The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  “I was going to speak to Toby,” he said, “but you’ll do even better. Seething with talent, aren’t you? What are you doing going around with Maxwell Hyde?”

  “He’s teaching me,” I said, sliding to the right and hitting thorns. I slid left and got nettled. “I needed to learn about magic.”

  Jerome Kirk spit into the blackberry bush. “Bloody Magid,” he said. “They can’t stir a finger without permission from Above, these Magids. Brownnose puppy dogs. You’d be far better off coming in with us instead.”

  “Er,” I said, trying another slide into thorns. “Coming in with who?” The thorns brought me up short, and I was forced to stare at the red veins in his nose and at his dirty beard. I thought he must be the last person in Blest I’d ever want to join up with. I felt sorry for Toby for having the man as his father. I mean, by all accounts, my own father was pretty awful, too, but I’d never met him. I felt a gust of pure thankfulness that I had been able to choose Dad instead. “What do you mean?” I said.

  He leaned toward me and began speaking eagerly, waving the jug in his hand in circles, and I leaned backward, trying to get out of range of the yucky smell of the perry from the jug and from his breath.

  “We’re an association,” he said, “but we don’t name ourselves. We just exist and gather strength and numbers. Now the Merlin’s put himself at our head, we’re really going places. We’re going to clear these islands of the old-school-tie, entrenched magics, and the wimps and Magids and brownnoses that crawl along with them, and we’re going to bring in new energies, new people, the small magic users who are never given a chance under this present regime. You’re young. You need to join our new order. You don’t want to be throttled by their stupid rules!”

  He went on like this for quite a while. Every so often he seemed to go on a prowl, but he only seemed to. He was really moving in to pin me down closer each time. I stood there licking at sweat gathering on my top lip and felt truly trapped.

  Then he said, “Think about it. We’ve already discovered a whole new source of power. Salamanders! How about that? You’d never get any of the old guard finding an idea like that, would you?” He leaned toward me, gathered his tankard and his jug into one hand, and tapped the side of his big, veiny nose at me. I stared. I had never seen anyone do that before, not outside the telly, not for real. “And that’s only one of the new ideas that are coming through,” he told me. “I know. I’m in their inmost councils. They asked me to live here and keep an eye on the old magics in case they get out of hand. That’s a fact. And I’ll tell you another thing.” He tapped his nose at me again. “We’re almost ready to show our hand. You don’t have long to decide. Think about it. And if you want to join us—and you will, of course—just give me a nod before you go. Right?”

  I was backed into the bush by then. I said, “Right,” feebly.

  He nodded, and to my immense relief he turned his baggy back and prowled away.

  All I could think of after that was to find Maxwell Hyde and tell him what Jerome Kirk had said about salamanders. It seemed urgent to me if they really were getting ready for a revolution or whatever. And I could see that it tied in with what Roddy had said. But I couldn’t find Maxwell Hyde anywhere at first, and when I did, he was at the rickety table with Jerome Kirk and Toby. They were waiting for me to begin lunch.

  Lunch was a bit of a trial. It was cold meat and bread, which was all right, but there was this great swimmy dish of homemade pickle in the middle, and the wasps really went for that. I kept trying to show Maxwell Hyde I had something urgent to tell him, but I couldn’t sort of get through to him. We were all too busy dodging wasps.

  Before the end of lunch Maxwell Hyde and Jerome Kirk got into an argument about politics, and as soon as they started, I thought, Stupid! What am I worrying about? Tell him on the way home! Toby slipped away the moment the argument began. I was sick of the wasps, so I slipped off, too.

  I went the way I thought I saw Toby go, across the road and uphill from the house. There was a path there, winding up onto the hot hillside, so I went that way, twisting about among head-high bushes, until I came out on a steep grassy bit where the path forked.

  There I stopped. It came to me with a sort of thump that Jerome Kirk had not been lying when he said he lived near the old magics. There was a wood up to my right. It was dark, hot, and rustling and made of very upright old trees. I found I was staring at it nearly with terror. Whatever was inside that wood was very old, very strong, and—well—awesome. I simply could not bring myself to go near it. If Toby had gone there, he was a lot braver than I was.

  I took the left fork instead. It went veering along below the top of the hillside. There was a bit of a breeze up there that rattled the dry, wiry ends of the grass and shook hot smells, almost like spice, out of no end of dry, wiry flowers. Insects hummed or hopped, but none of them were wasps and it was blazingly, strongly peaceful there. If I looked down, all I could see were woods and fields into blue distance. If I looked up, there was blue, blue sky and, against it, the green hilltop which sort of peeled back in places to show hard whiteness, like the hill’s bones.

  It came to me as I wandered on, and more and more whiteness peeled out of the green turf, that I must be walking westward along that spine of chalk downs that I had seen from the main road. In that case, I thought, the whiteness was like bones, the backbone of Blest. I kept looking up at it as I walked. And after nearly a mile I came to a place where more turf than usual had peeled away, into a sort of humpy cliff. The humps fell into a most definite shape. There were two long pieces with a slight gap between and, above and back eastward of those, a big bulge and a sort of hollow in the midst of the bulge.

  I was thinking of bones. I thought to myself that this bit really almost looked like a huge skull. An enormous animal skull, with huge jaws, many times larger than an elephant’s skull. And I imagined to myself that this creature—a really immense creature—was lying all along the hillside just below the top of it, mostly buried in chalk and turf.

  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 BEGIN
NING,” 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.

  10

  RODDY AND NICK

  ONE RODDY

  Mrs. 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.”