The Merlin Conspiracy (39 page)

Then I got all excited, thinking it really might be a dinosaur skeleton. Yet I almost didn't want to scramble up there and look, because I
knew
I would be disappointed when it turned out to be just a chalk cliff. But I did climb up. And the nearer I got, the more like a huge head the thing got. By the time I was level with the end of the part that looked almost like jaws, I could see dents in the top one, like nostrils, and when I edged nearer, there were faint patterns on it that were nearly like scales, white on white. Then, if I looked up to the hollow in the bulging part, I could have sworn it was an eye socket with the eyelid down over it. There was even a stony sort of fringe to it, like chalky eyelashes.

“Hell's bells!” I said out loud. “I think it really
is
a huge fossil!”

“
WHO
,” said the hillside, “
ARE YOU CALLING A FOSSIL
?”

I fell several yards down onto the turf. It gave me such a shock. And the whole cliff thrummed and heaved and then buckled as the huge jaws moved, and it more or less threw me off. I looked up to find that the place that I had thought was an eye socket had opened. A vast green eye was looking down at me.

I don't think I
could
have moved. I managed to say, “What
are
you, then?” My voice came out as a squawky whisper, but I was too interested not to ask.

“
THE WHITE DRAGON OF ENGLAND
,” the huge head answered. “
DO PEOPLE NO LONGER SPEAK OF ME
?”

“Yes,” I said hurriedly. “Oh, yes. They do.” After all, I had heard of such a creature on Earth, and it stood to reason that there was one on Blest, too, with all the magic they had there. “But not very often,” I said, to be truthful. I was looking back along the hillside as I said this, and now I could see very plainly where the green turf humped upward over the shape of the enormous body. If it comes out, I thought, I am dead. Its tail must have stretched right back into the woods. “Er,” I said, making stupid conversation for all I was worth, “you've been here a long time, haven't you?”

“
FROM THE BEGINNING
,” it replied. The hillside shook and blurred with its voice. I could feel it through my entire body. “
I SLEEP UNTIL I AM NEEDED. DO YOU HAVE NEED OF ME
?”

“Not really,” I said. “Well, no—no, not at all, really. I just came along here by accident, really.”

The vast green eye blinked, shut, open, shut. I hoped it might be going back to sleep, but I could tell it was thinking. I could feel, almost hear, great slow, grinding thoughts going on in the huge head.

The eye opened again. “
I AM NOT WOKEN BY ACCIDENT
,” said the earth-moving voice. “
NOTHING I DO IS EVER ACCIDENTAL. I AM NOT CALLED FORTH LIGHTLY
.”

“Oh, I quite understand,” I said. You say such silly things when your brain is canceled out by terror. “I—I'm not here to call you forth. Honestly!” I began to back away down the slope, very gently and quietly, but I had to stop when the hillside blurred again and pieces of chalk and turf and earth began to drop all round me.

“
WHEN YOU DO
,” the great voice announced, “
REMEMBER THAT I WILL NOT BE PLEASED. MANY PEOPLE WILL HAVE REASON TO REGRET THAT YOU CALLED ME. GO NOW
.”

Nothing would have possessed me even to
try
to call that thing out.

I went, staring upward the whole time at that vast green eye watching me all the way down to the path. It turned in its socket to watch me as I trotted shakily back the way I had come. My knees trembled. As soon as I had got beyond where that eye could possibly turn far enough to see me, I sprinted—I fair pelted—between hot gorse bushes, and I did not stop running until I came down to the road and saw Toby and Maxwell Hyde standing by the car. I trotted up to them, streaming with sweat. Maxwell Hyde was looking grim. Toby, for some reason, was looking rather like I felt. I supposed they were annoyed with me for keeping them waiting.

“Sorry to be so long,” I said in an airy, artificial way. What had just happened was something I didn't think I would
ever
be able to speak about. “Went further than I meant to,” I said.

“Get in,” said Maxwell Hyde. “Both of you.”

We got in, and he drove off. He had been driving for miles before I recovered. I kept thinking,
That thing! That huge thing!
Lying under the turf, just waiting. Too true that people would regret it if it ever came out.

When we were nearly back to London, Maxwell Hyde spoke, in a very dry voice. “Toby,” he said, “I think we shall have to cut the connection with your father. He's in with a bad crowd, I'm afraid.”

Oh! I thought. My mind had been so blown by that dragon that I had clean forgotten the talk I had had with Jerome Kirk. But it looked as if he had been fool enough to try to enlist Maxwell Hyde in his group, so I wouldn't need to tell about it after all.

“Yes,” Toby more or less whispered. “He talked to me, too.”

“Is that why you're looking so devastated, then?” Maxwell Hyde asked him.

“No,” Toby said. “That was the wood.”

“What about the wood?” his grandfather said snappishly.

“I don't know,” Toby said. “There were tall people. I didn't know if they were really there or not. They were scary.”

“Scary how?” Maxwell Hyde asked. “Diabolical, you mean?”

“No. I wondered if they were angels,” Toby said. “But they kept asking me if I was ready yet, and I didn't understand. The wood asked me, too, you see.”

This gave me the idea that Toby had had an experience at least as terrifying as mine. I could tell he was relieved when Maxwell Hyde just made that “hmm” noise that people do when they have no idea what someone is talking about and didn't ask any more. He bent his head toward me instead and said, “And you talked to the good Jerome, too, did you, Nick?”

“Yes,” I said. “He's in with whoever's getting the salamanders.”

Maxwell Hyde went “hmm” again, but this time in a nasty, considering, grim way. I could tell by the way he glared through the windscreen that he was thinking about what I'd said all the rest of our drive through London. It was getting to be dusk by then. As he parked the car, he said, “Well, we won't talk about that anymore. I'm starving. Too worried about munching on a wasp to eat much lunch.”

I suppose we were all tired, but we were a bit pathetic, really. We couldn't wait to get indoors and get back to the evening routine. Dora was standing there, wringing her hands, not because we were so late, but because she had remembered to buy seven kinds of cheese and cooked some potatoes, but she couldn't work out how to turn it into a proper supper. We didn't care. We sent salamanders shooting in all directions as we rushed to the table and ate cold potatoes with slices of cheese. Then we pounded into the main room and turned on the media for the tail end of the hurley report.

Maxwell Hyde and Toby got out their game then. I settled down on a chair at one side and opened a magic theory book with a sigh of relief. I was really ready for a bit of quiet boredom. Dora sat on the sofa rustling through a magazine called
The Meaning of Dreams
.

They were well into the moaning stage of the game and I had read the same page four times without getting any of it into my head when Dora sprang up from the sofa and screamed.

The room was suddenly full of soundless men riding tall, soundless horses. A soundless wind came with them. It fluttered my book and tore Dora's dyed hair sideways. She sort of grabbed at her hair as she screamed and clapped one hand down to keep her skirt from blowing up round her waist. The same wind billowed the cloaks of the horsemen. There were far more riders in among us than the room could possibly have held, and yet they were all definitely there. The one nearest me was carrying a thing like a battle standard, except that it was really just a rough stake with the skull of a horse skewered on to it, and pieces of raw, bloody horse skin blew out from it in the wind. I stared at it and felt ill.

The rider in front was on a white horse, and he was all in black except for the white lining in his flapping cloak. “I apologize for this,” he said. I ought not to have been able to hear him through the noise Dora was making, but I could hear him perfectly. He had quite a strong Welsh accent. “You must forgive me,” he said, leaning down to Maxwell Hyde. “I am constrained by an enchantment to do as I do.”

He reached out and took hold of Maxwell Hyde round his waist. He lifted him up as easily as you would lift a kitten and slung him over the white horse facedown. Maxwell Hyde said, “
What
the—” as he was lifted and then stopped as if he had passed out.

Toby was the only one of us who behaved at all well. He jumped in front of the white horse and shouted, “
Stop it!
Put my grandfather
down
!”

“I wish I could, young man,” said the rider. Then he rode forward just as if Toby was not standing there. The table, the game pieces, and one of the chairs went all over the floor when Toby had to fling himself out of the way, and the horsemen rode away out of the room, taking the wind with them. They didn't ride through the wall. They sort of rode away in the space they were in and took that space and Maxwell Hyde with them.

Dora's screams seemed even louder once they were gone. “He's taken Daddy!” she shrieked. “That was Gwyn ap Nud! He's Lord of the Dead, and he's
taken Daddy
!”

She made such a noise that we almost didn't hear someone knocking on the front door.

ONE
RODDY

M
rs. Candace, besides being very old, is a bit crippled and has to walk with a stick. She didn't come any further than her front door with us. There she shook hands with Grundo in a very formal, old-fashioned way and kissed me good-bye. I flinched a bit as her dry old mouth brushed my cheek, not because it was an unpleasant feeling, but because that one small touch somehow told me that it was her right hip that was the crippled part of her. It was just like the hurt lady in the ruined village. And I thought, Do all women with strong powers have to have a ruined hip, then?

“Go with Salisbury, my dears,” she said. “Everything's arranged.”

We followed Salisbury's striding green rubber boots outside and along the street. By the time we got to the corner, the boots had been joined by two big, smooth-haired retrievers, a black one and a golden one, frisking sedately on either side of Salisbury. Grundo was delighted. “Are they yours?” he asked, staring up at Salisbury's tall face.

Salisbury nodded. “I am never without a dog or two,” he said. “They have owners, of course.”

“Um,” said Grundo. “I think I see.”

However it was, the dogs came with us all the way to the edge of town, weaving to and fro, the way dogs do, until we came to a space in front of quite a tall little hill, whereupon they began weaving more widely. One cocked a leg and peed on the tire of a square, brown, old car that was parked there.

“Don't you do that, you dirty brute, you!” someone shouted from the hill.

It really was a very odd little hill, if you looked closely. It seemed to be made of buried houses. You could see windows and doors and bits of walls half hidden under the grass, piled on top of one another all the way to the summit. Halfway up, where a tree leaned over a buried doorway, an old tramp was sitting on a turfy doorstep.

“Can't you keep your bleeding dogs in order?” he yelled at Salisbury, in a high, cracked old voice.

“Easily,” said Salisbury. “They never foul my streets. This is my brother,” he said to us. “Old Sarum.”

We gaped up at the tramp. He got up and climbed nimbly down the hill. He was wearing rubber boots, too, only his were black and cracked and mucky, and a coat and trousers so old that you couldn't tell what color they had once been. Beside the tall Salisbury, he looked almost like a gnome. His half-bald white head barely came up to Salisbury's waist. He grinned a wicked grin, with crooked teeth in it, right in Grundo's face, and said, “
Elder
brother, I'll have you know. I had my charter before
he
was built or thought of. And I
still
send a Member to parliament in Winchester. I'm a rotten borough, I am.”