Elidor (Essential Modern Classics) (3 page)

D
EAD
L
OSS

B
y the time Roland was clear of the gatehouse the fiddler had reached the trees. Roland hurried after him.

For a while the road passed charred stumps of buildings, and field rank with nettle. Dust, or ash, kicked up under Roland’s feet, muffling his walk and coating his body so aridly that his skin rasped. Flies whined round him, and crawled in his hair, and tried to settle on his lips. The sky was dull, yet there was a brittleness in the light that hurt. It was no longer wonder that led him, but dislike of being alone.

Even the singing had lost its enchantment. For now that the old man had appeared again Roland recognised where he had heard the song before: the fiddler had played it. And so what he had imagined to be the music of his dreams was only the jingle of a half-learned tune.

Although Roland wanted to catch up with the man, he wanted less and less to reach the forest. He could make out nothing sinister at first, apart from a general atmosphere of gloom and stillness, and it was not until he
was close that he knew why this forest was different from all others. The trees were dead.

Roland looked back: but he had nowhere else to go, and at that distance the castle was a tortured crag. He clutched a handful of gravel and rubbed it against his cheek. It hurt. It was real. He was there. He had only himself.

Within the forest the road dwindled to a line of mud that strayed wherever there was ground to take it: fungus glowed in the twilight, and moss trailed like hair from the branches. There was the silence of death over everything: a silence that was more powerful for the noises it contained – the far off crash of trees, and the voices of cold things hidden in the fog that moved in ribbons where there was no wind. Oaks became black water at a touch.

Roland could not tell how long he had struggled, nor how far, when the trees thinned on to moorland below a skyline of rock. The forest held neither hours nor miles, and all that he had been able to do was to wade from one bog into the next, to climb over one rotting trunk to the next, and to hope for an end to the slime.

He walked a few shambling steps clear of the trees, and collapsed in the grass. He had lost the road, and he was alone.

When he opened his eyes Roland thought that he would never move again. The chill had seeped through his body and locked him to the ground.

He turned on to his side, and dragged himself to a sitting position, his head on his knees, too cold to shiver.

However long he had slept, nothing had changed. The light was just the same, the sky unbroken.

He began to walk uphill towards the rocks. They were higher than he had thought – packed columns of granite, splintered by frost and ribbed by wind – but he scrambled amongst them up weathered gullies to the top.

Here Roland found himself on a broad ridge shelving away to a plain which stretched into the haze. Nothing showed. No villages; no houses; no light; no smoke. He was alone. Behind him the hill dropped to the forest, and he could see no end to that. The only proof that anyone had ever lived in this land was close by him, but it gave Roland little comfort.

A circle of standing stones crowned the hill. They were unworked and top-heavy; three times bigger than a man and smooth as flint. They rose from the ground like clenched fists. Roland walked into the circle which was easily four hundred yards wide, and at the middle he stopped and gazed round him.

From the circle an avenue of stones marched along the ridge, and these were sharp blades of rock, as tall as the circle, but cruel and thin. They went straight to a round hill, a mile away.

If possible, the air was quieter here: so quiet that it was
as if the silence lay in Roland. He avoided making any noise, for fear that the stillness would not be broken.

But how many stones were there in the circle? Roland started to count from the left of the avenue – eighty-eight. Or did he miss one right at the end? Try again – eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven. It may have been that his eyes were tired, but the flick, flick, flick, flick, flick of the pale shapes as he counted them was making the stones in the corner of his vision seem to move – eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine. Just once more. One, two three, five, six – no. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven – the air was like a deafness about him.

Why am I bothering to count? thought Roland.

“You must stay until you have counted them all.”

Yes, I must – who said that? Roland caught himself looking over his shoulder.

I did. I must be cracked.

The silence was so complete that his thought had sounded as loud as a voice.

I’m getting out of this.

Roland sprinted across the circle, intent only on reaching the open hill-top, and he did not notice at first that he was running into the mouth of the avenue. He swerved aside towards a gap between the stones, but as he approached, the perspective seemed to alter, to become reversed, so that instead of growing broader the gap appeared to shrink. He could not pass through.

Roland changed direction, bewildered by his misjudgement of distance – and now he was going into the avenue again. Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Ninety. Stones don’t move. There’s plenty of room between them.

He fixed his eyes on one gap, and made for it.

These huge boulders were spaced many times their own width apart, yet as Roland drew near, instinct told him that the gap was not wide enough. He kept jerking back, as though from an unseen obstacle in the dark. Stones – don’t – move. There’s plenty – of room. He
could see that there was, but even in the last yard he flinched from the stones, and the moment of passing through tore a great, wordless cry from his throat.

“I’m imagining things,” said Roland.

The abruptness with which his fear had left him was frightening in itself, for the instant Roland crossed out of the circle the stones shrank in his mind to their true size.

“You could drive a bus between them!”

But even so, the air was less stifled now, and nothing moved when he counted.—Eighty-one. Again.—Eighty-one. No trouble at all.

Roland decided to follow the avenue to the hill. He would have a better view from there, and perhaps something would give direction to his wandering: but he kept well clear of the standing stones, walking below them on the ridge.

It soon became obvious that the hill, for all its mass, was not a part of the ridge but an artificial mound, completely circular, and flat-topped.

The avenue ended at a dry moat, or ditch, that went round the hill. Roland slithered into the ditch, ran across its broad floor, and started to climb. The turf was like glass under his shoes.

From the top of the mound there was one landmark, in front of him on the plain, far off.

A heap of rocks. No, thought Roland, it’s towers – and walls: all broken. Another castle. That’s not much use. What else?

Roland screwed up his eyes, and after a while he thought he could make out a form that was more substantial than the shifting cloud, away to his left.

A castle. Black. Dead loss.—There’s got to be something.

But the view showed only desolation. Plain, ridge, forest, sea, all were spent. Even colour had been drained from the light, and Roland saw everything, his own flesh and clothes, in shades of grey, as if in a photograph.

Three castles.

He looked to his right. Here the dark was like thunder, impenetrable. Then—It came, and went, and came again.

It’s a light. On a hill. Very faint – like – a candle – dying – towers! Golden towers!

Roland could never remember whether he saw it, or whether it was a picture in his mind, but as he strained to pierce the haze, his vision seemed to narrow and to draw the castle towards him. It shone as if the stones had soaked in light, as if stone could be amber. People were moving on the walls: metal glinted. Then clouds drifted over.

Roland was back on the hill-top, but that spark in the mist across the plain had driven away the exhaustion, the hopelessness. It was the voice outside the keep: it was a tear of the sun.

He started for the castle at once. He crabbed down, braking with his hands. It would be all right now. It would be all right: all right now. He landed in a heap at the bottom of the mound. Close by his head four fingers of a woollen glove stuck out of the turf.

Four fingers of a woollen glove pointing out of the mound, and the turf grew smooth between each finger, without a mark on it.

Roland crept his hand forward and – the glove was empty. He dragged a penknife out of his pocket and began to hack at the turf. The root mantle lay only two inches deep on white quartz, and he cut back and peeled the turf like matting. It came in a strip, a fibrous mould of the glove below, with four neat holes. The fingers and the cuff were free, but the thumb went straight into the quartz.

Roland looked for the name tape inside the cuff. He found it: Helen R. Watson.

He stabbed the turf, but he could find no break in the quartz, nothing that he could lift. The glove was fused into the rock. There were no cracks, no lesions. The thumb went into unflawed rock, and turf had covered it.

Roland jerked the glove, but he could not move it. He threw his weight against it in all directions, and the glove twisted and swung him to his knees. He wrestled, but the glove dragged him down in exhaustion, handcuffed to the mound.

He knelt, his head on his forearm, looking at the quartz: white; cold; hard; clean.—But a stain was growing over it: his shadow, blacker and blacker. The light was changing. And from the drift of the shadow Roland knew that the cause of the brightness was moving up close behind him.

M
ALEBRON

I
t was a man with yellow hair. He wore a golden cloak, a golden shield on his arm. In his hand was a spear, and its head was like flame.

“Is there light in Gorias?” he said.

“Help me,” said Roland. “The glove.”

“Is there light?” said the man.

“The glove,” said Roland. “Helen.”

He could think of nothing, do nothing. His head rang with heartbeats, and the hill spun. He lay on the turf. And slowly a quietness grew, like sleep, and in the quietness he could hold the glove so that it was not a grappling hand. The man stood, unmoving, and the words came back to Roland as he had heard them before the table of the cloth of gold. The table: the castle: and the man – nothing else showed the colour of life in all this wasted land.

The man’s face was slender, with high cheekbones, and the locks of his hair swept backwards as if in a wind.

“Who are you?” whispered Roland.

“Malebron of Elidor.”

“What’s that?” said Roland.

“Is there light in Gorias?”

“I don’t understand,” said Roland.

The man began to climb the hill, but he was lame. One foot dragged. He did not look to see whether Roland was following.

“Are you hurt?” said Roland.

“Wounds do not heal in Elidor.”

“There was a fiddler,” said Roland. “He’d got a bad leg. I had to help him—”

“Now that you have come,” said Malebron, “I need not skulk, in beggar’s rags again. Look.” They were at the top of the mound. He pointed to the distant ruined keep.

“There is Findias, Castle of the South. And the forest, Mondrum: the fairest wood in Elidor.”

“It was you?” said Roland. “You? Then you must have been watching me all the time! You just dumped me by the cliff – and left me – and what have you done with Helen? And David and Nick? What’s happened?” shouted Roland.

But his voice had no power in the air, and Malebron waited, ignoring him, until Roland stopped.

“And Falias, and Murias,” he said. “Castles of the West and of the North. There on the plain beneath.”

He spoke the names of castle and wood as if they were precious things, not three black fangs and a swamp.

“But Gorias, in the east – what did you see?”

“I – saw a castle,” said Roland. “It was all golden – and alive. Then I saw the glove. She—”

“You have known Mondrum, and those ravaged walls,” said Malebron. “The grey land, the dead sky. Yet what you saw in Gorias once shone throughout Elidor, from the Hazel of Fordruim, to the Hill of Usna. So we lived, and no strife between us. Now only in Gorias is there light.”

“But where’s—?” said Roland.

“The darkness grew,” said Malebron. “It is always there. We did not watch, and the power of night closed on Elidor. We had so much of ease that we did not mark the signs – a crop blighted, a spring failed, a man killed. Then it was too late – war, and siege, and betrayal, and the dying of the light.”

“Where’s Helen?” said Roland.

Malebron was silent, then he said quietly, “A maimed king and a mumbling boy! Is it possible?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Roland. “Where’s Helen? That’s her glove, and the thumb’s stuck in the rock.”

“Gloves!” cried Malebron. “Look about you! I have endured, and killed, only in the belief that you would come. And you have come. But you will not speak to me of gloves! You will save this land! You will bring back light to Elidor!”

“Me!”

“There is no hope but you.”

“Me,” said Roland. “I’m no use. What could I do?”

“Nothing,” said Malebron, “without me. And without you, I shall not live. Alone, we are lost: together, we shall bring the morning.”

“All this,” said Roland, “was like the golden castle – like you sang? The whole country?”

“All,” said Malebron.

“—Me?”

“You.”

Findias… Falias… Murias… Gorias. The Hazel of Fordruim… the Forest of Mondrum… the Hill of Usna. Men who walked like sunlight. Cloth of gold. Elidor. – Elidor.

Roland thought of the gravel against his cheek. This is true: now: I’m here. And only I can do it. He says so. He says I can bring it all back. Roland Watson, Fog Lane, Manchester 20. What about that? Now what about that!

“How do you know I can?” said Roland.

“I have watched you prove your strength,” said Malebron. “Without that strength you would not have lived to stand here at the heart of the darkness.”

“Here?” said Roland. “It’s just a hill—”

“It is the Mound of Vandwy,” said Malebron. “Night’s
dungeon in Elidor. It has tried to destroy you. If you had not been strong you would never have left the stone circle. But you were strong, and I had to watch you prove your strength.”

“I don’t see how a hill can do all this,” said Roland. “You can’t fight a hill.”

“No,” said Malebron. “We fight our own people. Darkness needs no shape. It uses. It possesses. This Mound and its stones are from an age long past, yet they were built for blood, and were supple to evil.”

Roland felt cold and small on the hill.

“I’ve got to find the others first,” he said.

“It is the same thing,” said Malebron.

“No, but they’ll be better than me: they’re older. And I’ve got to find them, anyway.”

“It is the same thing,” said Malebron. “Listen. You have seen Elidor’s four castles. Now each castle was built to guard a Treasure, and each Treasure holds the light of Elidor. They are the seeds of flame from which all this land was grown. But Findias and Falias and Murias are taken, and their Treasures lost.

“You are to save these Treasures. Only you can save them.”

“Where are they?” said Roland. “And you said there were four Treasures: so where’s the other?”

“I hold it,” said Malebron. “The Spear of Ildana from
Gorias. Three castles lie wasted: three Treasures are in the Mound. Gorias stands. You will go to Vandwy, and you will bring back light to Elidor.”