The Merlin Conspiracy Page 29

  “My brother is not so attached to his buildings as I am,” Salisbury explained. “This is why he is able to take you to London.”

  Old Sarum’s face contorted dreadfully. First, it went a long, long egg shape, and his lower lip stuck out so that we thought he was going to cry. Then it crunched together short with a snap, like an angry nutcracker. “Attached!” he said. “That’s a joke! How could anyone be attached to a heap of old ruins? I tell you, it’s no fun being a rotten borough. Got no people left, have I?” He wheeled round to look petulantly up at his tall brother. “Have you got any guarantee,” he demanded, “that London’s going to let me in? Well, have you?”

  “Get them to the outskirts,” Salisbury said. “Then parley.”

  “You get on to him, then, and make sure he’s expecting me,” Old Sarum retorted. “I don’t want to uproot myself all that way for nothing, do I?”

  “If he won’t let you in, they can always go the rest of the way by bus or taxi,” Salisbury said, turning away on one green rubber heel. “But I’ll let him know. Get going.”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” Old Sarum grumbled. “I’m only a rotten borough. I do your dirty work. Come on, then,” he said to us. “Don’t just stand there. Or don’t you want to get to London?” He shambled to the old brown car and hopped up into its driving seat. “Get in, get in,” he called out of the window. “This is Salisbury’s pride and joy, this vehicle. He saves it for the Bishop or the Candace woman usually. We’re honored today, we are.”

  Grundo and I exchanged a look as we hurried to open the polished brown door to the backseat. Neither of us was quite sure what a rotten borough was, but Old Sarum certainly smelled as if he were rotten. The whiff as he hurried past us was faint but nasty. Inside, among the shiny brown leather upholstery, it was really quite strong—or not so much strong as filling the space with a rotten sort of persistence, like a blocked drain on a hot day. And this was a hot day. Grundo and I wound down the car’s yellow-tinted windows as fast as we could. They would only go about halfway down, and because of the brownish yellow tint, looking out through them was a very odd experience. Through the lower half, the figure of Salisbury, walking away among the houses with the two dogs, seemed lit with unnatural thundery sunlight. Through the open part above, everything looked too blue by contrast. And the smell was still just as bad.

  “Dogs’ dos,” Old Sarum muttered as he started the engine. “Won’t let them foul his streets, oh, no! So they come and do it on me all the time. I tell you, it’s no fun being a rotten borough.”

  He kept on like this for most of the journey. We had no idea if he was talking to us or just muttering, so we slithered back into the shiny seat and said, “Mmm,” and “Oh?” and “Really?” from time to time, in case Old Sarum got offended, and tried to get the wind in our faces to counteract the smell. It did not help that it was a hot wind. I think Old Sarum took a strange route. Grundo says he did anyway. There seemed no reason, even to me, why we should before long find ourselves driving past Stonehenge.

  “Look at that!” Old Sarum exclaimed pridefully. “Take a good, long look. There’s real stonework for you! That’s how to treat stones! And to think, in the old days, that all of it used to be mine! Enough to make you cry, it is.”

  We leaned over to that side to look. Grundo said politely, “You must have owned an incredible amount of magic once, then.”

  “Magic!” said Old Sarum. “That’s beyond magic into thaumaturgical transcendental, son! I could weep!”

  Grundo said more polite things. I couldn’t speak. The sight of that compact ring of great stones, huge and small at once, and dense with strength through the queer thundery windows, did strange things to the inside of my head. I raised myself higher, so that I could see it above the glass in its proper strong grays, and discovered that some of the way I was feeling seemed to be due to the fact that Stonehenge had triggered one of the hurt lady’s flower files. Briar Rose: places of power. But I found that the knowledge was all swimming away from me, rotating like a wheel, in spinning spokes of wisdom. At first I thought that this was because I didn’t really need to know about Stonehenge. Then I realized that it was because this place was not in the file. The hurt lady’s knowledge went back to the days before Stonehenge was made. This made me feel so odd that I had to clutch one of the straps beside the window and shut my eyes until we had gone past.

  After that we seemed to work our way onto the main London road, but whenever we came to a town, we left that road and zigzagged between dusty hedges on small white lanes, and only came back to the main road after we had passed the town.

  “Have to give them a wide berth,” Old Sarum muttered. “Don’t want an argument. Don’t want all that about ‘You can’t come through me, you rotten borough!’ Oh, it’s no fun, I tell you.”

  Back on the main road, we rumbled along beside dark trees, with a long green line of hills over to our right. Around the time sunset was growing up the sky behind us, Grundo and I both found our heads being snatched round toward that line of hills. There was something there. Back into my head came Briar Rose: places of power. This time it was odder still. Some of whatever power it was had evidently been old when the hurt lady made her files, but some of it was not there, and new, and quite as strong as Stonehenge.

  “What’s that?” Grundo asked, rather dizzily. “Over that way.”

  “Can’t say, I’m sure,” Old Sarum answered. “Some old stuff, nothing to do with me. I’m only a rotten borough.”

  We drove, and the feeling died away gradually, almost reluctantly, as if something might have been trying to get our attention. Sunset blazed all round the sky. And quite suddenly the car began to zigzag around in the road and Old Sarum started to shout. “Gerroff, gerroff. Gerroff my windscreen, damn your eyes!” We stopped with a squeal and a dreadful jolt.

  “One of you get out there and kill this thing, whatever it is! Bat or whatever,” Old Sarum commanded. “I can’t see a thing with it there.”

  Grundo and I looked past him at the windscreen, but as far as we could see, there was nothing there but yellow-tinted glass and some flies stuck to it.

  “Get it off!” howled Old Sarum.

  We sighed and climbed out into the dusky road, where all at once everything was smelling of dew and damp hay. “I think he’s gone potty,” Grundo grunted under the noise of the car drumming and throbbing beside the hedge.

  “Or he was potty to start with,” I agreed.

  We edged along to the front of the car. There still did not seem to be anything wrong with the windscreen, until we reached the long brown bonnet and leaned over to look. Then the thing clinging to the windscreen wiper flinched away from us and tried to scuttle up over the top of the car. Grundo made a grab—with a touch of magic to help—and caught it by the filmy veiling along its back. He held it out to me in both hands, quivering and all but invisible.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Kill it, come on!” Old Sarum ordered, leaning out of his window.

  It was alive and terrified and bewildered. It was also beginning to glow faintly. “No, don’t,” I said. “I think it may be a salamander. They’re rare.”

  “Ouch, it’s getting hot! I think you’re right,” Grundo agreed. “What’s a soothing spell, quickly?”

  I began a spell for him, and he took it up, too, as soon as he remembered it. We bent over the quivering salamander while Old Sarum watched ironically. “It’s vermin,” he said. “That thing can set fire to a house, you know.”

  “Yes, but it won’t now,” I said. “I think you can let it go into the hedge, Grundo.”

  “It doesn’t want to go,” Grundo said. “It’s foreign. It’s lost. It’s escaped from somewhere horrible, and it doesn’t know where to go to be safe.”

  “Speaks to you, does it?” Old Sarum asked sarcastically. “Don’t trust it. It’s just vermin. Throw it in the hedge.”

  “Not speaks, exactly,” Grundo said, “but I think it’s tellin
g me the truth. Roddy, we’d better take it to your grandfather Hyde and ask him what to do about it.”

  “Good idea,” I said, although if Old Sarum hadn’t been there setting me a bad example, I might have been sarcastic, too. I felt really envious of the way Grundo could understand the salamander.

  As for Old Sarum, he did his ghastly face contortions again, going long and egg-shaped and then snapping into a nutcracker bunch. “It’s your funeral,” he said as Grundo climbed into the car, tenderly holding the salamander. “You’re the ones that’ll fry and sizzle when it sets this car on fire, not me. I don’t burn easy.”

  “Then that’s one good thing about being a rotten borough, isn’t it?” I said, climbing back in, too. After the fresh dewy evening the smell in the car was beastly.

  “True, but Salisbury’s going to be pretty peeved when I come back and tell him his car burned up,” Old Sarum retorted. He started the car moving and grumbled for the next ten miles. “Tell him I never got to London and he’ll do me. Lose my charter and my MP, I shouldn’t wonder. And I hate the smell of burning. Sets all my bricks on edge.”

  “Just shut up,” Grundo whispered. He crooned the soothing spell to the salamander until it climbed up his arm to his shoulder, where it sat pulsing out pleasure. What with my envy about that and the smell and the way Old Sarum was grumbling, I didn’t want to be in the car at all. I turned and stuck my face out of the open half of the window.

  After a while, when the road was nearly dark, I realized that there was a white horse alongside, keeping pace with the car. I looked up to see that there was a rider on its back, whose flapping black cloak showed a white lining. “Oh!” I said.

  Grandfather Gwyn leaned down to the open half of the window. “They have called me out for a third time,” he said, “to carry away a great many more people. In some ways, though, this is good news. If they try to call me again, I am free to summon them. But I am sorry about the rest of it.”

  Before I could answer, he clicked his tongue to the gray mare, and she went surging off up the road ahead.

  Grundo stared. “He went faster than this car!” he said. “What did he say? I didn’t quite hear.”

  “Something private,” I said. For some reason, I did not want to tell Grundo how very anxious this had made me. Sybil was Grundo’s mother, after all, and she had just done something new. I wanted to get to my lovely, safe, soldierly Magid of a grandad Hyde more than anything in the world just then. Grandad would know. He would be able to tell me what Sybil and her friends had done this time. I wished he were here telling me now. Every time Old Sarum slowed down for a corner or a crossroads, I wanted to scream at him to drive faster. When he slowed down and stopped just outside London, I almost did scream. “Drive on!” I shouted.

  “Can’t do that,” Old Sarum said. “This is London. Got to negotiate, don’t we?”

  To my utter exasperation, he turned off the engine and climbed out of the car. I flung my door open and jumped out, too. After a moment Grundo got out as well, leaving the salamander curled up on the seat. The smells of a hot city night, a hot country night, and Old Sarum flooded round us. Hedges rustled behind us. In front, the headlights of our car blazed down a suburban road lined with streetlights and glistened on two enormous shiny things planted like roadblocks in front of us.

  They were shoes. It took us a moment to see that they were shoes.

  Our heads turned slowly upward, and we saw London, vast and shadowy, towering against the purple city sky. “What are you doing here?” he said to Old Sarum.

  London had the strangest voice. Part of it was like the groan and clatter of thick traffic, and the rest was a chorus of different voices, high, low, and tenor voices, voices with very upper-class accents, bass voices speaking purest Cockney, overseas voices, and every grade of voice in between. It was almost like hearing a huge concert.

  Old Sarum whined and bowed and rubbed his hands together. In the headlights his face went through extraordinary contortions. “I’m only a rotten borough, Your Honor, and I mean no harm. Not wishing to trespass in any way upon Your Honor’s precincts, but I was given this mission, see. I’m to drive these two here, take them to the Magid. I knew that might be pushing it a bit, Your Honor, but what’s a poor rotten borough like me to do when people in high places start giving orders? No offense in the world …”

  “Who gave you your orders?” chorused London. He had his shadowy head bent, listening to Old Sarum, but even in that dim light he seemed to have the strangest face. It was like the framework of a strong, noble face with other faces stuck into it. Part of one cheek was shifty. The end of one eyebrow and part of his mouth seemed to leer. One of his eyes seemed to be glass. At least, his left eye caught the light differently from the right one. A tarry, bricky city smell blew off him, with a touch of stale river mixed in.

  “It was that Candace woman, Your Honor,” Old Sarum whined. “What she tells Salisbury, Salisbury does. Nothing to do with me, except that I got roped in to do the dirty work. As usual.”

  “Mrs. Candace,” orchestrated London, “used to be a great beauty. I knew her well. She held salons in Berkeley Square. Then she married an Italian Count.”

  “Yeah, but he died, and she gave all that up,” Old Sarum said. “Lives in Salisbury now and bosses the country from there.”

  “I know,” London rumbled. “And you should speak of her with proper respect.”

  “All the respect in the world, Your Honor,” Old Sarum protested. “Anything you say. But I don’t have to tell someone who straddles a great river like you do that humans are just water under your bridges. Water under all your bridges. Mrs. Candace, these two young’uns with me, they’re all the same. They come, they go. You live on. Even I live on, Your Honor.”

  “We grew up for and by means of humans,” London thumped out. He sounded like hammers on a building site.

  “Well, speak for yourself, Your Honor,” Old Sarum whined. “All humans mean to me these days is they let me send one of them off to argue in Winchester. What I’m trying to say, Your Honor, is that it’s nothing to you what humans come or go. So you might as well let me take these to the Magid.”

  “On what grounds?” chorused London.

  I began to feel increasingly uneasy. It wasn’t just that I was frantic to get to Grandad or even that we were standing in the road being argued over by two cities. It was because now that I had learned to see the near-invisible creatures like the ones who inhabited the Dimber Regalia, I could see—and hear—them here, too. They were being drawn here by the argument. The hedges behind were full of stealthy rustlings and small blinks of light. Bluish shadows were stalking in from the rear of the car. These felt different from those I had seen earlier today. I realized that the ones I had seen by sunlight were the lazy, harmless creatures of the day. These, now, were the people of the night. And very few of them were friendly.

  Grundo had seen them, too. His head kept turning toward the hedges as the argument went on.

  At length London said, in a distant sort of city buzz, as if he were considering, “I’ve no objections to the humans entering. When have I ever prevented that? I suppose they can take a bus or a taxi.”

  “We’ve no money!” Grundo called up at him anxiously. “We used it all yesterday.”

  I don’t think London heard him. He suggested in chorus, “Or they can walk.”

  Old Sarum sent a contorted glance toward the hedges and the shadows in the road and stuck his lower lip out. “As to that, Your Honor, I’m not sure they would be safe. I was told to keep them safe, meaning no disrespect.”

  “I have never guaranteed safety,” London replied, “or wealth either.”

  “No, and your streets aren’t really paved with gold neither,” Old Sarum retorted. “I know. It’s not your fault some humans get rich and have a lovely time and some has to doss on a doorstep or get robbed. Nothing to do with you. But we’re not talking about that, Your Honor. We’re discussing about me driving them to a part
icular doorstep like Mrs. Candace wants me to. Is that too much to ask?”

  There was a long pause. London appeared to be listening to something in the distance, the singsong of a fire engine or an ambulance perhaps. We certainly heard something like that, followed by clocks striking, while we waited. Then, finally, his vast figure straightened a little. His chorus voice sounded amused.

  “I have been under orders, too,” he told us. “Even me. It seems that time was needed to penetrate certain magical defenses. The enchantment was absolute while it lasted, but I can let you go now. Get in your car and drive where you want to go.” He lifted one huge, glossy shoe and stepped over the nearest row of houses into the next street. Before he lifted the other foot, he stood astride the houses and gave a rumbling chuckle. “I shall be with you all the way, of course.”

  He was, too. We climbed quickly and thankfully back into the car and Old Sarum drove on through the city. And every time I glanced out of the open half of the window, I saw London’s huge shadowy figure wading among the houses beside us.

  It seemed to take an age to get to Grandad’s house. I was mad with anxiety all the way. I knew that if Sybil was able to order London to hold us up while Grandfather Gwyn carried out her orders, then she had grown hideously powerful and we had to tell Grandad.

  But it never occurred to me what she had done. Old Sarum drew up outside the house at last with a fine shriek of brakes, and I jumped out and rushed to the front door. While I clattered away at the knocker, I could hear Old Sarum going on at Grundo: “Oh, I don’t do it to be thanked. I’m just the dogsbody, I am. You rush away, too. Don’t mind me, I’m only a rotten borough....” And Grundo was trying to make himself heard, saying, “But we do thank you. We’re very, very grateful. Hey, let me get the salamander out before you drive away....”

  Long before the door was opened, Old Sarum had driven away and Grundo had joined me on the doorstep with the salamander on his shoulder. I clattered the knocker one more time, and the door was opened at last by my cousin Toby.