Coromandel! (9 page)

‘But how can I get on board? Will they take me as a sailor?’ Old Voy said, ‘Take you as a sailor? Why, I don’t know. It depends, Jason.’

Jason’s fingers tightened. The damned old fool! He was helpless. Perhaps he’d never been to London or seen the sea, and didn’t know what a sailor was any more than Jason himself did! But that didn’t mean the map was useless! There were plenty of ways a man like Voy could come into possession of a real, true map. But the man himself was no good. Jason had depended on him and told himself he could do nothing without Voy’s help. But he’d have to.

He said abruptly, ‘Thank you. I’ll find my way. Good-bye.’ Old Voy sighed and pressed a sack into his hands. It was the one he always wore over his shoulder. ‘Take it,’ he said, ‘and when you fill it with the treasure of Meru, remember old Speranza Voy.’

Jason crept out under the branches and ran full tilt down the slope towards his father’s farm.

Time was passing, but he hardly thought about that. Had the hue and cry been at his heels, he could not have left out one of these last visits. He scrambled quickly in through his window, gathered his sling, his book, his map, and his last few shillings, and stuffed them all into the sack Voy had given him. Now he had two books, one full of writing and one full of pictures. He had found the first muddied in the road, and the second he had just stolen from Pennel Manor. Perhaps it would be all right to think Jane had given it to him.

He went silently into Molly’s room and bent over to awaken her. She had heard him and was awake. For the third time he said, ‘I’ve killed Hugo Pennel. I’m going to London to take ship for Coromandel.’

Molly was calm, but that did not surprise him. He had expected her to be. She said, ‘Can I come with you? Are they after you yet?’

He said roughly, ‘No,’ and, ‘No,’ and, ‘Good-bye, Moll.’ For a moment they clung together like lovers. (But there must be a woman in the world for him who was not his sister.) He broke away.

As he reached the door she said, ‘Wait! Which way are you going to London?’

He had no idea. He said, ‘Pewsey, I suppose.’

She said, ‘That’s the straight road. They’ll be looking for you there. Don’t go that way. Go across the Plain to Amesbury and up from there. As soon as you’ve gone I’ll put on some of your clothes, take the mare, and ride through Pewsey, and on until I’m caught.’

Jason said, ‘But they’ll say--‘

She leaped out of bed and whispered furiously, ‘Will you go away and do what you’re told, you helpless booby? And as soon as I can, I’ll run away too. I told you I would. Oh, Jason!’ Again she clung to him, then broke away with a violent jerk and turned her back.

All that she had said, both then and all their lives, stayed a long time with him as he hurried south through the rain.

For a time he would be safe on the open Plain, especially in this darkness. He climbed fast and did not look back until he was near the crest, where the hummocked circle of Shrewford Ring dominated the slope. His father’s farm was the nearest building to him then, and he saw a faint point of light in that direction, and knew that Sir Tristram’s men had reached the farm to look for him. He watched the light for a minute and wondered whether he ought to be thinking of his father, and whether Molly had got away to carry out her plan. The rain was only a thin spatter now, and, because he knew it so well, he could see the vale spread out below him like a quilt, and fit each field into its place, and name each pouring copse, and hear the rain on every roof, all known, all unseen. He turned again.

He stretched his legs and swung on with long strides. There were no hedges or ditches to worry about on the Plain, only the rabbit holes, and usually you could see them by the whitish blur of the chalk the rabbits threw out in digging them. The wind veered steadily from west to north-west, the rain stopped, and it became colder. Clouds hurried close above, low over the long roll of the Plain, and the wet grass shimmered like a mist about his feet. Some light illumined his way, but whether it filtered down from above the clouds or came up through the chalky earth he did not know. He felt hungry and pulled out a rabbit leg and gnawed it as he walked.

The Avon ran south through the Plain in a deep and narrow valley to his right. The roads from Devizes and Pewsey, going towards Salisbury, joined each other just north of Challbury, which stood at the entrance of the valley. The wind blew from that quarter now, and he heard the drum of hoofs and saw a lantern moving like a will-o’-the-wisp southward along the road. ‘Fools!’ he muttered to himself, ‘I could hear them a mile off if I was on that, road, and get off and let them pass.’ It was comforting to talk to himself as he hurried on.

But that meant that the chase was spreading out in all directions. The majority might be following Molly through Pewsey, but they were taking no chances. Sir Tristram must have sent men to warn all the squires around. The watches would be out in the villages, but horsemen would be his greatest danger. There might be twenty or thirty of them in the lanes by now.

He stopped suddenly and listened--only the wind; but he thought he had heard again the dull beat of hoofs, now on turf, and somewhere in front. He lay down and put his ear to the earth. Quite clearly he heard the thud-thud. He turned right and hurried diagonally down the slope towards the Avon. Horsemen were spreading over the Plain. Someone had guessed he would go on foot across the Plain rather than on horseback up the vale--probably his father.

He came to the Avon and stopped a moment to collect his thoughts. Men would be watching the river if they had had time to get here. They could have done that only on horseback; so he should hear the horses stamping and breathing before he saw the men. They might be on either side of the stream, or both.

He began to walk very slowly southward on the left bank. The rushing of the water drowned the
shush-shush
of his shoes in the grass, but the same noise would hide the sounds made by men and horses. Challbury was on the hill up there to his right. If men had come down to the river they would probably be hereabouts, where a cart track led from the village to the stream.

It was not the horses he heard first but a man coughing close ahead of him. He stopped and crouched. A voice from the opposite side of the stream muttered, ‘Hold your coughing, Peter.’ That was Phineas Granger who spoke--to Peter Sale. They were two of Sir Tristram’s men. They knew this water as well as he did.

Jason took off his shoes and dropped them into his sack. He stepped into the river, crouched low to the surface, and moved forward, feeling with his toes for his footing as he went. The river was twenty feet wide here, no more.

The enemy lurked about him, and there was a vital message in his sack. He was carrying it to his captain. The Turks lay in wait, and Coromandel was beleaguered. He had a bloody knife in his belt. . . . But there used to be a pair of moorfowl that nested every year in the old snagged tree which had blown down when he was a little boy. The tree lay in the middle of the stream, not quite straight across, leaving only a foot or two clear between each end and the bank. He reached out his hands and felt the smooth dead wood. He could see Peter Sale now, a shape to his left in the blackness. He sank under the water and crawled forward on his stomach, holding his breath, below the arch of the tree. He came up and breathed out with a gasp, but he heard the changed sound of the water and he knew he was damming it with his body. He heard Granger call in a low voice, ‘See anything in the river, Peter?’

Sale said, ‘Nothing. It’s as black as pitch.’

‘I heard something.’

Jason kept creeping forward. The wind blew through his clothes, and he shivered with the cold of it. The water dripped loudly from him into the rush of the stream. God’s blood, his map and books would be wet! He moved one foot forward, dragging it along, testing the bottom, put it down, put his weight on it, dragged up the other foot. He climbed carefully out on the right bank. There was a big black hole under the overhang where he could put his foot. A pair of water rats used to live in there. Once he’d seen the dog rat eating the moorhen’s eggs.

He struck south-west, up and away from the river, and moved at a trot. The valley was too narrow to be safe by daylight; it could be searched too easily. He knew where he was heading, and an icy light lay low along the eastern horizon.

It was somewhere here, a little to the right or left, on this swell of Compton Down. He knew the place, but he’d never had to find it in the dark before. The three stones by Shrewford Ring stood away from the earth now, a black finger-sign across the valley, and the dawn spreading behind them.

He sighed with relief and dropped into a shallow chalk pit.

It was not more than ten feet long and a couple of feet deep. The turf above was so thick, and its roots so strongly bound, that it projected a foot or more over the edges of the pit. Jason lay down, frowning. He’d found this in a midsummer’s game of hide-and-seek with Hugo and other lads long ago--the ponies tethered on the road to the east, and the girls playing silly girls’ games, and himself hiding here--and the boys had never found him.

He got out his books and map and saw with amazed relief that they were hardly wet. Voy’s sack must be almost waterproof. He ate some more rabbit and wished he’d remembered to take a drink before he left the Avon. The hurrying had warmed him inside, and down here he was out of the wind, but if the sun didn’t break through later he would be cold. He chewed the tough meat, cautiously raised his head above the level of the turf, and looked around. No one in sight--only the Plain, a distant thorn, a lonely bank of firs, daylight, thinning cloud.

He felt his freedom as the physical lightening of a load--but some of that load had been comfortable and warming to him. ‘Home’ had been in a certain direction; now it was in no direction, or in every direction. ‘Molly’ had been his sister, who lived in the Savage farmhouse; now she didn’t live there, and she was not his sister because they had parted for ever. ‘Salisbury’ had been a far town; but it was close, and where he was going was farther than the stars. All his horizons had vanished, and nothing was fixed any more. For a moment he cowered before the empty vastness of his freedom. Then he said aloud, ‘Coromandel!’ and burrowed a place for himself under the overhanging turf at the edge of the chalk pit.

He thought for a moment about what he would do if they found him. He drew his knife, hefted it in his hand, and pricked the point through his clothes until it hurt. Then, with the knife in his fist, he curled up and went to sleep.

When he awoke it was midday and the sun was out, but it had rained again. Now he must wait at least six hours before it would be safe to move. He began to study his map of Coromandel. But soon he knew it by heart and put it carefully away.

He ate a piece of ham. His lips were dry in spite of the damp, and long before dark he began to shiver. It was cold and lonely there on the Plain; he was lost by the world. He looked at the picture book but put it away when he found he could think only of the wind in the grass, and Molly, and his father, bitter and lonely at the farm. He shivered more violently and, to stop himself from weeping, stuffed his hand into his mouth and bit hard on it and cursed at himself with all the foul language that he knew.

When it was dark he stepped out of the pit, stretched, and began to move. He hurried down to the river and took a drink, then headed south by west as hard as he could go, across the Plain. The rain blew down in the wind and, in fighting against it, he recovered his courage. He knew where he was going, and they couldn’t catch him in this driving murk. To forget that he had wept from loneliness he summoned jewels into his sack and a curved sword to his side. The raging Turks gnashed their teeth behind him, having found their leader dead and the prisoner escaped; but they would never catch him.

A road. The deep ruts stretched across his path, half full of water. He stopped, looked north into the black rain--nothing. South--a dim lightness, and the spears of rain slanting down to pierce the earth; no one. He crossed the road and strode on. Men could get lost on the Plain, but not he. He could look at the sky and feel the wind, and walk and know where he would arrive. Aleppo stood dim above its battlements behind him; his camel moved fast across wet grasslands. What did you feed a camel? It would probably be a difficult animal to ride, being shapeless. The dark, mysterious girls in the houses were secretly laughing at him. A horse, then, it had better be, a stallion galloping towards distant, half-seen mountains. . . .

A voice called sharply, ‘There, left.’ Jason stopped dead. A light sprang out thirty yards to his right.

‘Damn your eyes, I tell you something moved!’

Jason crouched, still as a hare in the rain. The lamp came towards him, and he saw two pairs of wet boots striding and two big cloaks swinging, and the blade of a sword. When they reached within ten paces of him he bounded to his feet and ran on south as fast as he could. He heard the gasp, the shouts of ‘Stop, stop!’ The rainy wind drummed on his hood, and his heart pounded.

Quick! They’d run after him for a few paces; then they’d find they couldn’t catch him because of their big boots--riding boots; horses. They’d go back for their horses and start to ride him down.

He turned sharp left and ran till his lungs were ready to burst. He lay down and put his ear to the wet grass and heard the horses galloping, not close. He didn’t want to get into Amesbury itself, but to circle it and then head towards London. He’d better make for Stonehenge. He turned a point west and went slowly, every minute stooping to listen against the earth. The rain squall blew away, and the stars crept out.

He plodded south for another two hours and began to feel achingly tired, but he knew he was near now. He bore left and lay down to make a horizon. Staring, for a time he could see nothing. It was very quiet on the Plain, and no one was at his heels.

Gradually, striding slowly like giants out of darkness, the stones of the Henge advanced upon him. He lay lower against the wet earth and pressed his clenched fingers down until the chalk gritted under his nails.