The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World (7 page)

The slithering was suddenly loud and all around him, mingling with the laughter, mixing and dissolving into it. He realized at last what the slithering was.

It was the branches, creeping like snakes, writhing as they knotted and kneaded, tangled and touched, quivered and quaked.

And the laughter was the laughter of a million shivering leaves, rattling and chuckling, rustling and giggling. Then a branch reached out, closed cobwebbed finger-leaves about the wick of the candle, reaching through the hole cut in the glass. The light went out.

Ewan quivered, just once. He felt faint. He dropped the lantern. He stood quite still and waited.

Soon, he realized that he could see again, by pale greenish-white light. The branches of the terrible trees were alive, not merely with their own sinuous movement, but with glow-worms that crawled from every crack and cranny. They came from the murky depths which surrounded him to make a cocoon of radiance.

He looked round, awed and quite unable to understand.

The way ahead was still waiting. But it was no longer a tunnel getting ever narrower and leading nowhere. It was a doorway to a clearing. In the clearing, illumined by a chandelier of glow-worm infested branches, was a mound of stones, and supported by the mound of stones was a signpost.

It was the weirdest signpost that Ewan had ever seen. Its arms hung limp and were crumpled, as if half melted by great heat at some time in the indeterminate past. Its stem was bent over, so that two of its arms pointed down, two up.

Ewan walked into the clearing, and the gateway behind him sealed itself silently. But he was past fear by now. He was quite calm.

He walked forward and began to rummage among the rounded stones which formed the cairn beneath the signpost. It didn’t take more than a minute to find the stone that he wanted. It was in no way similar to the rest. It was flat and square and pale blue in colour. It was polished smooth, and engraved upon it were the following words:

TURN THE SIGNPOST ROUND

And that, thought Ewan, dazedly, is that. So much for one of the great mysteries of our time. But it was not so simple.

He had, by some peculiar quirk of fate, been allowed to reach his destination just as it seemed the forest would not let him… but getting there was only half the battle.

The question now was: how did he propose to get back?

He looked around and saw that the clearing was ringed by a solid wall of tangled branches, utterly impenetrable. He looked up and found that he could see dim and distant stars in the circle of night sky which the clearing cut out of the forest canopy. But that was no use. He couldn’t fly.

Nowhere in the confining walls was there the slightest chink. There was not the thinnest sliver of empty shadow. There was no way out of the grim and gloomy prison.

Unless….

He leapt suddenly up on to the mound of stones and grasped the bent stem of the signpost in both hands.

It turned quite easily. He turned it round one quarter of the way, and nothing changed. Then he turned it halfway round, and then three-quarters. Still nothing happened, and so he completed the operation, bringing the stem back to its original position.

Then it came alive in his hands.

There was a blinding flash as if lightning had struck into the clearing. Ewan’s body jerked rigid with the shock. It was as though there was an explosion inside his head.

He toppled slowly from the mound to fall unconscious on to lush green grass.

Much later, he awoke.

It was late evening. The sun was sinking toward the western horizon. The sky was deep blue. Everything was

bright.

Everything–-

The signpost stood tall and straight, its four arms pointing along four neatly cut tracks extending into the forest. The forest was green, its trees standing tall and dignified, no longer involved in a conspiracy to cut out every last vestige of the sunlight. Around the signpost grasses grew, and there were flowers on the forest floor. The sound of birdsong was dancing in the air.

Leaves rippled, and the undergrowth rustled with the passage of small creatures. As Ewan sat up and looked round, a butterfly which had settled on his sleeve took off and bobbed in the air as it steered itself to a nearby cluster of willow-herb. There was a sweet smell on the drifting wind. A small stream emerged from the other side of the moss-covered cairn to run away downhill towards the edge of the world.

Ewan wondered desperately what day it was. If it was the same day that he had set out, he could be in time with the answer when he returned to Jessamy. If it was the day after, then he had run over the time limit. He remembered the patch of night sky that he had seen before turning the signpost around. It had to be the next day. He must have been asleep for many, many hours.

But something inside him told him that it wasn’t the next day, that he still had time.

He stood up and stretched his limbs.

The grey mare was standing beside one of the four roads which led away into the forest—the one which led away toward the setting sun, and Caramorn. In the grass where he had lain were two things. One was a set of panpipes. The other was a candle in a glass casket. When he knelt to pick them up he saw, much to his surprise that the wick of the candle was still smouldering.

While he marvelled, he heard the sound of someone approaching. Coming from the east, walking beside the little stream, was a figure bent with age, cloaked and hooded, helping himself along with a long black staff which seemed to be carved out of ebony wood.

Ewan ran to the man’s side, and without bothering with any formula of greeting, said: “Tell me quickly please—what day is this?”

The bent figure unwound slightly, and the light penetrated the shadow within the hood just long enough for Ewan to catch the merest glimpse of two remarkable eyes.

“You are in time,” said the hooded man. Just that and no more.

Ewan did not pause but ran back to the mare and mounted her. He had turned her towards Jessamy an urged her into her shambling trot before it occurred to him that the answer he had received was really no answer at all. How could the old man possibly have known why he needed to know what day it was?

He looked back quickly, but the hooded figure was no longer to be seen. Ewan shook his head, wonderingly. He was angry at himself for having taken the answer at face value like that. He had simply accepted it, and trusted it, without a moment’s thought.

And yet, inside himself, he still felt that it was true. He would be in time.

“Even so,” he said, aloud, while he reached forward to pat the old grey mare on the neck, “remind me to ask my questions more carefully next time we meet a man with purple eyes.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

While Helen studied the letter her facial expression registered puzzlement and dismay. It said, simply:

My dearest Helen,

The words written upon the stone beneath the signpost at the heart of Methwold forest were: TURN THE SIGNPOST ROUND. My question, obviously, is: “And what are those engraved… on Faulhorn’s horn…in Mirasol’s haunted banquet hall?” I trust you will find this query simple enough, as I found mine. I look forward to hearing your answer in two days’ time.

Yours very sincerely, with all best wishes.

Damian, prince of Caramorn

“I just don’t believe it,” murmured Helen. “It’s a lie. He made it up.”

Tears came into her eyes, though she wasn’t quite sure why. Partly it was annoyance, but partly it was the knowledge that she had somehow missed the target badly, and that she was now enmeshed by the consequences of her actions.

She saw her father hurrying across the great hall, and she quickly folded up the letter and put it away.

“The most incredible thing…” he began, and then broke off. “Was that the letter from Prince Damian?”

“Yes,” she said, dully.

“May I see it?”

“Oh, no,” she said, hurriedly. “It contains his question. You’re bound to know the answer. I must find it myself.”

“I won’t tell you what it is.”

“You know perfectly well that you wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to drop hints,” she said, firmly. “I can’t let you see it.”

“Oh, well,” sighed the enchanter. “But this does mean, doesn’t it, that he answered your first question correctly?”

“Oh, yes,” said Helen, dryly. “He answered it.”

“I’m so glad. Everything is going very well, isn’t it? You know, I was almost afraid that you’d attempt to set a question that was virtually unanswerable. I’m glad you’re playing fair.”

Helen looked down at the floor, as if inspecting the carpet for stains.

“You will be able to answer the prince’s question, won’t you?” asked Sirion Hilversun. “It’s not too hard for you?”

She looked up at that, her eyes flaring as if she were about to lose her temper. But she only said, in a voice steeped in determination: “His question is no harder than mine. If Prince Damian can discover what I set him to find, then there’s no reason at all why I shouldn’t succeed just as well.”

“Oh, good!” said the enchanter. “Excellent!”

Helen managed a weak smile.

“What’s incredible?” she asked.

“Eh?”

“You came in just now and said that something was incredible.”

“Did I really?” The enchanter furrowed his brow, stroked his long beard, thinking hard. He took a pair of spectacles out of his sleeve, polished them, and put them on. Then he peered all around the room. No inspiration struck him.

“I wonder what it was?” he murmured. “Quite slipped my mind. I wonder if it’s something that’s already happened or something’s that’s just about to happen. What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” muttered Helen. “But don’t worry about it. It’ll be just as incredible when it occurs to you again, if not more so.”

She made as if to leave, but Sirion Hilversun said: “No, wait. It’ll come back. I was up on the battlements, pacing. I was looking out toward Methwold. Everything was just the same as usual…. I must have turned round half a dozen times. You know how it is when you’re preoccupied… you see what you expect to see, not what’s really there. But I finally noted that something wasn’t as it should be, that something unfamiliar had turned familiar….”

“The forest…” whispered Helen.

“That’s right,” said the enchanter, snapping his fingers. “The forest. It’s turned green. Incredible! The enchanted forest has simply been… disenchanted! I can’t remember anything like it ever happening again. Or before, for that matter. Where are you going?”

“Out for a walk,” said Helen, who was running towards the great staircase, intending to change her clothes immediately. “Maybe I’ll go over the hill and out towards Mirasol.”

“Oh, yes,” said the enchanter, absently. “Good idea.”

Meanwhile, in the library at the palace, while Ewan proceeded patiently with his task of cataloguing the books, Coronado was having his doubts.

“I admit that it was the obvious thing to do,” he said. “But where would politics be if we never looked beyond the obvious? I think that we should have found an easier question. Nothing too fancy, just something ingenious and clever. We do, when all’s said and done, want this marriage to take place.”

“I answered the first question,” pointed out Ewan. “It was pretty hairy there, for a while, but I did it. There’s nothing impossible about the rhyme. And, as you agreed yourself when you wrote the letter out, the girl has laid down a challenge and we should be prepared to meet it. If we break the pattern she may decide that Damian is a worthless specimen and set something really hard next time.”

“You have thought ahead, I suppose?” said Coronado sarcastically.

“About the lamia in the forbidden city? Certainly I have. And also about the gate at the edge of the world. I don’t say I’m not worried. But when things got to their worst in that forest last night… or tonight, perhaps, if I really did come back in time… someone or something helped me. There’s something very peculiar about that so-called will, and I can’t help being curious.”

“Curious enough to look up a lamia? Do you know what a lamia is?”

Ewan shrugged. “Supposedly a female vampire who may sometimes change into a snake.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?” asked the prime minister.

“I always suspect that such legends and rumours are wildly exaggerated,” said Ewan. “As in the case of the forest, where men had disappeared and there were supposed to be trolls and evil spirits round every corner. It was just dark and rather nasty, that’s all. And even that turned out to be an illusion that collapsed when I did something very simple.”

“That may be very true,” said Coronado. “And it’s certainly brave. But if I were you, I wouldn’t bank on that theory. It’s never safe to mess about with the supernatural.”

Ewan shrugged again. “The supernatural is only the natural we don’t yet know much about,” he said. “It’s mostly to do with appearances, not with real things at all. Haven’t you ever seen a conjurer at work?”

This remark had a slight hint of insult about it, but Coronado diplomatically let it go.

“I told the king where you’d been and what you’d done,” mused Coronado. “He wasn’t very happy about it. I didn’t tell him about the rest of the verses. It didn’t seem to be the right time. Deep down, you know, I’m not at all sure that he wants this to go through. I almost think that he’d like to find a legitimate excuse to call it off. The battle of conscious desires and unconscious prejudices, you know.”

“I know,” said Ewan. “Only too well. My conscious desire tells me to get out of this now, and never mind the consequences. But there’s something inside me that won’t let it go. This is important. I think it’s one of those things that once you’re involved with it you can’t back out. Do you see what I mean?”

“Certainly. It’s like being prime minister of Caramorn. I have to save the kingdom, if only to protect my reputation. It’s difficult to get another job if the last one ended in total disaster. I don’t think I’m ready to retire yet, and the government couldn’t pay my pension anyway.”