The Changes Trilogy (54 page)

Silence. A long wait. The hounds scratched and the fire, which he'd never seen fed, hissed sappily. Outside a pigeon cooed its boring June coo. Then the clop of hooves.

“Stop there, Maddox. Good old boy. No, stand still while I climb up. That's it. Golly, it's heavy. I don't think …”

A scratching noise and a clunk. Geoffrey heaved at the door and it swung open.

Mr. Furbelow was lying on one side, with his leg bent back under him. He was breathing snortily, with his mouth open. Geoffrey ran into the cottage, nearly slipping on the icy steps himself, and brought out the sofa cushions. They eased him onto these and straightened him out on his back. His left leg seemed to be broken somewhere above the knee. Geoffrey decided he'd better try and set it while the old man was still unconscious. Trying to remember everything that Uncle Jacob had shown him (“Decide slowly, laddie, and do it quickly and firmly. No room for the squeamishness in a sick bay.”) he felt the bones into position. There was one place where they seemed right. Then he used his sword to lever the back off one of the kitchen chairs, bandaged the leg with torn strips of pillowcase from the bedroom, and lashed the uprights of the chairback down the leg with the knotted belts. It was very tiresome to do without unsettling the join, even with the leg propped on cushions, and when he'd finished it looked horribly clumsy, but felt as if it ought to hold the break firm for a bit. Sally went into the hall to fetch a jug of wine, but before she was back the old man blinked and groaned.

“Morphine,” he muttered. “Top right-hand drawer of my desk. Hypodermic syringe, bottle of spirit there too. Don't touch anything else.”

There was a box of morphine ampoules, three hypodermic syringes and what Geoffrey took to be the spirit bottle. Mr. Furbelow took the things onto his chest, dipped the point of the needle into the spirit and then prodded through the rubber at the end of the ampoule, withdrawing the plunger to suck the liquid out. Then he tilted it up, pressed the plunger until a drop showed at the point of the needle, and pushed the point into a vein on the inside of his left arm, squeezing the morphine slowly into his bloodstream. You could see the pain screaming from his eyes. Hell, thought Geoffrey, he's a brave old man and I've done a wicked thing. He decided to tell him the truth, but Mr. Furbelow seemed to have fainted again. They watched him for five minutes. Then he spoke, not opening his eyes.

“That's better. Have you contrived to do anything about my leg?”

“Yes, Mr. Furbelow. I hope I've done the right thing. I tried to set it, and it felt as if it was together properly, and then I put splints on it. I
am
sorry. It must hurt frightfully.”

“What had we best do about
him
?” said Mr. Furbelow.

“If you'll tell me what to do, I'll try and do it properly. Sally can talk to him if necessary. If it's the best we can manage he'll have to put up with it.”

“He will not like the change, I fear. He is the most conservative of creatures.”

“Would you like us to try and carry you into your house? It won't be very easy, but I expect I could rig something up.”

“Let us leave that, for the moment. Perhaps he will be so angry that he will destroy us all, or perhaps he will mend my leg. In either case the effort will have been pointless. Oh dear. Well, there's one comfort. I baked some oatcakes only yesterday. And I've put the water on to boil. He insists on water from the well, and I've always boiled it, but I haven't liked to tell him. He won't make his own food, though he doesn't mind bringing the oats out of nowhere, and I have to pound them up in a mortar and then cook them. And the bees hive in the stable roof, and I collect their honey every autumn. The honey's in the cupboard on the left of the passage, and the oatcakes are there too. The kettle's on the fire in my room.”

He sighed and shut his eyes. Geoffrey started up the steps to look for this primitive meal, thinking how strangely different it was from the elaborate and moldering banquet which they'd thrown to the wolves the evening before.

“Wait,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I'm only resting.”

Geoffrey sat on the bottom step, where the sun had melted the ice and dried a patch of stone. The old chemist's face was gray as ash, the lines on it suddenly deeper, the nose pinched, but the wispy moustache wavered slightly below his nostrils as his breath went in and out. Geoffrey was wondering whether he'd gone to sleep when he spoke again.

“You must take a clean linen cloth and a clean towel,” he said. “You will find them in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in my study. The kettle is a big one, so there will be plenty of water. First you pour about two pints into the silver jug on the mantelpiece; then you put that in the big earthenware jar in the back room to cool off, so that he can drink it. I've built a platform of stones in the bottom of the jar, so that you can put the jug in and leave it there, without unboiled water slopping in over the top. Then you can get the other things together—two oatcakes, the little silver bowl on the shelf full of honey, a linen cloth, a towel, and the bowl for the hot water in case he wants to be washed. Shall I repeat that?”

“I think I've got it,” said Geoffrey.

“Then you can come back and I'll tell you what to do, while the drinking water is getting cold.”

The oatcakes were not those thin saucer-shaped things you buy in tartan tins in Edinburgh: they were just lumps of cooked oatmeal, with no real shape at all. The honey was the palest yellow, very runny, and smelling of wilder flowers than the garden-and-orchard-scented honey which shops sell. And the cloths smelled of mountain streams and sunlight. Mr. Furbelow spoke more drowsily when Geoffrey came back.

“It all depends,” he said. “Sometimes he just lies there and opens his mouth, like a bird in a nest, and you have to break bits off the oatcake, dip them in the honey and pop them in. Other times he sits up on his elbow and feeds himself. Sometimes he's asleep, and I just put the tray beside him on his stone. About once a week he likes to have his face and hands sponged and dried. But really, you'll find you know what he wants without his telling you. I should go as soon as the water's cool enough to drink. I shall try to sleep now.”

The cranking seemed to take half an hour, but at last the stone gave the dull thud which meant it was high enough.

“I'll go first,” said Sally. “It's not really as dark as it looks—he makes a sort of light at the bottom. You've got to feel each step with your foot because they're all different.”

They felt their way down the coarse stone. The steps did not seem to be shaped work at all—more like flattened boulders from a riverbed, pitted with the endless rubbing of water and patterned with fossil bones. There were thirty-three of them. At the bottom a passage led away through rock toward a faint green light. It was eleven paces down the passage and into a long, low chamber whose rock walls sloped inward like the roof of an attic. The air in the chamber smelled sweet and wild and wrong, like rotting crab apples. Merlin was waiting for them.

He lay on his side, with his head resting on the crook of his arm, staring up the passage. Perhaps he had been aroused to expect them by the clack of the ratchet. He wore a long, dark robe. Colors were difficult in the strange light, but his beard seemed black and his face the color of rusted iron. His eyes were so deep in the huge head that they looked like the empty sockets of a skull until you moved across their beam and saw the green glow reflected from the lens, like the reflection of sky at the bottom of a well. The light seemed to come from nowhere. It was just there, impregnating the sick, sweet atmosphere.

He gave no sign, made no movement, as Sally crossed his line of vision, but his head followed Geoffrey into the room. Geoffrey found he was gripping the tray so hard that the tin rim hurt his palms. There was a widening of the stone slab where he could have put it down, but instead he turned away from Merlin (it was a struggle, like turning into a gale at a street corner) and put the tray on the rough rock behind him. When he turned back Merlin had moved, rearing up onto his elbow. He was a giant. The black hair streamed down in a wild mane behind him. His eyes were alive now, and the chamber was throbbing with a noiseless hum, like the hum of a big ship's engines which you cannot hear with your ears but which sings up from the deck through your feet, through your shoulder when you lean against a stanchion, and through your whole body as you lie in your bunk waiting for sleep. His lips moved.

“Ubi servus meus.”

The voice was a gray scrape, like shingle retreating under the suck of a wave. Sally answered in a whisper.

“Magister Furbelow crurem fregit.”

Merlin did not look at her. The green blaze of his eyes clanged into Geoffrey's skull, drowning his will in a welter of dithering vibrations. The lips moved again.

“Da mihi cibum meum.”

As the huge wave of Merlin's authority washed over him, Geoffrey gasped, “Tell him what's happening.”

“Magister …” began Sally.

“Tacite,” said Merlin, and Geoffrey's tongue was locked in his mouth, as though he would never speak again. Mastered, helpless, he turned and picked up the tray and put it on the slab. The giant lay back and watched him out of the corner of his eyes. Geoffrey broke off a crumbling corner of one of the oatcakes and picked up the little silver pot of honey. The surface of the honey was curved, with the faint arc of its meniscus, and that of the shining curve of the silver below gathered the green light to a single focus, a spark of light in the gold liquid. The clean wildflower smell smote up through the sick air of the cave. Geoffrey stared at the gold spark. It was the sun, the outside world where the wheat was growing toward harvest. His mind clung to the light, hauled itself toward that tiny sun.

“Tell him Mr. Furbelow gave him poison,” he croaked.

“Venenum …” whispered Sally out of the blackness beyond the sun.

“Mel?” said Merlin's voice.

“Venenum tibi dedit Magister Furbelow,” said Sally.

“Quando?” The old voice was weary, disbelieving.

“Hic quintus annus,” said Sally.

“Mr. Furbelow tried to wake him up with a synthetic stimulant,” said Geoffrey. “But he got stuck halfway.”

“What does ‘synthetic' mean?”

“Made in a factory, out of coal or oil or something. Not grown. Not natural.”

Sally started on a longer whisper. Geoffrey still didn't dare look at her—he still clung to the sun in the honey. When she reached the word
natura
Merlin gave an odd, coughing grunt, and Geoffrey saw, at the edge of his vision, a shape moving downward. At last he looked away from the little silver bowl, and saw that the shape had been Merlin's legs. Merlin had heaved his body up again and was now sitting on the slab, his legs dangling, his head bowed so as not to touch the roof. He must have been nearly eight feet tall, and now he was staring at Sally with a deep, steady gaze as though he was seeing her for the first time. She finished what she had to say.

“Dic mihi ab initio,” he said.

“He wants me to tell him from the beginning,” said Sally. “Where shall I start?”

“Start with Mr. Furbelow digging into his tomb. Tell him what he was trying to do. Say he's not a bad man, but muddled. Then tell him what England's like now—how cruel people are. Tell him about all the people who had to go away.”

Twice While Sally spoke to him something seemed to shake Merlin like a branch shaken by a sudden gust. Both times Sally paused; the feeling that the chamber was throbbing wavered, increased, then steadied back. Both times Geoffrey knew that Merlin had fought away the delirium which had engulfed him for the last five years. Sally's voice became pleading. She wasn't whispering now, but almost shouting. “Indignum est,” she said several times, “indignum nominis tui.” Her face became runneled with tears, as she tried to ram her message through five years of poisoned stupor—she was thinking of the dancing bear. In the end she was gasping between each syllable and her voice was cracked with pain. Merlin stared at her like an entomologist considering an insect, and at last sighed. Sally stopped shouting.

He turned to Geoffrey.

“Da,” he said.

Geoffrey handed him an oatcake and the honey pot. He broke off a fragment, dipped it in the honey and began to eat. While he ate he talked. Sometimes Sally answered. The word
natura
came up again and again. Next time he wanted food he just held out his hand to Geoffrey for an oatcake while he went on talking to Sally. His palm was covered with fine black hairs.

His voice changed, as though he were not asking anymore, but telling. Sally just nodded. Then he handed the empty honey pot to Geoffrey, drank a few sips from the jug and settled back onto the implacable stone.

“Difficile erit,” he said, “sed perdurabo, Deo volente. Abite vos. Gratias ago.”

The green light dimmed. Geoffrey picked up the tray. They left.

As Geoffrey began to wind down the stone he said, “Tell me what all that was about.”

“I didn't really understand everything,” said Sally. “I told him what had happened, and then I said that what he was doing now was—there isn't a proper word for
indignum
—unworthy, dishonorable, something like that. Then he told me a lot about
natura
, which means nature—but it isn't anything to do with wild birds and hedges. It's all about what we really are, and what is proper for us. I remember he said machines were just toys for clever apes, and not proper for man—they prevent him from finding his own nature. But anyway the stuff Mr. Furbelow gave him was very bad for
his
nature, and now he's going to try and change it so that he can overcome it. He said it would be difficult. He said that all sorts of things might happen out here, because once you start interfering with the strong bits of nature the things around them get disturbed. It's like the whirlpools around an oar, he said. Then he said it would be difficult again, but that he would manage with God's will, and then he said thank you. You know, he didn't seem at all worried about what he'd done to the other people in England—it was just unlucky for some of them, but they didn't matter much.”