The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  “The knife,” said Margaret.

  “Yes, of course.”

  They went back to the boat. Lucy was sitting on the bulwark with her head in her hands; Tim was tickling Davey’s stomach on the foredeck. Jonathan scampered aboard while Margaret looked over Scrub’s harness and tightened the girth a notch. He came back with a knife which was almost like a scimitar, with a knobby bone handle made from the antler of a deer; she tried it with her thumb and found that it had the almost feathery touch of properly sharpened steel. Too scared to speak, she nodded to her cousin, raised her hand to Lucy and led Scrub away under the trees.

  After a hundred yards they worked through a broken fence into an overgrown lane, with another small wood on their left; beyond that she turned south, still screened by trees, parallel with the canal but four hundred yards nearer the great river. At the far corner of the wood she found she could see neither Splatt Bridge nor the bull, so, hoping that meant that none of her enemies could see her either, she mounted and cantered on over the plashy turf. Scrub was still moving easily, his hooves squirting water sideways at every pace as he picked the firmest going between the dark green clumps of quill grass that grew where the ground was at its most spongy. Two furlongs, and their path was barred by a wide drainage ditch, steep-banked, the water in it flowing sluggishly toward the Severn. Scrub stretched his pace, gathered himself for the leap and swept across. Now they were riding along the far side of the Tumps.

  This was a long, winding embankment, old and grassy, built (presumably) to stop the Severn from flooding in across Frampton long before the canal was dug. The map showed that it dipped sharply in toward Splatt Bridge. They reached the place far sooner than she wanted, but she dismounted at once and whispered to Scrub to stay where he was and taste the local grass. Then she wriggled to the top of the bank.

  The bridge was three hundred yards away, straight ahead but half hidden by the patchy saplings of a neglected hedge. Much nearer, more to her right, stood the enemy of her dreams. The bull was already disturbed in his furious wits by the crowd on the bridge, and had strained to the limit of his tether in the hope of wreaking his anger and frustration on them. The best thing would be to snake through the grass and cut his tether while he fumed at Mr. Gordon and his cronies. Surely he wouldn’t notice if she came from straight behind. There was plenty of time.

  But she couldn’t do it. To be caught there, helpless, too slow to escape the charging monster … She lay and sweated and swore at herself, but her limbs wouldn’t take her over the bank.

  Suddenly a savage cackling and hooting rose from the bridge. Through the bare branches of the hedge she could see arms pointing upstream. She looked that way herself. Clear above the distant wood rose a foul cloud of murk, that could have come only from some wicked engine.

  She ran back to Scrub, mounted and trotted him along the bank until she thought they were opposite where the bull was tethered; then she nudged her heel into his ribs and he swept up over the bank, and down the far side. She’d been hoping to catch the bull while he was straining toward the shouting voices; but he must have heard the drub of hooves, for his head was already turned toward her and even as Scrub was changing feet to take the downward slope the horns lowered and the whole mass of beef and bone was flowing toward her as fast as cloud-shadow in a north wind. She could see from the circle of trampled grass how far his tether reached; she was safe outside it, but she could never cut the rope unless she took Scrub inside it.

  Scrub saw the coming enemy and half shied away, but she forced his head around and touched his ribs again to tell him that she knew what she was up to. When the bull was so close that she could see the big eyes raging and the froth of fury around the nostrils, she jerked sideways at the precise moment in Scrub’s stride which would whisk him to the right, and as the bull belted past she leaned forward to slash at the tautening rope.

  The first slash missed completely, and the second made no more than a white nick in the gray hemp; then the enemy had turned.

  The bull was dreadfully quick on his feet, considering how much he weighed; he seemed to flick his mass around and be flowing toward her before she had really balanced herself back into the saddle. But Scrub was still moving toward the center of the trampled circle, and even before she asked him he accelerated into a gallop. She knew he didn’t like this game at all.

  But he turned when she told him, out on the unchurned grass, and they tried again. It was a question of swaying out around the charge of the bull, allowing for the extra width of the sweep of his awful horns, and then at once swaying in to come closer to the rope than they had before. And this time she would have to lean backward, away from the pommel and stirrups of the sidesaddle. But Scrub’s pace was all wrong, and she knew this before they reached the circle, so she took him wide out of range with several yards to spare. They halted on the far side of the circle and prepared for another pass. In the stillness between the two bouts of action she heard the men’s voices again, deeper and more menacing than before. She glanced up the canal and saw the black funnel about three hundred yards away. It would have to be this time.

  By now Scrub seemed to know what was wanted of him. As the eight hooves rushed the two animals together he swayed sideways at the last moment in a violent jerk, and then in again. Margaret couldn’t tell whether she’d controlled him into this perfect movement, or whether he’d done it on his own, but there was the rope, taut as a bowstring, beside her knees. She stabbed the knife under it and hacked upward. The rope broke and the bull was free.

  She flashed a glance over her shoulder; the bull had already turned and was coming at her again. Something about the way he held his head told her that he too knew that the rules of the game had changed. Now all that mattered was which of the two animals was faster. And where was the best gap in the ruined hedge.

  There was no time to think. She saw a wide hole in the bushes a little to her left, just behind the bridge, so she nudged Scrub toward it. The men were making such a clamor now that she couldn’t hear the hoof beats of the bull. As she came through the gap she saw that her moment was exactly ripe: the men were on the bridge still, all their attention toward the tug which was booming down toward them with a solid wave under its bows; two of them had arrows ready, tense on the pulled strings; the rest had spears and billhooks. Above them all Mr. Gordon crouched in his swaying litter, his face purple, his fist raised to the bleak sky.

  Margaret gave a shrieking yell, and two heads turned.

  A mouth dropped open, an arm clutched at the elbow of one of the bowmen. More heads turned, and the color of the faces changed. Then, like reeds moving in a gust of wind, the whole group of bodies altered their stance—no longer straining toward the tug, but jostling in panic flight away from the bull. As Margaret reached the white railing that funneled in to the bridge, a half-gap opened in the crowd. She leaned over Scrub’s neck, yelled again, and drove him through it. His shoulder slammed into the back of one of the litter bearers and she saw the crazy structure begin to topple, and heard, above all the clamor, a wild, croaking scream. Then she was over the bridge and wrenching him around to wait beside the canal while the rout of men fled down the lane and the bull thundered behind them.

  She rushed Scrub back onto the bridge and leaped down by the crank. The wreck of the litter hung half over the railings and something was flopping in the water below her, but she hadn’t time to look. She snapped the locks up and began to turn the handle. The bull was snorting in the middle of the lane while the men struggled through hedges. One man lay still in the middle of the road, and the legs of another wriggled in a thorny gap. She cranked on, and suddenly found that the handle would turn no more. The bridge was open, and pat on time Heartsease came churning through.

  “Look out!” yelled Jonathan from the wheelhouse, pointing up the road.

  She looked over her shoulder. The bull had turned. Beyond it two men with spears hesitated by gaps in the hedges. The bull snorted, shook its head, lowered its
horns and was surging back toward her; and the men behind it were coming in her direction too.

  “I’ll wait for you,” shouted Jonathan. Margaret swung onto Scrub’s back and skipped him from the end of the bridge onto the little path that ran up beyond the deserted cottage where the bridgekeeper had lived. Forty yards further up, Heartsease was edging in to the bank, and by the time they reached it, was almost still; without orders Scrub picked his way over the bulwark and stood quivering where Caesar had been. Margaret slipped down and caressed the taut neck while the engine renewed its heavy boom and the smoke rose, puff-puff-puff, from the ridiculous funnel.

  When Scrub had stopped quivering she walked along to the wheelhouse.

  “Father was there,” said Jonathan.

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “I think he got away all right.”

  “There was one man lying in the lane, but his trousers were the wrong color. And somebody fell into the water, I think.”

  “That was Mr. Gordon—I saw him topple. I wish Father hadn’t come.”

  “Perhaps he was going to try and do what he could for us if we were caught.”

  “I hope so.”

  “How long must we wait for Tim and Lucy?”

  “I’ll pull in here. Marge, you were quite right—I couldn’t have managed that, not possibly. Now I want to go and tell Otto what happened. Just watch the bridge, in case they get across while I’m below.”

  Splatt Bridge was half a mile astern now, looking almost as small as it had when they had first peered over the bank at the other end of the straight. Margaret tied the hawser to a sapling on the bank and then led Scrub ashore; the pony moved off a few yards and began to browse among the withered grasses, looking for blades with sap in them; then he found a small pool and drank. The bleak wind, scouring the fens and hissing through leafless thickets, seemed to be made of something harder than ordinary air, and colder too. Margaret crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse and watched the men on the bridge.

  They were bending at the rails, and at first Margaret thought they were trying to fathom the workings of the crank; but they moved, and she saw they were busy with something in the water.

  A hoof clopped on stone; peeking around the wheelhouse she saw Lucy leading Caesar out of the meadow on their left, with Tim walking beside her.

  “Did you kill him?” said Lucy, her voice almost a whisper.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Gordon. I saw him fall in.”

  “Ah, please God no!” cried Margaret. Lucy smiled at her—the same smile as she sometimes watched Tim with.

  “Aye,” she said. “Best dead, but not when one of us has to be killing him. Shall we be sailing on now?”

  “As soon as possible, I think,” said Margaret.

  But nothing would make Caesar go aboard the tug again, not though Scrub stepped daintily on and off a dozen times. After Jonathan had tugged and bullied, after Margaret had flattered and coaxed, they decided to leave him.

  “Perhaps he’ll follow us,” said Jonathan.

  “Perhaps,” said Margaret. “Anyway the winter’s over, and he’ll be all right. Nothing the weather can do can hurt a pony—that’s what the old stableboy told me.”

  “Only four more bridges,” said Jonathan with a slight change of voice which made Margaret realize that he’d only been pretending to worry about Caesar to keep her happy—left to himself he’d have abandoned his pony long before.

  “One of them’s in Purton,” said Margaret, “and there’s people living there.”

  “Two on the map,” said Jonathan.

  “I only remember one.”

  “Well, you’d best get right ahead and scout. It’s four miles yet, and round a bend. If we have to, we’ll stop the engine and let Scrub tow us through.”

  “Do you think they’d allow us to open the bridges if we told them our story?”

  “Let’s hope.”

  Heartsease, as if in triumph over the battle of Splatt Bridge, spouted her largest and nastiest plume of smoke when she restarted. Scrub cantered easily down the tow-path, quite rested from his battle with the bull. The first gate moved like the others, but the second, in the middle of a huge emptiness with only the white spire of Slimbridge Church to notch the horizon, was stuck. In the end Jonathan had to ram it open, backing Heartsease off and charging a dozen times with fenders over the bow before something in the structure gave way with a sharp crack. Then Tim and she together just managed to wind the opening section around so that the tug could go through. It seemed too much work to shut it again, so Jonathan ferried them across to the towpath.

  “I didn’t enjoy that at all,” he said. “Purton’s about two miles on now. You get well ahead and see what’s best, and I’ll wait half a mile out until you come back—if I’ve got the contours right there’s a little hill which will screen us.”

  So there was a long, easy canter, dead level, with Scrub’s hooves knocking out the rhythm of rapid travel. The estuary gleamed wide on her right, at about half-tide—so if it was ebbing they’d have a dangerously long nine hours to wait before high tide, and if it was flooding they’d have a bare three. Three seemed nothing like enough to be sure of finding out how the lock worked, but quite long enough for angry men to come swarming after them.

  Scrub suddenly became bored with hurrying when they were almost at the last bend and slowed to a shambling walk, so Margaret dismounted and led him along the tow-path. She’d have liked to leave him to rest and browse while she went on alone to explore, but she hadn’t quite the courage to go among dangerous strangers without her means of escape—Scrub could gallop faster than the angriest man in England could run. The first bridge was open, which was why she hadn’t remembered it, but the second was shut. Worse still, a fishing rod was lashed to the further railings, its float motionless on the gray water, and that meant that someone must be watching the bridge. But at least the locking-bar on her end was open. She led Scrub across, peering over hedges on either side of the street.

  He was in the garden of the first house on the right, a fat lump of a man lying almost on his back in a cane chair, wrapped in blankets and coats against the bitter wind. A straw hat covered most of his face, so that Margaret couldn’t tell whether he was watching the float through a gap in his fence, or listening for the bell at the end of the rod, or sleeping.

  “Good morning,” she called—softly, so as not to break his precious sleep, if he was asleep.

  The hat was brushed back by a mottled hand, and an angry blue eye peered at her from above a purple cheekbone, but he said nothing.

  “You’re a long way from your rod,” said Margaret cheerfully.

  “Three seconds,” the man grunted, and shoved his hat forward.

  Margaret felt sick. He was much too big and much too close—it took forty seconds to open a bridge, even if it moved easily. She walked back over the bridge but stopped close by the handle.

  “Lame?” she said, as if she was talking to a baby. “Oh, you are a big softy—let me have a look. Why, it’s only a tiny pebble. There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

  Scrub was not a good actor; anyone actually watching could have seen how puzzled he was to have a perfectly sound hoof lifted up, peered into, poked at and put down again. While she was kneeling Margaret flipped the locking piece of the bridge over, and as she rose she gave the handle a single turn, trusting the fidgeting hooves to drown the noise, to see whether it would move at all. It did, and at the far end she could see the crack in the film of dried mud which showed where the join had begun to part. Then she mounted and rode slowly up the canal and told Jonathan what she had seen and done.

  “Three seconds is useless,” he said. “We’ll have to lure him away. Are there a lot of other people in the village?”

  “I didn’t see any, but I think there must be—all the gardens are dug and weeded.”

  “Probably they’re having dinner. If you rode back in a frenzy and said there was something wicked coming down th
e canal but you could only see it properly from the other bridge, he’d run up there and you’d have time to get that bridge open. If you time it right, you could point to the smoke.”

  “I’ll try,” said Margaret, though she didn’t feel from the look of the fat fisher’s eye that he would be an easy man to lie to. She cantered back reining Scrub in every few paces and then letting him go again so that he would seem properly fretful when they reached the village. She rehearsed cries—was “Help!” a better beginning or “Please …”?

  No need. The rod was there, but the fat man was gone from his garden.

  She jumped down and started to wind frenziedly at the handle. The end of the bridge had moved a yard when there was a shout behind her and something flicked past her ear, banged on the railing and dropped into the water; she looked around—he was behind the fence, his hand raised to throw another stone. She gave a meaningless shout and, still cranking, pointed with her free hand to the space between rooftops where the familiar black puffs rose before they were scattered by the wind. He wheeled around, stared, ran to the far hedge, stared again, and bellowed. Windows in the village opened with bangs or squeaks.

  “Oi, you girl, you lay off!” he shouted. “We’ll catch un here!”

  Nearly far enough. Margaret cranked on. Pain blazed into her left shoulder. She gave the handle five more turns, dodged sideways and heard the splash of a stone, turned thrice more and ran to where Scrub waited out on the arm of the swinging bridge. Her shoulder was still fiery with pain when she twisted up into the saddle and urged him forward. A stone grazed his quarters and rapped her heel. Startled, he gathered himself and sprang straight out over the waiting water. There was a roaring splash, freezing water blinding her eyes, burning her nostrils, panic. But she’d remembered to lean right forward, and kept her seat as Scrub’s body tilted into its swimming posture. The roaring died, though the deadly cold remained, and they were swimming slantways toward the far bank with Scrub’s head and her own head and shoulders rising above the water but the rest of them covered from the old man’s stones. Then she heard shouts behind, and a tinkle of breaking glass. They’d stopped throwing at her.