The Changes Trilogy (45 page)

“I hope they'll be all right,” said Geoffrey. “I was dead worried when they went all fuzzy like that, but they seemed to perk up once they were a bit away from the car. We'd never have got here without them. Does this thing worry
you
, Sal?”

“Some of the time. But I don't think it really bothers me
inside
me, if you see what I mean. Not like Arthur and Basil. It was something in their minds coming out which made them go all funny. But with me it's really only that I'm not used to engines. I'm used to thinking they're wicked. Parson preached against machines every Sunday, almost. He said they were the abomination of deserts and the great beast in the Bible. He watched the men stoning Uncle Jacob.”

“But you aren't suddenly going to drop a match into our petrol tank?”

“I don't expect so. I don't feel any different from France. I hated those little French beetles whining about, but I think some machines are lovely, like the train on the bridge. And this one too, I suppose.”

She ran a dirty hand over the old red leather.

“Then you must be immune, too, or you'd have started going like the brothers. Do you think it runs in families? There was Uncle Jacob, and you, and me. Do you really think we're the only ones?”

“I don't know. I don't
feel
like an only one.”

“Nor do I. I think I must have been immune before I got hit on the head, or I'd never have been able to look after
Quern
. I suppose Uncle Jacob told me—”

“Jeff, I think there's another animal coming. I can feel it.”

“Okay, Sal.”

He let the big engine take the car slowly away, trying not to disturb the murderous forest which had sent the boar, but it was too late. A gray stallion, wild, swerved into the road ahead of them, snorted as it saw the car and reared with whirling hooves to meet them. Geoffrey increased his speed, nudged the wheel over so that the ram pointed directly at the beast and pooped the horn. The stallion squealed back. At the last moment, when they were doing nearly forty, he jerked the wheel to the left and back again, so that the huge car skittered sideways and on. The horse, clumsy on its hind legs, couldn't turn in time to block them, but a hoof, unshod, banged on metal somewhere at the back of the car.

They drove quietly around the outskirts of Brockenhurst until they came on a group of children playing a complicated sort of hopscotch in the middle of the road. Some ran screaming into the houses, but others picked up clods and stones out of the gutter and showered them at the Rolls, which clanged like a tinsmith's shop as Geoffrey nosed through. The windshield starred on Sally's side, where a flint caught it. A man came and stood in a doorway with a steaming mug in his hand. He shouted and flung it at the car, but missed completely in his rage and the mug shattered against the wall of a cottage on the far side, leaving great splodges like blood on the white stucco.

Geoffrey laughed as he accelerated away. “Tomato soup,” he said.

Sally was crying. “It's everybody hating us, even the children. It's horrid.”

“They hate the car, really. They'd have been sure to hit one of us if they'd really been aiming at us. Cheer up, Sal. We're not going through any more towns. We've chosen a whole lot of little lanes that ought to miss them completely, and you'll have to do the map-reading. I'll teach you as soon as we come to a safe bit of straight where we can't get surprised.”

They found a good place almost at once, by a stream under some willows. Geoffrey stopped the car and switched off the engine.

“It's quite easy,” he said, “especially as we're going north so everything's the right way around. These yellow and green and red lines are the roads. That's all that matters for the moment, but you'll learn the other signs as we go along. That's Brockenhurst, which we've just been through, and we're here. We want to get up to this road with the pencil mark beside it, which is the one we're supposed to be on, so we go up here, see, to the A35. That's about three miles. Then we turn right, and quite soon come to a bridge—this blue line is the river. Then a bit over a mile further on, when we're almost in Lyndhurst, we turn left through Emery Down and we're on our proper road. Try and tell me what's going to happen next about a mile before we get to it. Right? Off we go.”

What happened next was a tree across the road. It had evidently been there a couple of years, but nobody had tried to move it. Instead, passersby had beaten a rutted track around the roots, which Geoffrey had to follow. The Rolls lurched and heaved at a walking pace, with the ruts, hardened by months of summer, wrenching the steering wheel about. Geoffrey remembered what the military-looking gentleman had told him about Silver Ghosts being used in the First World War to carry dispatches through the shell-raddled terrain behind the trenches. He realized, too, that he still had the five-year-old tires on. The ram was a nuisance in the tight curve of the track, poking ahead and catching in brambles and weeds, but the big engine wrenched it through. It might come in useful soon: the A35 was the old main road between Southampton and Bournemouth, and there was that bridge. He swung back thankfully onto the remains of the old tarmac.

A couple of miles later he eased cautiously out onto the main road. Its surface was no better than that of the side lanes—worse, if anything, as it seemed to have seen more traffic—but it was wide enough for him to pick some sort of path between the potholes. They swirled past a cart, leaving the driver to shout the usual curse through their long wake of dust. Now that they were coming out of the Forest, there would be more people about, of course. The road dipped toward the stream, and there was the bridge.

And there, on the bridge, was the tollgate. Sally had mentioned tollgates to M. Pallieu, who had informed the General. The ram had been built on his instructions. It was his sort of weapon.

The gate looked hideously solid, with a four-inch beam top and bottom, set into a huge post at either side. Geoffrey changed down to third and second, double-declutching anxiously. The tollkeeper, a fat woman in a white apron, came to the door of her cottage, stared up the road and screeched over her shoulder. Geoffrey changed down (beautifully—the military-looking gentleman would have been delighted) into first, glanced at the gate—now only twenty feet away—decided he was still going too fast and eased off, to a trot, to a walk. With the gate a yard off he accelerated. The whole car jarred through all its bones as the ram slammed into the bottom beam—they weren't going to make it. With a deep twang the hinges gave, the structure lifted and leaped sideways, and the car surged forward. A big man with an orange beard pushed out from behind the woman, swinging a sledgehammer, but before he got within smiting distance a yellow thing looped out of the car behind Geoffrey's head and caught him in the face. Unbalanced by the swing of his mallet he fell backward, bringing the fat woman down too. Geoffrey drove on.

“What on earth was that that hit him?” he asked.

“I threw your smelly stove at him,” said Sally. “I never liked it anyway. I hope the gates aren't all as exciting as that.”

“With luck we won't meet many. We'll hardly be on main roads at all. But rivers are almost the only thing we can't find a way around, so we've got to go over bridges. I didn't expect the gates to be quite so strong.”

“We turn left quite soon,” said Sally. “When are we going to have lunch?”

“Let's go on a bit. I don't really want to stop till I need a rest from driving. There ought to be some biscuits somewhere. If we get a puncture we'll just have to stop.”

Chapter 6

ROUGH PASSAGE

They found an open upland of chalk an hour later, between Winchester and Salisbury, roughly, where an old chalkpit opened off the road. Geoffrey drove in between the high banks and discovered that the place had been used, in civilized days, as a graveyard for abandoned cars. There were a dozen rusting sedans amid the nettles and elders.

The floor of the pit was hard enough to hold a jack. Sally climbed up with the food to the untended grassland above the pit and kept a lookout while he changed the tires. (These came already attached to their steel rims, which were then bolted to the wooden wheels—it couldn't have been easier.) That left him with two good spares and the four old ones. He climbed up and joined Sally.

The Rolls was invisible from a few yards, but they could see for miles. The countryside to the south, which had once been mile-square fields, had reverted to a mosaic of tiny, unrelated patches, some worked, some abandoned. About half a mile away to the south he could see a piece of green with a row of dots spread across it at the line where the green changed texture. He ate a slab of bread and Camembert and saw that the dots had moved—they were a team of men mowing a hayfield with scythes. Behind them came another pattern of dots, again altering the texture of the green: more men (or probably women) tossing the hay out of its scythe-laid rows so that every stem and blade was exposed to the reliable sun. A few fields away they'd got beyond that stage and were loading the pale, dried hay onto a wooden wagon. Elsewhere the cereal crops were still tender green, oat and wheat and barley each showing its different shade in long narrow strips. The sun was very hot, and there were lots of butterflies, all the species regenerated since men stopped spraying. Geoffrey felt tired as tired.

“I think I'd better try and have a nap, Sal, or I might drive off the road. Wake me up the moment you see anything funny. You'd better put everything back in the car, so that if we really are caught napping we can say we had nothing to do with it. We just found it, and were waiting for someone to come along and tell us what to do next. I'll stick to my robe, just in case. Remember, I'm your idiot brother, deaf and dumb but quite harmless, and you're in charge of me, trying to get us north to stay with our married sister in, um, Staffordshire. You take the grub down, and I'll see if I can find a place without too many ants.”

“When do you want to wake up, supposing nothing happens?”

“Give me a couple of hours, about.”

He rolled up his jersey with the robe inside it for a pillow, and wriggled round for a place where his hip felt comfortable. The grass ticked with insect life. The sun was very bright. A seed-head tickled his cheek. Hell, he wasn't going to be able to sleep here.…

“Wake up, Jeff. Wake up.”

He sat up, the side of his face nubbly with the knitwork of the jersey. The sun had moved, and the mowers were near the end of their field. The wagon was gone, and the air was still and heavy with grass pollen.

“I'm sorry, Jeff. You've slept for about three hours, but they've pulled that hay cart on to this road, and I think they'll be bringing it up the hill. They're going awfully slowly. There. You can see them coming out by that copse.”

A green-gold hump heaved into sight out of the trees. There was a man in blue overalls lying on his back on top of it, with his hand behind his head. The wagon was about the size of a toy, and it would be ages before the horses brought it creaking up the hill.

“Anything happen while I was asleep?”

“Nothing, except that a rabbit came and nibbled one of the wheels, but I threw stones at it and it ran away.”

Geoffrey lunged down the slope to look at his tires. On the left front there were a series of strong gouges, running in pairs—not nibbling, but a determined attack. The cart was still a good twenty minutes off, he decided—not worth risking a tire like that over these roads. He got the jack out, fumbled it into position, pulled himself together and changed the wheel deliberately. Eight minutes, not bad. There was time to fill up with petrol. Its stench rose shimmering into the untainted air. Four gallons gone.

As they backed out onto the road there were shouts from down the hill. Three men with hayforks, very red in the face, were running slowly up toward them. They must have spotted the tire treads in a patch of chalk dust on the untended tarmac. Lucky he'd been given as much as three hours' sleep—the countryside must be fantastically empty for nobody to have come up the road in all that time. The Rolls whined to the top in second and hummed down the far side, leaving the haymakers shouting. One of them had been wearing a smock, of the kind you used to see in particularly soppy nursery rhyme books.

On the next long stretch of road he stopped and sorted out the most obviously French blanket. This he folded in two, with the tent pole in the fold; he ran about six feet of cord from each end of the fender at the back of the car to the two projecting ends of pole; then he made a couple of holes through the blanket and tied the pole in.

“What's that for?” said Sally.

“Sweep out our tracks, with luck.”

“It won't last very long, I'd have thought. Haven't you got anything tougher, like a piece of canvas or something?”

“No.”

“What about cutting some branches out of the hedge. You could tie them in two bunches, and it wouldn't matter if they wore a bit, because there'd always be more twigs coming down.”

“I suppose that'd work, too, but let's see how we get on with this first.”

They drove on, Sally kneeling in her seat and looking backward. The blanket lasted about three miles. Sally hummed perkily as she helped him cut two large besoms of brushwood and tie them where the blanket had been. Off they went again, Sally still watching backward.

“It's making a terrible lot of dust, Jeff—much more than before.”

Hell. He ought to have thought of that, with the roads so white with powder from the chalk hills. They were sending up a signal for miles in every direction. Better to leave tracks behind than warn people you were coming. He stopped, climbed down again and cut the bundles free.

Just outside Over Wallop they came around a corner to find a high-piled hay cart clean across the road, maneuvering to back into a farmyard. Geoffrey braked hard. There was no hope of turning in the narrow lane before the farm workers were on them—he'd have to reverse out and find a way around. But before he came to a complete stop the cart horses panicked, rearing and squealing as they struggled to escape through the quickset hedge opposite the farm gate. The cart came with them, up to its shafts, leaving a possible gap behind it. He wrenched the gear into first and banged through, misjudging it slightly so that the near fenders grated against the farm wall. Amid the grinding and shouting he was aware of a portentous figure poised in midair above him, arms raised, spear brandished, like St. Michael treading down the dragon. He ducked as the man on top of the hay flung his missile, but the hayfork clanged into the hood and stuck there, flailing from side to side as he drove on into the village. He couldn't afford to stop and pull it out until he was well clear of the houses, by which time it had wrenched two hideous wounds in the polished aluminum. Thank heavens Lord Montagu wasn't there to see how his toy was being treated.