“What’s that?”
“Hounds. Hunting. I’ve heard them before.”
His mind flickered for an instant to the dog that had bayed on the banks of Beaulieu estuary, but whose cry had gone unanswered.
“What on earth are they hunting at this time of night?”
“Us.”
Yes, possibly. The village of Baydon might have come swarming after them, like a hive of pestered bees. More likely the man with hawk had sent a messenger to Hunger-ford and got a thorough pursuit organized. If he was important enough he could have commandeered fresh horses, fresh hounds even, all the way up. It wasn’t all that distance.
“How far away are they? What time is it?”
Sally looked at the stars for a moment.
“Between three and four. I don’t think they’re as far off as they sound.”
She was right. The hound cry modulated to a recognizable baying, only just up the road, a noise whose hysterical yelping note told that the dogs had scented their presence and not just their trail. The best bet was to start on the magneto: he switched on and flicked the advance and retard lever up and down. Too fast. He took it more slowly and the engine hummed alive. As he moved off there was a sudden biting pain in his right thumb. The damn string. He declutched and tugged. No go. He leaned over and tried to bite the taut cord free, but achieved nothing more than saliva-covered string, as strong as ever. Suddenly the cord gave and something bonked into the bodywork beside his head—Sally had slashed the cord through with the sickle. The hounds sounded as if they were almost on them as Geoffrey eased the car over the loose rubble of the old road, jerked up onto the newer tarmac and accelerated downhill. The white dust of the road (limestone here) made the way easy to see under a large moon. They whined down the incline and curved into a long straight, overhung with beeches on the left and with a bare, brute hill shouldering out the stars on the other side. The surface was almost unpocked, and Geoffrey did fifty for six miles on end.
“Jeff! Jeff! You must slow down. I can’t read the map in the dark at this speed. We’ve got to turn off somewhere along here and there’s a stream just before. It may be another gate. No, it wasn’t—that must have been it. Now we turn right in half a mile and then left almost at once, and then—oh, I see, you’ve only done that to get round Stratton St. Margaret. It’s awfully wiggly. Couldn’t we go straight through at this time of night?”
They did, the exhaust calling throatily off the brick walls down the long street. Half the roofs showed starlight through them.
“Right here! Right!”
He only just got the car around onto the A361.
“I thought you said straight through.”
“Well, it’s straighter than going round, anyway. I’m sorry. We turn left in about three miles. I think I’ll be able to see soon without the torch. Bother. We could have gone straight through and branched off later. It would have saved us a lot of wiggling.”
“Never mind. If that’s the main road to Cirencester there’s probably quite a bit of stuff on it in the early hours—folk going to market and so on. I hope it gets lighter soon.”
It did. The gray bars in the east infected the whole sky. The stars sickened. For about five minutes, while his eyes were adjusting to their proper function, he drove through a kind of mist which was really inside his own mind, because he couldn’t decide how far down the road he could really see. Then it was morning, smelling of green grass sappy with dew. They breakfasted early, before the dew could clear and the haymakers would be about with their forks and scythes. Geoffrey filled the radiator from a cattle trough, still a bit shaken by the distance the hunt had managed to cover (assuming that it came from Hungerford—and he was sure it did—he was obsessed by the small man on the big horse with a hawk on his wrist) in seven hours or so. He got out the map and did sums. They’d done about twenty miles between Inkpen Beacon and stopping for the night, and roughly the same again this morning. At that rate the hunt, if it kept going, would be about twelve miles behind now. Allow an hour for breakfast, and it would be six miles—say four for safety. That should be okay.
But they must have spotted the general direction the Rolls was going by now, and they might send messengers posting up the main road to Cirencester and Cheltenham. If they took it seriously enough (and, considering Weymouth Bay and the fuss since the Rolls had been stolen and everything, there was no reason why they shouldn’t), they might then send more messengers along the main roads radiating from those towns, ordering a watch to be kept. Obviously all the bridges west of Gloucester would be closely guarded. The first danger point would be crossing the Fosse Way, a few miles on; then the A40 and A436. Besides, once people were about to mark their passage, there’d be messages and rumors streaming into the towns from the farmland, and the hunt would know which way its quarry had passed. Better not allow an hour for breakfast, really. They might be able to have a bit of a rest when they were up beyond Winchcombe and had turned sharply left.
Perhaps it was just luck, or perhaps it was because they’d kept going and left the chase miles behind, but they had almost no trouble all morning except for shaken fists and thrown stones. They motored in flawless summer between the walled fields of the Cotswolds, dipping into steep valleys where loud streams drove booming waterwheels, or where gold-gray wool towns throve in the sudden prosperity which the defeat of the machine had brought back from the North. Then up, hairpinning through hangers of beeches, where herds of pigs grunted after roots, watched by small boys in smocks. Or along molded uplands where huge flocks of sheep nibbled at fields still rich from the forced harvests of six years back.
The only real excitement came from such a flock, which they met not far from Sudeley Castle in a bare lane with well-kept walls rising five feet on either side. The road foamed with fleeces for hundreds of yards, and beyond they could see a group of blue-clad drovers beginning to gesticulate at the sight of the car. There was time to hesitate. Geoffrey thought for a moment of plowing on through a carnage of mutton, but realized he’d bog down almost at once.
“How far have I got to go round if we go back, Sal?”
“Miles.”
“Oh well, let’s see what happens.”
He pulled over as far to the left as he could, and then swung right. This wasn’t going to be like a gate. He slowed below a walking speed before the ram touched the wall. The whole car groaned, jarred and stopped, wheels spinning. He backed and charged the same spot, and this time saw the top of the wall waver. Third time it gave, and the Rolls heaved itself through the gap, one wheel at a time because of the angle, like a cow getting over a fence. The grass on the other side was almost as smooth as a football field, and they fetched a wide circuit around the flock. A flotilla of sheepdogs hurled across the green and escorted them, yelping, to a flimsy gate which the ram smashed through without trouble. Soon after he had settled to the road again he realized that the car did not feel itself.
“Lean out and look at the wheels, Sal.”
“There’s something wrong with this one on my side at the back. It’s all squidgy.”
He could see nothing through the wake of dust, but when he stopped and listened there seemed to be no sound of pursuit. He climbed down, leaving the engine running, and looked at the right rear wheel. The tire was flat, with a big flap of rubber hanging away from the battered rim. When he was halfway through changing it there was a snarling scurry in the road and a black sheepdog sprang toward him, teeth bared. He lashed at it with the wrench, and it backed off and came again. He lashed again, and again it retreated. As it darted in for the third time a stone caught it square on the side of the jaw and it flounced, whining, out of range.
“I think I can keep it off for a bit, Jeff.”
“Great. My, you’re a good shot, Sal. Where did you learn that?”
“Scaring rooks.”
When he had two nuts on she spoke again.
“There’s someone coming down the road, and I think I saw a man running
behind the wall over there. Something blue went past the gate at the other side of the field.”
He hurriedly screwed on a third nut, hoping that that would be enough to hold for a few miles, and lowered the clumsy jack. As he drove off half a dozen men appeared from behind walls to left and right, like players at the end of a game of hide-and-seek. Heaven knows what kind of an ambush they’d been planning, given five minutes more. He stopped and put the remaining nuts on just before they turned left on the A438. They banged through another toll-gate, over the Avon and climbed the embankment onto the M5 motorway near a place called Ripple. The great highway was a wound of barren cement through the green, lush pastures. It was deserted. Where they joined it was a strange area, a black, charred circle covering both lanes. Two miles later they came to another.
Chapter 7
THE STORM
“Funny,” said Geoffrey. “It looks as if someone had been lighting a series of enormous bonfires down here. D’you think they’ve been trying to burn the motorway?”
“It isn’t quite like bonfires—it’s too clean. There’s always bits and bobs of ends of stick left around a bonfire, and the ash doesn’t blow away either, not all of it. It makes itself into a sticky gray lump. It is funny. I suppose they could have come and swept it up.”
There was something else funny too. Geoffrey felt it in a nook of his mind as being wrong, out of key with the solid sunshine of the day. There was a flaw in the weather ahead of them, a knot in the smooth grain of the sky. Nothing to see, unless it lay hidden beyond the hills of the Welsh border. It worried him, so much so that he kept glancing at the horizon and almost drove headlong into a vast pit in the road where a bridge had once carried the motorway but was now a scrawl of rusted and blackened iron. He let the weight of the car take them down the embankment and stopped in the lower road to look at the wreckage.
“It must have been a bomb did that, Sal.”
“They don’t have bombs. It’s been burned, hasn’t it?”
Very odd. The destruction didn’t look as if it had been done by people at all. He felt thoroughly uneasy as he drove up the far embankment. The flaw in the weather was insistent now, either stronger or closer—he thought he could see a change in the hue of the air just north of one of the hills on the western horizon. Another three miles and he was sure. Soon the shape of the hammerheaded cloud that brings thunder was unmistakable. Odd to see one of them, all alone, but nice to know what it was that had been worrying him. He drove on, relieved.
But soon his relief was replaced by a greater unease. Thunderclouds didn’t move like that—they planed slowly across the countryside in straight lines, diffusing energy, grumbling, like an advance of arthritic colonels. This one was compact, purposeful, sweeping eastward down a single corridor of wind between the still regions of summer air. He increased his speed to get out of its path, the Rolls exulting up to seventy. At this speed they’d be clear of the cloud’s track in no time.
Or would they? He slacked off and gazed at the hills again. The corridor must be curved, for the cloud was still advancing toward them, moving at the pace of a gale. A few miles more and there was no doubt about it—the thing was aimed at the Rolls, following as a homing missile follows its target. He stopped the car.
“Out you get, Sal, and up the bank. Two can play at that game.”
He followed her slowly through the clinging weeds, gathering his strength, resting his mind. The motorway ran here through a deep cutting, from whose top he could see for some distance. He unrolled his jersey, took out the robe and put it on. Then he sat beside Sally and stared at the charging cloud, blue-black beneath and white with reflected sunshine through its two miles of height. The thing to do was nudge it aside. Wind from the southwest.
The island drowses with heat. The hills are baked. The mown hayfields drink sun. The woods breathe warmth. And over them all lies air, air twice heated, first as the jostling sunbeams plunge down, again as the purring earth gives back the warmth it cannot drink. Isle-wide the air swells with sunlight, lightening as it swells, rising as it lightens, sucking in more air beneath it, cold from the kiss of the Atlantic. Now it comes, broad-fronted over the Marches, comes now,
here,
now,
here,
now in this darkness, in this up-and-down roaring of black, rubbing itself together, three miles high, generating giant forces, poised, ready, smiting down with a million million volts on to the thing it was aimed at.…
Mastered, overwhelmed, Geoffrey crumpled into a gold shambles. Sally alone, thumbs uselessly in her ears, watched the storm heave its bolts of bellowing light down on the Rolls. The air stank with ozone. The clay of the bank vibrated like a bass string. She rolled onto her belly, buried her face in the grasses and screamed.
The noise was gone, except inside her skull. Dully she sat up and looked down the embankment at the motorway. The Rolls, charred and twisted, lay in the center of a circle of blackened cement like the others she had seen. Tires and upholstery smoked, the stench of burned rubber, leather and horsehair reeking up the bank on the remains of Geoffrey’s wind. The wind had carried the cloud away, appeased. Her brother lay beside her on his back, with bruise-blue lips and cheeks the color of whitewash. She thought he was dead until she slid her hand under the robe and felt the movement of his breathing.
When a person faints you keep him warm and give him sweet tea. She must get his jersey on, but not over the robe in case someone came by. It was like trying to dress a huge lead doll, and took ages. But it was three hours more before he woke.
Geoffrey came to to the sound of voices. There seemed to be several people about. He kept his eyes shut for the moment.
“You’m sure he baint dead, missie?”
“Yes,” said Sally. “You can see. His face is the proper color now.”
“Ah, he’s a brave one to call a storm like that. I never seed our own weatherman do the like, not living so near the Necromancer as we be. It’s surely taxed un.”
“It always does,” said a voice like a parson’s. “You say he’s a bit simple, young lady?”
“No, I didn’t. He’s quite as clever as me or you, only he can’t talk and sometimes he looks a bit moony.”
“Did you see no one in the wicked machine then?” asked one of the rustic voices. “We did get word as how there was two demons a-driving of it, spitting sparks and all.”
“They been hunting un,” said another peasant, “all along up from Hungerford way. Lord Willoughby seed un out hawking and give the word. And they damn near caught un last night, I do hear.”
“Only she go so mortal fast.”
“Hello,” said the parsony voice. “I think he’s stirring.”
Geoffrey sat up, groaned and looked about him. There were more people around than he’d expected, mostly tanned haymakers, but also an oldish man in a long blue cloak with an amber pendant around his neck. Down on the concrete the superb car reproached him with smoldering, stinking wreckage. He smiled at it, what he hoped was a pleased, idiot smile.
“Yes, Jeff,” cooed Sal. “You did that. You are a clever boy.” He stood up and shifted from foot to foot as the people stared at him. “Please,” said Sally, “could you all go away? I don’t want him to have one of his fits. It’s all right, Jeff. It’s all right. Everybody likes you. You’re a good boy.”
Geoffrey sat down and hid his face in his hands.
One of the rustic voices said, “S’pose we better be getting back along of the hayfield then. Sure you be all right, missie? We owe you summat, sort of.”
“No thank you, honestly. We don’t want anything.”
“You get along, chaps; I’ll set them on their road and see that they’re properly treated.” This was the parsony voice. Then there was a diminishing noise of legs swishing through grass, and silence.
“You made a mistake there, young lady. If he’d really made the thunderstorm you’d have asked for money, but of course he didn’t have anything to do with it. H
e might have made that funny little bit of wind from the southwest, but the storm came from the Necromancer, or I’m a Dutchman.”
“I wish you’d go away,” said Sally. “We’re quite all right, really.”
“Come, come, young lady. I have only to go and tell those peasants in the hayfield that I can see what looks like a spot of engine oil on our dumb friend’s trousers, and then where would you be? Can he talk, as a matter of interest?”
“Yes,” said Geoffrey.
“That’s more like it,” said the man in the blue robe, sitting beside them and gazing down the embankment.
“What was it?” he asked. “Something pretty primitive, by the look of it.”
“A 1909 Silver Ghost,” said Geoffrey, nearly crying.
“Dear, dear,” said the man. “What a pity. There can’t be many of those left. And where were you making for?”
Geoffrey peered at the horizon, working out in his mind the curve of the thundercloud’s path in relation to the hills. He pointed.
“Curious,” said the man. “So am I. A pity we have no map. I was coming up from the south when I first sensed the storm, and you were coming from the northeast. We could do some crude triangulation with a map, but the point is academic. It would have saved us a deal of trouble.”
“I have got a map,” said Sally, “but I don’t know how far it goes. I was still holding it when we got out of the car, but I hid it under my frock when we heard people coming.”
“Oh, how perfectly splendid,” said the man. “You stay up on the bank and keep watch, young lady, while my colleague and I do our calculations down here out of sight.”
As he moved down, Geoffrey saw a gold glint beneath the blue robe.
“Are you a weatherman, too?” he asked.
“At your service, dear colleague.”
“Are you the local chap? Did you make the storm?”
“Alas, I am, like yourselves, a wanderer. And alas too, it is beyond even my powers to make such a storm as that—though I should certainly have claimed the credit for it had I arrived on the scene in time, and profited more from it than you did. You are something of a traitor to the guild, dear colleague, refusing fees; but we will mention it no more.”
The Changes Trilogy Page 36
