The Changes Trilogy (29 page)

“The ponies are getting worried,” she said.

He followed her listlessly down the dusty flights; the ponies were stamping fretfully in the shadows, but as much from boredom and strangeness as from fear—or perhaps the stress the children felt was making them kick the cobbles in that fretful way. Jonathan walked up to Caesar and slapped his well-padded shoulder.

“Shut up, you fat idiot,” he said. “We could stick it out for months here. Corn for you and pineapples for me and a million rats to talk to.”

Caesar enjoyed being spoken to like that. Margaret fondled Scrub's nose and gently teased his ears until he was calm. Then she opened the door. The water was almost still now, though two dogs still paddled feebly at the far edge. A few more shapes floated in the middle of the water—the others must have got out somehow, or sunk when they drowned. As she looked, a hatch on
Heartsease
opened and a cautious head poked out—Lucy's. Margaret stepped into the open and waved; an arm waved back. Jonathan came and stood beside her, with his usual perky, cat-faced look.

“If they used their pole to break the ice around her,” he said, “they could cast off the far hawser and we could haul her over.”

“Scrub and Caesar could, anyway,” said Margaret.

But it took five minutes of signaling and hallooing before Lucy grasped the idea and persuaded Tim to do the work. Meanwhile Margaret devised a makeshift connection between the near hawser and Scrub's horsecollar, and an even more makeshift harness for Caesar to do his share of hauling in. Caesar didn't mind, but the ramshackle and once-only nature of the whole contraption displeased Scrub's conservative soul, and she had to bully him before he suddenly bent to his task like a pit-pony and began to haul the inert but frictionless mass across the dock. Margaret led the ponies back into the warehouse, so that they could pull straight.

“Whoa!” shouted Jonathan from the quayside, and she hauled back on the bridles. The hawser deepened its curve until it lay like a basking snake along the floor, but it was many seconds before she heard the dull boom of the tug nudging up against the stonework. Three minutes later they had shut the ponies back in the warehouse and were standing on the deck, where Tim was cuddling a draggled yellow blob with a snarling black snout.

“What's he got?” said Margaret.

“Puppy,” said Lucy. “He fished un off a bit of ice as the boat ran past. Come and see Otto. He's better—in his mind, that is. He can't move his legs still, and his side hurts him, but he's better in his mind.”

She led them below.

Chapter 6

WILL SHE GO?

It was glorious to be out of the fingering wind.

The cabin, an odd-shaped chamber with a tilting floor and walls which both curved and sloped, was beautifully warm and stuffy—warm from the round stove which crackled against the inner wall, stuffy from being lived in by three people. The witch lay in a corner, his feet down the slope of the floor, and watched them scramble down the ladder; the reflection of daylight from the open hatch made his eyes gleam bright as a robin's. He looked thin, tired, ill—but not dying, not any longer.

“Welcome to the resistance movement,” he said in his strange voice, slow and spoken half through his nose. “What you got there, Tim? Another patient?”

Tim cooed happily and put his bundle on the floor, a wet, yellow, floppy pup, just big enough to have followed its mother with the pack but not big enough to fend for itself, nor to tilt off its patch of ice and drown. It snarled at them all and slashed at Tim's hand; he didn't snatch it away but let the puppy chew at it with sharp little teeth until Lucy handed him a mutton bone. The puppy took it ungraciously into the darkest corner and settled down to a private growling match.

Otto laughed.

“What shall we call him?” he said. “If it is a him.”

“Davey,” said Margaret without thinking. The other two children looked at her, surprised.

“Means something to you?” said Otto. “Okay, fine. What happened outside? We heard the noises but we couldn't figure them out. At least you won your battle.”

Jonathan told him what they had done in dry sentences, as though it had happened to someone else and was not very interesting anyway. Otto listened without a word and then lay silent, twitching his eyes from face to face.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I reckoned I'd just been mighty lucky till now. I didn't know we had a thinker pulling for us.”

“We can't do it if we're not lucky,” said Jonathan without emphasis.

“Yes,” burst in Margaret, “but we couldn't have got anywhere without Jo. He's made all the luck
work
.”

“The question is can we make the engines work,” said Jonathan.

“What's she got?” said Otto.

“I think it must be diesel,” said Jonathan. “It's very old; there's a brass plate on the engine saying nineteen twenty-eight. I can't see anywhere for a furnace, or for storing coal; and there are feed-pipes which look right for oil and wrong for water, and a big oil tank behind here.”

He slapped the partition behind the stove. Otto whistled.

“Nineteen twenty-eight!” he said. “A genuine vintage tub, then. Isn't there anything newer?”

“Yes,” said Jonathan, “the other tug, the one that's not sunk I mean, looks much newer and much more complicated. But it's in a mess, as though they were using it all the time just before the Changes came. But this one's very tidy, with everything stowed away and covered up and tied down. I thought perhaps it was so old that they didn't use it at all, but just kept it here, laid up. So they might have left it properly cared for, so that
they'd
be able to start it if they hadn't tried for a long time.”

“Yeah,” said Otto, “that they might. And another thing—a primitive engine is a simple engine—unsophisticated, not much to go wrong, provided she isn't all seized up. I'll get Tim to lug me along for a look-see as soon as my rib's mended, three more weeks maybe. And where'll you sail us then, captain?”

“We're in Gloucester Docks,” said Jonathan. “There's a canal which goes down to the Bristol Channel. Margaret's explored it. It's about fifteen miles long, she thinks, and not many people live near it. The bridges over it open quite easily, though she didn't try them all. There's only one lock, out beyond the other docks at the far end. We thought we'd use the ponies to tow
Heartsease
right down there, and if anyone stopped us we could say it was a wicked machine and we wanted to get it away from our part of the canal—that would be a good argument in England now. And when we got there we could see if we could find enough fuel (or we could look for some here) and see if we can make the lock work. If we can we'll try to start the engines and get out down the Bristol Channel, and if we can't we'll think of something else.”

“Sharpness,” said Otto. “That's the name of the port at the far end; I remember it from my briefing. And another thing I remember—that the Bristol Channel's just about the trickiest water in Europe. Tide goes belting in and out, six knots each way, and drops thirty foot in two hours; then the river's nothing but mud flats and a bit of stream winding through the middle. We'll need charts.”

“I'm hungry,” said Margaret.

“Right,” said Otto. “Food first, action after. What's on the menu?”

“We've nigh on eaten all you brought last time, Master Jonathan,” said Lucy.

“We've brought enough for another three days, I hope,” said Margaret.

“Anyway,” said Jonathan, “the warehouse is absolutely full of cans.”

“Given you can find a can opener,” said Otto.

The shape of that forgotten tool was suddenly sharp in Margaret's mind, like an image out of a lost dream.

“I'll look for an ironmonger's,” said Jonathan, “after I've burgled the offices for charts.”

While they ate the firm cheese and crisp-crusted bread (one thing about Rosie, she baked better than anyone else in the village) they talked a little and thought a lot. Margaret was dismayed to find that they were less than halfway through their job; the most dangerous part was still to come. And she alone knew how huge and immovable-seeming were the steel gates down at Sharpness. She distracted herself from her worries by watching Tim coax the puppy into trusting him, so gentle, so patient that it was difficult to remember that he hadn't all his wits. The puppy was quite wild, but with generations of man-trust bred into it; savagery and hunger and fear fought with these older instincts, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. At last there came a moment when it took a fragment of bacon from Tim's hand without snatching and running away, then stayed where it was to let him rub the back of its skull with his rough, dirty fingers.

She looked around the cabin and saw that the others had been watching just as intently as she had, as though the fall of kingdoms depended on Tim's winning.

“He's not so hungry now,” explained Jonathan with his dry laugh.

“Tim, you're marvelous,” said Margaret.

“Why do you want to name him after Mr. Gordon, then, Miss Margaret?” said Lucy, soft and suspicious as of old.

“I don't know,” said Margaret. “Mr. Gordon's a bit like that, I suppose, savage and doing what he does because something in him makes him. But I thought it might be lucky too, I don't know how.”

“Who's Mr. Gordon?” said Otto.

It was not comfortable to explain, because if Mr. Gordon had not lived in the village Otto might never have been stoned. Even so, they found themselves trying to make as good a case as they could for the terrible old man, partly for the honor of the village but partly for reasons they couldn't put a name to.

Otto's good hand kept fingering the puckered tissues which were left after the healing of his smashed cheek.

“To think of you kids living with all this and staying like you have,” he said when they'd finished.

“It's Aunt Anne, more than anything,” explained Margaret.

“And that's true,” whispered Lucy.

Jonathan didn't speak, but got up and climbed the ladder into the square of daylight. Margaret went with him and found that the tug had now drifted a few feet away from the quay. For the first time she really looked at
Heartsease
by daylight—a dirty old boat, black where it wasn't rusty, about seventy feet long; the bulwarks curved out from the uptilted prow about knee-high, and became shallower as they reached the rounded stern; the cabin was at the fore end, its roof barely a foot above deck level; then a narrow strip of deck beneath which lay the fuel tank; then the wheelhouse, which was really just a windowed shed much too tall and wide for the proportions of the boat. Behind that stood the big funnel, with its silly little hat brim running around it just below the top—she could still see the lines of color which showed which shipping firm the tug had belonged to. The funnel rose from the top of a low, flat roof, along whose side ran tiny rectangular windows, which could only allow the skimpiest ration of light through to whatever was below. The engine room. Under there must lie the iron monster which Jonathan was going to try to wake; it was the monster's weight which set the tug so much down by the stern, making it (even at rest) seem to tilt with an inward energy as though it were crouched to tackle huge seas. And last of all came an open area of deck rounded off by the curve of the bulwarks at the stern. This was what Margaret had been looking for—a place where she could tether Scrub when the time came.

Jonathan had opened the engine room hatch and was kneeling beside it, craning down into the gap, his trousers taut over his rump, his whole body as tense as a terrier at a rat hole. Margaret nudged his ribs with her shoe and he stood up frowning.

“Too difficult for me,” he said. “At least, I'm sure I could understand it if Otto would teach me. If you'll show Lucy where the cans are I'll look for charts and a can opener.”

“Don't you think Tim had better go with you, just in case?”

Jonathan agreed, and scuttled down into the engine room. He came back with a massive wrench, almost the shape of a caveman's club. Margaret explained to Lucy, who frowned and stood biting her thumb in the cabin. It was difficult for her: danger for Jonathan meant danger for Tim; but they would never get away if Jonathan went into danger alone and was caught by the dogs; and Tim couldn't decide for himself, so …

She sighed, shook herself and tried to explain to Tim that he was to go with Jonathan to stop him from being hurt. At last he grasped the idea that something was dangerous, and took the big wrench. Jonathan led him off. Every few yards he brandished the wrench and snarled right and left.

“Do you think he'd actually hit a dog if he had to?” said Margaret.

“I dunno,” whispered Lucy, “but he'd surely fright 'em.”

She gazed after the hulking back with just the same smile as a mother's who watches her pudgy toddler playing some private game. Margaret had never liked her so much.

The ponies had become fretful in their strange dark stall, all rustling with rats, but it seemed safe enough to lead them out and tether them on the quay. On the first floor of the warehouse Margaret found a sack which seemed not to have gone musty, so she tilted a double helping of corn into the fold of her skirt, carried it down and spread it in two piles on the snow. The ponies sniffed it, then gobbled greedily at it.

By the time the girls had carried their third load of cans aboard, Jonathan and Tim were back, both too laden with looted goods to fight off a single hungry terrier. Luckily they hadn't even met that. They had charts and tide tables, books for Otto, a can opener and knives and forks. Jonathan dumped his load on the deck and opened a blue metal case.

“Look, Marge,” he said. “Aren't they
beautiful
?”