The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  It turned out that Maddox wouldn’t let Geoffrey ride him, even with Sally leading. This suited Geoffrey very well, as it allowed Sally to ride and rest (it wasn’t like real riding—no bumpity-bumpity—more like traveling on a coarse, swaying sofa) while he walked beside her. The pony’s pace exactly matched his, and they ambled west in a mood extraordinarily different from yesterday’s. Then they had felt invaders, alien, blasting their way between the growing greens of early harvest; now they were part of the scenery, moving at a pace natural to their surroundings. Haymakers straightened from scythes and waved to them, shouting incomprehensible good-days. For two miles, between Orcop and Bagwy Llydiart, they walked with a girl of about Geoffrey’s age, a plump, bun-faced lass who talked to them in a single incessant stream of lilting language—about her relations and acquaintances, never pausing to explain who anybody was, but assuming that they both knew Cousin William and Mr. Price and Poor Old John as well as she did. The idea that anybody really lived outside the span of the immediate horizon—closer now as the foothills of Wales grew steeper—was clearly beyond her. Two or three times she referred casually to the presence of the Necromancer, twelve miles westward, as one might refer to the existence of a river at the bottom of the paddock—a natural hazard that must be reckoned with but which nothing in the ordinary round of life could affect or change. She left them before Bagwy Llydiart, in midsentence. Geoffrey and Sally got the subject and verb, and the girl who opened the farm door to her got the object.

  In the village, which is really only an inn and a couple of houses, they bought bread and bacon and cider. Geoffrey had been rehearsing his story for the last half mile up the hill, but found it wasn’t needed. The bar had five old men in it, all talking eagerly about the demon-driven engine which had been slain on the bad road by a storm from over the mountains. The accounts of the two demons were exciting but confusing, because two different stories seemed to have arrived in the village together. In one the car had been driven by monsters, horned, warty, blowing flames from their noses; in the other by a man and woman of surpassing but devilish beauty. Both stories agreed that no remains had been found in the car, which made the supernatural quality of the drivers obvious. Then the landlord joined in the talk, after doing complicated sums with Geoffrey’s change—England seemed to have some very peculiar coins these days.

  “I did hear,” he said, “as how Lord Willoughby had hunted un all the way up from Hungerford, and precious near caught un two nights back. And they’m sending south for his lordship’s hounds, as may still have the scent in ’em, after nosing round where the engine stopped in the dark. I don’t reckon ’em for demons. What need would there be for the likes of demons to go stopping in the dark? You mark my words—they was nobbut wicked outlanders, who seed the storm a-coming and left their engine in time. S’posing his lordship brings the dogs up in coaches, they’ll be on the bad road two hours since. Then there’ll be fine hunting.”

  “Lot o’ s’posins,” said one of the old drinkers. “They’m demons for my money.”

  The argument circled back onto its old track, and Geoffrey left, sick with panic. Fifteen miles start, perhaps, and there’d been a good stretch yesterday evening when everyone was riding. That should confuse them. On the other hand the hunt must have guessed where they were making for by now, and once they’d been traced to Overton Farm there’d be descriptions available, of a sort.

  Sally had become bored with waiting, and was trying to balance, standing, like a circus rider, on Maddox’s back. It can’t have been difficult on the broad plateau of his shoulders, but she looked nervous and sat down the moment she saw Geoffrey.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

  “Nothing. I hope.”

  “Oh, you must tell me. It isn’t fair being left in the dark.”

  “Something they said in the pub. It looks as if we’re still being hunted by those hounds.”

  “Oh bother. Just when everything seemed so easy and right. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Plug on, I suppose. They can hunt us wherever we go, you see.”

  “I suppose perhaps if we got close enough to the Necro man they might be too frightened to follow us.”

  “It’s a chance—the best one probably.”

  “I wonder if they’ll start hunting our weatherman too. That would surprise him.”

  Indeed it might, but no doubt he’d talk his way out of it. Geoffrey decided not to stop for lunch but to eat walking. Maddox decided otherwise, and won. They ate their bacon (smoked, not salted, and very fatty) and drank their sweet unbubbly cider a mile out of the village, where the hill sloped gently down in front of them. Maddox found a stretch of grass which appealed to him and champed stolidly. Geoffrey and Sally sat on the gate of an overgrown orchard and looked west. Now, for the first time, they could see how close the ramparts of the Black Mountains loomed, a dark, hard-edged frame to the green and loping landscape. Nothing on the near side of the escarpment looked at all peculiar. The haymakers were at work, as they had been in Wiltshire; an old woman in a black dress, leading a single cow, came up the road toward them and gave them good-day. Perhaps fewer of the fields were worked here, and more had been let go, but that might be simply because the soil here was less rewarding than in the counties they had passed through yesterday. You couldn’t tell.

  Maddox took nearly an hour to finish his meal. Without event they covered the long drop into Pontrilas, where they crossed the Monnow and found a two-mile footpath up to Rowlstone. Here the country grew much steeper, so that Geoffrey realized how tired his legs were, and that there was a blister coming on his left heel. On the crest of Mynydd Merddin they rested and looked back.

  “See anything, Sal?”

  “No. They couldn’t be coming yet, could they?”

  “Not unless they were dead lucky. We ought to have three or four hours yet. What we really need is a stream going roughly the way we want to go, and then wade down it, but there doesn’t look as if there’s anything right on the map. This one at the bottom’s too big, I think. On we go.”

  Clodock, in the valley, was an empty village with its church in ruins, but the bridge still stood. The mountains heeled above them. Geoffrey led Maddox up a footpath, very disused and overgrown, to Penyrhiwiau, where the track turned left and lanced straight toward the ramparts. Already it was steeper than anything they’d climbed, and the contour lines on the map showed there was worse to come. The hills were silent, a bare, untenanted upheaval of sour soil covered with spiky brown grass and heather. He’d been expecting to see mountain sheep and half-wild ponies, but not an animal seemed to move between horizon and horizon, not even a bird. He felt oppressed by their total loneliness, and thought Sally did too. Only Maddox plodded on unmoved.

  His heart was banging like an iron machine and his lungs sucking in air and shoving it out in quick, harsh panting, like a dog’s, when they took the path southwest for the final climb. This path slanted sideways up the hill, so that they could look out to the left over the colossal summer landscape. No road could have taken that hill direct: its slope was as steep as a gable, and was topped with a line of low cliffs, where the underlying bone of the hills showed through the weatherworn flesh. Their path slanted around the end of these and then (the map said) turned sharply back, down through terrain just as bleak to Llanthony. It looked as though there was a stream they could wade down starting almost on the far path. His legs were too accustomed, by now, to the rhythm of hurrying to move at a slower pace, but when they rounded the cliff at the top he knew that he had to rest.

  Sally slid off Maddox and lay on the grass beside him, looking back over their route. The pony nosed disgustedly among the coarse grass for something worthy of his palate. Geoffrey swung the map around and tried to work out exactly where they’d been. Mynydd Merddin seemed no more than a gentle swelling out of the plain, until you realized for how far it hid the country behind it. Then that must be their path, coming down by the tip of t
hat wood, and into Clodock, which was easy to spot by its square church tower. Of course, he would not be able to see the footpath from here—it had been so overgrown that …

  He could see it. Not the path itself, of course, but the horsemen on it. And, in a gap, the wavering pale line which was the backs of hounds.

  He stared at them hopelessly.

  “Come on, Jeff. We can’t give up now, after getting so far. Do come on.”

  He shambled up the path, too tired to run, to the crest of the hill. Perhaps he’d be able to run a bit down the far side; then, if they could get to the stream, or at least if he could send Sal off down it, there might be hope. Eyes on the track, he weltered on.

  “Oh!” cried Sally, and he looked up.

  They were on the crest, and the Valley of Ewyas lay beneath them. It was quite crazy. Instead of the acid, barren hills that should have been there, he saw a forest of enormous trees beginning not fifty yards down the slope with no outlying scrub or thicket to screen the gray, centuries-old trunks. Beneath the leaves, beyond the trunks, lay shadows blacker than any wood he had ever seen. Above, reaching north and south and out of eyesight, the green cumulus obliterated the valley. Out of the middle of it, a single monstrous tower, rose the Necromancer’s castle. It could be nothing else. Their path led into the wood and straight toward it.

  Chapter 9

  THE SENESCHAL

  A crooked tissue of wind brought the sound of hallooing from over the cliffs behind them.

  “Come on,” said Sally, “it’s the best bet. Maddox, you’re going to have to see if you can go a bit faster.”

  With the help of the downward slope the pony managed to produce out of his repertoire a long-forgotten trot. In a way he was like the Rolls, a rectangular, solid, unstoppable thing. Geoffrey, now in a daze of tiredness, let the path take him down in a freewheeling lope, which he knew would end in fainting limpness the moment the path flattened to a level. They plunged into the trees.

  It was darker than he’d thought possible. This was a quite different sort of forest from the gone-to-pot New Forest which they’d breakfasted in yesterday. That had seemed, somehow, like a neglected grove at the bottom of a big garden—after all, its trees had been tended like a vegetable crop only six years before. But this one had not seen a forester’s ax for generations of trees. The oaks were prodigious, their trunks fuzzy with moss, and the underwoods were a striving, rotting tangle, tall enough to overarch the path for most of the way—this was what made the shadows so dark. The silence was thick, ominous, complete; even the noise of Maddox’s hooves was muffled by the moss on which they ran, a soft, deep, dark-green pile which would surely be worn away in no time if the road was used much—used at all. Why had the forest not swallowed it? It lay broad as a highway between the tree trunks, without even a bramble stretching across it.

  “Jeff, what was that?”

  “What?”

  “That. Listen.”

  A noise of dogs howling. The hunt, of course. But it came from the wrong direction, forward and to their right, and was different from the baying they’d heard last night—deeper, more intense, wilder.

  “Jeff, there aren’t any wolves in England today, are there?”

  “I hope not. But anything—”

  There it was again. No, that was the hunt this time, behind them and distinctly shriller—they must be at the crest now. The new noise welled up again, closer, but still to their right, up the hill, and the hunt behind them bayed its answer. And here, at last, was the stream.

  “Look, Sal, this is the only hope. Get off and lead Maddox down there, keeping in the water. I’ll run down here a bit further and then come back. Keep going down the stream till I catch up with you.”

  “You will come back won’t you? Promise.”

  “All right.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  She led Maddox gingerly into the stream, which was steep and stony, and Geoffrey pounded on down the mossy ride. He thought at once that he ought to have brought Maddox too, and bolted him on downward while he climbed back to the scent-obliterating water, except that Maddox wasn’t the sort to fit into elaborate schemes of deception. Hurrah, here was another stream, too small to be marked on the map; if he went back now the hunt might waste time exploring this one.

  The climb seemed like a crawl, and the woods swayed round him. This was hopeless—he must have somehow branched onto another path without noticing—there wasn’t a sign of his footprints on the moss. He looked back, and saw that he’d left no track there either, which would help the deception supposing he got back to the first stream on time. The two choruses of baying clashed out at each other again, and the hunt sounded fearfully close. At last he splashed down into the stream, his weak legs treacherous on the wobbly boulders, and waded downstream. He caught Sally up only a few bends down.

  “You ought to have got further. You shouldn’t have waited.”

  “I didn’t, but Maddox felt thirsty. Come on now, boy. Not far. Oh!”

  Her quack of surprise was almost inaudible in the yelping and baying that shook the wood. Somewhere on the path the two packs must have met. Above the clamor he could hear human voices shouting and cursing; they did not sound as if they were in control of the situation.

  He followed Sally down to a lower road, which also seemed to lead toward the tower; without a word they turned off along it, padding in a haze of silence down the endless mossy avenue while the battle in the woods above them whimpered into stillness. He realized with surprise that the darkness was not only caused by the double roofing of leaves; it was drawing toward night outside, and the tower, whatever it might hold, was the only chance of escaping from the fanged things that ranged these woods. And at least they would have arrived, against all odds, at the target at which the General had aimed them three whole days ago in Morlaix. And he hadn’t had a proper sleep since then. A voice somewhere, confused by the booming in his ears, started saying “Poor old Jeff. Poor old Jeff” over and over again. It was his own.

  He was drowning in self-pity when they stepped out of the forest into the clearing around the tower. It was enormous, three times as high as the giant trees, wide as a tithe barn, a piled circle of rough-hewn masonry sloping steadily in toward the top—the same shape as those crude stone towers which the Celts built two thousand years ago in the Shetland Islands, but paralyzingly larger. Around its base, some distance away from it, ran a stone skirting wall about as high as an ordinary house. Just outside this was a deep dry ditch, and then the clearing they stood in. There was no door or window in this side of the wall, so they turned left, downhill, looking up at the monstrous pillar of stonework in the center with a few stars coming out behind its level summit. The black wood brooded on their left.

  They rounded a sharper curve by the ditch, and saw the line of wall interrupted. Eighty yards on was a bridge across the dry moat, and two small turrets set into the wall. As they trudged through the clinging grasses toward it no sound came from the tower, no light showed. Perhaps it was empty. They crossed the bridge and found the gate shut. Geoffrey hammered at it with his fist, but made no more noise than snow on a windowpane. He crossed the bridge again to look for a stone to hammer with, but Sally pointed above their heads.

  At first he thought there was a single huge fruit hanging from the tree above the path, then he realized it was too big even for that, and decided it must be a hornet’s nest. He moved and the round thinned. When he was under it it looked like a thick plate, something man-made.

  “What is it, Sal?”

  “I think it’s a gong. You come along here on your charger and bonk it with your lance and the lord of the castle comes out to answer your challenge. If you stood on Maddox’s back you might be able to reach it. Come here, Maddox. That’s a good boy. Up you get, Jeff. Oh, Maddox, you are awful. I’ll see if I’ve got any horse bait left. Here. Stand still. That’s right. Now Jeff!”

  He scrambled on to the broad back. The g
ong was just above his head and he struck at it with the fat edge of his fist. It made a tremendous noise, a sustained boom that died away at last into curious whinings all the way up the diapason. Nothing stirred in the tower. He struck the gong several times, judging its internal rhythm so that each blow produced a louder boom. At last Maddox decided that enough was enough and shied away; Geoffrey slithered down and the three of them stood listening to the resonance of bronze diminish into whimperings.

  In the new silence they realized they could hear another noise, one that they had heard several times that afternoon. The baying of wolves (or whatever they were) was echoing through the valley, seeming to come at times from all around the compass, but at other times from the hill they had themselves descended. It was getting nearer.

  “Jeff! D’you think we ought to go on?”

  “We’ll give it another minute and then we’ll climb a tree. Maddox will have to … Look!”

  In the near-dark they could see a movement of light behind the postern tower. A few seconds later they heard a rattle of chains and the grate of rusty metal drawn through metal. In the big gate a small door started to open and they ran toward it. A face thrust through, with a long white beard waggling beneath it.

  “Well,” said the face, “what is it? Do you realize how late it is? I was just shutting up.”

  “Please,” said Sally, “but we got lost in the wood and it seems to be full of wolves or something and could we come in for the night, please?”