The Cockatrice Boys

  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, S
auna 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—

  The track narrowed here, between steep mossy banks, and the surface underfoot became a gluey mixture of snow and deep mud; sometimes she sank up to her knees; she lost a shoe and barely managed to rescue it by delving down in freezing mud with her hands, then lost the other one altogether. Only the knowledge that it would be wholly impossible to battle a way through that fallen tree kept her from turning back.

  But what if this path leads nowhere, comes to a stop? she thought.

  Then I’m really done.

  But a path has to lead somewhere, doesn’t it?

  She struggled on. Eight eights are sixty-four, eight nines are seventy-two.

  After a while the path widened again, and the surface improved; now it was firm rock or frozen earth under layers of fallen leaves and snow. Sauna, wincing as she walked on bare and burning feet, remembered an old rhyme that her mother used to sing about souls after death making their arduous way through purgatory and its trials.

  If hosen or shoon thou ne’er gavest nane

  The whins shall prick thee to the bare bane.

  That old ballad that Mam used to sing. Mam was Scottish, of course. She knew all those old rhymes. How did the refrain go?

  This ae night, this ae night,

  Every night and alle,

  Fire and sleet and candlelight

  And Heaven receive thy soul …

  I just wish I could see a bit of fire, a bit of candlelight.

  She came round a clump of trees, and found herself in a clearing. An assart. She remembered Dr. Wren explaining the word one day when the Cockatrice Belle was running through woodland and came to an open space.

  “It is a strip of land in the middle of woodland, my child, which has been opened out, the trees felled and uprooted so that the ground can be cultivated and crops grown. And mostly there will be a house, probably the dwelling of the first farmer who reclaimed the land; often the house may be very old. Assarts are old, hundreds of years old, from when the whole country was covered by forest; these days folk do not choose to live in woodland glades.”

  There was a house in the clearing.

  Oh, Dr. Wren, how I wish you were here.

  Dr. Wren had also told them stories in between periods of instruction. “People need stories,” he said to Dakin and Sauna, “to remind them that reality is not only what we can see or smell or touch. Reality is in as many layers as the globe we live on itself, going inwards to a central core of red-hot mystery, and outwards to unguessable space. People’s minds need detaching, every now and then, from the plain necessities of daily life. People need to be reminded of these other dimensions above us and below us. Stories do that.”

  So he told his stories, which were always startling and often beautiful. The strange, the really strange thing about them was that like dreams they vanished. The very moment after the final sentence was spoken the listeners would find that the whole web of the story had melted from memory, however hard they tried and struggled to hang on to even a single thread.

  They complained about this to Dr. Wren, and asked why it should be so.

  “We can remember other stories—like Alfred and the Cakes or Bluebeard. So why not yours?”

  He laughed and said, “Mine are intended to be lost. And none the worse for that. They are supposed to sink out of view, deep down to where they will do the most good.”

  If only I could remember one of those stories now, thought Sauna. Just the smallest scrap of one.

  But it was no use; she could not. Even the attempt was some help though. It seemed to brace her mind against the sight that she was expecting.

  Nine twelves are a hundred and—a hundred and—

  The house was very small, stone-built, with a thatched roof. It stood at the opposite end of the clearing. If there had ever been any crop grown in this woodland place, its harvest had long ago been reaped. Snow lay level and untrodden over the sloping ground. Nobody had walked this way for many hours.

  But in one of the windows of the house—it had two, both at ground-floor level—there was, unmistakably, a light. The dimnest, smokiest blink, yet a light.

  Sauna limped on. What else could she do? There was no possibility of going back. And so far as she could make out the track led on no further than this clearing. Behind the cottage the hill rose steeply. And if there had been a track she could not have followed it. She had come to the end of her strength. She felt unbelievably weary, hollow with hunger, sick with cold. Only this extremity of need drove her on.

  For as she neared the cottage, her unexpressed terror was confirmed—one, she now realized, that had been lurking at the back of her mind for the last few hours.

  A dark shape stood outside the door—a thing, an effigy of a person, not a real person but a grotesque figure made out of wicker or willow wands. Dozens of wands were loosely, lavishly coiled round to make a bulbous, huge head; masses more sprang from the neck and ran down bulging out into a grotesque body; wands from the shoulders were buckled in at the wrists and spread out again as fingers, curved into a clutching gesture.

  Sauna stood still in a numbness of horror. For here was the cottage, here was the figure of her dream.

  Then a comforting thought came to her. Perhaps this is all of a dream—the longest, worst dream I have ever dreamed, but still no more than that.

  I had better go into the house. Perhaps that will cause me to wake.

  Mustering up all her courage, she walked up to the motionless figure, walked past it and knocked on the door. Nobody answered, so she lifted the latch and went in.

  Chapter seven

  The Cockatrice Belle crept along very slowly and mournfully in the days following the loss of Sauna.

  When they were still at Falstone, Lieutenant Upfold had had the sensible idea of giving the dog Uli Sauna’s skipping-rope and ordering him to follow her track.

  This worked well so long as the road ran beside the railway, but at Hawick the track of the coach carrying the kidnapped girl diverged from the rail turning north-eastwards, while the train was obliged to continue straight on in a northerly direction.

  “Should we send a separate party of men along the road to follow the scent?” worried the colonel. “There aren’t many monsters about just now.”

  “On the whole I think it will be best to keep all our forces together,” advised Dr. Wren. “Remember what happened at Willoughby. The lack of monsters may mean they are massing elsewhere. Besides, we may pick up the track at Peebles.”

  Not happy about this, but as there really seemed no alternative, the colonel accepted Dr. Wren’s counsel. He was extremely put out though before they reached Peebles, when the archbishop insisted on a visit to Melrose, which took half a day.

  “What in the world is that for?” demanded Clipspeak sourly.

  “I need to consult the library there,” was Dr. Wren’s calm answer.

  When the archbishop returned to the train, the colonel was pacing to and from, on indignant watch for him.

  “Well?” he snapped. “Did you find what you hoped for in the library, may I ask? It’s as well there are so few mons
ters about! Your little side-trip might have cost us dearly!”

  “I fear they must be massing farther on. No,” said Dr. Wren, “I hardly hoped to find anything. But it was needful to check.”

  “To check what? What, pray, were you looking for?”

  “Michael Scott’s last book.”

  “That feller that wrote Tom Cringle’s Log?”

  “No, Colonel, no, no,” said the archbishop patiently. “The other one. The thirteenth-century alchemist. As I believe I told you, his grave is in Melrose Abbey, and he is said to have stipulated that his last book, his greatest achievement, should be buried along with him.”

  “So? Well? Well? Was the book in the grave? Or the municipal library?”

  “No, it was in neither of those places. The grave had been opened some time during the last century, but only a single page of manuscript was discovered in it. That had been deposited in the municipal library, but it seems that, just last year, it was stolen.”

  “Disgraceful,” remarked the colonel, not particularly interested. “Even public libraries ain’t safe from vandals these days. So you had a wasted visit, when we might have been on our way.”

  “Oh, not entirely wasted,” said Dr. Wren peacefully. “Knowledge is always useful. I had a description of the man who stole the page.”

  At Peebles there was still a somewhat unnerving shortage of monsters. But here the intelligent hound Uli once more picked up the scent of the coach that had carried off Sauna. The trail, not surprisingly, led northwards towards Edinburgh; but then, to the colonel’s surprise, it turned west once more, avoiding the main line to Edinburgh and seemed to be heading for Linlithgow and Falkirk.

  “Just as I expected,” said Dr. Wren with satisfaction. “They are making for the Crook of Devon. A most unchancy place of evil fame and bad repute.”

  “Then why the plague don’t they go across the Forth Bridge and turn left?” demanded the colonel.