The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  He thrust himself up through the gap, diving for the sky. There were no watchers in the valley between the new storey and the old roof.

  He had to rearrange his loose stones to get his elbows on the wall; the chisel, unsettled by this joggling, began to slide out, then clanged down to the flagstones just as he jerked upwards, wondering whether he could make it without using the other chisel for a second step. The panic at lost support gave his arms a moment of strength and before the metal had stopped ringing he was barking his belly on the masonry. He threshed with his legs behind him and unsettled more masonry from the arch—hell, someone would be bound to hear! The jarring and booming didn’t stop as he wriggled round sideways to lie full length along the supporting wall. He turned to look.

  Piece by piece the whole vault over his cell was giving way, one stone falling to loose another. He stared appalled at the mess and ruin, as small Jamie had stared appalled at the fragments of the big purple vase that lay in the brass fender when he’d clambered on to the piano stool to look at his face in the mirror over the mantelpiece and count his chicken-pox spots. All that painful work in dust-smoking ruin. Something groaned in sympathy beside him, and he saw the new wall creak open. In a desperate baboon crouch he scuttered down the valley by the old roof. Fresh booming rose behind him.

  He peered down over the edge beyond Patience’s surgery, still half certain that somewhere he’d find Hope in ambush. Nothing but whistling grass, and beyond that the undulating heather.

  He hung feet first. The tiles were clattering off the roof, and the wall now visibly bulging. With a roar like surf it slid down, filling the crater where the cell had been. Above it a bare beam projected, like God’s finger in the cartoonist’s convention, accusing. He dropped. Ouch! Little toe broken? No, only abused.

  Of course. With the balancing thrust of his arch removed, the thrust of the next-door arch had shoved the whole wall inwards. Crippen, with a bit of luck they’d think he was under the rubble, judged by God. He put up his hood for extra camouflage and found that his sweat had brought out the garlic-smell with overpowering pungency; it was like sitting among labourers on the Metro. Bent double, he floundered towards the low horizon. No shouts rose as he scuttered across the skyline. He flopped into the heather and lay panting. Twelve, twelve-thirty, bit before one … say two o’clock now. An hour before Sir Francis was due at the Macdonalds’ bothie. Carefully he peeked above the heather and looked back, half surprised to see that the tower had not come wobbling down in a chain reaction set off by the removal of that sliver of stone.

  An unfamiliar area of his consciousness was reproaching him, amid all the furious chaos of pain and action, for not having noticed a less dramatically changed sensation. The moment he paid attention to it he discovered that the skin of his belly was no longer being pricked by the corners of Sir Francis’s folded note—his written authority for all this derring-do. It must have fallen out from the elastic of his pants as he scrambled from the cell—if they dug for him and found it, they’d know he knew they were murderers.

  All the same he felt strangely relieved to be acting again on no higher authority than his own conscience.

  Back there, too, lay his other belongings. He must have scampered within ten feet of them. Police-card and wallet. Shoes and trousers.

  7

  He had forgotten about Rita.

  There she was, foreshortened, kneeling on the floor of the quarry and knocking weak-wristedly with chisel and log at a faintly cuboid boulder. If his reactions had been actors inside the Little Theatre of his skull, their dialogue would have been written like this:

  PIBBLE I Poor kid!

  together

  PIBBLE II Bloody nuisance!

  PIBBLE III (slow-thinking, as usual): That means there’s a Virtue about, not counting Love! Tolerance and his damned valve-brothers.

  She knelt with her back to him, but the lissom figure was recognisable, and the shining black hair, and the earnest ineffectualness. He lay on the lip of the quarry, too far along to see the launch or the quay; his heart was still knocking like an ill-adjusted diesel as he peered for a climbable route down that wouldn’t bring him in sight of the quarry. So used was he now to the inert grammar of granite and heather that the intrusion of two humans and a dog confused him: he’d need ten minutes start, roughly, to get to the cottage. The odds on getting clear out of the harbour with Truth were sharply lowered. Rita was in an even worse case than he was for scurrying through the island’s knee-high rubber shrubbery.

  The stone-cutters had left a flight of stairs, four foot from tread to tread, to his left. He worked his way down without a rattle and stalked up behind the kneeling figure.

  “Countess,” he whispered, “the time of our flight is at hand.”

  She rose in a swirling flow. But the moment she saw him her cheeks lost their blush of romance, her eyes dimmed, her shoulders stooped, and she turned and knelt again to the dismal snicking of tiny chips from her stone. Chink, chink, chink went the chisel.

  “Countess, the boat is ready and cannot wait.”

  “I must cut my die. The stones are my brothers.”

  “I come from my father, the King.”

  “Our Father is King. It is for Him we are building the City.”

  (So Providence had been talking to her in terms of her own Jeffrey Farnol fantasy.)

  “I will cut your die for you, Countess. Chivalry demands no less.”

  As he reached for the chisel she responded, letting go the tool and turning to him again with a heroine’s eagerness. But the moment she actually faced him the fire died.

  “Go away,” she whispered, “or I’ll call for Brother Tolerance and tell him all your snakes.”

  She moved towards the lower lip of the quarry. Pibble snatched at her wrist.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She hesitated, and then watched, biting the back of a knuckle, while he grasped the hem of his habit and pulled it quickly over his head. If he was wrong, if the colour of the stuff wasn’t a trigger for her madness, then he’d have to lay her out. He struggled out of the garlic jungle and stood before her like an advertisement for Officer’s Woollen Underwear from an Army and Navy Stores Catalogue before world wars had been thought of.

  “My Prince!” she cried, and flung to him, thin arms grappling round his weary neck, soft lips sucking at his face in crazed kisses.

  “Keep chopping, sweetie,” sang a tenor voice from the quay. The wind carried it, but with luck had thinned Rita’s cry to a bird-call; Pibble ducked out of her clutch, picked up the tools and renewed the chink-chink-chink. With his head he motioned her to kneel beside him.

  “Your Highness,” she whispered, “forgive me. I did not know you in your disguise.”

  “My father is disguised also. Will you carry a message to him?”

  “I will treasure it in my heart,” she breathed.

  “You will know him because he is very old, and hairy. It is part of his disguise. Go through the heather to the cottage which lies under the headland at the north end of the island—” he pointed “—and either you’ll find him there or else he’ll be expected soon. Soon expected, I mean. The women in the cottage do not speak our tongue. My father may pretend madness, but tell him that I follow you, with all speed. Speak of me by the name I use when in hiding—James Pibble.”

  “James Pibble!” she whispered, with a gesture of courtly amusement. “How too delicious!”

  “Go now,” said Pibble. “Keep the wind to your left and try not to be seen from the, er, castle. You can climb the cliff there.”

  He pointed to the blocks by which he had clambered down. She sped across the quarry floor, turned and waved with gay bravado, and clambered lightly to the top. Pibble, watching while he clinked at random at the boulder, was interested to see how cunningly she slid over the skyline. He tried to remember that long-ago course in
abnormal psychology: should you, in Braybrook’s words, answer a fool according to his folly? Or was the next verse of the Book of Proverbs, which gives precisely the opposite advice, more relevant? Was he making her madness better, or helping her to wallow further into it? Would her fantasy sustain her slight strength as far as the cottage? It was uncanny to be able to play on her aberrations like that, and nastily pleasurable—Pibble realised why Braybrook hadn’t minded the moneyed striplings calling him “God”.

  He picked up a stone he could carry one-handed and, clinking at it spasmodically with the chisel, crept to the edge of the quarry.

  The pilot was busy with his engines. The port one seemed finished, but judging by the pieces on the deck there was still work to be done on the starboard one. Hell! There was no point in trying to steal Truth now. He wasn’t mechanic enough to finish putting a big motor like that together. But the pilot was; even if they got away in the Macdonalds’ boat, a crew of monk-thugs could come hurtling after them.

  He clinked his way back to Rita’s boulder and knapped the best-formed corner off it with a dozen solid blows. He was cutting anti-dice—a notion which gave him strength to demolish another protuberance which might stop the thing from rolling. When it was off he trundled the boulder towards the chute and bashed away at the corners on its other side. The sweat in his woollens was evaporating, chilling him in the steady wind. He picked up his habit, then put it down again as his nostrils caught the reek of it. Where was Brother Love? The brown habits had smelt of mint, the orange one of nothing much and the green ones of garlic; and the Great Dane had first made friends with him in the colour-obliterating night, after sniffing deliberately at his chest.

  Clink, clink, clink. Tumble stone again. It was neither round nor cuboid now, and trundled fairly well. Knock that corner off. Tumble again. Five minutes since Rita left, say. He left the boulder at the top of the chute and scuttled back across the quarry floor to where the last big bite out of the hillside had spilt a scree of rubble. God seemed to have abetted the monks in their madness by giving them an island whose rock-base was already fissured into rectangular sections; Pibble had to hunt to find two roughly round stones, about the size of a man’s skull. He carried them back to the top of the chute one by one, clinking at them with the chisel as he went. Ah well, might as well start now. Either the pilot would come up and fight him, which would be nasty, or he’d run back to the buildings for help, which would give Pibble ten minutes’ start—more if they didn’t guess at once where he’d gone. If he was dead lucky he’d be out of the quarry with the job done, before the pilot came up, and they’d think Rita was the villain, with him buried under the chaos back at the buildings.

  He trundled Rita’s boulder the last two feet to the lip of the chute and stared at slope and angles for the last time before he committed himself: there’d be no chance, surely, of it bouncing so high from the quay that it would clear the transom and squash the kneeling man. Odds were it would smash into the stern or batter the propellers. He gave the rock a heave to set it rolling.

  The chute boomed. Tolerance looked over his shoulder and shouted. The boulder bounced and bounced again, and all the timber thundered. It hit the cobbles of the quay with a sharp crack, but landed on a corner and spun sideways, in an off-break, bouncing high and curving down to clip the corner of Truth’s stern, making the whole boat plunge at its moorings like a tethered mule, before falling into the harbour with an oddly undramatic splash.

  As Pibble picked up his second boulder and started it down the chute the pilot was running for the gangway. This stone was smaller and went down with a different motion, leaping high where the flexing of the bottom planks sprung back beneath its weight. Pibble bent for his third stone, and straightened in time to see the pilot come hurling round the corner of the quay as the second one reached the bottom. It looked as if it would run true for the port engine, but the pilot, like a full back desperately defending a goal-line behind a sprawling keeper, thrust one brown-swathed knee into the path of the stone. After the thunder of its bounding down the timber the noise it made as it crushed his legbones was a momentary light pattering. He flung up his arms as he fell, shouting. Not a scream—a word. “Love!”

  The stone, unhindered by the pitiful obstacle of flesh, crunched into the engine with a tearing clang. Pibble took his last missile off the chute, tossed his habit down to the quay, and started to work his way down the splintered timber, gripping the sides with his hands and shuffling his feet six inches at a time down the steep pitch. The man at the bottom lay still, his left arm dangling over the quayside, his head on the verge. The dog, come from nowhere as silent as nightfall, stood above him, licking his face with slow, tender strokes. They made a pathetic group, as though Landseer had posed them for an attempt to cash in on the Oxford Movement.

  Pibble began to skirt the pair on his way to the boat, but stopped when he saw how dangerously close Tolerance lay to the edge. One groaning move as he came to would pitch him fatally over. He walked firmly towards the pair. The dog looked up.

  “It’s OK, Love,” said Pibble quietly.

  The dog stood to one side, its tail not really wagging but twitching slightly with relief of having a human to take responsibility for an event outside its training. Pibble lifted Tolerance by the shoulders and pulled him a few feet towards safety. The effort made him realise how much of his middle-aged strength was spent. Watched by the dog he fetched his habit from below the cliffs and spread it across the body as a slight guard against the killing chill of shock.

  Love’s hackles rose. He padded stiffly in and straddled the unconscious man. Pibble realised his mistake and darted in to whisk the habit away. The creamy teeth bared in a deep, purring snarl and the mask slashed wickedly round. Pibble backed off, walked along the quay and up the gangway, picked up the cylinder head from the deck and threw it into the harbour. As he passed the man and the dog on his way back to the helicopter shed, the pilot opened his eyes.

  “Oi, Love, have a good kip then? Lemme get up, mate.” Speaking to the dog his accent was unaffected; garage, not stage. The dog snarled.

  “Oi, Love, it’s me! Tolly! Where’s that sod of a copper, then?”

  The snarl deepened.

  “Cut it out, mate! I’ve hurt my leg.”

  Neither of them seemed to notice as Pibble slipped past. The door of the shed was held by a thick, looped chain, fastened with a newish padlock. He’d planned to remove a distributor-arm, if he could find it, so that only he could make the gadget fly, but with the door locked and the pilot out of action it wasn’t possible or necessary. Crippen, if only all decisions were as clear-cut! He climbed awkwardly up the chute, scared of every splinter. The dog’s attitude had changed, subtly. Tolerance was still talking, and the coaxing murmur of his voice droned up on the big wind.

  Love was puzzled already. It wouldn’t be long before Tolerance—supposing he didn’t faint with pain—chatted him out of his Pavlov-induced savagery, or else worked out what had happened to change his nature and twitched off the green habit to expose the mint-smelling, dog-enchanting cloth below.

  Pibble struggled up the ogrish staircase he’d descended. It was like dream gymnastics, with all limbs lolling and all holds wrong. His hurts were badgering him again for sympathy and comfort. At last he rolled over the skyline and crawled down among the scattered boulders. The buildings were visible from this slight rise. He could see a figure or two on the vault which led to his shattered cell. One pointed, but inwards. They had their backs to him. He scampered down the slope, thinking how conspicuous a running man in woollen underwear must be amid the grey grasses or the russet and purple heather. From lower in the dip only the top of the tower still showed, and Braybrook didn’t seem to have set a watcher there—he’d be all right if he kept as far as possible to the hollows, though it would take him longer then to reach the doubtful haven of the Macdonalds’ cottage. If only the Community had kept sheep, h
e could have passed from a distance as just one more woolly object on the landscape, browsing erratically north.

  He walked on, stepping high like a dressage horse. The dip he was in curled away eastwards until he had to edge up the left-hand slope, glancing over his shoulder every few paces to see whether the buildings were in sight again. The tower rose higher each time, sinister but untenanted. As soon as the first roofs showed he dropped to his baboon posture and lurched on. Soon he had to go on hands and knees, then on his belly to wriggle over the crest through the shielding heather. His breath shrilled in his throat, but he went down the far side in a wallowing gallop, tripping twice to tumble into springy heather.

  This side of the island was a series of ridges and valleys; walking the other way that morning he had been aware of them only in the graph-curve of the cliff-tops; now he found how far they ran inland. Every two hundred yards he had to repeat the tiresome and tiring series of gaits from valley to ridge to valley: stride, crouch, crawl, wriggle, gallop. One valley contained a bog which he’d missed on his route along the cliff—black, acid, and stinking-sweet. He squelched heedlessly in before remembering tales of bogs that had swallowed wagon-trains, but the ooze never rose above his ankles. Even while he was wriggling over the next ridge the slime of it clung, strangely refreshing, to his feet.