“Nicky, you are in danger. It is not the sort of danger we have fought through this last year. It is inside you. We have been in bad times. We have all had to be hard and fierce. But you have made yourself harder and fiercer than any of us, even than us Sikhs. In bad times you have to wear armor around your heart, but when times are better you must take it off. Or it becomes a prison for your soul. You grow to the shape of it, as a tortoise grows to the shape of its shell. Nicky, you must go to a place where you can take your armor off. That place is your parents’ hearth.”
Nicky felt a chill in her bones which was not the chill of the night air. The small smithy under her ribs started its hammering, and in her mind’s eye she saw the iron doll topple, grinning and jointless from his huge horse.
“How did you know about the armor?” she whispered.
Neena translated, and the old lady’s cackling laugh surprised the night. Then the snake-rustling sentences began again.
“I was married when I was twelve. To a man I had never seen. It was the custom of our people. I loved my parents and my brothers and sisters and our happy house, and then I was taken away from them. I too put armor around my heart. But I was luckier than you, Nicky, for my husband—oh, how old he seemed—was kind and patient and clever. He made a place, a world, in which I wanted to take my armor off.”
“Perhaps they’re dead,” said Nicky.
“Perhaps they are not. Perhaps you will not find them. Who can say? But until you have tried to find them you will make yourself stay hard and fierce. That is the danger of which I spoke. It is in your nature to become like that forever.”
And that was true. Nicky knew that her kinship with the robber knight went deeper than the armor, deeper than the glorious wash of victory she had felt on the morning of the battle. Yes, she must go. But still she felt reluctant.
“Must I go so soon?” she said. “Next week is …”
“You must go now,” said Neena decisively. “We have not talked to the village about this, but we think that all this island is closing in on itself. Soon they will have forgotten about how to get people away; they will have forgotten about France. We must expect difficult times.”
“Then I ought to stay and help you,” said Nicky obstinately.
“No. We have learned to be careful. We will survive and prosper. If you ever come back, you will probably find that Jagindar is an earl. Nicky, you don’t have to go. We all love you here, and we should like you to stay, out of our own selfishness. But we think you should try to go to your family.”
Nicky made up her mind, as usual, in one irrevocable rush.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will go. But perhaps one of you could come with me as far as the sea. Kewal or Uncle Chacha or Mr. Surbans Singh.”
Neena sighed in the dark, and Nicky could hear the rustle of her sari as her shoulders made the familiar shrug.
“It would be nice, Nicky, but it would not be safe. Outside these few fields we are still the Devil’s Children.”
Book Two
HEARTSEASE
for Philippa and Polly
While Four Years Pass
Nicky was lucky. She bought a passage on an almost empty fishing boat. In mid-Channel they hove to beside a large steamer and she climbed aboard, only finding it strange that she did not find it strange. At Calais the refugee agencies searched their files and sent her to a camp where she found her parents waiting in the long queue, as they’d done every day for many months. Despite the drabness of the huts, finding them was like coming out of an icy, drizzling street into a warm house full of friendship.
Nicky’s ship was one of the last few to leave. Britain, as Neena had foreseen, closed in on itself, like an anemone in a rock pool closing at a touch. When other nations tried to probe into the island, the island seemed to grow a mysterious wall around it. It was very difficult to get even a single spy through.
But behind the wall we began to change. The Changes were mostly inside us, in our minds, but a few were outside. In a bare hill valley a great oakwood grew, overnight, with a tower in the middle of it. In Surrey that wild Dervish who had caused the panic when Nicky lost her parents discovered that the thunderstorm had been no accident. He had willed it into being, and now he could will any weather he chose. He didn’t know how, nor did the others (a boy in Weymouth, a schoolmaster in Norwich, for instance) who found they had the same gift. In a year or two it was just a commonplace that there would be sun for harvest and snow in December, accepted by everyone in much the same way that they accepted that a chestnut tree would grow its five-fingered leaves every spring.
But not everyone was aware of the weathermongers at work, because not every district had its own weathermonger, and just as the island closed in on itself, so the cells inside it also closed. Men lived by rumor. Events in the next county became strange and far away. One winter, for instance, it was said in Yorkshire that dragons had begun to stir in the Pennine hills; quite sensible farmers took to sleeping with buckets of water beside their beds, ready to quench the fiery breath.
Most of the customs that grew up were concerned with witchcraft (as the use of machines was called). These also varied from shire to shire. Hereford, for instance, was very little troubled by witches and the reason for this (men believed) was the great Hereford Flower Dance, which lasted for fourteen days in May and was a time of singing and happiness, a celebration of the power of Nature against the horror of engines.
By contrast there were the great witch-findings in Durham Cathedral, with three thousand people massed under the frowning Norman arches, pale-cheeked and sweating, groaning all together as name after name was called, neighbors and wives and sons and cronies, to stand the unappealable tests.
In an island like this, so secretive, so unpredictable, how could a spy from the outside world survive? As he set up his little transmitter in a Cotswold copse, working with difficulty because the controls and connections seemed suddenly unfamiliar and awkward, how could he know that he would be smelt out, ambushed, seized and stunned, and then wake to find his legs shackled by oak stocks, his back against a wall, and himself facing a baying crowd of villagers? And then the brief, jeering trial and the hail of stones.
Chapter 1
THE STONES ARE BURNING
It was the last of the soft days of autumn. As dusk fell, you could feel the frosts coming, a smell of steel in the air.
If it hadn’t been so nearly dark Margaret would have gone the long way around; but she was tired and Scrub was even tireder, his head drooping, his mane clotted with sweat, his hooves not making their proper clipclop, but muddling the sound with a scrapy noise because he wasn’t lifting them up properly. Even so she began to lead him the long way, without thinking about it. It was only the clank of a milking bucket from Fatchet’s cowshed reminded her that Uncle Peter would be finished milking soon; if she came back after he’d sat down in his rocking chair in the farm kitchen and begun to drink his evening’s cider from the big blue-and-white mug, he’d beat her with his belt until she was sore for days.
She turned back and led the pony down Tibbins Lane, toward the stocks where the dead witch lay under the new heap of stones.
She started to sing a carol, “The Holly and the Ivy,” but found her voice wouldn’t rise above a mumble, and even that noise dried in her mouth before she was halfway down the lane. She tried again and managed a whole verse at a bare whisper, and then the muscles in her throat turned the words into no sound at all. She would have run if she’d been alone, but Scrub was past anything except his dragging walk. Clip, scrape, clop went his hooves on the old tarmac, clip, scrape, clop. She could see the heap of stones now, lying against the Rectory wall as though they’d just been tipped from a cart—not brought in baskets and barrows by a hundred villagers for throwing.
All at once she thought of Jonathan; just like him to be helping Aunt Anne with the baking that morning, so that he hadn’t been made to go and watch the stoning. He’d laugh at her, his sharp snortin
g laugh, if she told him she’d ridden so far to get away from this heap of stones that now she had to come back right past it. Jonathan always thought things out before he did them. Come on, Margaret, it’s only a heap of stones and what’s left of a foreign witch. Come on.
As she passed the neat pile the stones groaned.
Margaret dropped the reins and ran. Forty yards on, where the walls narrowed into an alleyway between two cottages, she waited, panting, for Scrub. He clopped down in the near-dark and nuzzled against her shoulder, but nothing else moved in the dusk behind him.
Uncle Peter was still whistling shrilly at his milking stool when she led the pony past the cowshed toward the little paddock which he shared with poor neglected Caesar. Jonathan was waiting for her, leaning against the pillar of the log-store, his little pointed face just like a gnome’s under his shaggy black hair.
“What’s wrong, Marge?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Is it to do with the witch? You didn’t watch, did you?”
“No, of course not.”
“But it is, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Jo, it was … I had to come back down Tibbins Lane because I was so late, and when I passed him he groaned. I thought witches died, just like anybody else.”
Jonathan tilted his head over the other way, still watching her with his bright, strange eyes—like a bird deciding whether to come for the crumbs you are holding in the palm of your hand.
“You’re not making this up, are you, Marge?”
“No, of course not!”
“All right. Now listen. I’ll take Scrub out and put his harness away. You—”
“But why?”
“Listen! You go and offer to carry one of Father’s buckets in—he won’t let you, but it’ll tell him you’re home. Go and say hello to Mother, then go upstairs noisily and quietly into my room. Climb out along the shed roof and jump down into the old hay. I’ll meet you there.”
“But why, Jo?”
“Because he’s still alive, of course. We’ve got to get him out. Tim’ll help us, but we’ll need you too.”
“Jo, you’ll—”
“Yes, I’ll take care of your precious Scrub. Go slowly, Marge. Talk slowly. Try and sound just tired, and nothing else.”
She gave him the reins, started to walk toward the cowshed door, turned back to shout to him to see that there was enough water in the trough, realized that it would be dangerous to shout (dangerous now, in a house which was safe this morning) and walked on.
Uncle Peter was milking Florence, so he must be almost finished. There were two full buckets by the door, so he’d be middling pleased—last week he hadn’t managed to fill even two most days.
“Can I carry one of these in for you, Uncle Peter?”
He grunted but didn’t look up. “You leave ’em be,” he said. “Too heavy for a slip like you, Marge. Where you been all day, then?”
“Riding.”
“Long ride. Didn’t you fancy what we did to that foreigner this morning?”
Margaret said nothing.
“Ach, don’t you be feared to tell me. You’re a good lass, Marge, and I wouldn’t have you hard-hearted, but you must understand that it’s necessary. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, the Book says. Look now, I took nigh on half a bucket out of Maisie, who was dry as an old carrot till this very day, when she should by all rights have been flowing with milk like the land of Canaan—what was that but witchcraft?”
“I suppose you’re right, Uncle Peter.”
“Course I am, girl. You go in now. You’ll have forgot all about it by tomorrow.”
Aunt Anne was in the kitchen, which had been the living room before the Changes came. She was rocking her chair an inch to and fro in front of the bread-oven, staring at nothing, her face drawn down into deep lines as though she wanted to cry but couldn’t. Margaret said hello but she didn’t answer, so it seemed best to go thumpingly up the stairs, tiptoe into Jonathan’s room, wriggle out through his window and crawl down the edge of the shed where the tiles were less likely to break.
The hay was last year’s, gray with mustiness, but thick enough to break a clumsy jump. She picked herself up and moved into the shadow of a stack of bean poles which Uncle Peter had leaned against the shed wall. It really was night now, with a half-moon coming and going behind slow-moving clouds, and the air chill for waiting in; but before she began to feel cold inside herself she heard a low bubbling sound which meant that Tim was coming up the path from his hut in the orchard. The moon edged out as he reached the shed, and she saw that he was carrying a sheep hurdle under one arm and a full sack on his other shoulder. Jonathan was with him.
“You there, Marge?” he whispered. “Good. Hold this. I won’t be long.”
He handed her a saw and scampered off down the path. Tim at once began to make his bubbling noise more loudly, because Jonathan was the only person he knew and trusted, apart from his own sister, Lucy. Other people teased him and threw things at him, or were frightened of him and kept away; but inside his poor muddled brain he knew that Jonathan really thought of him as a person, and not as an animal who happened to be shaped like a man.
“It’s all right, Tim,” whispered Margaret, speaking as she might have done to Scrub, “he’s coming back. Be brave.” The whisper seemed to make Tim feel he was with someone who wouldn’t hurt him, so he settled down to wait and the bubbling quietened in his throat. Jonathan was away several minutes, and when he came back he walked slowly, bent sideways by the weight of the heavy thing he was carrying.
“What’s that?” said Margaret.
“Petrol, I think. It burns. I found a few tins hidden under the straw in the old barn where the machines are.”
“But you aren’t allowed to go there!” whispered Margaret.
“Tim can carry it,” said Jonathan. “And the sack. There won’t be anyone in the road now it’s really dark. I’ll manage the hurdle and you take the saw, Marge. Keep in the shadows. If someone does come, stand still until you’re sure they’ve seen you. If you have to run away, don’t drop the saw or they’ll know where it came from. Climb up the ivy on the other side of this wall and you can get back onto the roof. Off we go.”
Tim followed him like a dog at its master’s heels. The alley between the cottages was a black canyon, but beyond it the moon shone clear against the Rectory wall. Tim moved more quietly than the children because he didn’t have proper shoes, not even clogs; his feet were wrapped in straw which he tied into place with strips of old rag. The stocks had been set opposite the gate into Squire’s house, where the road was wider, so that there would be plenty of room for the villagers to gather round and throw things at whoever was in them—soft fruit and rotten eggs and clods of turf at ordinary bad people, stones at witches.
The pile was silent now, but Jonathan didn’t stop to listen to it. He started lifting the stones away, not dropping them but putting them down carefully so as not to make any noise. Tim watched, bubbling quietly, and then began to help. When Margaret lifted her first stone the witch groaned again.
There weren’t as many stones as there seemed. The pile looked big because Mr. Gordon, the fierce old sexton, had made the men pick the loose ones up when the stoning was over and heap them into a neat cairn. Before long Margaret tried to pull a bigger stone out but found it was soft and warm—a legging with a leg inside it. In a few minutes more they had cleared the legs up as far as the stocks.
“You two carry on with the top half,” said Jonathan, “while I cut through here.”
“But Jo,” whispered Margaret, “won’t they start hunting for him when they see it’s sawn through? They’ll know someone’s got him out.”
“That’s what the petrol’s for.”
He was already sawing, slowly but firmly, making as little noise as possible. Margaret and Tim labored on, lift, stoop, lift, stoop, lift, stoop. No single stone seemed to make the cairn any smaller, but soon they had cleared the body up to the waist. Tim had
stopped his bubbling and was working with increasing urgency now that he could see enough of the witch’s body to know what it was; he cooed once or twice, a noise which Margaret hadn’t heard him make before. The witch had sheltered his head behind crooked arms, but these were now stuck to the mess of clotted blood and clothing and hair around his face; when Margaret tried to move an arm to get at a stone which had lodged in the bend of the elbow he groaned with a new, sharp note.
“He ought to be dead,” whispered Jonathan. “Perhaps he’s wearing some kind of armor under his clothes.”
Tim knelt down beside the bloodied head and with slow tenderness, cooing like a distant pigeon in June, lifted the wincing tangle and cradled it against his dirty chest while Margaret picked out the last stone and eased the arms down into the man’s lap. Jonathan sawed with even strokes, as though he was in no hurry at all.
“Oak,” he whispered. “About three minutes more. Watch out up the lane, Marge, just in case.”
The last tough sliver gave beneath the sawteeth and he lifted the imprisoning timber from the man’s ankles. Then he fetched the hurdle and laid it beside the body. Tim, without being told, eased the wounded man on.
“We’ll each take a corner in front, Marge. Tim can carry the back.”
The weight was heavy but manageable. As soon as they were well clear of the rubble Jonathan lowered his corner to the ground so that Margaret and Tim had to do so too. Then he tipped the contents of the sack out and arranged them carefully around the stocks—straw and kindling and a few small pieces of plank. He opened the can and poured its contents over his bonfire and the surrounding stones. An extraordinary smell rose into the night air, and all at once Margaret remembered the seaside, which she’d completely forgotten about for five years—a smooth sea, hot sun, sand crawling with people, and behind it all a road where just such a smell came from, because a lot of machines were waiting there for three ladies in white coats to—she remembered the right words—fill them up. She hadn’t thought of petrol, or the sea, or machines as things which took you to places, for ages—not since she was how old? The Changes were five years back, she and Jonathan were fourteen now, so not since she was nine. Now this smell, sharp, rather nasty, filling your nose like chopped onions, brought all the pictures back.
The Changes Trilogy Page 13
