lolling from side to side when she led Scrub up a steep little path to the coarse sea turf above the reach of any tide. The hill sloped up and up, but she knew from the way he hung his head that he too was near the last morsel of his strength, so she led him dizzily on. Halfway up the seemingly endless slope she had to stop and be sick. Perhaps it was just the salt water she had swallowed; or perhaps she was really ill.

  There was a path. It must go somewhere, so she followed it right-handed, looking a bare yard in front of her feet but still stumbling every few paces. Around the shoulder of the hill the path dipped and they came out of the full blast of the wind, so she stopped and looked about her.

  It was almost night, true night. They had climbed far above the deadly waters which stretched away on her right into dimness. There lay Wales, invisible in storm and dusk; ahead, though, a fault split the level clouds and a thin streak of gold evening sky showed through it, the last light of day gleaming off the water. Into this gold gleam on the sea crawled a black fleck, dirty as cinders; above it, just visible, rose its indomitable signal, puff-puff-puff. She waved again, though no one could possibly see her, then stumbled on along the path.

  Chapter 10

  AND HOME …

  The path started to climb again, curving through the dusk, then dipped; it was hard to see now that night was turning all colors to different shades of dark gray. She kept falling, and Scrub waited while she picked herself up. She tried to mount him once, but was too weak to pull her own weight up to the sodden saddle. She kept her eyes on the ground, only aware of the few feet of bristly turf around the dimming path. She could no longer feel anything, even the cold, but she knew that if they didn’t come to warmth and shelter soon she would die.

  A gate blocked the path. Cattle snorted and fidgeted in the darkness down the slope. The voice of a hen tickled the night. She looked up at these homelike sounds and saw, not twenty yards away, the orange square of a lit window. The gate led into a farmyard. She fumbled at the chain with unfeeling fingers.

  A tied dog lunged yelping at her the moment she had it open, but she edged around the limit of its reach, trying to think of a story. A door opened and a man’s voice shouted, “Quiet, you! Who’s there?” The dog slipped back to its kennel, duty done, and Margaret reeled toward the black figure outlined against firelight and lantern light.

  “We fell in the river,” she gasped, clinging to Scrub’s neck to hold herself from falling.

  “Martin!” he shouted. “Horse to see to!”

  A boy, younger than she, ran out and took Scrub confidently by the reins. The man grunted and caught her by the elbow as she melted toward the paving. Then she was lifted and carried into warmth and light, and the lovely smells she knew so well—curing bacon and fresh bread and a stew on the hob and woodsmoke and old leather and cider.

  “Cold as a side of beef,” said the man’s voice, “and dripping wet.”

  “She’ll have pneumony on her, likely,” said the soft voice of a woman.

  “What’d we best do?” said the man. “She’s nobbut a girl.”

  “Put her in my chair,” said the woman, “and fetch me two blankets and some towels. You can go and help Martin while I strip her off and dry her. I shan’t be ten minutes.”

  “Aye,” said the man. “Horse’ll need a good rubbing down, given it’s as drenched as she is.”

  Margaret heard a door close, and flickered her eyelids up to catch a picture of flecked green eyes in a large red face with a straggle of gray hair around it. She tried to say thank you, but her lips wouldn’t move.

  “There, there,” said the woman, “we’ll soon have you to rights, my dear. Warm and dry and sleeping like the angels.”

  Then there was darkness.

  Voices swam in the dark, and pictures which shifted into each other before they could really mean anything. Uncle Peter snorted in his chair by the fire, and the bull snorted toward her over the mashed turf, and Mr. Gordon raised his blackthorn stick and cried, “The Devil has taken his own!” Then they were all on the sledge, including Aunt Anne, racing along the hissing snow in glorious freedom, but the snow had melted and Tim was trying to haul the sledge through a plowed field, only now it was a capstan and the rope broke like a strand of wool and Uncle Peter, swinging his ax, galloped at her out of the smoke and she leaped for the tug but it wasn’t there and she was falling, falling, falling.

  There were many dreams like that, sometimes with the dogs hurtling after her, sometimes with seas of petrol reeking over her, sometimes Mr. Gordon rocking and clucking till she forgot the lifesaving lie and blurted out the truth. But at last she woke to a strange ceiling with a black beam straight above her head, motes dancing in the sunlight, limed walls. A large woman in a gray dress sat by her bed, knitting placidly but looking very serious. Her eyes were the color of plovers’ eggs, and flecked with the same brown spots. She spoke as soon as Margaret opened her eyes.

  “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. You talked enough—more than enough—in your fever.”

  “Oh,” whispered Margaret.

  “Four days you’ve been lying here,” said the woman, “and talking I don’t know what wickedness.”

  “No,” said Margaret. “It wasn’t like that, it really wasn’t.
Please, I’d like to tell you. You look as though you’d understand.”

  The needles clicked to the end of the row and the woman put them down.

  “Tell me one thing first,” she said, “before I decide to listen. Do you believe, right in the honest heart of you, that you’ve done God’s will?”

  “I’ve not thought of it that way,” said Margaret. “But yes, I suppose so. Once we’d begun we couldn’t have done anything else. It would have been wrong to stop.”

  “If you believe that,” said the woman, “really and truly, I’ll hear you out. Don’t you tire yourself, mind.”

  So Margaret told her story while the needles rattled and the fat fingers fluttered and the motes drifted and shafts of sunlight edged across the room. All the words she needed came to her just when she wanted them. She never changed her voice, but let the story roll out in a steady whisper, even and simple, like water sliding into a millrace. All the time she watched the woman’s face, which never changed by the smallest wrinkle or the least movement of the mouth corners, up or down. When the story was ended she shut her eyes and tried to sink back into the darkness which had been her home for four days.

  “Aye,” said the woman, “it’s wicked water, the Severn. No, I don’t see what else you could have done, my dear. Thank you for telling me. My men are out sowing—that’s my husband and my son—and we won’t tell them what you and I know. They wouldn’t understand the rights and wrongs of it like we do, being women. My name’s Sarah Dore, and you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

  “Oh, you are kind,” said Margaret. “But really I must go and tell Aunt Anne what’s happened to Jonathan.”

  “Maybe you must,” said Mrs. Dore, “but not till you’re well inside yourself. Two days you were that nigh death I fairly gave you up.”

  “How’s Scrub?” said Margaret.

  “Right as rain. My Martin’s got a way with horses, so he’s pulling a cart up in Long Collins.”

  Margaret smiled.

  “He won’t like that,” she said and fell asleep again, a silky, dreamless, healing sleep that lasted until she woke to the hungry smell of frying bacon. She got out of bed, found a dressing gown on the chair where Mrs. Dore had sat and, holding weakly to walls and banisters, traced the smell down to the kitchen, where the Dores greeted her as though she’d belonged in that family ever since she could crawl. She stayed with them eighteen days, and at last rode off after trying to say thank you in a hundred different ways, none of which seemed nearly enough. Indeed, the day before she left Martin brought up from the beach a gull with a broken wing, which he set before bandaging the bird into a fruit basket so that it could not harm itself with its struggles. Margaret looked into its desperate wild eye and tried to tell it that it was safe here.

  The gale had blown the winter away, and weald and wold were singing with early spring. Really singing—innumerable birds practicing their full melody among the still-bare branches of every hedge. As she crossed the smooth upland behind the Dores’ farm she saw a dazzling blink of black and white, gone before she could see the true shape of it, but she was sure it was wheatears. And then there were curlews, playing in the steady southwest wind. The color of the woods had changed—beeches russet with the swelling of their tight little leaf buds, birch tops purple as a plum. And the larches were a real red with their tasseled flowers, and the sticky buds of chestnuts glistened when the sun came out from behind the lolloping fat clouds which rode up off the Atlantic.

  But, more than anything, every breath she took was full of the odor of new growth, a smell as strong as hyacinths. In winter there are no smells, or very few and sour—wood-smoke and reeking dung heaps and the sharp odors man makes with his toil. But there comes a morning when the wind is right and the sun has real pith in it, and then all the sappy smells of growth are sucked out of the earth, like mists from a marsh, and the winds spread them abroad, streaming on the breeze with a thrilling honey-sweetness which even high summer—the summer of bees nosing into lime blossom—cannot equal.

  It was through such a world as this that Margaret rode home, with Scrub dancing and happy beneath her and all her blood and all her mind well again. (To be fair, Scrub was probably mostly happy not to be pulling the Dores’ cart.) She had to fetch a wide circle around Bristol, which seemed an even bigger city than Gloucester, and ask her way north many times; but all the people she spoke to were full of the kindliness of the season and answered her like friends. That night she slept in an isolated barn beside a beech hanger, north of Chipping Sodbury. The air turned cold but she snuggled deeper into the tickling hay and made herself a nest of warmth where she dozed until the dawn birds began their clatter of small talk again.

  It was another dew-fresh day, chilly but soft, with scarfs of mist floating in the valleys. The sun, an hour after it was up, became strong enough to strike caressingly through her coat, and the wind was less than yesterday’s and herding fewer clouds. She had started so early that she was hungry enough for another meal by midmorning. As she settled to eat it in the nook of a south-facing dry-stone wall she saw, almost at her feet on the strip of last year’s plowland, a tuft of wildflowers: yellow and white, marked out with strong brown-purple lines which made each flower a quaint cat face. Wild pansies, heartsease. They must have been the very first of all the year.

  She reached out to pick them so that she could carry home with her a token of that grimy but heroic tug, then drew her hand back and left them growing. All the time she munched the good farmbread and the orange cheese, she kept looking at them, so frail and delicate, but fluttering undamaged above the stony tilth.

  It was dinnertime in the village when she came to Low Wood. She had worked her way around by well-known paths so as to be able to come to the farm without passing another house. Now she tied Scrub to a wild cherry, just big enough for the hired man not to have felled it, in the hollow of a little quarry where he couldn’t be seen from the road. She tried to tackle her problem Jonathan-style, so she used a knot which Scrub would be able to loose with a jerk or two—just in case she was trapped by vengeful villagers. The safest thing would be to creep up and hide until she could talk to Aunt Anne alone.

  Primroses fringed the quarry, and celandine sparkled in the wood. She walked up the eight-acre, keeping well in under the hedge; then stole through the orchard. There seemed to be no sound of life in the whole village, though most of the chimneys showed a faint plume of smoke; no men called, no bridles clinked. She tiptoed along the flagged path at the edge of the yard and peeped carefully through the kitchen window.

  They had finished their meal but were still sitting at the table—not in their own chairs at either end but side by side on the bench where the children used to sit. Aunt Anne’s hand lay out across the white deal, and Uncle Peter’s huge fist covered it. Their faces were shaped with hard lines, like those a stonecarver’s chisel makes when he is roughing out a figure for a tombstone. They both looked as though they had lost everything they had ever loved.

  Margaret changed her mind about hiding; she stepped across to the door, lifted the latch and went in. They looked up at her with a single jerk of both heads and sat staring.

  “May I come back, please?” she said.

  “Where’s Jo?” said Uncle Peter. His voice was a coughing whisper.

  “Safe in Ireland, I think. There was a storm, and Scrub and I were washed overboard, but we climbed a hill and I saw the boat going on into what looked like calmer water; and it was still going properly, too. He’ll come back, Aunt Anne, I’m sure he will—as soon as the Changes are over, and that can’t be long now.”

  “Please God,” said Aunt Anne faintly. Margaret now saw that the whole of Uncle Peter’s other side was hidden by a yellow sling.

  “What have you done to your arm?” she said.

  He gave an odd little chuckle.

  “What’ve you done, you mean, lass. Your friend the bull broke it after he’d knocked Davey Gordon into the water and drowned hi
m. But it’s mending up nicely enough. I went down with them to see what I could do for you, supposing you got caught in your craziness. Leastways I think I did.”

  “That’s what I told Jo,” said Margaret. “Where’s Rosie?”

  “Sent her packing,” said Uncle Peter triumphantly. “What call had she to go nosing among my son’s belongings in the middle of the night, eh?”

  “Did he tell you why we did it?” said Margaret.

  “He tried,” said Aunt Anne with a tiny smile, the first that Margaret could remember for months. “But he’s a poor hand at explaining himself, at least on paper. You must tell us over supper.”

  “You know,” interrupted Uncle Peter, “I needn’t have troubled myself to traipse down there getting my arm broken. I might as well have stayed at home milking for all the help you needed of me, you and Jo.”

  He sounded really pleased with the idea—proud of them, almost.

  “Thank you for coming home,” said Aunt Anne. “We need you, Pete and I.”

  “Shall I be able to stay?” said Margaret. “I could dye my hair and pretend to be the new servant girl, I thought.”

  “No need, no need,” said Uncle Peter.

  “The village is different now, isn’t it, Pete?” said Aunt Anne.

  “It is that,” he answered. “All different since Davey died. Not that you can lay it against him, honest—he just brought out of us what was in us. Oh, he piped the tune all right, but we’d no call to dance to it if we hadn’t the lust in us. But never mind that: winter’s gone now, and the season of idleness. Spring’s on us, and that means hard work and easy hearts. What could a man ask more, hard work and an easy heart?”

  “I saw some heartsease in a field above Dursley,” said Margaret.