The Changes Trilogy (15 page)

Gopal had been watching the duel through the long slit where the knight's two blows had knocked a whole plank out. Now he was lifting the bar of the door.

“Shut it behind me!” he hissed. “He cannot fight three men!”

“Wait!” whispered Nicky. “Then you might catch one of them from behind.”

A thud told that Uncle Chacha had his back to the planking. Peering through the slit, Nicky saw the rush of his pursuers falter as he faced them—they had seen what had happened to the knight. They were all three terribly young, just murderous loutish boys, eighteen at the oldest. Now they quailed before the hard old warrior standing at bay, glanced uncertainly at each other and crept forward with their swords held stiff and low. They must have plundered some museum for them.

Gopal crouched where the doors joined, like a runner settling into his blocks at the start of a race. The robber at the near end passed out of Nicky's line of sight, his back toward her.

“Now!” she whispered, and threw her weight against the big leaf. Gopal stayed in his crouch until the gap was wide enough; just at the moment when steel tinkled on steel outside, he exploded through. Nicky forgot her duty and rushed after him.

The nearest man had heard, or felt, the movement of the door and had half turned, so that the point of Gopal's sword drove into the soft part of his side below the rib cage. His face contorted; with a bubbling yell he buckled and collapsed. But the small blade had gone in so deep that his fall wrenched the hilt out of Gopal's hand, and the boy now stood weaponless.

The middle man, who had just skipped back out of reach of a lunge from Uncle Chacha's lance, wheeled at the cry, then rushed toward this easier victim. Gopal waited his coming hopelessly, but knowing that you have more chance if you can see your enemy than if you have your back to him. Nicky, who had checked her outward rush as the first man keeled over, scooped up some turf from the stack by the barn door and hurled it, two-handed, over Gopal's shoulder into the attacker's face. The brilliant summer had dried the turf into fine dust, barely held together by the dying roots of grass. The man staggered in his charge, blinded, and the next instant Uncle Chacha's lance had caught him full in the neck.

The third man dropped his sword and ran around the corner of the barn. No one chased him.

Without a word Nicky and Gopal walked panting to the other side of the doors, where there were no corpses, and leaned against the wall. Uncle Chacha picked up his shield and joined them.

“Three more killed,” he said, “and one run away. Not bad.”

“What happened at the house?” said Gopal.

“They are good soldiers. Many of them slept with weapons by their beds. Wazir is dead, and Manhoor, and young Harpit. We have killed perhaps half of them, but a group are defending themselves in the big bedrooms on the far side. We are hunting through the other rooms before we attack them. Perhaps we will have to burn the house around them. Look.”

A man, an Englishman, was running along the top of an eight-foot wall. He must have climbed from an upstairs window. Another figure, turbaned, dashed out of a door, planted its legs wide apart and raised its arms in an age-old pose. The arc of the risaldar's bow deepened; then it was straight. The man on the wall threw his arms wide between pace and pace and tumbled with a crash through a greenhouse roof.

“I must go back,” said Uncle Chacha.

“I expect the other horses are in that stable,” said Nicky, “and the rest of the armor. If you turned the horses out you could set fire to the stable and burn the saddles and things as well, and then you wouldn't have to fight any more knights on horseback.”

“You are right,” said Uncle Chacha, and trotted off across the grass, still as light on his feet as if he hadn't spent the morning fighting for his life against grisly odds.

“You go too,” said Nicky. “He'll need a hand with the brazier. I'm going to take the children home.”

“That was a good throw, Nicky,” said Gopal. “Thank you.”

He gave her a gay salute with his bloody sword, made two practice slashes with it, and ran off after his uncle. Nicky climbed to the loft with legs like lead.

Ajeet's tiger was dead, with its skin nailed to the temple door. In the temple the woodman's sons were marrying queens.

Nicky nodded to Ajeet, who put her palms together under her chin.

“And so ends the tale of the tiger who had no soul,” she said.

The children watched her in silence.

“Thank you, miss,” said the redheaded girl.

“I'm going to take you all to your homes now,” said Nicky.

A squealing like a piggery racked the loft.

“Quiet!” she yelled, and the squealing died.

“Now listen to me,” said Nicky. “My friends have killed half the robbers. Ajeet's father beat the worst of the men on horses and killed him too. The rest of the robbers are shut up in the house, but a few have run away. Some of them may be hiding in the woods, but it's all right—they can't hurt us if you do what I say. There's a pile of flints by the ditch over there, and I want you each to pick up two of them, or three if you've got a pocket to put the third one in. Choose stones which are the heaviest ones you can throw properly and straight. Carry one in each hand, and if you see anybody who looks like a robber, lift up your arm and be ready to throw, but don't throw till I shout. Do you understand? Just think—thirty big stones, all held ready for throwing. One man won't attack an army like that. You're an army now. Soldiers. And you're going home.”

She led them down the ladder. Ajeet came last. By the flint pile she marshaled them into a crocodile, with the smallest children in the middle clutching their useless but heartening pebbles. But the big boys and girls, back and front, were armed with flints that really would make an enemy hesitate. She looked for the last time toward the house. A flurry of shouts and a scream rose from the far side. A wisp of smoke came from the stable, and Gopal was leading a huge horse over the grass toward her.

“The other one bolted,” he said, smiling. “But this one is too darn friendly. Can you take him with you?”

Nicky dithered, frightened by the animal's size.

“I'm used to horses, miss,” said the redheaded girl. “I'll mind him.”

She took the halter and Gopal started back toward the battlefield, in a careful copy of Uncle Chacha's energy-preserving trot.

“Now,” said Nicky, “I don't want to go past the house and along the road because that might make things difficult for my friends. Who knows the best way across the fields?”

Several voices answered and all the hands pointed the same way. She chose a dark, sensible-looking boy as her guide and set off. They crossed the big lawn, skirted a little wood, used a tarred footbridge to cross a dry ditch among bamboos, and came to a gate at the end of the garden. They wound slowly up the wheatfield beyond, tramping their path through stalks which had already dropped their seed and were now so brittle that the first gale of winter would push them over to lie and rot. A sudden rustling, as of a large animal disturbed, shook the stems to their left.

“Ready!” shouted Nicky. Thirty fists came up with rocks poised—though the pudgy arms at the center scarcely rose above the wheat stalks. Out of the wheat a naked man bounded like a startled deer. He gazed wild-eyed at the children for a moment; then, amid whoops and jeers, he was scampering up the hill. Nicky called her army into line of march again. That must have been the man she first saw escaping across the lawn in the gray, chill air before sunrise. She looked to her left and was astounded to see that the sun had still not crossed the low hilltop, though the air was gold with its coming. Less than an hour ago, then, the attack had begun.

Her guide led them slantwise up to a second gate, beyond which was a pasture full of cows who stared at them in stolid boredom as they trooped across. The cries from the house were faint and few now, but a strange mutter seemed to be growing in the village. The next gate led into a lane, all arched over with hazels, which her guide wanted to turn along; but Nicky thought they were still dangerously close to the big house and insisted on pushing through the fields behind the straggle of cottages that ran down the main road to the Borough.

More pasture here, and they had to skirt around a marshy piece where the stream that flowed through the White House gardens rose. The mutter from the village was like the roar of surf, and above it floated indistinguishable human shouts. Looking to her right as they slanted down toward the uproar, Nicky saw a slow column of smoke billowing up into the blissful morning. She realized what had happened.

“Run!” she cried. “Run, but keep together!”

If they didn't reach the road in time, a hundred maddened villagers would be roaring down to the big house to slaughter every living thing there, Sikh or robber. It was no use reaching the road alone—she had to come with all the children, safe. The villagers had seen the smoke from the stables and decided that the robbers had fired the barn where their hostages lay. And it would be the Sikhs' fault.

The line moved down hill, slowed to the pace of exhausted and ill-fed six-year-olds stumbling through the tussocks.

“You three,” gasped Nicky to the older ones nearest her, “run to the road. Try to stop the village from attacking my friends. Tell them all the children are safe.”

The messengers went down the slope in a happy freewheeling gallop, as if it had been a game for a summer evening. Nicky grabbed the wrists of the two smallest children and half helped, half hauled them over the hummocky turf. Other children dropped their flints and copied her. And here was a path, a narrow channel between the wall of a chapel and the fence of a pub garden, and now they were in the road, gasping, while the three messengers shrank from the roaring tide of the enraged village as it poured down the road toward them, led by little old Maxie waving a carpenter's hammer. The men were yelling, but the women were silent, and they were more terrible still: marching in their snowy aprons, faces drawn into gray lines with rage and weeping, fingers clenched around the handles of carving knives and cleavers.

Terrified by the sight, Nicky's army melted to the walls of the road. She stood helpless in the middle, still gripping the fat wrists of the two small children.

The tide of vengeance tried to halt, but the villagers at the back, who could not see what had happened, jostled into the ones who could. The news spread like flame through dry hay. The roaring anger changed and became a great hoarse splendor of cheering and relief. Mother after mother dropped her weapon and ran forward, arms outstretched. They came in a white whirl, like doves homing to the dovecote, and knelt in the road to hug their children.

Nicky ran to Maxie.

“Can you get the men to come and help my friends?” she cried. “They've killed half the robbers, but they're still fighting.”

Maxie looked around at the bellowing crowd and nodded.

“Lift me up, Dave,” he crowed to the stout man beside him.

Dave and another man swung him up to their shoulders as if he'd been a child held high to watch a king come past. He raised his arms like Moses on the mount and waited for the cheering to die.

“Men o' Felpham,” he crowed. “You know as the Devil's Children have rescued our childer out of the hands of the robbers. Now they're fighting them to the death down at White House. Do we go help them?”

A mutter of doubt ran through the crowd.

“We've taken the horses,” cried Nicky. “Look, I've brought one. And we've burned the place where the armor was, and we've killed half the robbers. We've killed the worst of the horsemen.”

The mutter changed its note, and rose.

“Do we go help them?” crowed Maxie again. “Or do we let it be said that the men o' Felpham stood and watched while a handful of strangers did their fighting for them?”

The mutter returned to the note that Nicky had first heard, the noise of surf in a gale.

“Okay, Dave,” said Maxie, “you can put me down.”

The women pulled their children aside to let the bellowing army pass. Nicky picked up a fallen cleaver and walked beside Maxie.

“Five of my grandchilder there,” he said. “You go home now, girl. This is no business for a child.”

“I'm coming to make sure you don't hurt my friends,” she said.

“Shan't do that. Not now.”

“Well, I'm coming anyway.”

Maxie looked over his shoulder.

“Hey!” he crowed. “You get off that horse, Dave Gracey, and let the girl ride. She'll be safer up there.”

The stout man slid down, grinning, and whisked Nicky up to the broad and cushiony back. She had ridden ponies on holidays, sometimes, but never a creature as tall as this, never bareback and without reins, though Dave Gracey still held the halter. She seemed a mile in the air, and clutched the coarse mane with her left hand.

But after a minute she found that she wasn't afraid of the height, because the back was so broad and the horse's movement, at this pace, so steady, that she might have been riding on a palanquin. She let go of the mane, rested the cruel cleaver across her lap, straightened her back and neck and rode like a queen.

The exultation of victory thrilled through her blood. They had nearly done it now. All through the long night stalk, and the taut waiting, and the short blind blaze of action, she had felt nothing. She had simply thought and acted as the minute demanded. Even fear (and she had been horribly afraid) came from outside, pulsed through her, and was gone. But now she thought, “We have nearly done it.” Glory washed over her like sunrise.

Now she knew why the robber knight had laughed like a lover as he clove at the tarred planks. The same glory was in him; but in him it had gone rancid.

It was a good half mile from the Borough to the White House. The village bellowed its coming all the way.