The Merlin Conspiracy

by Diana Wynne Jones

  She gave a huge cackle of laughter when she saw I understood this. Then she looked regretful. She twisted her mouth until there were lines all round her lipstick. “Pity,” she said. “That stuff in your head’s set you on quite another path, Arianrhod. Shame I didn’t get to you first, my girl. Now what about you, little man?” She peered intently at Grundo. “Called Ambrose, are you?”

  “I’m usually called Grundo,” he said.

  Heppy gave another cackle of laughter. “Very fitting, with a growl for a voice like that! But what’s wrong with you? You’re all back to front!”

  “Dyslexia,” Grundo said bitterly.

  “Don’t believe in it,” she told him. “It’s just a fancy modern word for mixed up. You turn yourself right-about, and you’ll be fine. What’s your mother doing to let you get so scrambled in the first place? Who is she? Oh, I see. It’s that Sybil Temple. Always was a greedy, selfish wifty-wafty, that girl. Trust her to mix a child up! You ought to be living with your father, my boy.”

  I wanted to shake Heppy. Grundo was shamed and embarrassed and shifting from foot to foot. “Nobody knows where my father is,” he muttered.

  “Ran away from her, ran away from Court,” Heppy said. “I know. You should go and find him. It doesn’t do a child any good, being dragged round the country after the King all the time, if you ask me. That goes for you, too, Arianrhod.”

  “Er—Heppy, could you call me Roddy?” I said. “I do prefer it.”

  “Whatever for? That’s a boy’s name!” she squawked. “You ought to be taking up your true heritage, my girl, not trying to be someone else.”

  I felt my face flooding hot with annoyance. I knew it would take very little for me to have a real row with my grandmother. I didn’t like her. And I had a feeling she didn’t like me either.

  TWO

  Luckily, before things got any worse for me or for Grundo, a kettle whistled over on the stove, and Heppy went trotting and clacking over there to make tea. She shortly came trotting and clacking back, carrying a vast teapot in a knitted cozy. Grundo and I watched her tottery high heels both ways in nervous fascination. We expected her to tangle with a rug and trip at any moment, but she never did. It was like a miracle.

  Judith meanwhile was setting the table and laying out covered plates of small sandwiches. “These are only cucumber,” she apologized. “We’ll do better for supper.”

  “Tea!” Heppy shrieked. “Tea’s up!” The nearest I can get to describing my grandmother’s voice when she screamed is a parrot imitating a steam whistle. We heard a lot of her screaming later, but I never found a better description.

  Her voice must have carried out into the back garden with no trouble at all. They could probably hear it a mile away in the village. The back door burst open almost instantly, and almost before it had hit the wall with a crash, two small girls bounded in, followed by a large, curly, yellow dog. A black cat, which had been snoozing on a cushion up to then, woke up and bolted. Grundo said later that the cat’s behavior was highly significant. “And sensible,” he added.

  One of the small girls was wearing baggy trousers and a white vest. The other was in a trailing, shiny, pink tea gown which almost certainly belonged to Heppy. Otherwise you would never have told them apart. They both had the same light brown hair falling in twists to their shoulders, and the same pale, pert little face with huge blue eyes.

  There was a brisk minute of pandemonium. The dog barked. Heppy screamed, “Shut the door, Ilsabil! Isadora, you’ve been at my clothes again!”

  At the same time, Judith was saying, “These are my twins. This is Isadora, and this is Ilsabil. Girls, come and meet your cousin Arianrhod and her friend Ambrose.”

  Also at the same time, the twin in trousers screamed, “Oh, my God!” and backed dramatically against the wall. “It’s a boy in here! Don’t let it near me!” She made fending motions at Grundo. But the twin in the silk dress put on a sickly, gushing smile and glided up to Grundo with both arms out. “A boy!” she cried, in a deep, actressy voice. “Let me at him!”

  Then, just as I was thinking, in a slightly stunned way, that this behavior was the way you told these twins apart, the one in the dress recoiled from Grundo with a scream. “Mother!” she howled. “How can you let a great rough boy in here?” Instantly the other twin put on the sickly, gushing smile and undulated up to Grundo, stretching her arms out and yelling, “A kiss, my lover, a kiss!”

  Grundo’s face was a study, and I didn’t blame him.

  “Shake hands with your cousin!” Heppy screamed.

  They didn’t, of course. Shaking hands would have been too normal for these twins. Ilsabil sank to her baggy-trousered knees. “Oh, my!” she yelled. “Have you really spared time from Court to come to our humble house?” while Isadora swished her pink dress and said, “Of course, when I come to Court, I shall outshine everyone there.”

  “That could be true,” I said. “And you might not like it.”

  Neither twin listened to me. They hurled themselves into chairs round the table shouting, “What’s for tea?” and dragged the covers off the plates. “Oh!” screamed one of them, “I hate cucumber! I’m allergic to it!” while the other one yelled, “Cucumber! I love it!” Again, just as I was thinking this was another way to tell them apart, they swapped roles, and the one who hated cucumber shouted, “Snatch! Seize! I’m going to eat all these delicious sandwiches myself!” Meanwhile the other one whined, “Moth-ther! I can’t eat this! I’m electric to cucumber!”

  “Allergic, dear,” Judith said anxiously. “And I don’t think you are.”

  “Yes, I am,” whined the twin.

  “Yes, she is,” whined the other one. “She fizzes all over.”

  It was like this the whole time. At first, I tried telling myself that all the children at Court had to be so well behaved that I’d forgotten what normal little girls were like. That may have been true, but I very soon decided that Ilsabil and Isadora had never been normal in their lives. Neither of them was the same person for more than two minutes. Neither of them seemed to care what she did or said, as long as it fixed everyone’s attention on her.

  Judith watched them all the time with an anxious, pleading smile.

  Heppy gazed at them proudly. “Aren’t they a caution?” she said several times. Then she asked Grundo, “Can you tell them apart?”

  “No, and I’ve given up trying,” he said. “I’m calling them both Izzy.”

  “Pathetic!” squealed both twins. “Per-thetic! Izzy, izzy, is he stupid!” This was followed by “Mother! I’m very hurt and insulted!” from one twin and “Oh, gorgeous boy! He’s calling me Izzy!” from the other. And then the same thing the other way round.

  I had hoped to talk to Judith about Sybil and the Merlin. Judith seemed to be the calm, sensible one in this family, and I was sure she could give me proper advice. But it was hopeless even to try during tea. The Izzys kept everyone’s thoughts and ears on them the whole time.

  “They’re very excited at seeing you, you see,” Judith explained, in her anxious, apologizing way. “They’ve heard so much about you and their uncle Daniel and the Progress.”

  The moment everyone had finished tea, the Izzys jumped down and rushed shrieking to the back door. They were stopped there by an even louder shriek from Heppy. “Wait! Take Ambrose and the dog with you and play in the garden. We have to show Arianrhod the Regalia.”

  “Oh, why? I want to see it, too,” shouted Ilsabil.

  “Stupid stuff!” Isadora proclaimed, with a toss of hair and chin. “I wouldn’t go and look at it if you paid me.”

  Then of course they did it the other way around, except that Ilsabil added, “Regalia—such boredom!” with a deep, world-weary sigh.

  As for Grundo, he positively scowled at being told to play with the Izzys. I think the only thing that reconciled him to it was the dog. Grundo has always wanted a dog, even more than I have, but the Waymaster’s office forbids pets on the Progress. He went out into the gar
den with one hand on the dog’s curly back, while Heppy and Judith took me past the looms and into their front room.

  Good! I thought. Maybe we can talk now.

  It was one of those hushed rooms with a lot of upright antique furniture and books in glass cases. It looked as if it were very rarely used, but now I come to think of it, they must have used it every day. Somehow, they must have managed to make the Izzys take care in there.

  “Phew!” Heppy said as the quiet of it closed in around us. “I can hear myself think again! Roll on the day when we have to turn one of those girls out!”

  Judith looked anguished. “There always have to be three Dimbers,” she explained to me, “one from each generation and no more. In seven years’ time, there is going to be the most agonizing choice. We’ve no idea whether we’ll keep Isadora or Ilsabil on as our third. How do you choose between identical twins?”

  “Time enough to choose,” Heppy said. “Don’t buy trouble, Jude. And as I always tell her, Arianrhod, it was just as agonizing in my day, when we had to choose between Judith and Dora.” She chuckled. “And I’d complicated things by going and having your father before either of the girls. That’s just as unheard of as twins in our family, I can tell you.”

  “What would have happened to my father,” I asked, “if Grandad hadn’t taken him to London?”

  “Oh, he’d have been packed off over the hill where we usually send the boys,” Heppy said. “There’s a family of male witches with a farm there. It’s where the husbands come from usually. I was unusual, falling for Maxwell. And while we’re on this, I’ll tell you straight, Arianrhod, this is quite a problem, you bringing the boy with you. You yourself are welcome for as long as you care to stay, but seven days is all I can house a male stranger. What would you like us to do for you?”

  “Well,” I said, “you’ve been awfully kind, and I don’t want to cause a problem. If you know how to find where the King is, Grundo and I will rejoin the Progress as soon as we can.”

  Heppy looked up at her tall daughter, and Judith, as usual, looked anxious. “Huh!” Heppy said. “You can’t find them either, can you? Thought so. Those wizards are keeping the King secret again, aren’t they?”

  “I was told one of the ports,” I said.

  Heppy swept that aside. “They could be anywhere. No, your best bet is to go to your grandfather in London. Maxwell can do the finding for you. He’s good at it. Judith, when you’ve a moment, will you get Maxwell on the far-speaker? If I speak to him, we’ll only end up shouting at one another.”

  Judith smiled at me. “Of course. But first …”

  “Yes, yes, she has to be shown the Dimber Regalia. It’s her right as a female of the family.” Heppy, upright and barrel-shaped, bustled across the room. One wall was dark oak paneling. I watched as she laid one chubby, much-beringed hand on a particular place in the wooden squares. “Now you’ll see,” she said over her shoulder. Then she worked magic. It was nothing like any of the magic I had in my head. It was reverent magic, very old and very practiced, and it sent a shiver up my spine. I felt another shiver as two doors that had not been there in the wall before came creaking open like a cupboard. Inside, something blazed. There was a sweet smell, of old wood and new flowers.

  Judith put an arm round my shoulders and pushed me gently toward the open space. “Our vessels of virtue,” she said softly. “Full of beauty and power.”

  I found myself gasping. Inside the wooden space, laid out on red velvet, were cups, bowls, plates, and jugs of gold and silver. All were most exquisitely made and wonderfully, elegantly shaped. Some had patterns raised in the metal—patterns that I knew meant something, except that the meanings were just out of reach somehow—and some had small clusters of sapphires and pearls set into them. One of the most beautiful was a great cut glass goblet with a base of gold filigree that grew around the glass like part of a flower. The centerpiece was a majestic flat chalice with golden handles that had tiny running patterns on every part of it. Around it were old, old cups, worn lopsided with use. I could see everything was immensely old and full of power. And it all felt alive. The life in the things seemed to pour out of the cupboard and scintillate on all the elegant, shiny surfaces. While I was trying to decide which vessel was the most splendid—the crystal goblet, the chalice, or maybe the small, strange one like a vase, irregularly dotted with bulging pearls and sapphires—their sheer aliveness seemed to cause two little gleams of light to go dancing over them. They looked almost like eyes.

  “Aren’t they something?” Heppy said warmly.

  At her parrot voice, the eyes vanished, but the sense of warmth and strength stayed. The things felt so safe and so strong that I had no doubt that they would help me when I tried to explain about Sybil and the Merlin.

  “They’re the repositories of our strength,” Judith said raptly, clasping her hands gawkily to her chest. The shine from the vessels was gold and silver on her face. It made her look quite beautiful for a moment.

  “And,” Heppy said, “believe it or not, we use them every day.”

  “Yes, every day, for whatever needs working on in our provenance,” Judith said. “We’re working at slaking this drought just now. And there seems to be a little imbalance in the magics here at the moment that we’re trying to put right.”

  “And you use everything in here?” I asked.

  “Not all at once, of course,” Heppy said. “But according to which day it is and where the moon is. We give them all a drop of blood every time we use them. This is why we can’t have men around. Can’t you feel how secret and how female they are?”

  To tell the truth, I couldn’t. The strength that came out of the space lined with red velvet did not feel to me particularly much to do with women, or men either. But I did my best not to say this. “They are … quite wonderful,” I said. “Quite the most strong and beautiful …” Then my worries got the better of me, and I burst out with “Oh, Heppy, Judith, how do I go about raising the land?”

  “Good lords!” Heppy banged the two halves of the cupboard shut, and the cracks in panels where they had been vanished at once. “Heavens, child, don’t say such things! In front of the Regalia, too! Don’t even think them! Whatever put that notion into your head?”

  “You really shouldn’t know about that,” Judith said reproachfully. “Come and sit down, my dear, and tell us what made you say that. I can see you’re dreadfully anxious about something, but I feel sure you have to be overreacting.”

  I could see they were both going to treat me as an over-fanciful child. I sighed. But I sat down all the same in the upright chair Judith guided me to and tried to explain. I was so worried by then that tears were trying to push themselves out of my eyes, and I could hear my voice shaking as I talked.

  And it was no good. Heppy simply laughed comfortably. “No, dear. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick somewhere. The Merlins are always for good, and Court wizards are chosen for their loyalty. What you’re talking about just can’t happen in Blest. We’re the most stable of all the worlds. You misunderstood something grown-up, dear. That’s all.”

  “It’s so easy,” Judith explained soothingly, “to hear three adults talking in the dark and to imagine all sorts of queer things. No wonder you went on and had bad dreams about it. If you’d overheard them in daylight, you’d have felt quite different.”

  “But you said yourselves that the magics were unbalanced,” I said desperately. “And Grandfather Gwyn told me—”

  “Hush!” Heppy said sternly. “We don’t mention That One here. And he’s someone you can’t be expected to understand, not for years yet. You go and play in the garden, Arianrhod my dear, and don’t trouble your head anymore. Judith will get on the far-speaker to Maxwell for us, and we’ll have you all sorted out before bedtime. You’ll see.”

  I left Judith dragging a far-speaker out from among the looms and went dejectedly out into the back garden. It was almost as empty as the front, just grass—where Grundo was sitting with
his arms round the dog and wearing his most faraway look—and some wire netting around it.

  The Izzys were cavorting around the grass. “Pathetic!” said one.

  “This boy is per-thetic!” said the other. “Fancy not understanding us Dimbers!”

  When they saw me, they left off trying to provoke Grundo and began doing handstands up against the wire netting. “You understand us, don’t you?” Isadora said. She was rather muffled because her dress had turned upside down with her. I pretended not to hear and looked anxiously at Grundo instead. He just looked vague. He had had tons of practice in ignoring Alicia after all.

  “Our family never stays married,” Ilsabil proclaimed, clattering the netting with her feet. “It’s against our rules. Anyway, I’m thinking of joining a circus.”

  “We invented single-parent families,” Isadora said, from inside her dress. She came down, tangled in pink silk. “Our customs go back thousands of years,” she added breathlessly, “but I shall never marry. Boys are too pathetic. So are circuses. I shall be a great actress.”

  “I believe you,” I said as Ilsabil came down in her turn.

  Ilsabil went upside down again with a twang almost immediately. “I shall marry a rich wizard,” she declared, “and wear lots of jewels and lipstick. Then I shall kick him out and keep his money after seven years. Because I’m going to be chosen for Dimber third, not Isadora—Ouch!”

  She ended in a scream and a collapse when Isadora rushed at her, shrieking, “No, you won’t!” and shoved her hard in the stomach.

  “Filthy little witch!” Ilsabil yelled. They fell on one another and fought energetically. The pink dress tore with a noise like a gunshot.

  Grundo, I could tell, neither heard nor saw any of this. I thought at the time that he had simply tuned the Izzys out, the way he does with Alicia or Sybil. It never occurred to me he might be up to something.