‘Apparently,’ said the Director, ‘we are almost too late. He was waked already.’
Dimble stopped eating.
‘Jane found the place empty,’ said Ransom.
‘You mean the enemy have already found him?’
‘No. Not quite as bad as that. The place had not been broken into. He seems to have waked of his own accord.’
‘My God!’ said Dimble.
‘Try to eat, darling,’ said his wife.
‘But what does it mean?’ he asked, covering her hand with his.
‘I think it means that the whole thing has been planned and timed long, long ago,’ said the Director. ‘That he went out of Time, into the parachronic state, for the very purpose of returning at this moment.’
‘A sort of human time-bomb,’ observed MacPhee, ‘which is why–’
‘You can’t go, MacPhee,’ said the Director.
‘Is he out?’ asked Dimble.
‘He probably is by now,’ said the Director. ‘Tell him what it was like, Jane.’
‘It was the same place,’ said Jane. ‘A dark place, all stone, like a cellar. I recognised it at once. And the slab of stone was there, but no one lying on it; and this time it wasn’t quite cold. Then I dreamed about this tunnel…gradually sloping up from the souterrain. And there was a man in the tunnel. Of course, I couldn’t see him: it was pitch dark. But a great big man. Breathing heavily. At first I thought it was an animal. It got colder as we went up the tunnel. There was air–a little air–from outside. It seemed to end in a pile of loose stones. He was pulling them about just before the dream changed. Then I was outside, in the rain. That was when I saw the white gate.’
‘It looks, you see,’ said Ransom, ‘as if they had not yet–or not then–established contact with him. That is our only chance now. To meet this creature before they do.’
‘You will all have observed that Bragdon is very nearly water-logged,’ put in MacPhee. ‘Where exactly you’ll find a dry cavity in which a body could be preserved all these centuries is a question worth asking. That is, if any of you are still concerned with evidence.’
‘That’s the point,’ said the Director. ‘The chamber must be under the high ground–the gravelly ridge on the south of the wood where it slopes up to the Eaton Road. Near where Storey used to live. That’s where you’ll have to look first for Jane’s white gate. I suspect it opens on the Eaton Road. Or else that other road–look at the map–the yellow one that runs up into the Y of Cure Hardy.’
‘We can be there in half an hour,’ said Dimble, his hand still on his wife’s hand. To everyone in that room, the sickening excitement of the last minutes before battle had come nearer.
‘I suppose it must be tonight?’ said Mrs Dimble, rather shamefacedly.
‘I am afraid it must, Margaret,’ said the Director. ‘Every minute counts. We have practically lost the war if the enemy once make contact with him. Their whole plan probably turns on it.’
‘Of course. I see. I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘And what is our procedure, Sir?’ said Dimble, pushing his plate away from him and beginning to fill his pipe.
‘The first question is whether he’s out,’ said the Director. ‘It doesn’t seem likely that the entrance to the tunnel has been hidden all these centuries by nothing but a heap of loose stones. And if it has, they wouldn’t be very loose by now. He may take hours getting out.’
‘You’ll need at least two strong men with picks–’ began MacPhee.
‘It’s no good, MacPhee,’ said the Director. ‘I’m not letting you go. If the mouth of the tunnel is still sealed, you must just wait there. But he may have powers we don’t know. If he’s out, you must look for tracks. Thank God it’s a muddy night. You must just hunt him.’
‘If Jane is going, Sir,’ said Camilla, ‘couldn’t I go too? I’ve had more experience of this sort of thing than–’
‘Jane has to go because she is the guide,’ said Ransom. ‘I am afraid you must stay at home. We in this house are all that is left of Logres. You carry its future in your body. As I was saying, Dimble, you must hunt. I do not think he can get far. The country will, of course, be quite unrecognisable to him, even by daylight.’
‘And…if we do find him, Sir?’
‘That is why it must be you, Dimble. Only you know the Great Tongue. If there was eldilic power behind the tradition he represented he may understand it. Even if he does not understand it he will, I think, recognise it. That will teach him he is dealing with Masters. There is a chance that he will think you are the Belbury people–his friends. In that case you will bring him here at once.’
‘And if not?’
The Director spoke sternly.
‘Then you must show your hand. That is the moment when the danger comes. We do not know what the powers of the old Atlantean circle were: some kind of hypnotism probably covered most of it. Don’t be afraid; but don’t let him try any tricks. Keep your hand on your revolver. You too Denniston.’
‘I’m a good hand with a revolver myself,’ said MacPhee. ‘And why, in the name of all commonsense–’
‘You can’t go, MacPhee,’ said the Director. ‘He’d put you to sleep in ten seconds. The others are heavily protected as you are not. You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil. Then, if he stands, conjure him.’
‘What shall I say in the Great Tongue?’
‘Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon and command him to come with you. Say it now.’
And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room seemed to have been intensely quiet; even the bird, and the bear, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance–or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.
‘Thank you,’ said the Director in English; and once again the warm domesticity of the kitchen flowed back upon them. ‘And if he comes with you, all is well. If he does not–why then, Dimble, you must rely on your Christianity. Do not try any tricks. Say your prayers and keep your will fixed in the will of Maleldil. I don’t know what he will do. But stand firm. You can’t lose your soul, whatever happens; at least, not by any action of his.’
‘Yes,’ said Dimble. ‘I understand.’
There was a longish pause. Then the Director spoke again.
‘Don’t be cast down, Margaret,’ he said. ‘If they kill Cecil, we shall none of us be let live many hours after him. It will be a shorter separation than you could have hoped for in the course of Nature. And now, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you would like a little time, to say your prayers, and to say goodbye to your wives. It is eight now, as near as makes no matter. Suppose you all re-assemble here at ten past eight, ready to start?’
‘Very good,’ answered several voices. Jane found herself left alone in the kitchen with Mrs Maggs and the animals and MacPhee and the Director.
‘You are all right, child?’ said Ransom.
‘I think so, Sir,’ said Jane. Her actual state of mind was one she could not analyse. Her expectation was strung up to the height; something that would have been terror but for the joy, and joy but for the terror, possessed her–an all-ab
sorbing tension of excitement and obedience. Everything else in her life seemed small and commonplace compared with this moment.
‘Do you place yourself in the obedience,’ said the Director, ‘in obedience to Maleldil?’
‘Sir,’ said Jane, ‘I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.’
‘It is enough for the present,’ said the Director. ‘This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.’
‘This is the craziest business ever I heard of,’ said MacPhee.
11
Battle Begun
‘I can’t see a thing,’ said Jane.
‘This rain is spoiling the whole plan,’ said Dimble from the back seat. ‘Is this still Eaton Road, Arthur?’
‘I think…yes, there’s the toll-house,’ said Denniston who was driving.
‘But what’s the use?’ said Jane. ‘I can’t see, even with the window down. We might have passed it any number of times. The only thing is to get out and walk.’
‘I think she’s right, Sir,’ said Denniston.
‘I say!’ said Jane suddenly. ‘Look! Look! What’s that? Stop.’
‘I can’t see a white gate,’ said Denniston.
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ said Jane. ‘Look over there.’
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Dimble.
‘Do you mean that light?’ said Denniston.
‘Yes, of course; that’s the fire.’
‘What fire?’
‘It’s the light,’ she said, ‘the fire in the hollow of the little wood. I’d forgotten all about it. Yes, I know: I never told Grace, or the Director. I’d forgotten that part of the dream till this moment. That was how it ended. It was the most important part really. That was where I found him–Merlin, you know. Sitting by a fire in a little wood. After I came out of the place underground. Oh, come quickly!’
‘What do you think, Arthur?’ said Dimble.
‘I think we must go wherever Jane leads,’ answered Denniston.
‘Oh, do hurry,’ said Jane. ‘There’s a gate here. Quick! It’s only one field away.’
All three of them crossed the road and opened the gate and went into the field. Dimble said nothing. He was inwardly reeling under the shock and shame of the immense and sickening fear which had surged up inside him. He had, perhaps, a clearer idea than the others of what sort of things might happen when they reached the place.
Jane, as guide, went first, and Denniston beside her, giving her his arm and showing an occasional gleam of his torch on the rough ground. Dimble brought up the rear. No one was inclined to speak.
The change from the road to the field was as if one had passed from a waking into a phantasmal world. Everything became darker, wetter, more incalculable. Each small descent felt as if you might be coming to the edge of a precipice. They were following a track beside a hedge; wet and prickly tentacles seemed to snatch at them as they went. Whenever Denniston used his torch, the things that appeared within the circle of its light–tufts of grass, ruts filled with water, draggled yellow leaves clinging to the wet blackness of many-angled twigs, and once the two greenish-yellow fires in the eyes of some small animal–had the air of being more commonplace than they ought to have been; as if, for that moment’s exposure, they had assumed a disguise which they would shuffle off again the moment they were left alone. They looked curiously small, too; when the light vanished the cold, noisy darkness seemed a huge thing.
The fear which Dimble had felt from the first began to trickle into the minds of the others as they proceeded–like water coming into a ship from a slow leak. They realised that they had not really believed in Merlin till now. They had thought they were believing the Director in the kitchen; but they had been mistaken. The shock was still to take. Out here with only the changing red light ahead and the black all round, one really began to accept as fact this tryst with something dead and yet not dead, something dug up, exhumed, from that dark pit of history which lies between the ancient Romans and the beginning of the English. ‘The Dark Ages,’ thought Dimble; how lightly one had read and written those words. But now they were going to step right into that Darkness. It was an age, not a man, that awaited them in the horrible little dingle.
And suddenly all that Britain which had been so long familiar to him as a scholar rose up like a solid thing. He could see it all. Little dwindling cities where the light of Rome still rested–little Christian sites, Camalodunum, Kaerleon, Glastonbury –a church, a villa or two, a huddle of houses, an earthwork. And then, beginning scarcely a stone’s throw beyond the gates, the wet, tangled endless woods, silted with the accumulated decay of autumns that had been dropping leaves since before Britain was an island; wolves slinking, beavers building, wide shallow marshes, dim horns and drummings, eyes in the thickets, eyes of men not only Pre-Roman but Pre-British, ancient creatures, unhappy and dispossessed, who became the elves and ogres and wood-wooses of the later tradition. But worse than the forests, the clearings. Little strongholds with unheard-of kings. Little colleges and covines of Druids. Houses whose mortar had been ritually mixed with babies’ blood. They had tried to do that to Merlin. And now all that age, horribly dislocated, wrenched out of its place in the time series and forced to come back and go through all its motions yet again with doubled monstrosity, was flowing towards them and would, in a few minutes, receive them into itself.
Then came a check. They had walked right into a hedge. They wasted a minute, with the aid of the torch, disentangling Jane’s hair. They had come to the end of a field. The light of the fire, which kept on growing stronger and weaker in fitful alternations, was hardly visible from here. There was nothing for it but to set to work and find a gap or a gate. They went a long way out of their course before they found one. It was a gate that would not open: and as they came down on the far side, after climbing it, they went ankle deep into water. For a few minutes, plodding slightly up-hill, they were out of sight of the fire, and when it re-appeared it was well away on their left and much further off than anyone supposed.
Hitherto Jane had scarcely attempted to think of what might lie before them. As they went on, the real meaning of that scene in the kitchen began to dawn on her. He had sent the men to bid goodbye to their wives. He had blessed them all. It was likely, then, that this–this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field–meant death. Death–the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point. Jane was trying to see death in the new light of all she had heard since she left Edgestow. She had long ceased to feel any resentment at the Director’s tendency, as it were, to dispose of her–to give her, at one time or in one sense, to Mark, and in another to Maleldil–never, in any sense, to keep her for himself. She accepted that. And of Mark she did not think much, because to think of him increasingly aroused feelings of pity and guilt. But Maleldil. Up till now she had not thought of Maleldil either. She did not doubt that the eldila existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed…whom the Director obeyed, and through him the whole household, even MacPhee. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as ‘religion’, she had put the thought aside. The distance between these alarming and operative realities and the memory, say, of fat Mrs Dimble saying her prayers, was too wide. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, the tingling light and sound from under the Director’s door, and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive girl), the embarrassment of confirmation classes, the nervous affability of clergymen. B
ut this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. Because, really, it now appeared that almost anything might be true. The world had already turned out to be so very unlike what she had expected. The old ring-fence had been smashed completely. One might be in for anything. Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell. The thought glowed in her mind for a second like a spark that has fallen on shavings, and then a second later, like those shavings, her whole mind was in a blaze–or with just enough left outside the blaze to utter some kind of protest. ‘But…but this is unbearable. I ought to have been told.’ It did not, at that moment, occur to her even to doubt that if such things existed they would be totally and unchangeably adverse to her.
‘Look out, Jane,’ said Denniston. ‘That’s a tree.’
‘I–I think it’s a cow,’ said Jane.
‘No. It’s a tree. Look. There’s another.’
‘Hush,’ said Dimble. ‘This is Jane’s little wood. We are very close now.’
The ground rose in front of them for about twenty yards and there made an edge against the firelight. They could see the wood quite clearly now, and also each other’s faces, white and blinking.
‘I will go first,’ said Dimble.
‘I envy you your nerve,’ said Jane.
‘Hush,’ said Dimble again.
They walked slowly and quietly up to the edge and stopped. Below them in a big fire wood was burning at the bottom of a little dingle. There were bushes all about, whose changing shadows, as the flames rose and fell, made it difficult to see clearly. Beyond the fire there seemed to be some rude kind of tent made out of sacking, and Denniston thought he saw an upturned cart. In the foreground, between them and the fire, there was certainly a kettle.
‘Is there anyone here?’ whispered Dimble to Denniston.
‘I don’t know. Wait a few seconds.’
‘Look!’ said Jane suddenly. ‘There! When the flame blew aside.’
‘What?’ said Dimble.
‘Didn’t you see him?’
‘I saw nothing.’
‘I thought I saw a man,’ said Denniston.
‘I saw an ordinary tramp,’ said Dimble. ‘I mean a man in modern clothes.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We must go down,’ said Dimble.
‘Can one get down?’ said Denniston.
‘Not this side,’ said Dimble. ‘It looks as if a sort of path came into it over there to the right. We must go along the edge till we find