Healer (14 page)

She was hesitating when Norah swung sideways, still with her front paws on Barry's chest but slashing at Pinkie with head and shoulders and a deeper and more deadly-sounding snarl. The shift of weight let Barry take a full breath.

“Keep away!” he shouted. “Dangerous! Not the same!”

Pinkie backed off, out of his line of vision. She must have got it. This was something different from two nights ago, when he'd been wearing his uniform, was part of the system Norah was trained to obey. Here he was enemy, and whoever tried to help him was enemy, too.

Norah went back to barking. Barry lay still. It wasn't over yet.

Her body above him hid Sergeant Coyne's arrival. The first he knew of it was when the weight left his chest and the snarl slowed to a quiet growl. He sat up. The sergeant's chest heaved with running, but his leathery face was calm as he bent to pat Norah's still-bristling hackles.

“There's a clever girl,” he whispered. “There's a clever girl.”

He looked at Barry.

“Try anything, lad, and she'll have you.”

You couldn't really tell with his strange voice, but he didn't sound fierce or angry. The Foundation had that sort of effect on people.

“Lost something, Miss Pinkie?” he said.

“My glasses came off.”

“Give us a minute, and we'll find them.”

Pinkie was several yards from the bike, bent double, patting the ground. She sounded quite ordinary, too, as though nothing special had happened. The tractor stopped twenty yards away. The knock of its engine stilled, and Mr. Freeman climbed down from the cab and strode toward them. He was wearing a long dull green cape, which made him look even larger, even more Moses-like than usual. The early sun glinted off his beard, too gold to be true. It wasn't true, Barry suddenly realised. He'd dyed it that colour.

For one strange moment Barry seemed to see him quite clearly as two separate people, people whose bodies occupied precisely the same space without the slightest blur of overlap. They wore one cloak; the light wind flapped at its folds. They left one set of footprints on the track as they strode along it. One was a phony, a crook, a chancer, a loony with a dyed beard. The other was a seer, leader, hope of the world. He was—Barry suddenly perceived—at least twenty years older than he looked. Over seventy, perhaps. This didn't make him weak or pitiful. It made him heroic. He was a fighter against time, against age and death. If all his hopes and schemes came to nothing, he still wouldn't ask for pity. He didn't merely look terrific. He was.

It didn't make any difference. The other one was there, too, just as real. And they were both wrong.

The moment of vision—very like the vision Barry had had of himself a few weeks ago on a rainy morning in this precise place—ended, and he was watching his enemy approach. Mr. Freeman stopped to pat Norah.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. “She did very well. You were right about bringing her. Will you take her back to the tractor now?”

“Miss Pinkie's gone and dropped her glasses, sir.”

“All right. See if you can find them. You can get up now, Barry, but please remember that Norah is still with us. Come over this way, will you?”

Barry rose. He was trembling—mainly the after-effects of effort and then terror, but also a sudden rush of new tension. The crisis hadn't come yet. Mr. Freeman's attempt to get Sergeant Coyne out of earshot proved that.

“What have you done to Mr. Stott?” he said.

Mr. Freeman was already strolling toward Pinkie, who seemed to have stopped looking for her glasses and was now hobbling off toward the stone circle. She couldn't have seen it was there. She just seemed to be drifting, like a leaf on water caught in some unseen current.

“Was that who it was?” said Mr. Freeman. “Of course. I should have guessed. A remarkable old gentleman.”

He sounded amused but only slightly interested. Barry's response was an uprush of pure rage, Bear rage, hot, thrilling, uncontrollable. To be lied to like that, so obviously, out of sheer contempt! Of course, Freeman knew who it was; he'd got here by following the invalid car, hadn't he? But he couldn't resist the chance to add to the idea of his own mysterious power, as if he'd turned up because he was all-seeing, a sort of God … The chain and padlock still swung from Barry's right hand. Three quick steps, a backward and forward whip of the arm, the heavy lock slashing into that neck at maximum impetus, exact on its target between vertebra and vertebra—snap! And the tower of dead flesh which had been his enemy tumbling into the heather like a demolished mill stack. Barry knew, because Bear knew, that it was going to happen just like that. He could not miss. The exact moment had come: Bear's moment.

The impulses to send his muscles into that rush, that blow, were already on their way when something cried out in the silence of the moor, a short, wailing yelp, not loud but full of pain. An animal sound, calling to an animal, to Bear. For a fraction of an instant he hesitated, stopping the arm in its backward motion, and glanced toward the sound. Pinkie was standing facing him in the gap by the missing stones. Her skin gleamed. Pale light seemed to be flowing out of it so that it shone like a signal. The pain and the cry and the light were all part of the same thing.

With that hesitation the moment of certainty was lost. The chain could still slash forward, still probably hit the neck, hurt, wound—but kill? And after? The incalculable network of consequences, the alterations in his own life and destiny that would flow from that spasm of action, exploded in Barry's mind. He was appalled. He lived in a real world where things weighed what they weighed and no Bear magic could change them. Somehow he took control, forcing Bear back, away, down into darkness. The rush of attack became a momentary lurch and stumble.

“Twisted her ankle?” said Mr. Freeman.

He had heard Pinkie cry out and quickened his pace. They walked toward her, picking their way along separate twisting paths between the heather patches.

“I am very impressed with you, Barry,” said Mr. Freeman.

“Uh?”

“Don't misunderstand me. You have made a serious mistake, both dangerous and distressing to innocent people, but I have no doubt you acted for what you thought were good reasons. I can see myself at your age and in your shoes doing much the same. I hope I would have had the resource you have shown in carrying it through.”

And Mr. Stott is a remarkable old gentleman. What's he up to?

“Pinkie, too, no doubt …” Mr. Freeman went on but then stopped. The track he had been following twisted to one side to get around a large mound of old, tangled, almost impenetrable heather. Barry's track turned the other way but not so sharply. He hurried on and found Pinkie now leaning against one of the stones, running her hands over it and patting it like a completely blind person, though she must have been able to see, so close, what she was touching.

“You all right?” he said.

“I hurt my leg. Ouch!”

He lifted her and settled her onto his left hip. She snuggled close against his shoulder. He found he was trembling, partly with unused adrenaline and partly with the slowly realised shock at what he had almost done. She didn't seem to notice.

“I was wrong, Barry,” called Mr. Freeman. “It was no mistake. No mistake at all.”

Barry turned, surprised by the velvety, preaching tone, the throb of excitement. Mr. Freeman, instead of following his track around the heather clump, had picked his way right into the middle of it and was standing there. He seemed to be floating a little above ground level. Presumably there was some kind of mound under the heather, or possibly a hidden stone. He faced directly toward the mouth of the broken circle.

“The ancients were wiser than we remember,” he said in the same loud voice, as though he was preaching to the silent stones. “They had not yet dulled their sensitivity to the Harmony by overreliance on the five superficial senses of the body. They understood that there are not only times and places but places beyond time.”

“What's he on about?” whispered Barry.

“Places.”

“Like you said yesterday?”

“Suppose so.”

She seemed dazed. It could have been the fall, or the tiredness of the last two days, or the shock of capture.

“I wonder who owns the land,” said Mr. Freeman, quietly but with a throb of excitement in his voice.

Once again, but with his intellect this time, Barry was aware of Mr. Freeman's double nature. He'd decided that Ferriby Circle was a “place”—whatever that meant—and that the whole business of Barry's escaping with Pinkie had been arranged, without any of them knowing, so that he should come to Ferriby and find the circle. And now his first instinct was to ask who owned it. He wanted Ferriby for himself. He wanted to own it and use it, in the same way that he owned and used Pinkie. He would lie and cheat and fake evidence to get it and then probably use it to cheat people out of money they couldn't afford. But at the same time he was totally sincere, a true believer. He believed in his Seven Energies far more deeply than Barry believed in anything. He wanted money, but more than that, he wanted power, and more than that, he wanted knowledge. If he'd lived a thousand years ago, he'd have been a magician who spent his time doing hocus-pocus to cheat peasants out of a few small coins, but he'd still have been certain that one day he would draw the right signs on the floor and throw the right herbs in the fire and say the right words, and then the enormous powers of hell would rise in the room and be his slaves, and he would rule the world and be told all its secrets. A man like that, a thousand years ago, would have sacrificed his own daughter on his crazy altar if he thought it might do the trick. A man like that, in these days, would fill a kid with mind-bending chemicals for the same kind of reason.

An unmistakable shout floated across the moor. Halfway along the track to the parking lot, still a couple of hundred yards from the circle, Mr. Stott was wrestling with his wheelchair. One of the wheels was stuck, and he was bellowing his frustration, but as Barry watched, he reversed free and came slowly on, wriggling his way past obstacles over the heavy ground. He must have got his chair out from behind the seat of his car and then somehow forced himself and it up the steep bank and onto the track. His face, even at this distance, glowed scarlet with effort and anger.

Mr. Freeman had heard him, too. He glanced around, called to Sergeant Coyne and gestured to him to head the intruder off. The sergeant, who had been waiting with Norah a few yards from the tractor, hesitated a moment, then loosed Norah from her leash and spoke to her. She settled onto a grassy hummock. He crouched beside her, pointing toward Barry. Her ears came up, and her gaze fastened. The sergeant made signals to Barry to make sure he understood the dog was still watching him, then turned and trotted off to intercept Mr. Stott.

For a moment hope flared. The tractor. If he could move a bit farther out of Freeman's line of vision … with Coyne out of the way there was only Norah … Freeman had turned the engine off, but if he hadn't pocketed the key

Pinkie stirred on his shoulder.

“Don't go,” she whispered. “Something …”

“What?”

“Can't you feel—”

“No.”

He was outside the mystery, if there was one. He could not even perceive that anything might be happening for him to be outside of. The moor was a wide, bleak space containing five people, a dog, a tractor, and a circle of stones. That was all.

“Pinkie,” called Mr. Freeman.

She hid her face in Barry's shoulder. Mr. Freeman looked around.

“Bring her here,” he said, speaking in a low but urgent voice, like a stage performer prompting an assistant when something has gone wrong with the act.

Pinkie seemed to cling even closer. Barry stayed where he was.

“Bring her here,” repeated Mr. Freeman. “Now. The harmonics …”

Her arms were as hard as tree roots, gripping a cliff face. Barry shook his head. His own grip tightened on the chain where it hung from his right hand. Mr. Freeman's face changed. His nostrils widened, and his eyes seemed to darken from gold to hot brown. His look was one of aimed fury, like a beam of force coming out of a weapon, glaring directly at Barry as he climbed down, thrashed his way out of the heather, and strode toward him. Barry turned to run.

It was hopeless, of course, with his own tiredness and Pinkie's weight to carry. In half a dozen paces he felt Mr. Freeman's hand grab him by the shoulder to heave him around. His foot slithered on a wet patch; he staggered and broke accidentally free. His heel caught on something, and he staggered still farther, thrashing for balance. Still Pinkie clung to his neck as if she'd been soldered there. This time, though, he did see Norah coming.

Sergeant Coyne must have told her to watch him and bring him back if he tried to run away. That must have been part of her training. In her simple dog brain his attempt to keep Pinkie from Mr. Freeman must have triggered the response. The thirty yards or so she had to cover let her reach maximum impetus for that massive flowing onrush with which the wolf brings down a caribou three times its own weight. She was stretching into the final elastic bound before the leap of attack when Barry, still off balance, saw her coming.

His answer was instinct. It was Bear, doing what he was there for. In his effort to keep his feet he had thrown his right arm back. Now it flailed forward in a whipping arc that flung the chain and lock out beyond it. He let the movement take him right off balance, falling clear of the line of Norah's leap. In the middle of the tilting moorland he watched her and saw with precise, slow clarity the instant of impact.

She was in the air, leaping for the target of his left arm where it held Pinkie. She had seen him beginning to fall and had allowed for the movement in her leap. Now she saw the arm coming around, saw that the fist would miss her, turned her head, and opened her jaws to snatch the wrist as it went by. She had not seen or had not understood the chain before the padlock slammed into her, catching her edge-side on between the corner of her jaw and her ear.