The Changes Trilogy (55 page)

“But he said thank you,” said Geoffrey as the flagstone boomed back into position over the dark stair.

“Yes,” said Sally.

Chapter 12

PORTENTS

It felt as if it should be later afternoon as they came up the steps, but it was still morning, the sun just sucking up the last of the melted ice from the night before. Not knowing whether it was the right thing to do, Geoffrey lowered the slab over the tunnel and carried the tray toward the cottage.

Mr. Furbelow had his eyes open. He too had been roused by the clack of the ratchet and was waiting for them.

“Did he miss me?” he said.

“Yes,” said Geoffrey. “He noticed at once.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Furbelow. Silence. “And he took it from you all right?”

“I hope you won't be cross,” said Sally, “but we found him in a lucid interval and we told him what was happening.”

“You did what?”

“We persuaded him to try and go back into his sleep. I'm afraid he said it might be dangerous for us out here.”

“Do you want us to try to carry you into your house?” said Geoffrey.

“No thank you. I am better here.”

“Then we must try and build you some sort of shelter.”

There were a lot of curious tools in one of the sheds, great adzes and odd-shaped choppers. There were blunt and clumsy saws, too, and another shed was a well-stocked timber store. Geoffrey prized out four cobbles at the corners of Mr. Furbelow's bed with his sword—they were pigs to move, each packed tight against its neighbors and jammed by century-hardened dirt. He loosened the exposed ground and walloped four pointed uprights into position, staying them with what he took to be bowstrings, which he tied to knives jammed between cobbles further out. He nailed a framework of lighter timbers onto the uprights, and fastened to this the most waterproof-looking of the furs Sally had brought out from the tower. The whole contraption took him about six hours to build, so, what with stopping for lunch (stale bread and cheese, apricots and souring wine) and ministering to Mr. Furbelow's needs (the old man was quiet and dignified now, but gave himself another shot of morphine toward evening) it was drawing on to dusk by the time he had finished. Venus glimmered in a pale wash of sky above the western hill line before the first symptom occurred.

All the hounds in the tower began howling together, a crazy, terrifying yammer, interrupted by choruses of hoarse barking. A moment's silence, and they spilled into the courtyard, howling again, dashing to and fro under the tower wall, biting fiercely at each other with frothing mouths until the yellow fur was streaked with dirty red blood. Geoffrey drew his sword and told Sally to run to the house if they came any nearer, but the madness stopped with a couple of coughs, like a fading engine, and the dogs crept away to lick their wounds and whimper under the eaves of the timber store.

The evening deepened and the air chilled. Geoffrey went to spread the lightest pelt over Mr. Furbelow and to let down the sheltering flaps at the side of his bed. One of the guy ropes had gone slack, and when he tried to tauten it he found that the crack into which he had driven its knife was now half an inch wide. The ground had moved.

“Sal, I think you'd better get Maddox out into the open. Anything might happen tonight. I'll look for more rugs and food, if there's any left.”

He jammed the knife into another crack and went into the tower. One of the big doors was off its hinges. Inside all the flambeaux were smoking, and the fire, too, was sending up a heavy gray column which didn't seem to be finding its way out of the hole in the roof. The huge room was full of choking haze, and a voice was shrieking from the upper gallery: “Mordred. Mordred. Mordred.” It went on and on. One of the long tables had been overturned, leaving a mess of fruit and bread and dishes spilled across the floor, but on the other he found a bowl of tiny apples and some untouched loaves. He carried them out to the cottage steps, where Sally sat wrapped in a white fur.

“Get as much wood as you can out of the timber store,” he said. “We'd better have a fire. I'll find something to protect Mr. Furbelow's leg in case that contraption collapses. It sounds as though there's people in there now, Sal, but I can't see anyone.”

“I don't think he'd hurt us on purpose,” said Sally.

This time the smoke in the tower was worse. The voice had stopped but there was a clashing and tinkling on the far side of the hall, interspersed with hoarse gruntings. He couldn't see what was happening because of the smoke, but suddenly grasped that this must be the noise people make when they are fighting with shield and sword. He picked up a bench and began to carry it out, but before he reached the door there came a burst of wild yelling behind him and the running of feet. Something struck him on his left shoulder; he staggered and then something much solider caught him on the hip and threw him sideways across the bench he was carrying in a clumsy somersault. He crouched there as the feet thudded past, but saw nothing. When they had gone the voice began shrieking again: “Mordred. Mordred. Mordred.” It was lower in tone now, but still the same woman's voice, hoarse and murderous. He picked up his bench and limped away, the pain where the thing had hit him nagging at his hip. Sally had gathered a useful pile of timber.

“We'll want smaller stuff to start it with,” said Geoffrey, “and straw out of the stables. Did you see anyone come out of the tower? Somebody knocked me over but it's so full of smoke that I couldn't see what was happening.”

“I saw Maddox shying and neighing, and then he went off and made friends with the dogs, but I didn't see anything else. How are you going to light the fire, Jeff?”

“If you'll get straw and kindling, I'll get a burning log out of the hall.”

“Do be careful.”

“Okay. But I don't think being careful is going to make much difference.”

The voice had stopped again and there was no noise of fighting. The smoke was thick as the thickest fog. Geoffrey crouched under it and scuttled across the paving until he could see the glow of the fire. Before he reached it he realized there was something in the way, and stopped. It looked like two new pillars, supporting a heavy, shadowy thing. At the same moment as he realized that the pillars had feet, the thing became the back of an armed man, motionless, squat, brooding into the fire. His armor was leather with strips of thick bronze sewn on to it. A tangle of yellowy-gray hair flowed over the shoulders from under the horned helmet.

Geoffrey crept away beneath the shelter of the smoke. When he reached the wall he found a tall stool, which he stood on to take one of the flambeaux out of its iron bracket. He decided not to go back into the tower again.

The flame of the straw flared into brightness and died down almost at once, but some of the kindling caught and with careful nursing they made a proper fire, leaning billets of timber into a wigwam around the crackling, orange heart. As soon as it was really going the hounds slouched over and arranged themselves in a sprawling circle, scratching, yawning, and licking the blood off their coats. Maddox followed and stood in the half-light on the edge of the circle, thinking obscure horse thoughts. Geoffrey placed the bench at right angles across Mr. Furbelow's sleeping form, and stayed it firm, to be a second line of defense if the shelter fell. He went into the cottage and brought out the rest of the blankets and the drawer of medicine, which he put into the shelter. Nothing noticeable happened for half an hour, while Sally and he sat on the steps and ate bread and apples.

Then came the storm. The stars which had been blazing down hard-edged as diamonds vanished from horizon to horizon. The sky groaned. Balefires pranced along the parapet and flickered down the edges of the tower. A few drops of rain fell, warm as blood, and then the valley cracked with lightning. Geoffrey could see that the dogs were howling again, but he couldn't hear them through the grinding bellows of thunder. There was no darkness. All down the valley the black cloud-roof stood on jigging legs of light, blue-white, visible through closed eyelids. The shed next to the stables caught fire and burned with orange flames and black, oily smoke. Maddox picked his way between the dogs and nuzzled under Sally's fur, shivering convulsively. The world drowned in noise.

When the storm finished he thought he was deaf. His head was full of a strange wailing, which he decided must be the effect of ruined eardrums. But then a log on the fire tilted sideways and he heard it fall—the wailing was outside, coming from the sky, swooping in great curves around the tower. As it crossed the now blazing stables he thought he saw a darker blackness in the night, bigger than a bird, but wasn't sure. The wailing rose to a tearing squeal and floated away westward.

Then, he afterward realized, the disturbances invaded his own mind. At the time it seemed like more portents crowding in around him. A new tower sprouted to the north, with people moving about at the top of it, carrying lanterns. A dark beast, toad-shaped, big as a barn, heaved itself out of the forest and scrabbled at the stonework. Uncle Jacob stalked across the cobbles, cracking his thumbs in a shower of sparks; he looked angry, did not speak, and walked on into the dark. The whole landscape started to drift, to float away after the wailing noise, faster and faster, with a whirling, bucking motion, sucked on a roaring current of time which toppled over the edge of reality. They were falling, falling …

The rest, for a while, was dreams, meaningless; shapeless, a dark chaos.

When he woke up it was still dark. The clouds had gone, the moon was well down in the sky, a few red patches of embers showed where the stables and the sheds beyond them had been, and the earth was heaving in sudden stiff jerks and spasms. Tiles were clattering off the sheds all around the courtyard, and from the forest came the groaning of toppled trees. The steps on which they were sitting had tilted sideways. Sally lay across him with her head in his lap.

“Wake up, Sal. Wake up and be ready to run. I think the tower might fall.”

“Oh, Jeff, I'm frightened.”

“So'm I. If it falls straight at us we're done for, but if it looks like going a bit to one side we must run the other way. Don't try to hide in any of the buildings—they might cave in too. I hope Mr. Furbelow will be all right.”

You couldn't prepare for the spasms, because they weren't rhythmical, just shuddering jars from any direction, often with a deep booming noise under ground. Geoffrey looked around to see how the cottage was taking it, and saw in the moonlight a black ragged crack, inches wide, running up the stucco beside the door. They fell over twice as they moved away (it was like trying to stand in a bus without holding on and without looking where it's going). They had to be careful, too, where they put their feet, because of the way the gaps between the cobbles widened and snapped together. They found a patch of flagstones, which seemed safer, and sat back to back, looking up to where the dark wedge of the tower blanked out a huge slice of stars.

They waited for it to fall. It came down quite slowly.

First there were three grunting spasms, all together, and a section of the outer wall over to their right fell with a gravelly roar into the ditch, taking the timber store with it. Then they saw the ground in that direction humping itself up into a wave which came grinding across the courtyard, six feet high, throwing off a spume of cobbles in the moonlight. They stood up. Sally turned to run.

“Face it, Sal. Try and ride over it when it comes. Hold my hand. Run
up
.”

The shock wave reached the paved area, tilting the stones over like the leaves of a book being flipped through. Geoffrey ran forward, dragging Sally with him, climbing and scrambling. Sally fell and he leaned forward, heaving at her arm. The stone he was standing on tilted suddenly the other way, breaking his grip and shooting him up onto the crest of the wave and down the other side. A stone fell painfully across his leg, pinning him by the ankle, and then Sally came floundering on top of him.

“Are you all right, Jeff?”

“Yes. Oh, look!”

He pointed. The wave was past the tower now, but the tower was falling. First a big triangle of masonry slid out on the far side, broad at the top and narrow at the bottom, like wallpaper peeled downward off a wall. The boulders slid, coughing and roaring, down in a continuous avalanche that spilled away from the base right out to the windlass and flagstone over Merlin's chamber. Something deep underground must have given way, for the tower continued to tilt in that direction, slow as the minute hand of a clock it seemed, but spilling more small avalanches from the ruined lip. It tilted, still almost whole, until it looked as though it could not possibly stand at that angle. Then the flaw below the foundation gave way with a final shudder; the severe curve of the outline crumpled; it was falling in hundreds of colossal fragments; there was one last roar and the tremor of booming hammer blows jarring the ground beneath them; dust smoked up in a huge pillar, higher than the tower had been, a wavering ghost of the solid stone; silence.

The long hill of rubble, immovable thousands of tons, lay directly over the place where Merlin was buried.

Chapter 13

TIDYING UP

That was the last upheaval. Soon there was a faint staining of dawn light over the eastern horizon. The courtyard was a Wilderness of tumbled stones and half the outer wall was down. Two of the dogs were dead and a third was whining miserably, its leg trapped between cobbles. Maddox stood with his back to the worst of the wreckage, as if to make clear that anything that had happened wasn't his fault. At first Geoffrey, after he'd levered the flagstone away, had thought that his own ankle was broken, but he found he could just stand on it and hobbled over to see what had become of Mr. Furbelow. The shelter had collapsed, but the bench had fallen sideways across a protruding mound of cobbles and was still protecting the damaged leg. When Geoffrey cleared the furs and timber away he found the old man staring placidly upward.