The Merlin Conspiracy

by Diana Wynne Jones

  I tried singing, like the drunk. But that came out wavering and scared. So I tried to think about something else. I thought about Loggia City. What a crazy system it was, putting the people who did the embroidery right at the top where the sun would kill them. If they all died, the shops would have nothing to sell! I was really glad that Romanov was giving them sunshield spells. It proved that Romanov was a good thing, and I was not making a mistake trying to find him.

  I tried not to think of the way Romanov had despised me.

  I thought about the girl, Roddy, instead. If she hadn’t wanted me to deal with her politics, I’d have made a real effort to get through to her. She was quite something. I kept getting a sort of jolt every time I remembered the way she had stood balanced on that hillside. But she had looked at me as if I was a sort of tool, and I didn’t go for that. And I just couldn’t see myself, not ever, doing anything about Kings and Merlins and suchlike. I’d gone out of my way, after all, not to have anything to do with ruling or rulers. No, that would have to wait for a few years.

  On I went. I was trying to imagine what Roddy would be like in a few years’ time, and getting a bit eager about it, when I noticed that the path had widened out a lot. Everything was just a little lighter, and my feet echoed in a different way.

  Damn! How am I going to know if a path I need goes off to the right? I thought. I got myself to the middle and sort of groped along there with one hand out in front.

  And something groped back at me.

  It sort of dabbed at me, whatever it was, wet and cold and desperate. It groped at my hand and then at my face. I went backward with a shriek and sat down in a puddle. It had felt like a snake. But the thing shrieked and went backward, too. The ground shook under my behind. I sat staring, shaking all over. There was just enough gray light for me to pick out what seemed to be a couple of small trees, with the snake coiling this way and that down from them. I thought I must have walked into a forest.

  “Oh, please!” said the forest—unless it was the snake. “Help me! I’m lost! I’m stuck!”

  “What kind of a snake are you?” I said.

  “I’m not a snake! I’m an elephant!” it said despairingly.

  Elephants that talked now! I thought. But I’d already met a panther that I could understand, so why not? It was all one long, mad dream.

  “It’s more like a nightmare, I think,” the elephant objected. “And I’m not exactly talking. You must be good at picking up four-legged thoughts. Please help me!”

  I could hear its huge feet shuffling and grinding about just in front of me. It was in a bad state, and it probably couldn’t see me any more than I could see it. I was likely to be trodden on any second. I got up quickly. “Okay, okay,” I said out loud. “I’m supposed to help you anyway. Where do you want to go?”

  “Not this way!” it said. “It’s all so dark, and I can’t turn round!”

  It began trumpeting then, earsplitting squeals, and trampling in panic. I was terrified, too. I thought it was going mad.

  “Stop it!” I bellowed. “Shut up this moment or I won’t help you!”

  It shut up almost at once. I got the feeling it was used to humans yelling at it. “Sorry,” it said meekly.

  “That’s better,” I said. “Getting in a panic in this place just makes it worse. Where are you from? How did you get here?”

  “I was in the circus, outside the big top,” it said, “waiting for my turn to go on, when all of a sudden there was this great whirling wind. All the tents came down or blew away, and people were screaming. I’m afraid I screamed, too, and ran away. I found a path that looked safe, and I ran and ran, until it all got too narrow and …” It was starting to trample and puff.

  “Steady, steady!” I said. “What did they call you in your circus?”

  The trampling stopped. “Mini,” the elephant admitted, sounding ashamed.

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Short for Pudmini,” the elephant said haughtily. “I’m a lady elephant.”

  “And I’m a gentleman human,” I said, “and how I got here’s a long story. My name’s Nick—short for Nichothodes, if you want to know—and I’m on my way to see someone called Romanov. He’ll be able to help both of us. So, if you just let me help you turn round …”

  “I can’t turn round!” Mini protested. “It’s not wide enough!”

  “Yes, it is,” I said before she got too hysterical again. “Or I can guide you backward—”

  “I’m not good at going backward!” she said frantically.

  “Then we’ll go forward,” I said, “very steadily and carefully.” I managed to reach up, find her waving trunk, and grab it. “Come along,” I said. I made myself sound really firm, to disguise from both of us that I’d never handled an elephant before and hadn’t a clue how you did it. “Forward carefully,” I said, just as if I knew.

  Have you ever tried to turn a panic-stricken elephant round in the dark, in a space that is probably too small, which you never saw before anyway? Don’t try it. It’s awful. I’d never have tried it if I’d seen anything else to do. You end up weak at the knees and ready to give up. I kept making soothing noises. Mini shook like an earthquake and squealed that she couldn’t and I was hurting her trunk. I fumbled about and found one of her great thick tusks, but she didn’t like that either.

  “I’ve still got my harness on. Why don’t you take hold of that?” she said.

  I felt about again and found jingly leather somewhere on her huge face. It was all thick and wet and slimy in the rain, but I took hold of it and pulled her confidently sideways. This caused her to stick slantwise across the path. She nearly did go mad then. The noise was horrible. I was going, “Stop it, stop it, stop it! Or I’ll go away and leave you here! Calm down!” and she was going, “Oh, I can’t, I can’t!”

  “Stand still!” I screamed at her. “Where’s the back of you?”

  “Jammed right up against the cliff. I want to kick!”

  “Well, don’t,” I said. “It won’t help. What you need to do now is walk your front feet up the cliff this side until you’re reared up, and then walk your back feet forward away from the cliff behind you. After that, you walk your front feet round to the left, so you come down facing the other way. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know!” she said.

  “You can,” I said.

  I’d never have got her to do it if she hadn’t been brought up to trust humans. She’d been trained to stand on her hind legs, and that helped, too. But she kept losing her sense of direction halfway. I got her reared up twice with no end of rasping and elephant grunting, and twice she came down facing the wrong way. I only just dodged in time. In the end I had to go right up to her and lean hard against her and then keep her going the right way by walking my feet up and round on the cliff beside hers.

  She went round sideways like a house tearing open. There was such a scraping and rending that I was sure she’d broken a tusk at least. Then there was a horrible moment when I was being ground against the cliff by her big, warm side. I was curled into a crouch with my face on my thighs and my knees crunching against rock. I felt her going the wrong way again and tried to uncurl to push her. And then uncurled again as if my life depended on it. Perhaps it did. And she went round at last. She came down quite lightly. Elephants can be pretty nimble when they want. And Mini did want. She was so glad to be loose that she went away down the path at a thundering gallop, while I slid down the cliff and sat in another puddle, quite sure that I’d lost both kneecaps and at least one big toe.

  THREE

  Mini stopped and waited for me about fifty yards on. I could see her enormous ears spreading anxiously against the dim sky as I limped after her.

  “Are you all right? I haven’t hurt you, have I?” She was a thoroughly considerate elephant. When I reached her, she said, “I’d prefer it if you’d take hold of my harness again. I feel safer that way.”

  I think that was considerate, too. I grabbe
d hold gratefully and practically leaned on her as we walked the last part. It turned out not to be far, just time for my knees to stop throbbing and my toe to start behaving normally. By that time we could almost see the crags at each side of the path. Then a moment or so after that, we sort of came down sideways onto the rest of the world and out onto a wet, green slope, where Mini’s feet went suck, suck, suck in the grass. And we were in wonderful, bright, pinkish light.

  Mini went, “Oh! I’ve gone blind in one eye!” and started to panic again.

  Her harness turned out to have been pink and scarlet, with silver decorations. Part of it was that kind of flat hat that goes on top of an elephant’s head, and she had scraped it sideways on the cliff, so that it draped across her eye and one tusk. Her tusks, I was glad to see, had been banded with metal and neither of them had been broken.

  “No, you haven’t gone blind!” I told her. “Put your head down so that I can reach it.”

  She nodded her head down at once. She was really well trained. I hauled the whole wet, heavy lot of harness down across her face and her trunk so that it fell chinking down her legs and she could step out of it.

  “That’s a relief!” she said, and blinked around with her big gray eyes. Elephants have ridiculously long, shaggy eyelashes. “It’s sunset!” she said.

  “Making my third in two days,” I said, turning to look.

  The sun was behind me, flaring pink and gold paths over sheets of water as far as I could see. The sound of water rippled and husked and whispered everywhere. Everything smelled of water, softly and strongly.

  “Where are we?” Mini said.

  “Romanov’s place,” I said. As soon as I was facing the water, I had no doubt of it. The water was all joined up to look like one sea or a huge lake, but the part on my left was clear blue like sea around a coral coast, with little waves frilling on white sand, and the part in front of me was muddy and rippling against rushes. Round to the right, the rushes were taller, but the gray water there was coming in fairly big waves and the rushes were blowing in a wind we couldn’t feel. You could see the lines dividing the different kinds of water if you half closed your eyes. They rayed outward toward the horizon like huge slices of pizza. Even the sun, setting in the midst of red and purple clouds, was divided into an orange part and a smaller slice that was much redder. It looked really odd. I remembered Dave saying that Romanov lived on an island that was made from parts of several worlds, and I knew where we were.

  I also knew that if Romanov was here, then we were going to meet his big spotted cat any moment. I was suddenly not quite as glad to have got here as I had been.

  “Oh, dear,” Mini said. She was shuffling her front feet, and one of her back legs was rubbing up and down the other. She looked like an enormous, embarrassed schoolgirl. “Do you think there’s anything to eat in this peculiar place? I’m so hungry.”

  I remembered reading somewhere that an elephant can be a match for a tiger. I swallowed a bit and said, “We’ll go and ask. But if we happen to meet a whitish creature about so big”—I showed her with my hand halfway up my chest—“er, do you think you can, well, you know, sort of kick it? Or trample it, perhaps?”

  “I suppose I could,” she said doubtfully. “Is it fierce?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s all right if Romanov’s with it. It does what he says.”

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  We turned away from the patchwork water and climbed the grassy rise to the high part of the island. My eyes were going this way and that, dreading the sight of that big cat. Mini’s trunk flapped wistfully toward a big clump of trees in the distance that were three kinds of green from the patchwork effect.

  “I could eat those,” she said.

  “Romanov won’t like it,” I said. “Come on.” We crossed a dividing line into yellower grass and pushed warily through some bushes—or I did; Mini trampled them, and if the cat had been in there, we’d have known, and it wasn’t—and came across the shoulder of the hill beside a high brick wall. I wasn’t tall enough to see over it, but Mini was. Her trunk kept stretching out across the wall and then guiltily curling back. “Is the animal behind that?” I asked her.

  “Only vegetables,” she said. “They smell delicious.”

  Round the corner of the wall, I peered cautiously down at another piece of water. Deep blue water, this time. There was a long, low house by the shore there, sheltered by some pine trees. It looked really elegant, a bit like millionaire dwellings you see on telly. I could see a diving board off one end, big picture windows, and lots of clean new woodwork. And no big cat, to my relief. “Nearly there,” I said, and down we went.

  As soon as we were on the flatter ground near the house, a crowd of hens rushed at us and nearly gave me a heart attack, running and cackling. They got in among Mini’s feet, and she was forced to stand still for fear of treading on them. “I think they’re hungry, too,” she said.

  Then a white goat came bounding up and nearly gave me another heart attack for a second, until I realized it was a goat. It was almost exactly the size the scornful cat had been.

  “You want me to tread on this goat?” Mini asked dubiously.

  I don’t go for goats. I hate their smell and their mad eyes. And they have horns. “No, no, no!” I said, backing away. “It’s only a goat.” At that, Mini’s trunk flipped out toward it, in an interested sort of way. The goat stared in what seemed to be horror and then galloped away yelling. “What did that?” I said.

  “She’s never seen an elephant before,” Mini said. “Do find us something to eat!”

  “All right,” I said. Since it did seem urgent, I went over to the nice wooden door in the long side of the house.

  I had meant to knock, but the door opened inward under my fist. “Hallo?” I called out. No one answered, so I went cautiously into the dusky corridor inside. It smelled wonderfully of new wood, and it was very warm and quiet. There was a door to my right. “Hallo?” I said, and I opened it and looked in.

  There was an empty ultramodern kitchen in there. This smelled of new bread and coffee, which, since I could still taste nipling inside myself, made me feel slightly ill. I shut that door and went on to the next one, straight ahead.

  I opened that door on a blaze of sunset from big windows looking over the waters and on a splendid smell of leather, wood, and clean carpet. This room was a long, low, elegant living room—really beautiful, just the kind of room I’d like for myself—full of interesting comfortable sofas, low tables that caught the light, a long shelf of books, nice cushions, and almost no ornaments. Lovely. But there was no one in there either.

  The corridor turned a corner then and ran through the middle of the house, with light coming in through slit-shaped windows in the roof. My feet went splonch, splonch, splonch on polished wooden floor as I walked down to the next door—broom cupboard—and the next, a very nice bathroom that was so up-to-date I didn’t understand most of the fitments. The next door was on the other side. I opened it, and it was pitch black inside. And I don’t think I could have gone inside it even with the scornful cat after me. Keep Out! it said, like a smell boiling out of the darkness. Somehow, I knew it was Romanov’s workroom. I knew I had no business going in there. I backed off quickly and shut the door on the darkness.

  That left just the one door, facing me at the end of the corridor. By this time I was fairly sure Romanov was out, away in some other world, but I opened the door just to check.

  There was a big, graceful bedroom beyond, where everything was square and white. Thin white curtains blew inward from the window just beyond the square white bed. Clothes had been dropped on the white carpet, a leather jacket nearest to the door, a shirt beyond that, a pair of soft boots almost on the shirt, and socks after those. Then came underclothes, a towel, and a wallet, and these led to suede trousers not quite draped over the white chair beside the bed. By the time my eyes had been led to the bed, I realized that Romanov was in it, asleep. I could just see a pi
ece of his dark hair on the pillows.

  I was horribly embarrassed and nearly backed straight out. You could see that Romanov had come home tired out and just thrown off his clothes and fallen into bed. I couldn’t go and shake him awake and say, “I’m sorry, I’ve got a starving elephant outside.” Could I? But that made me think of poor Mini standing outside in a crowd of hungry hens. I did know elephants needed a lot of food. I didn’t know when she’d last had any.

  All right, I thought. And if he turns me into a frog, I suppose she’ll have to eat the trees. I swallowed, all the same, as I stepped over the suede jacket and on past the line of clothes. I leaned over the bed. I put out a finger, but I didn’t quite dare touch the hump that was probably Romanov’s shoulder. Turn me into anything you like, but please don’t kill me! I thought.

  “Er, excuse me,” I said.

  Romanov rolled over. I jerked back. We stared at one another. He looked a bit more than just tired to me. He looked ill. An unhealthy sort of smell came off him. “Oh, not you again!” he said, thick and groaning.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “A touch of flu, I think,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came here with a starving elephant,” I said. “Is it all right if I let her eat the trees?”

  “No!” he groaned. He pushed his hand across his zigzag of a face, obviously trying to pull himself together. “An elephant? Seriously?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I met her stuck in those dark paths. Her name’s Mini. I think her circus got hit by a tornado or something.”