The Cockatrice Boys (16 page)

Chapter six

When Sauna woke she knew that a lot of time must have passed. Days, perhaps. Days and days, even. In some indefinable way, she felt older. Her head ached, her mouth tasted dry and queer and there was a sweet, strong, unpleasant smell in her nostrils, like the smell of the white powder that Auntie Floss used to sprinkle to keep away moths and mice. Somebody had been dreaming, a long, sad, complicated dream, and somebody had been crying bitterly over what had been said in the dream.…

After much pondering she realized that the person who had been crying was herself. But I can't remember
who
said
what,
she thought, only that it was someone I knew very, very well. And that it was heartbreakingly sad.

Breathing was difficult, and seeing anything was out of the question, because her head was wrapped in thick cloth. And her hands were tied tightly together. And she felt sick, partly because of the heavy, stuffy cloth and its disgusting smell, partly because of the motion. Jog, jog, jiggle, joggle, joggle.

I can't be on the train, she thought. The train runs smoothly. You just feel it vibrate. Can I possibly be on a ship?

What happened?

Over and over, painfully, she sent her memory back. It was like sending a lazy child to school. She remembered the train slowing down. Because of the missing track. And Mrs. Churt making pints of blackberry tea. Then what? Memory, like the train, slowed down and came to a stop.

Her hands fought against the cords that tied them. She arched her wrists and pulled, and bent her little fingers backwards to push and scrabble, poke and rub at the rope, trying to stretch and loosen it. She would have pushed with her thumbs, which were stronger, but they were too short to be any use and, besides, they bent inwards not outwards. But slowly, slowly, she did begin to feel the cords give a little. Sauna's fingers and wrists were very strong from all the chopping and shredding she had done in the galley with Mrs. Churt, all the grinding and churning, the grating and kneading, and pounding of dough.

She worked away at the cords. It was all she could do.

But still it was a slow and discouraging business. When she grew tired, she tried to push the cloth away from her face with her tied hands. That, too, was a painfully unrewarding job. But she was at last successful in drawing in a sniff or two of air that did not reek quite so powerfully of moth- and mouse-powder. And a blink of grey light showed below the darkness.

The snatched breath of sharp cold air made her more conscious of the rest of her body and its problems. First, her feet were freezing; they were completely numb and for a long time she wondered seriously if they had been cut or burned off. But her thighs and knees were there, she could feel them. She was sitting uncomfortably on a broad, flat, hard seat, with her legs stuck out straight in front, leaning against a hard seat-back, probably made of wood. Her elbows were pressed against hard objects on each side. A cold draught was blowing on to her chest and shoulders.

Slowly she became aware that she was listening to two voices conducting a kind of dialogue. She was unable to grasp what they said, for they spoke in some unknown language. One spoke much more than the other—an urgent, obstreperous, pleading gabble, on and on and on, like a kitten mewing or a baby crying to be fed.

From time to time, not very often, the second voice would reply with one cold drawling statement on a high note, like the clang of a ship's bell, or the cry of a seabird.

Then the other would start pleading again, gabble-gabble-gabble-gabble. Babble babble.

Can't that one see it's no use, thought Sauna. She was reminded of how, long ago, she used to go to church service on Sundays with Mam and Dad, and some Sundays, not very often, thank goodness, there would be something they called the Litany. She had never liked it; it made her feel unhappy inside, because it seemed to go on and on, asking and asking, and there never seemed to be any answer to all those pleading requests.

You shouldn't
need
to ask for something like that, thought Sauna.

It was the same with the two voices that drifted back to her, alternately louder and softer, on the fitful wind.

If they go on clattering at each other for long enough, perhaps I shall begin to understand what they say.

Listening to them made some distraction from her sufferings. But not much. She was very miserable indeed, in many different ways. She was cold, her head ached, she needed to relieve herself, she was hungry and queasy, she was puzzled, worried about how she was ever to find her way back to the
Cockatrice Belle;
and she was also much troubled in her mind about Dakin. He had seemed almost bad-tempered, almost hostile, the last few times she had spoken to him, and that was not like Dakin at all. What could be the matter with him?

Several things now happened all at the same time.

The two voices rose up to a climax; for a moment it seemed to Sauna that she understood the meaning of what they were saying to each other, although the words remained unfamiliar. But the message was unmistakable.

“Take me with you! Master, take me with you!”

No.

“I beg you, I
beseech
you. I have served you faithfully. I have obeyed your orders. Take me with you.”

No.

“Do not, do not leave me here alone. I can't endure it. Take me with you, I beg you!”

No.

Pushing, straining while the voices were so occupied with one another, Sauna finally managed to shove the cloth wrapping off her face and down around her neck.

If she had not been so utterly frozen, hungry and exhausted, she might have let out some kind of gasp. And the course of events might then have gone very differently. But she remained totally silent, in a paralysis of cold and shock.

The first thing she noticed was the light. It was dusk, the strange, pinkish luminous afterglow that sometimes follows sunset. She was in a horse-drawn carriage, travelling fast along a road that ran in the bottom of a valley, between high hills. The hills, thickly wooded, were dark indigo blue, almost black against the lustrous pearly glow of the sky. The sound of a river could be heard very loud, close at hand, rushing among rocks.

In front of Sauna were two figures, the driver of the carriage and another seated beside him; they could only be distinguished as shapeless lumps of darkness in the fast-fading light.
Were
there two, indeed? Sauna could not be certain. Sometimes there seemed to be just one. But there were certainly two voices.

Now the cold voice gave a direction, an order. This must have meant go
left,
for the horses slowed and turned left, proceeding more slowly and gingerly up a rougher, narrower track. Here they were in almost complete dark, under heavy over-arching trees. And the hillsides drew together into a gorge.

Sauna, having freed her head, began to wrestle with greater confidence to loosen the cords round her wrists. Just a few minutes more and perhaps I'll have them free, she thought hopefully; and then what? Would it be possible to open the carriage door and throw herself out? Would she break her legs? Would the driver and his companion hear her? The sound of water was still very loud—there must be a waterfall, crashing down from a height, somewhere close by. The carriage was not moving very quickly …

But then it drew to a stop, slewing off the track into a flat area, perhaps a quarry, at the side of the road.

The two voices spoke again: a single brief order from the cold, distant one, more wild and anguished expostulation from the other.

“Lord! Don't leave me! Take me with you!”

No.

“I beg you, I beg you, Master!”

Obey me.

Instead of trying to escape, Sauna could not help listening intently. Who
were
they? What could they possibly mean?

So she missed her chance. The door opened, she was dragged from her place and thrown roughly on to hard, rocky ground. She hit her head, and lost consciousness for the second time. But before she did so she heard a last agonized, wailing prayer:

“Do not desert me, Masterrrr…”

Then silence.

*   *   *

When Sauna woke for the second time, it was to a truly ferocious degree of cold. She had thought she was cold in the carriage; but that was balmy warmth compared with what she now felt. A wild gale was blowing, and the icy bite of snowflakes on her face might have been what woke her; she struggled in a sitting position and found with relief that at least she had the use of her feet and could by degrees clamber up, stand, walk and warm herself. It was night, but not completely dark; there must be a full moon somewhere behind the snow clouds. She was at the side of a track, a flat bare place enclosed by woods; behind her rose a sloping cliff, and on the other side of the track there seemed to be a deep drop into a gully. Behind the wail of the wind she could hear water falling. To her right, she saw that the track was blocked: a huge tree had fallen across it in a tangled confusion of smashed branches. Perhaps the sound of the tree's fall was what had woken her? It must have happened very recently—some of the branches were still groaning and settling. If I had been twenty yards further that way, I should have been killed, I should have been crushed to death before I woke, thought Sauna, and a strange chill came into her, a chill of mind, not of body, at the thought of the danger that had been so close.

She dragged again at the cords round her wrists, and at last they were loosened enough so that she could twist out first one hand, then the other. She was on the point of throwing away the tangled mess of rope; but then thought better, and stuffed it into her pocket. No telling what might come in handy among these groaning, threshing trees; and in the same thrifty spirit she picked up the length of coarse cloth which had been wrapped around her head. It might once have been the skirts of a man's coat. It still carried that strange, unpleasant, sweetish smell, but was at least some protection against the weather; she drew it over her shoulders.

Which way had the carriage brought her? It had turned left, she remembered, from the wider road, and then left again into the quarry; logically, therefore, to go back the way she had come she ought to go to her right. But that was impossible, for the way was completely blocked by the fallen tree. Doggedly she turned in the other direction and followed the track uphill.

I wonder why there are no monsters? Perhaps they don't come out when it snows so hard.

She was too hungry and weak to walk at all fast. But the act of walking warmed her, and she tried once again to remember what had happened when the
Cockatrice Belle
came to a stop.

The men went ahead to lay a new track. We had stopped in a tiny deserted station. Mrs. Churt made blackberry tea for the fellows working up the track. Dakin and I carried trays of mugs …

Somebody must have nobbled me, she realized. When I was taking the tray of empty mugs back to the train. That's as far as I can go; I can't remember any more after that. But why did they do it? What's the point? And, if there
is
a point, why leave me here in the middle of no man's land? What's the point of
that?

The sound of those two voices hung in her mind's ear: the pleading, beseeching gabble, the cold, distant refusal. Who were they?
Who were they?
Why did they go off and leave me in the middle of heaven knows where? Did they mean me to die? Or just to be lost?

If they meant me to die, she concluded, they'd have slit my throat and done with it; there was no shilly-shallying with that pair; they'd have done it as soon as kiss your hand; so I reckon they just wanted me away from the train. And now I'm away they don't care a button what happens to me.

But where was Cold Voice going? And why didn't he want the other one along with him?

Suddenly she remembered an odd little passage of dialogue heard in Colonel Clipspeak's office, when they were trying to make contact with the Leicester Square Headquarters by means of the electric kettle and the colonel's dress sabre.

“Unloose the tempest.”

“Master, it shall be done.”

I do believe that was the self-same voice, Sauna thought. It had that same icy-cold twang, brings you out in goose pimples just to think of it. And the other one, the whiny one asking and begging and asking—why did that seem someway familiar too? Who does it sound like? Someone I haven't known very long?

The Mayor of Newcastle?

No.

It was Tom Flint, she thought suddenly. Of course, it was Tom Flint.

The discovery was not cheering. In fact it was very lowering. Sauna turned for relief to Dr. Wren's remedy for overcoming depression and boredom: the use of figures.

“The multiplication table has helped me out of many a tight corner,” he told her. “And out of some loose corners too!”

Oh, Dr. Wren, thought Sauna, how I wish you were here now. I don't know what kind of a corner I'm in, but it feels dead uncomfortable. Nine nines are eighty-one, nine tens are ninety. Nine elevens are ninety-nine, nine twelves are—