The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  “Ah,” said the face, “benighted travelers. Yes, yes, I’m sure he would think that proper, as far as one can be sure of anything. Come in. Goodness me, what an extraordinary animal! Is it a dog or a horse? Oh, it’s a pony, according to its lights. Well, well. Come in.”

  The small door swung wide open, so that they could see his whole body. He was a little, bent man, holding a flaming branch which had been soaked in some sort of tar or resin which made it flare in the dark. He wore sweeping velvet robes, trimmed with ermine around the edges; a soft velvet cap, patterned with pearls and gold thread, sloped down the side of his head. Sally led Maddox in, and as Geoffrey stepped over the threshold there was a snarling in the trees and a pack of dark shapes with gleaming eyes came swirling toward the door. The little man pushed it almost shut, poked his head out again and said “Shoo! Shoo! Be off with you! Shoo!”

  He shut the door completely, pushed two large bolts across, swung a huge balanced beam into slots so that it barred the whole gateway and laced several chains into position over it.

  “Nasty brutes,” he said, “but they’re all right if you speak to them firmly. This way. We’ll put your animal into the stables and then we’ll go and see if there’s anything for dinner. I expect you’ll be hungry. Do you know, you’re really our first visitors. I think he doesn’t fancy the idea of people prying around, reporters from the newspapers, you know, which is why he put the wolves there. But benighted travelers is quite different—I think he’ll appreciate that—it’s so romantic, and that’s what he seems to like, as you can see.”

  He waved a vague arm at the colossal tower, and led them into a long shed which leaned against the outer wall. It was crudely partitioned into stalls.

  “Tie him up anywhere,” said the old man, “there ought to be oats in one of those bins, and you can draw water from the well.”

  “Poor old Maddox,” said Sally, looking down the empty length of stables, where black shadows jumped about in the wavering flare of the torch, “I’m afraid you’re going to feel lonely.”

  “Oh, you can’t tell,” said their host. “Really you can’t. Having one pony here might put ideas into his head, and then we’d wake up to find the whole place full of horses, all needing watering and feeding. I don’t think he has any idea of the work involved, keeping a place like this going, but then he doesn’t have to.”

  The bins were all brimming with grain, and there was sweet fresh hay in a barn next door. Geoffrey worked the windlass of the well, and found that the water was only a few feet down. They left Maddox tucking in to a full manger, like a worn traveler who, against all the odds, has finished up at a five-star hotel. As they crossed the courtyard to the keep they realized it was now full night, the sky pied with huge stars and a chill night breeze creeping up the valley. The door to the keep was black oak, a foot thick, tall as a haystack. The old man levered it open with a pointed pole. Geoffrey noticed that it could be barred both inside and out.

  Beyond the door lay a single circular chamber, with a fire in the middle. It was sixty feet from where they stood to the fire, and sixty feet on to the far wall. The fire was big as a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, piled with trunks of trees, throwing orange light and spitting sparks across the rush-strewn paving stones. Around it slept a horde of rangy, woolly dogs, each almost as large as Maddox. The smoke filled the roof beams and made its way out through a hole in the center of the roof, which, Geoffrey realized, high though it seemed, could not have come more than a third of the way up the tower. He wondered what lay above. Around the outside wall of the chamber, ten feet above the floor, ran a wide wooden gallery supported on black oak pillars. It reached up to the roof, with two rows of unglazed windows looking out across the chamber. Beneath the gallery, against the wall, stood a line of flaring torches, like the one the old man carried, in iron brackets. Between them pot-shaped helmets gleamed. On either side of the fire, reaching toward them, ran two long black tables, piled high with great hummocks of food, meat and pastry and fruits, with plates and goblets scattered down their length and low benches ranged beneath the tables. They walked up toward the fire between an avenue of eatables.

  “Oh, splendid!” exclaimed the old man. “Perhaps he heard the gong and decided it was time for a feast. Often he doesn’t think about food for days and days, you know, and then it starts to go bad and I have to throw it out to the wolves—I used to have such a nice little bird table at my own house—and I don’t know which way to turn really I don’t. Now, let’s see. If you sit there, and you there, I’ll sit in the middle and carve. I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name’s Willoughby Furbelow and I’m seneschal of the castle.”

  “I’m Geoffrey Tinker and this is my sister, Sally. It’s very kind of you to put us up.”

  “Not at all, not at all. That’s what I’m here for, I suppose, though it isn’t at all what I intended. Really this place ought to be full of wandering minstrels and chance-come guests and thanes riding in to pay homage and that sort of thing, only they don’t seem to come. Perhaps it’s the wolves that put them off, or else you’re all too busy out there in the big world. I keep trying to tell him he ought to do something about the wolves, but he doesn’t seem very interested and my Latin isn’t very good—I keep having to look things up in the dictionary and I never thought I’d need a grammar when it all started, all those tenses and cases you know I find them very muddling and he does get terribly bored. In his lucid intervals, I mean. Now, this thing here is a boar’s head. Actually there isn’t a lot of meat on it, and it’s a pig to carve (pardon the pun) and though some bits of it are very tasty others aren’t, and besides it seems a pity to spoil it just for the three of us, it looks so splendid doesn’t it? Would you mind if I suggested we had a go at this chicken? You mustn’t mind it looking so yellow. Everything seems to get cooked in saffron, and it really does taste quite nice, though you weary of it after a few years. Which part do you fancy, Miss Trinket, or may I call you Sarah?”

  “Everyone calls me Sally and may I have a wing and some breast, please? There don’t seem to be any potatoes. And what’s that green stuff?”

  “Good King Henry. It’s a weed really, but it’s quite nice, like spinach. I’m afraid they didn’t have any potatoes in his day, any more than they had the fish fingers you’re used to, but there are probably some wurzels down below the salt, if you fancy them. You do realize you’ve got to eat all this in your fingers, like a picnic? I used to have such a nice set of fish knives and forks, with mother-of-pearl handles, which my late wife and I were given for a wedding present. I think I miss them as much as anything. But the bread is very nice when it’s fresh and you can use it for mopping up gravy and things. There. Now, Geoffrey?”

  “Please, may I have a leg? I didn’t understand what you said about lucid intervals.”

  “That’s what I call them, but I doubt if a psychiatrist would agree with me. I don’t mind confessing I’m at a loss which way to turn. Perhaps I should never have started. The result has been very far from what I intended, I promise you. But now … he’s so dangerous … so uncontrollable. So strong, too, of course. I did try to administer sedatives at one point, several years ago now. I thought I might contrive to return him to his previous condition, but he was angry. Very angry indeed. I was terrified. Oh dear, don’t let’s talk about it. You have no idea how powerful he is, really you haven’t. But he built this whole place in a single night, and all the forest too, and the wolves. I often wonder if he interferes with telly reception outside the valley. Just think what he might do if he were really enraged—especially now he’s so much worse than he used to be. Why, he might destroy the whole world. It says so on his stone. Is that enough or would you like a bit of breast too?”

  “That’s fine, thanks,” said Geoffrey. Mr. Furbelow was one of those men who cannot talk and do anything else at the same time, so Geoffrey’s helping had been mangled off somehow between sentences, and then the high, eager, silly voice rambled on. The old man helped h
imself to several slices of breast and both oysters, and then began to worry about drink.

  “Dear me, I don’t know what my late wife would say about Sally drinking wine. She was a pillar of the Abergavenny temperance movement. I had a little chemist’s shop in Abergavenny, you know. That’s what made the whole thing possible. As a chemist, I cannot advise you to drink the water, and though there is mead and ale below the salt, I myself find them very affecting, more so than the wine. I trust you will be moderate.”

  The chicken was delicious, though almost cold. Geoffrey was still hungry when he had finished and helped himself from a salver of small chops, which were easy to eat in his fingers, unlike the Good King Henry, which had to be scooped up on pieces of dark soft bread. His knife was desperately sharp steel, with a horn handle bound with silver. His plate seemed to be gold, and so did the goblet from which he drank the sweet cough-syrupy wine. All the while Mr. Furbelow talked, at first making mysterious references to the “he” who owned the tower and provided the feast, and then, as he filled his own goblet several times more, about the old days in Abergavenny, and a famous trip he and his wife had made in the summer of 1969 to the Costa Brava. It took him a long time to finish his chicken. At last he pushed his plate back, reached for a clean one from the far side of the table and pointed with his knife at an enormous arrangement of pastry, shaped like a castle, with little pastry soldiers marching about on top of it.

  “You could have some of that, if you liked, but you never know what you’ll find inside it. If you fancy a sweet there might be some wild strawberries in that bowl just up there beyond the peacock, Sally dear. Ah, splendid. And fresh cream too. No sugar of course. Now you must tell me something about yourselves. I seem to have done all the talking.”

  This had been worrying Geoffrey. He didn’t know what a seneschal would feel about a traveling leech’s dependents. Would he come over snobbish, and send them down below the salt? Or would the chemist from Abergavenny be impressed by the magical title of Doctor?

  “Honestly,” he said, “there isn’t much to say about us. We’re orphans, and we were traveling north with our guardian, who is a leech, when he had to hurry on and help someone have a baby, a lord’s wife, I think, and he told us where to meet him but we made a mistake and got lost, and when we heard the wolves in the forest we ran here.”

  “Dear me,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I’m afraid your guardian will be worrying about you.”

  Sally, her mouth full of strawberries, said sulkily, “I don’t like our guardian. I think he’d be glad if we were eaten by wolves.”

  “Oh, Sally, he’s been awfully kind to us.” (Geoffrey hoped he didn’t sound as though he meant it.)

  “You said yourself that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the estate. I bet you he doesn’t even try to look for us.”

  “What’s a leech?” said Mr. Furbelow.

  “A doctor.”

  “Do you mean,” said Mr. Furbelow, “that this”—he waved a vague hand at the tower and the hounds and the Dark Ages appurtenances—“goes on outside the valley?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Geoffrey. “All over England. Didn’t you know?”

  “I’ve often wondered,” said Mr. Furbelow, “but of course I couldn’t go and see. And how did this doctor come to be your guardian?”

  “He was a friend of Father’s,” said Geoffrey, “and when Dad died he left us in his care, so now we have to go galumphing round the country with him and he treats us like servants. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But it’s true,” said Sally.

  “You poor things,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I don’t know what to do for the best, honestly I don’t. Perhaps you’d better stay here for a bit and keep me company. I’m sure he won’t mind, and I’ll be delighted to have someone to talk to after all these years.”

  “It’s terribly kind of you sir,” said Geoffrey. “I think it would suit us very well. I hope we can do something to help you, but I don’t know what.”

  “Well,” said Sally, “I can speak Latin!”

  Oh, Lord, thought Geoffrey, that’s spoiled everything, just when we were getting on so well. She’s tired and had too much wine, and now she’s said something he can find out isn’t true in no time. Indeed, the old man was peering at Sally with a dotty fierceness, and Geoffrey began to look around for a weapon to clock him with if there was trouble.

  “Die mihi,” said Mr. Furbelow stumblingly, “quid agitis in his montibus.”

  “Benigne,” said Sally. “Magister Carolus, cuius pupilli sumus, medicus notabilis, properabat ad castellum Sudeleianum, qua (ut nuntius ei dixerat) uxor baronis iam iam parturiverit. Nobis imperavit magister—”

  “How marvelous,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I’m afraid I can’t follow you at that speed. Did you say Sudeley Castle? I went there once on a coach trip with my late wife; she enjoyed that sort of outing. Oh dear, it is late. We must talk about this tomorrow. Now it’s really time you were in bed. He might put the torches out suddenly. Perhaps you’d like to share the same room. This castle is a bit frightening for kiddies, I always think.”

  He said the last bit in a noisy whisper to Geoffrey, and then showed them down to the far wall where a staircase, which was really more like a ladder, led up to the gallery. There were several other ladders like it around the hall. Upstairs they found a long, narrow room, with a large window looking out over the hall and a tiny square one cut into the thickness of the wall. Through this they could see the top of the outer wall, and beyond that a section of forest, black in the moonlight, and beyond that the blacker hills. There were no beds in the room, only oak chests, huge feather mattresses like floppy bolsters, and hundreds of fur skins.

  “Where do you sleep?” asked Geoffrey.

  “Oh,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I’ve got a little cottage near the stables which I bought for my late wife. He didn’t change that. I have my things there and I like to keep an eye on them. I do hope you’ll be comfortable. Good night.”

  Before they slept (and in the end they found it was easiest to put the mattresses on the floor—they kept slipping off the chests) Geoffrey said, “How on earth did you pull that off?”

  “Oh, I can speak Latin. Everybody can at our school. You have to speak it all the time, even at meals, and you get whipped if you make a mistake.”

  The furs were warm and clean. In that last daze that comes before sleep drowns you, Geoffrey wondered where the weatherman had got to.

  Chapter 10

  THE DIARY

  Geoffrey couldn’t tell what time he woke, but the shadows on the forest trees made it look as if the sun was quite high already. Sally was still fast asleep, muffled in a yellow fur and breathing with contented snorts. He looked out of the window into the hall and saw that the feast was still there, though the dogs had been at it in places, scattering dishes and pulling the whole boar’s head onto the floor, where two of them wrenched at opposite ends of it. He felt stupid and sick, which might have been the wine, and very stiff, which must have been yesterday’s climbing and running. His clothes were muddy and torn. In one of the chests he found some baggy leggings, with leather thongs to bind them into place, and in another a beautifully soft leather jerkin. There was a belt on the wall, too, carrying a short sword in a bronze scabbard, pierced and patterned with owls and fig leaves. He buckled it around the jerkin and went down into the hall to see if the dogs had left any of the food undefiled.

  They were enormous things, very woolly and smelly, big-boned, a yellowy-gray color. Wolfhounds, he decided. Two of them lurched toward him, snarling, but backed away when he drew his sword. He found that they’d only messed up a tiny amount of the hillocks of food spread down the tables, so he filled a silver tray with fruit and bread and cold chops and looked around for something to drink. The thought of wine or mead or ale made him sick, and after Mr. Furbelow’s warning about the water he decided it would be safer to boil it, if only he could find a pot to put on the fire. He was afraid the gold and silver vess
els might melt, and there didn’t seem to be anything else.

  In the end he found, hanging between two of the torches, a steel helmet with a chain chinstrap and a pointy top. He used his sword to hollow out a nest in the red embers of the fire, settled the helmet into place and poured water in, spilling enough to cause clouds of steam to join the smoke and waver up toward the hole in the roof. It boiled very fast. He hooked it out by the chinstrap and realized that he couldn’t put it down because of the point and he had nothing to pour it into, so he held the whole contraption with one hand while he poured the water from one of the big jugs on to the floor and then wine out of a smaller jug into the big one, and at last he could pour his boiled water into the small jug.

  When he went to put the blackened helmet back in its place he found a new, shiny one already hanging there. Chilly with fright he carried his tray up to the bedchamber and woke Sally to tell her what had happened.

  “He must have done it,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Who? Mr. Furbelow?”

  “Oh, Jeff, don’t be tiresome. I mean the ‘he’ Mr. Furbelow keeps talking about, the one who makes all the food and could get rid of the wolves if he felt like it and might put a lot of horses into the stable to keep poor Maddox company. The Necro man.”

  “I expect you’re right. I just don’t want to think about it. I’ve boiled the water, so it should be all right to drink, but it’s still pretty hot. There might be enough left to wash with. You look a right urchin. I found my clothes in the chests, and it mightn’t be a bad idea if we looked for something for you. I’m sure Mr. Furbelow would like that. He’s got himself some pretty elaborate fancy dress. Though I suppose Latin’s our best bet. What do you think he means about lucid intervals?”

  “I don’t know. It ought to mean clear spaces, that’s what the words mean in Latin. May I have the last chop—you’ve got three and I’ve only got two. Is he mad?”