“As for the summons, well, you’re here, aren’t you? The son of the Weatherman, searching for his servants and companions of old! That can only mean one thing can’t it?”
“Uh, yeah! Yeah! You can consider yourself summoned! Really! Just get ’em all together, pack ’em up and let’s go go go!”
He grinned. A sigh of relief came from the watching Shieldsmen and a terrific tension went out of the air.
“I mean, is this all of you, is it?” I asked. “If we could just pile into a few vans and cars and things and hit the road that’d be great!”
Weisz stood up and walked over to me and put his arm around my shoulder.
“We’re the chosen, Neil. The youngest, the fittest, the strongest. The Shieldsmen have endured their exile for centuries now, living as a tribe apart, taking in husbands and wives from outside to keep the line strong, but all utterly dedicated to our duty: protecting the Weatherman. Passed down from generation to generation are our code, our mission, our training, and our skills. We have lived in glens, in bogs, in woods, and old ruins and abandoned villages. We have spent our lives training, preparing, watching—”
“NOBODY MOVE!”
Nobody moved.
“I’ve come for Neil! Don’t get in my way and nobody gets hurt!”
A hulking figure wearing a black ski mask entered the clearing. He had a sword, which he waved in the direction of the Shieldsmen.
“Ed!”
The figure with the sword stopped threatening the Shieldsmen, who did not seem particularly threatened. His shoulders slumped. “I’m in disguise, Neil,” he told me testily. “You’re not supposed to use my real name.”
“Ed!” I said. “It’s OK! These are the Shieldsmen. They’re on our side! I’ve summoned them!”
Ed swung his sword around on the Shieldsmen. “The Shieldsmen, huh?” He let his sword drop. “Well, all right. If Neil says you’re OK, I suppose I’ll let you off.”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, leaning on the sword. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the biggest gathering of people wearing the sort of clothes the people who took you were wearing. I’d nowhere else to look, so I chanced my arm. Good, eh?”
“Genius,” I said.
“Also they had Save the Trees spray-painted on the side of the van.”
“Aha!”
“And they’d been handing out leaflets along the canal.”
“Oh.”
“They even had a little map on them.”
“Right.”
“And they’d put up great big billboards along the road.”
“Yeah.”
“And I opened up today’s paper and they’d done a big photo story on the protest and there they were, hanging out of a tree.”
“OK, Ed.”
“It was like the universe was trying to tell me something. Weird, huh?”
“Very! Can we go now?” I asked. “This is great and all, but we really need to get back home with the Shieldsmen so they can help Dad.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ed said. He took off his mask and looked around for somewhere to put the sword.
“After you went off with your new friends, yer man Holland came climbing out through that broken window looking fit to burst,” Ed told me. “He wouldn’t even let them other lads dry themselves! He just hustled them off to those two big black cars. Wherever they were going, they were in a tearing great hurry.”
“Right,” I said, and stopped. He was giving me a look. My sense of urgency got even urgencier. “Wait. You don’t think they’re going home, do you? To my home? Oh my God, come on, let’s go!”
“No rush,” he said airily, waving a hand. “We’ll never catch ’em now, and, anyway, they’re harmless.”
“Harmless?”
“Mostly harmless. Besides, we can’t go anywhere yet.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why can’t we go anywhere?”
“Because they’ve blocked the road. I had to park half a mile back and sneak up through the trees.”
Everybody stopped talking.
“Who,” asked Weisz carefully, “has blocked the road?”
“The police,” Ed said. “Lots of them, and lots of men who aren’t police. And they have trucks and backhoes, and tractors and trailers and things.”
Twelve Celtic warriors all looked around uncomfortably.
“Um,” one of them said, “they can’t do this now! We’re not in our eco-warrior disguises!”
“I probably should have mentioned that sooner,” Ed said to me with a wince. “But I’d been thinking these were bad guys and that the police’d be a good distraction. Sorry.”
“So what do we do now?” someone asked Weisz. “Are we going with Neil or are we protecting the trees?”
Weisz blinked, then looked at me.
Suddenly the world felt very heavy.
If I commanded the Shieldsmen to defend the forest they would. They’d climb up into their tree houses and the protest could go on practically forever. These guys would never give up. And I would want to climb right up there with them. But Dad needed them at the Weatherbox to fight a bigger battle. So I had to tell them to let the trees be destroyed and come with me to fight the Fitzgeralds. It’s what they wanted, to be proper Shieldsmen again, but how much would they hate me for ordering them to walk away from the trees? This was so unfair. Weisz shouldn’t be putting this on me.
Except he had to, didn’t he? I was the son of the Weatherman. This was my job. If we didn’t let these trees fall then a storm would come that would make all the trees fall.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Leave the trees. We have to go home.”
They all bowed their heads, but they all straightened their backs and lifted their shoulders, too.
“Right,” Weisz said, waving at the weapons. “Better put the cutlery away before the cops get here. Remember, we’re leaving, not staying and fighting or protesting, so don’t engage, avoid!”
Too late.
Police in fluorescent yellow jackets and workmen in bright orange overalls came marching grimly up the track. The lead policeman spotted the Shieldsmen, pointed, gave a shout, and they all broke into a run.
The police and the workmen streamed into the camp, the police charging straight for the Shieldsmen and—incidentally—me, the workmen making for the camp and the kitchen. In seconds there were struggling bodies all around me. Police hauled Shieldsmen away, and there was a dreadful babble of screaming and shouting.
I held my hands up and my palms out in the universal sign of Please don’t beat me up I’m harmless. The timber frame of the kitchen crashed down. Bags and equipment and belongings were flung in a heap. A policeman went past with an armful of masks. A workman aimed a punch at a kneeling Shieldsman. I ran at him with both hands outstretched and shoved him into a tree. He sank down between the roots, staring at me with wide eyes. Four policemen closed in around me, and I was swallowed up in fluorescent yellow, while somewhere in the trees I could hear the chainsaws start to roar.
CHAPTER 18
LIZ
We knew straight away it was the wrong kind of engine. It didn’t sound anything like Ed’s truck at all.
Two huge black cars drove up and parked along the wall. They were bigger than some caravans I’ve seen. Doors opened with quiet, soft hissing noises, and three men and a woman got out. The car trunks opened like garage doors. I thought maybe a few smaller cars were going to drive out of the back of them, but the people began pulling out bags and boxes and stuff with wires attached, and a man stepped through the gate and walked up to us. The hags appeared, sitting on the wall, swaying gently. The people from the cars looked at them, then at each other, and carried on doing whatever it was they were doing.
“How are ye?” the man said. “Remember me?”
“No,” Dad said. “Wait. You’re…”
“Yeah. I am.”
“Tony? What are you doing here? I thoug
ht you … What is all this?”
“Tony?” Mum said. “As in Tony Holland?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “And that’s Clive, Bob, and Cherie, there.”
The three people looked up and gave little waves when he said their names.
“They’ll be doing all the work. Heard of me, have you?”
“Nothing good,” she said. “But I’d assumed it was lies.”
“All true,” he said. He didn’t look very happy about it. He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry. I’m the bad guy. I told the lies about your husband, I stole the money, and now I own all this. I have the deeds to the house, the rights to the phone box, the whole shebang. We’d have been down earlier like she wanted only we had a spot of bother, as the man says. Look, I’ve been over all this with that lad of yours, OK? Let’s not have a fuss.”
The two hags were dancing on the cars, quick little jigs, their bare feet darting up and down on the black metal.
“She,” I said. “You mean Mrs. Fitzgerald.”
He flinched.
“Neil?” Dad said. “You spoke to Neil? Do you know where he is?”
“Look, Maloney,” Tony Holland said, like someone trying to be kind. “You can let us in and we can talk, or I can come back with a small army of lawyers and an eviction notice. It’s up to you. The sooner we can get set up, the sooner we can solve this little problem of yours.”
“The Autumn is late,” Dad said through gritted teeth. “That’s not a LITTLE problem!”
“WHERE’S MY SON?” yelled Mum, and threw herself at Tony Holland. Dad grabbed Mum and held her back.
“Your son? That vandal? He destroyed the AtmoLab headquarters! Flooded the whole place!”
“He did no such thing,” Mum said in a low, dangerous tone.
“It’s true! He left my office and went mad! Tore the place to pieces! I’ve never seen anything like it. The insurance company wants to classify it as an act of God! Your son is a dangerous lunatic, and, if he’s not here, then I have no idea where he is!”
“AtmoLab,” I said. “They sent the elemental to AtmoLab, that’s what Hugh said. Is Neil OK? Is he OK?”
“Aye, last we saw him,” said Clive. “That were when the lad got taken off by them other lads—big blokes, wearing skirts, in a van. I still think we should have called the cops.”
“Wait,” Dad said. “WHAT?”
“An elemental,” said Bob, a small bearded man carrying a big roll of white cables. “That’s what he called it, him and his friend.”
“Keep out of this, you two,” Tony said.
“Did you say skirts?” Dad asked.
“Oh my God,” Mum said.
Bob was shaking his head. “It weren’t the lad that caused the havoc, I keep telling you. It were the … elemental thing.”
“Freakish weather conditions,” said Clive. “A random outbreak of freakish weather conditions. Never seen anything like it.”
“Clive!” snapped Tony.
“I am going to kill each and every one of you and it is going to hurt a lot,” Mum said.
“No,” Dad said to Mum. “It’s OK! He’s OK!”
“It was amazing!” said Cherie. “It was a total rush! There was wind and rain and waves and lightning and a big huge cloud all inside the freaking lobby! That kid couldn’t have done that! We’d be dead if they hadn’t broken that window and got us out!”
“Big lads in skirts?” Dad said with a laugh. “It’s the Shieldsmen! The Shieldsmen found him!”
“Are you sure?” Mum demanded. “How can you be sure?”
“Who else could it be? I’ll bet anything they were watching the offices and saw him come out. It wasn’t a kidnapping, it was a rescue!” Dad exclaimed.
I felt my heart beat faster. Was he right? Could it be true? It would be just like Neil to blunder around until the people he was looking for found him.
“None of that matters now,” Tony said sadly. “Look, I hate to do this, but I’m doing it anyway because I have to. Step aside or I will call the police. Anyway, I thought this place was a guesthouse of some sort and we need to stay. Doing well enough to turn away paying guests, are you?”
“I’d turn you away any day of the week,” Mum said.
The two hags were gone from the cars. I hadn’t seen them go.
Dad held up a hand. “What do you mean? And what did you mean when you said about solving our problem? How are you going to solve it?”
“We’ll fix it.”
“Fix it? Fix it how?”
“Easy. We’ll reconnect the phone line.”
“You’ll—you’ll what?”
“You see the old line was badly out of date and in need of upgrading, so we had it remotely disconnected. Now we’re going to go down and put in a new cable—brand shiny new and full of megabits and gigabots and whatever. It’ll increase the speed of your Seasonal adjustment by a factor of up to a hundred!”
“YOU DISCONNECTED THE LINE?” Dad screamed.
“Can’t upgrade without turning it off, can we?”
Dad stuck his finger right up under Tony Holland’s nose. “You,” he said. “You reconnect that line and you reconnect it right now! Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you have any idea what you’re risking?”
Tony made a face.
“Some. More than you do, I expect. Tell you what. Let us in and get set up and we’ll see what we can do, all right? The lads are keen to measure stuff and record stuff and they need to plug their gizmos in somewhere.”
Dad withdrew the finger and made a fist, which shook with rage. His whole body seemed to tremble and shake like an ash tree on a windy day. His eyes changed. They went red and green, and his face seemed to become hollow and empty, and it twitched and a hundred long thin moving things like ivy branches spread across his cheeks and his forehead and his fist. Holland stared at him, frozen, eyes bugging out. I heard the creaking of old roots as they dragged themselves out of the ground.
Then Dad opened his fist and let his hand drop to his side. The lines were gone, his eyes were blue again, and the noise had stopped. He turned his back on Tony Holland and stalked into the house, and Tony Holland leaned against Clive and wiped sweat from his face, which had gone the same shade of yellow as the sky.
“That was awesome,” said the girl quietly.
The AtmoLab crew came in and made themselves at home. They went up the stairs with their bags and baggage and picked out rooms for themselves. After dropping their bags on their beds they went back out and finished unloading the huge cars, and then the huge cars were driven away. The windows were all dark and I couldn’t see any drivers, so I assumed they were sort of robot cars that drove themselves. Clive, Bob, and the girl, whose name was Cherie, began unpacking their equipment out beside the phone box and running extension cables into the house, where they used every plug they could find.
Mum and Dad watched it all, helpless and unhelpful. Dad was bristling, Mum looked like all the cigarettes in the world would never calm her down or stop her from murderizing the next person who said a word to her, and me and Owen were standing there, the way you do when your mum and your dad can’t do anything to stop the bad stuff from happening.
The phone in the house rang. Dad ran in and snatched it up. I held my breath, and Mum stood beside him with her hands on her hips, staring at him. Dad listened, nodded once, put the phone down, then turned to us with a sad, lost look on his face—and then the sad, lost look was gone and he was turning angry and red and his eyes were becoming big and deep and green.
He came out to the doorway and took hold of the jamb. Green leaves and brown vines flowed over and through his hands and into the wood of the door frame. He was nearly doubled over, as if his stomach hurt.
“I have to go to Neil,” he said. “But I can’t leave you.”
Mum reached for him, but he waved her off. I could hear flies buzzing. A bumblebee flew out of his hair, which was longer, shaggier, stiffer.
“That was
Ed. Neil and the Shieldsmen have all been arrested and taken to a police station.”
“Dad?” I said.
“Twiggy Man,” Owen said.
“I don’t know what to do,” he murmured, his voice a whisper like a breeze through a meadow of golden flowers.
“You should go,” said one of the hags. They floated like pale gray ghosts in the hallway behind Dad. I could barely see their faces in the shadows over his shoulders. “Get that silly boy of yours back before he makes more of a mess.”
“Never knew a family like it for messes,” said the other.
“I can’t leave them,” Dad said. “I can’t leave it—the Weatherbox.”
“We’ll mind it for you, dear. And them,” the first hag reassured him.
“Quite good at minding things, us.”
“We could mind it for a thousand years.”
“But you’ll want to be back quicker than that.”
“Those tricksies with their electrics and their boxes full of colors and their phoney roots will have the bell ringing long before midnight. You must be back, son and all, when the bell rings.”
“Why would you help us? I asked them. “You’re her sisters.”
The hags looked at me.
“Oh, my little sweetie, not all families are like yours.”
“She abandoned us. Deserted us.”
“Grew young again.”
“You’re young again,” said Owen.
“We are. And as we get younger, we get less crazy. We forget the things we knew. Knowing too much makes you crazy, you know, dear.”
“But, you see, she’s the eldest. When we’re finished getting young again, we’ll be the age we were when they made us serve the Black Pool, but that’ll be no older than you and your sister, and no more powerful.”
“She was supposed to be the witch, you see. They took her and trained her and taught her, not us.”
“But they needed three sisters to stir and sing for the beast of the black hole, because they thought it was in love with the threefold goddess.”
“They took us from our home and threw us in that shell and left us there for a thousand years. By the hokey, I wouldn’t so much as sing for my supper or stir my own tea in the cup now for all the silk in China.”
The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox Page 13
