The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  “Lucy will stay down there, to set the engine to the speed I signal for. I’ll steer from the wheelhouse. You move off and open the first bridge. We’ll follow in five minutes, and you ought to be nearly at the second one by then.”

  Margaret stood quite still. She knew there was something in the plan that didn’t fit. She was just turning away when it came to her.

  “Some of the bridges open from the wrong side!” she said urgently. “I’ll have to wait till you’re through and shut them before I can ride on.”

  Jonathan shut his eyes, as though he was trying to draw the mechanism on the back of his eyelids.

  “I’m a fool,” he said at last. “They seemed so simple that I didn’t really think about them. We’ll have to go slower and let you catch up.”

  “Let’s see how we get on,” said Margaret, and swung herself up into the saddle. She was cold, and there was a scouring northwest wind beginning to slide across the Vale, the sort of wind that clears the sky to an icy paleness, and keeps you glancing into the eye of the wind for the first signs of the storm that is sure to follow. But in the shelter of the docks the water was still the color of darkest laurel leaves, and smooth as a jewel.

  Behind her the beat of the engines deepened. It was surprising how quiet they were, she thought, once you were a few yards away. But when she looked around she saw, black against the paling sky, the wicked stain of the diesel smoke. If it’s going to be like that all the way, she thought, we’ll rouse the whole Vale. But even as she watched in the bitter breeze the smoke signal changed; the black plume thinned and drifted away, and in its place the funnel began to emit tidy black puffs, like the smoke over a railway engine in a child’s drawing; the wind caught the puffs and rubbed them out before they had risen ten feet—not so bad, after all.

  This last time she decided to risk going right through Hempsted village, instead of dismounting and leading Scrub down through the difficult track to the canal. They’d always gone by the towpath and the empty house before, in case any of the Hempsted villagers should become inquisitive about their comings and goings. But now it wouldn’t matter anymore. Hempsted slept as she cantered through. This was one of the bridges that opened from the easy side; she lifted the two pieces of iron that locked the bridge shut and cranked the whole structure open; it moved like magic, with neither grate nor clank.

  If she had been good at obeying orders she would have mounted and ridden on, but she felt she owed something to the villagers of Hempsted, though she couldn’t say what. At least they had left the children to work out their plot in peace—and that man had tried to warn her about the dogs. So she couldn’t leave them cut off, bridgeless (no one would care to shut a wicked bridge like this, even if they could remember how). Besides, she wanted to watch Heartsease come through.

  Jonathan slowed down the engines and shouted something from the wheelhouse as the tug surged past, but she waved to show she knew what she was doing, and swung the bridge slowly (how slowly!) back to its proper place. She heard the beat of the engines quickening and saw the black cloud boil up again. Just as she was bending to put the first locking-bar back she heard a shout. Without looking to see who it was, she slung herself into the saddle, shook the reins, and let Scrub whisk her onto the towpath. Now, over her shoulder, she saw a little old man in a nightshirt standing at the other end of the bridge shaking a cudgel. She waved cheerfully back.

  Heartsease was already around the next bend when Margaret caught up, the funnel still puffing its ridiculous smoke rings against the pearly light of dawn, the throaty boom coming steadily from the huge cylinders. She was surprised to find, as she cantered level with the boat, that even she felt an odd pride and thrill at the sense of total strength which the shape of the boat gave because of the way it sat in the water. She slowed to a trot to watch it.

  At once Jonathan moved his hand on the brass lever that jutted up beside the wheel; the boom of the engines altered; Heartsease, no longer shoved by the propellers, began to lose speed as Jonathan edged her in toward the bank. He opened the door of the wheelhouse.

  “It’ll be all right,” he called, “provided you can keep that sort of speed up. You must think of a story, just in case you’re caught on the wrong side with a bridge open. What about …”

  “They wouldn’t believe it,” Margaret interrupted. “We’ll just have to swim. That old stableboy who came when the earl came told me horses can swim with a grown man on them. But Jo, try to keep your engine going the same speed all the time. It makes a horrid black cloud when you speed up. People could see it for miles, but you can’t in there.”

  “Thanks!” said Jonathan. He shut his door, signaled down to Lucy in the engine room, and, as the water churned behind the tug’s stern and the black smoke rose again, steered out for the center of the canal. Scrub was happy to go. The wind was even colder now, out from the sheltering buildings.

  Scrub was in good form, happy with the tingling early morning air and the excitement of having something to do. Margaret was sure he knew how much it mattered, that he sensed her own thrill and urgency. The towpath was a good surface, hard and flat underneath but overlaid with rank fallen grasses which softened the fall of his feet. She had to rein him in firmly as they took the bend at the end of the long straight, and he was fidgeting with the bit all the three hundred yards down to the next bend. Just around it was another bridge. This one opened from the wrong side.

  Already it was almost a routine, she thought as she hitched the reins to the rail, hoicked up the locking-piece and began to crank. But as the bridge swung over the water there was a shrill burst of barking in the lane behind her.

  Margaret panicked. In a flash she had untied the reins, flung herself up to the saddle and hauled Scrub around to set him up at the awkward jump from the end of the bridge to the bank. It wasn’t impossibly far, but it was all angles. He took it as though he’d been practicing for weeks, and climbed up to the towpath. From there Margaret looked back.

  The smallest dog she had ever seen, very scrawny and dirty, was yelping in the entrance to the far lane.

  Jonathan had slowed Heartsease down, but even so the tug was almost at the bridge, and there was no way for Margaret to cross and finish her job. She was turning Scrub toward the bitter water, nerving herself for the shock of cold, when she looked up the canal and saw her cousin gesticulating in the wheelhouse—he had another plan, and he didn’t want them to swim.

  His hand moved to the big brass signal lever and pulled it right over. The tug surged on for a second, and then there was a boiling of yellow water beneath the stern as the propeller went into reverse. Heartsease suddenly sat differently, slowed, wavered and was barely moving, drifting through the water, nudging with a mild thud against the concrete pier on Margaret’s side of the gap. The bridges were still high at this end of the canal, because the surrounding land was high: it was only the mast and the funnel which wouldn’t slide under. Delicately, with short bursts of power from the propeller, Jonathan sidled round the projecting arm, just scraping the corner of the wheelhouse as they went past. Once through, he opened the wheelhouse door to lean back and watch the oily smoke fade as Heartsease settled down to her six-knot puff-puff-puff.

  “Sorry!” shouted Margaret. “I was too frightened to think.”

  “Not surprised,” he shouted back. “But it looked funny from here—you two great animals routed by that little rat of a dog. Couldn’t you lean down and turn the handles from the saddle?”

  “No. They’re too low. How far is it to the next bridge? Scrub doesn’t understand about maps—the flapping makes him nervous.”

  “Half a mile. Then a mile and a half to the one after. Get ahead and come up to that one carefully, just trotting along. There used to be an inn there, and more folk’ll be about by now.”

  The next bridge opened from the right side and no one barked or shouted at her. Then came the stretch of bad tow-path, all muddy hummocks, so she took to the fields and cantered along on the wrong
side of the hedge, wondering why the canal wasn’t all in that kind of condition. The answer came to her at once, as she pictured the boiling khaki wake behind Heartsease. No ships had been using the canal for five years, so the water had barely moved; it had been when large engines had churned the surface about that the banks had needed constant looking after.

  As she came up toward Sellers Bridge and the inn beside it, she settled Scrub to his easiest trot, and made sure that there was a square of red cloth loose at the top of her saddlebag.

  She remembered the pub from her first exploration—a large white square building with broken windows. It hadn’t looked as if anyone lived there, but she slowed to a casual trot as a gentle curve brought the bridge into view. The whole narrow world—the world between the enclosing banks of the canal—seemed empty of people, but who could say what enemies mightn’t be about beyond them? As she wound at the handle she felt the blank windows of the ruined inn watching her, she felt the vast silence of the Vale listening like a spy to the slow clack of the cogs beneath her. This bridge was slightly different from the others: even though it opened from the “good” end, it turned on a pivot so that when it was open she was left with an awkward leap down to the bank. She decided it was safer to close it, but by the time she had watched Heartsease pass and had cranked the bridge shut she was shivery and sweating.

  The next bridge was already open, and now the land fell away on either side of her so that she could feel the teeth of the wind out of Wales—and the banks would no longer hide the tug. Now they would be parading their wicked engine before all the watching Vale, twenty miles wide. At the bridge after that all went well, though it opened from the wrong side, but as Margaret was cantering on she heard a shrill cry and looked back to see a woman brandishing a saucepan while an arthritic old man hobbled away down the lane—for help, probably, for somebody young and strong to pursue them. Margaret bent over Scrub’s neck and let him stretch to a full gallop; she was sure they could outrun any pursuit, provided they weren’t halted in their flight. Hungry, she felt into her saddlebag as soon as they were past the tug, and found a hunk of Rosie’s bread to gnaw.

  It was two miles to the next bridge, a flimsy affair for foot traffic, where the canal crossed the narrow little barge canal from Stroud, all reeded and silted. Then a short stretch to Sandfield Bridge, which opened from the “good” side; then nearly a mile more to the bridge between Frampton and Saul. That one lay amid brooding woods which screened the next expanse of country, and it was already open. Frampton, she remembered, lay only a furlong from the canal, and beyond the woods was a long straightaway through windswept and shelterless country; so, as she was now well ahead of the tug, she took Scrub down the embankment, dismounted and led him along by the overgrown gardens of Saul Lodge. The canal here ran ten feet higher than the land. She was completely under cover as she walked below the stretching arms of the pine trees to a point, thirty yards on, where the curve was finished and she could climb up again until only her head showed as she spied out the long straightaway.

  For five endless seconds she peered around a clump of withered nettle stems.

  Then she had wrenched the startled pony around and was running back along the awkward slope. Up onto the path the moment it might be safe; into the saddle; galloping back and reaching at the same moment for the square of red cloth. Heartsease was only fifty yards the other side of the open bridge; desperately she waved her danger signal.

  The water creamed under the stern as the propeller clawed at it to slow the tug down, but already they were through the bridge and Margaret could see that the momentum would take the tug around the curve before she could be stopped. Jo twirled the wheel and the bow swung toward the towpath; two seconds later it slid into the bank with a horrid thud. She jumped from her pony and ran along the path, but before she came to the place the still-churning engine had lugged the boat out into midstream again. Jonathan moved the lever to the stop position and opened the wheelhouse door.

  “I hope that was worth it,” he called.

  “Oh, Jo, we’re done for! Come and see! Can you turn the engine off without making smoke?”

  He fiddled with the lever and the wheel, so that a quick spasm of power sucked Heartsease backward to lie against the bank. Margaret caught the rope he threw and tied it to a thornbush; he scuttled down the engine room hatch, and almost at once the puff-puff-puff from the funnel died away. Lucy came up behind him, her face all mottled with oil and dirt, but stayed on the deck while he leaped ashore. Caesar fidgeted with his tether in the stern.

  Margaret led Jonathan along under the embankment. The children peered again around the hissing nettle stems, down the mile-long line of water which rippled grayly in the sharp wind, to where Splatt Bridge sat across the dismal surface like a black barricade.

  There were people on the bridge, about a dozen of them, tiny with distance but clearly visible in the wide light of the estuary. Above them rose a spindly framework with a hunched blob in the middle.

  “What on earth have they got there?” said Jonathan.

  “Mr. Gordon’s litter.”

  Chapter 8

  KNIFE AND ROPE

  There was no mistaking it. The freshening northwester had cleared every trace of haze from the fawn-and-silver landscape.

  “Bother,” said Jonathan. “It’s strange how you never expect other people to be as clever as you are yourself.”

  He spoke in an ordinary voice, but looking at him Margaret could see the hope and excitement fading in his eyes as the colors fade from a drying seashell.

  “Oh, Jo,” she cried. “What are we going to do?”

  “If we can’t think of anything else we’ll turn round, go back and hide again. Where’s that bull you told me about?”

  “Bull?” whispered Margaret.

  “Yes. You said you were chased by a tethered bull at Splatt Bridge.”

  “We can’t see him from here, if he’s still where he was then. We might if we go further along the wood.”

  “Wait a moment. Let’s watch them a little longer. It all depends whether they’ve seen us.”

  Margaret’s heart was beginning to bounce with a new dread, the terror of her remembered nightmares. The palms of her hands were icy patches. To stop herself from thinking about the bull she screwed up her eyes and peered along the narrowing streak of water until the bridge seemed to dance and flicker. But between the flickerings, the tiny people appeared lounging and unexcited. There was a small flurry, and the litter tilted, but it was only a change of bearers.

  “All right,” said Jonathan. “Let’s find your bull.”

  The children crept along the edge of the leafless wood, away from the canal; it was difficult not to walk on tiptoe.

  “There he is,” said Margaret.

  Even at this distance the bull looked dangerous, tilted forward by the weight of his huge shoulders and bony head. The cruel horns were invisible, but Margaret knew their exact curve.

  “No cows with him,” said Jonathan. “He’ll be in a real temper.”

  “What are you going to do?” whispered Margaret.

  “I don’t want to turn round and go back if we can help it,” said Jonathan. “Some people must have seen us pass, even if they couldn’t get out in time to try and stop us, so they’ll probably be hunting down the canal after us. And even if we do get through, they’ll probably stir up enough people to hunt us down in Gloucester. But if I can cut the bull’s tether and bait him toward the bridge, he’ll clear the men off for long enough for me to open the locking-pieces, and then you could simply barge the bridge open. They haven’t brought horses. They won’t catch us after that.”

  “You’ll have to borrow Scrub. Caesar would be hopeless at that sort of thing.”

  “So would I. I’ll do it on foot.”

  Margaret felt cold all over, a cold not from the bitter wind but spreading out from inside her. She knew Jonathan hadn’t a chance of beating the bull on foot, any more than she had a chance
of managing Heartsease. The plan was the wrong way around.

  “I’d rather do the bull,” she said. “I can ride Scrub. We’d both be better at our jobs that way. How do I cut the tether?”

  Jonathan tilted his head sideways and looked at her until she turned away.

  “It’s the only hope,” she said.

  “Yes. It’s better odds. And if it goes wrong at least you’ve a chance to get away. We’ll try it like that. I found a carving knife in the ironmonger’s in Gloucester—I liked it because it was so sharp—and if you can slash at the rope when the bull has pulled it taut you should be able to cut it in one go. Heartsease will make a tremendous cloud of smoke when she starts again, and they’ll all be watching the canal after that. Then it will be six or seven minutes before I reach the bridge if I come down flat out. You’ll have to time it from that, because you don’t want to clear the bridge too early, or they’ll simply dodge the bull and come back.”

  “What about Lucy and Tim?”

  “I’ll need Lucy to control the engine.”

  “Couldn’t we cut a pole for Otto to do that with? Then Lucy and Tim and Caesar could come down after me, and get away if things go wrong. I’m going to ride down behind that long bank over there—it’s called the Tumps on the map—so that I can’t be seen from the bridge. If it all works, the men will be on the wrong side after the bridge is open, so we could wait for Lucy and Tim beyond it. If it doesn’t, they might be able to escape.”

  “Um,” said Jonathan. “I’ll go and talk to them. And Otto. But I’ll need Lucy to help me start the engines, so she won’t be able to leave until you’re almost in position—they’ll be a long way behind you.”

  “Never mind,” said Margaret. “At least it means Tim won’t try to stop me teasing the bull.”

  Jonathan laughed.

  “He doesn’t look as if he needed much teasing,” he said. “You move off while I show Lucy where to go. I’ll give you twenty minutes before I start up.”