The Changes Trilogy (28 page)

In front of the inn at Edge stood a group of men with short boar-spears in their hands, and rangy dogs rubbing against their legs. They waved, like the old man down the lane, but their minds were busy with the coming hunt and the ponies padded by as unnoticed as a small cloud. The runner-lines of a few sledges showed on the big road, but when they dipped into the lane the snow was untrodden—the Vale had little cause to visit the hills, nor the hills the Vale. As they twisted between the tall, ragged hedges Margaret glimpsed vistas of the flat reaches below, dim with snow, all white patches like a barely started watercolor. It looked very different from her earlier visits.

But when they were really down off the hills it felt just the same. As soon as the lane leveled out they came across a bent old woman gathering sticks out of the hedgerow. She glanced piercingly at them as they passed, but gave them no greeting. There was a black cat sitting on her shoulder. She looked like a proper witch.

She was the only soul they saw for the rest of the journey (not many, even of the queer Vale folk, cared to live so close to the city). When they crossed the swing bridge Jonathan reined Caesar to a willing halt and gazed up and down the mottled surface where the snow had fallen and frozen on the listless water. It looked a wicked surface, cold enough to kill and too weak to bear.

“I'm stupid,” he said. “I should have known it would be like this. We can't tow her out till it thaws—for weeks, months, even.”

“Wasn't it frozen when you came down on Tuesday?”

“There were bits of ice on it, but it was mostly water. I think the river must have risen high enough to flood over the top gates—that would have broken up the first lot of ice.”

“What shall we do, then?”

“Go and see them, tell them to look out for the dogs, see how Otto is, give them the food. Then go and visit Cousin Mary.”

The path by the canal was flat and easy, but long before they came to the dock area it was barred by a tall fence of corrugated iron. Jonathan led the way up the embankment, through a gap in a hedge and into the tangled garden of one of the deserted houses between Hempsted and Gloucester. Beyond the level crossing he pushed at a gate on the right of the road, picked his way between neat stacks of concrete drainage pipes and back to the canal. They were just below the docks.

“I found this way last time,” he said. “There she is.”

He pointed along the widening basin. The tug lay in its private ice floe right in the center of the dock, with a hawser dipping under the ice at prow and stern and a dinghy nestling against her quarter.

“It'll be easier from the other quay,” said Jonathan. “We'll find a cord and throw it out so that they can pull the food sack across the ice—that hawser's shorter. Over this bridge is best.”

“I can't see anyone on her,” said Margaret.

“Too cold. They'll be keeping snug down below.”

They moved in complete silence up the quayside and around an arm of frozen water which stretched south from the main dock until they reached the place where the hawser was tied—a chilly and narrow stretch of quay under a bleak cliff of warehouse. Margaret peered nervously into the cavernous blackness between its open doors, and then squinted upward to where, eighty feet above her, the hoisting hook still dangled from the black girder that jutted out above the topmost door.

“Ahoy!” called Jonathan.

He was answered by a clamor of baying from the other side of the dock. There was a swirl of movement along the far quay, a shapeless brown and orange and black and dun weltering which spilled over the edge and became the dog pack hurling across the ice toward them.

“In here!” shouted Jonathan, using the impetus of Caesar's bucking to run him under the arch into the warehouse. Scrub followed, dragging Margaret.

“Door!” he shouted. She let go of the bridle and wrenched at her leaf of the big doors. It stuck, gave, rasped, and swung around into the arch. She could see the foremost dogs already on this side of the tug, coming in long bounds, heads thrown back and sideways, jaws gaping. Then Jonathan's door slammed against hers and they were in total dark.

“Sorry,” he said, “mine was bolted.”

He fiddled with the bottom of the doors while Margaret tensed her back against them and the baying and yapping rose in a spume of noise outside. The dark turned to grayness as her eyes learned to use the light from two grimed windows set high in the furthest wall. She could see the ponies now, standing quite still as though the dark were real night—just the way parrots go quiet when a cloth is thrown over their cage.

“I think that'll hold it,” said Jonathan. “Hang on, there's a hook here too. That's better. Let's go up and see if we can see anything from above. If there isn't another way out we're in a mess.”

The steps to the floor above were more of a broad ladder than a staircase. They found another long room, piled high with sacks of grain which had rotted and spilled their contents across the small railway that ran along the middle of the space from the doors overlooking the dock. The air smelled of mustiness and fermentation, sweet and bad.

“Let's go higher,” said Jonathan. “They'll get excited again if we open these doors, but they mayn't notice if we go right to the top.”

Each floor had the same layout, with the double doors at the end and the railway down the middle between the stacked goods. Different kinds of goods had been stored at different levels; on the second floor the trolley that ran on the rails had been left half unloaded, with two crates of canned pineapples still on it and a ledger loose on the floor. The very top floor was used for the most miscellaneous items—there was even a bronze statue of a soldier in one corner, swathed in the ropes that had been used to handle the crates on the hoist; beside him lay several truck axles. The roof had gone in a couple of places and patches of snow lay on the floor, but this meant it was much lighter; and when Jonathan pulled the double doors open it felt like sunrise. The girder arm of the hoist stuck out rigid above them, the big hook dangling halfway along. It was a gulping drop to the quay below. Out on the ice the dog pack were sniffing round
Heartsease
in an absentminded but menacing way. Jonathan leaned against his side of the doorway, quite unaffected by the chilling drop, and teased the back of his skull.

“We need a bomb,” he said.

“Oh, surely they wouldn't store them here,” said Margaret. “The army would have …”

He grinned across at her and she stopped talking.

“What's on that trolley?” he asked.

This one hadn't been unloaded at all. It was covered with small wooden boxes, no larger than shoeboxes, whose labels, still faintly legible, were addressed to the
Gloucester Echo
.

Margaret tried to pick one up but found she couldn't move it.

“Printing metal,” said Jonathan. “Must be almost as heavy as lead. The boxes are small, so that a man can lift them. Now that's what I call a real bit of luck! Let's see if we can push it. Come on, harder! One, two, three,
heave!
Fine. Leave it there and we'll try the hoist. It'll be electric, but there might be a hand control to run the hook out. Tell me if anything moves.”

He tugged levers without result, then began to turn a large wheel.

“That's it,” said Margaret excitedly, but still without any idea of what he was up to.

“Good. Now those bits of iron at the end of the rails must be to stop the trolley flying out over that quay if there's an accident, but there might be a way of moving them.”

“Mine's got a sort of hook this side.”

“So's mine, hang on, it's stuck. Can you see anything to bang it with? Yes, that'll do. Ouch! Don't worry, I only grazed my knuckles. Done yours? Fine. Now, just let me work this out.”

“But, Jo, even if you get them right under here, on the quay, you'll only hit one or two, and …”

Jonathan stopped sucking his ravaged knuckle to grin at her.

“I've got a better idea. If it works,” he said.

He looked outside, up at the hoist, back at the trolley, down at the drop. Then he wound the hook in, so that he could reach it. Then he made Margaret help him shove the trolley right to the giddy verge. Then he fetched the ropes which festooned the bronze soldier and spent several minutes contriving a lopsided sling from the hook to the trolley. Last of all he wound the hook out almost to the end of the girder and readjusted the ropes. Margaret suddenly saw what would happen if the trolley were pushed the last few inches over the edge—pushed with a rush: it would swing down and out, in a wide curve, trolley and boxes all moving together; but because the far end of the trolley was on longer ropes than the near end, the boxes would start to slide out forward, and when the swing of the ropes had reached its limit the boxes would all shoot on and be scattered right out across the ice, almost as far as
Heartsease;
and if the dogs could be lured onto the ice at the right moment … she knew what his next words were going to be before he said them.

“You'll have to be bait, I'm afraid.”

“Bait?”

“Yes, as soon as I've found a lever. I want them on the ice halfway between here and
Heartsease
—it's the big ones that are the killers. Go down to the bottom, edge one door open, make quite sure you know how to shut it, slip through and shout. Look, they're bored with the tug and they're going back to where they were before, so you'll know just how long it will take them to get across. Stick it out as long as you can, Marge, but get back inside when the first dog is halfway between the boat and the quay—I don't want to drop a ton of lead on
you
. If I shout, you'll know it's not safe to open the door. All right?”

“All right,” whispered Margaret, sick with terror. The stairs seemed longer going down, the rooms darker, the rustling of rats more obvious—perhaps they'd been scared into brief silence by the clamor of the dogs. Scrub and Caesar were restive: most ponies hate rats. She patted and talked to them both, until she realized she was only doing so to put off opening the door. She walked down between the rails and studied the bolt and the hook—the hook would be quite enough by itself. She was lifting it when she suddenly wondered whether she could hear him down all those stairs, supposing he was shouting to warn her of prowling hounds … come on, girl, of course you would—Jonathan wouldn't have suggested it if it wasn't going to work. She opened the door eight inches and slipped through the gap into the bitter daylight.

The dogs were over by a warehouse on the far side of the ice, squabbling over something edible. She could hear distant snarlings.

“Ahoy!” she called. Her voice was weak and thin.

“Ahoy!” came Jonathan's cheerful yell far above her head.

She saw two or three dogs raise their muzzles and look across the ice. She pranced about on the quay, waving both arms to make sure she was seen, because most dogs have poor vision and the wind was blowing from them to her, so that no scent would reach them.

At once it all became like the nightmares you have again and again: the same baying rose; the same swirl of color spilled down on the ice; the same dogs leaped yelping in front, their heads held the same way; the same panic lurched up inside her. She was yards from the door, after her prancing, and rushed madly for it, but when she reached it she saw that the dogs had barely come as far as the tug, so she still had to stand in the open, visible, edible, luring them on. Bait.

But it was only seconds before the first dog reached the rumple in the ice she'd chosen as a mark, and she could slip back in and hook the door shut. As she closed out the last of sky she thought she glimpsed black blobs hurling down.

Then there came a thud, a long, tearing crack, a lot of smaller hangings; the yelping changed its note, faltered and vanished; then there were only a few whimpers, mixed with a sucking and splashing. She unhooked the door, edged it open and poked her head out.

The whole surface of the ice had changed—it had been nothing like as thick as she'd thought and was really only snow frozen together, without the bonding strength of ice. Now the under water had flooded out across a great stretch of it and the part between her and
Heartsease
was smashed into separate floes, overlapping in places and leaving a long passage of open water. The smaller dogs had not come far enough to be caught and were rushing away to the far quay, but most of the larger ones were struggling in the deadly water. As she watched, one which had been marooned on a floating island of ice shifted its position; the ice tilted and slid it sideways into the water; it tried to scrabble back but could find no hold; then it swam across to the fixed ice and tried there, but still there was nothing on the slippery surface for its front legs to grip while it hauled its sodden hindquarters out; it tried and tried. Margaret looked away, and saw several others making the same hopeless effort around the edges of the open water. In the middle two still shapes floated—dogs which had actually been hit by the falling boxes. She shut the door and went trembling up the stairs.

Jonathan had shut his door and was sitting on a bale with his head between his hands. He looked white, even in the dimness.

“It worked,” she said, “but I couldn't go on looking.”

“Nor could I,” he answered. “It's not their fault they're killers.”

Margaret was surprised. She was so used, after five years of knowing him well, to his instant reaction to the needs of any happening that she hardly thought about it. Jo would say what to do, and he'd be right. Now, for the second time—the first had been when they'd crouched at the top of the stairs and listened to Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Aunt Anne—he'd buckled under the sudden load of his feelings. He felt the death of the dogs more than she did—she was only shocked, but he felt something deeper, more wounding, in his having done what he had to do. She put her hand under his arm and coaxed him to his feet.