The Sending (14 page)

However, there was no going back. I had been so appallingly successful that it occurred to me that, after all, Odolaga might not accept that I, known to have inherited a shaman's fellowship with other animals but nothing more, could be responsible. He too might search conscience after such an inexplicable disaster and never see that it was a warning from me to keep away from the scene of Paddy's murder and to set Rita free from her lethargy of spirit. He might believe it to be the revenge of some other enemy; or it might be the dark cone itself, which seemed capable of any malignancy if the Presence did not receive whatever sacrifices he made to it. A wild and primitive conjecture! But nothing would have induced me to live under the shadow of that uncanny mountain.

It was hardly wise to sign my name, but I did the next best. I broke the bow into two halves, throwing one away and driving the other into the ground. In a deep slit at the top I left a note:

WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF LEYALÁ.

He came into sight across the gorge, striding out firmly with two dogs at his heels. He stopped, looking all round for his black goat, and then noticed how scattered were the very few survivors of the flock. Assuming that the rest had for some reason gone down into the woods, he sent his dogs racing off to find them. He came nearer to the precipice, heard a faint baa-ing from some dying sheep and shone a torch on the scene below.

I slipped the lashings from the owl's talons, then from the wings while I held her between my legs, and lastly from the beak, heaving her into the air too fast for her to punish me. For a moment she settled on the rock to recover lucidity and balance and took off, a ghostly creature with a five-foot wingspread, yet without a sound in the air from the soft feathers. Her Hoo-Hoo, twice repeated, sounded like laughter as twice she circled over Odolaga.

He fell on his knees in the attitude of prayer. When he stood up, the tears streaming down his face sparkled like the drip of icicles in the light of the moon. He did not rush off with the dogs to find cause or culprit, as I expected he would. He turned back slowly towards his house to recover himself and, I suppose, to get help, to rouse men, and to drive tracter and trailer up into the gorge from the meeting of the waters.

So my escape was anti-climax. I walked off as he had done—but somewhat faster—and scrambled down into the bed of the stream, following its course for mile after mile so that no dogs could track me, until I was clear of the gorge and, at first light, passing through those flowered and idyllic valley meadows which I had taken so much trouble to avoid on my outward journey. I was utterly exhausted and careless, but the hill farmers and their children slept late and I think I was never seen. Later I remembered that it was Sunday. At last I hit the path on which I had started out three days before, and when I came to a tangled grove on the hillside where a deer or a wet and staggering man could lie up in safety, I entered it and rested and at last slept.

In the morning it was raining, of which I was glad since I should appear at the bus stop evenly wet all over, rather than from mid-thigh down. I flapped along, now more careful to avoid the scattered homesteads, and chose a moment when no one was in sight to cross the Bayonne road and vanish into the valley on the other side. Then I made a difficult circuit so that when I approached the village lower down the pass I should be seen descending from the hills to the east. Nowhere had I left any trace of my presence beyond the private warning to Odolaga.

My luck was in. There was a bus from the frontier due in about an hour and a blessed tavern in the village, where I was warmed and restored by good red wine and a pan of eggs with high-powered red sausages. I still had some of my Pamplona salami left. It will be long before I want to taste it again, but I must admit that as spicy and easily portable nourishment for the fugitive it is hard to beat.

While I waited, vast, black clouds gathered so swiftly that I could not tell whether they had come from the hot plains of France or Spain. The Pyrenees roared with the echoing anger of mountain thunder. The genial, French-speaking old lady who had served me stood at the window watching the fireworks. Twice the lightning struck on the tip of a cone, just visible to the north-west, which I knew only too well. I noticed that she crossed herself, which she had not done even for a strike just across the road.

‘Aquelarre,' she murmured.

I thought that was probably Basque for God Save Us, or something of the sort, but it turned out to be the local name of the mountain.

‘It's what we call it round here,' she said, ‘the Hill of the He-goat. Lightning always strikes it. Old people say it is because the devil lives there. What superstition! No doubt it is made of iron.'

‘But you did cross yourself, Madame,' I reminded her.

‘That is because my grandmother told me to. And the foolishness one does as a child one continues without thinking.'

I have no comment except that the slopes of Aquelarre showed no sign of iron ore.

The bus took me down to Pamplona where I changed into dry clothes in the garage where I had left my car. And so I drove away to Huesca, as I had come, and over the frontier to Toulouse, where I am staying for a couple of nights relishing modernity and writing up this journal, not omitting the victory and the human guilt, as in any other war diary.

Chapter Eight

August 27

I DO NOT KNOW what to make of myself. Nothing new about that. Conscience is uneasy, still accusing me of brutality, but conscience can go to hell. Rita, my Rita, is herself again and more adorable than ever. So Uncle Izar has come to respect the power of his rival shaman—black comedy if only I could make sense of the process by which he returned her soul at a distance. I must accept that there is far more in this tradition called magic than bullocks and birds and familiars and telepathy, and that I have only touched the fringe of many ways to exploit the unity of life for good or for evil.

With it all I am a very different man from the poor creature who drove away from Penminster. I have added action to knowledge, am complete and feel it. My only anxiety is the escape of Meg, but the bond between us is too close for her to have gone far.

My first thought on returning home this afternoon was Rita. I did not have to wait for news of her. She was in the house with Ginny, taking advantage of my absence to shake and dust all cleanable objects and rearrange them with such ingenuity that nothing is where it should be. At least they had some regard for the studio and left it alone.

I was shaken when Rita threw her arms round me and kissed me. Apparently she had told Ginny that I was likely to arrive that day—a premonition worthy of tiger brother, since they had had no word from me. ‘Ginny always wanted to have a go,' she said, ‘but she wouldn't until I gave her moral support.'

I should not have thought Ginny needed it, but it is true that I have left everything much as it was in my father's day and lately got into the habit of telling her not to bother with this and that.

Rita pointed out that it was due to living in the forest.

‘Instead of moving the litter away from the hut you got used to moving the hut away from the litter.'

Not wholly true. It was the camp we moved, not the hut. A stab of memory brought up the state of her cottage when I last saw it.

‘I know what you are thinking,' she said. ‘Darling Alfgif, forget it! I don't know what came over me, but it has gone.'

I asked her when she began to feel better.

‘Soon after you lent me Ginny, and a day or two later the sun came out.'

That must have been when I was on the prowl towards Odolaga but before I got to work on him.

‘And you—you're looking so brown and young and well. What did you do in Paris? Lunch out of doors every day?'

‘Yes, and up half the night.'

‘And here was I thinking you were all stuck into mysticism with your Indian friend. Any good garden restaurants where you would like to take me?'

Any and every, my Rita, with petals drifting on the wind into your hair. But I answered:

‘Only a rather gloomy place called Aquelarre.'

Under cover of the busy vacuum cleaner I left them and drove off to collect Meg from George Midwinter. He told me that she had escaped the night before and overwhelmed me with apologies.

‘I couldn't foresee it…it seemed impossible…just come and look!'

He led me to the special home he had prepared for Meg—not a proletarian cage as for the various convalescents—but a closed shed, its only door opening into the house, with a wooden floor, plenty of straw for burrowing, a new blanket and even a toy. Meg had eaten her way out, starting from a crack in the floorboards which she had enlarged to an irregular hole just wide enough to squeeze through. She had then burrowed through the earth under the shed. Splinters were scattered around, some with black hairs sticking to them, and a little powdery soil flung out from the tunnel.

George told me that he had had a few dogs staying the night after minor operations, and thought at first that their whimpering and barking might have upset Meg.

‘But it was the other way round. When I looked over my patients in the morning I found signs that the most active had been trying to get out as well—floors scratched, wood chewed, and the most intelligent of them had actually left tooth marks on locks and latches. I am sure it was Meg who started the rot. You weren't calling her, were you?'

I assured him that I wasn't, and that at the time I was driving through the night to the car ferry at Boulogne.

‘Or she calling you?'

I replied that I was not Paddy, and while Meg and I were responsive to each other in contact or near it, I had no idea how to influence her at a distance.

‘That sounds as if you thought it possible,' he said.

I told him that given the community of all life I wouldn't rule it out and added, more cautiously, that when he came across something as inexplicable as his mad dog which was perfectly healthy after all, the influence of another animal, including man, was a hypothesis to be explored.

But both of us were too worried to play about with anything but the facts. George swore that he had looked for her everywhere and informed his morning clients and even the police. No one had seen Meg.

‘You told Ginny?' I asked.

‘Yes, at once. Ginny called and called but couldn't find her. She doesn't seem to be in the house or garden.'

I said that she would be in the woods, where I had painted her and where again and again we had played together. I was reasonably sure of it and that she would come looping over the ground to my call. If she had been in an accident in Penminster or crossing a road we should have heard of it.

What surprised me was that Ginny had not told me at once of Meg's disappearance and evidently had not mentioned it to Rita. When I got back and found that Rita had left, I asked Ginny why she had said nothing.

‘Because I wants you to see when you comes back that Miss Rita was past her little trouble and as sweet and merry as we knows her. If I'd started up on that Meg, 'twould have been Meg and Meg as soon as you'd crossed the threshold instead of her being all over you as she was, the poor dear.'

Sentimental old thing! But I am glad of it. And, of course, she thinks nothing of calling our learned, lovely neighbour ‘poor dear' for some good reason of her own.

August 29

The man has left me disturbed. I have no fear of him and my uneasiness in no way resembles the neurosis which Odolaga wished on me. I might call it awe. I feel as if I were walking on the ridge between two hidden valleys. I do not know the path, and the wreathing of mist curls round me so that I can neither step off it nor go ahead with the confidence of Julian Molay.

I had always hoped that I should meet again that eccentric connoisseur of painting, Paddy's middle-eastern customer whom he sent to me in March before his death. I knew so much less of Paddy than I do now and had then no reason to suppose that their common interests extended beyond hunting saddles.

Early this morning Molay telephoned me from Frome that he was riding south across the downs to see something of the country and could pass near me. Would I permit him to look once more at my work? I replied at once, and warmly, that I could supply reasonable entertainment for horse and man, and hoped he would come to lunch. So I asked Ginny to do her best and I put some order into the studio.

I went out to meet him when I heard him trotting up the drive. It was still impossible to guess his age—somewhere between fifty-five and seventy—but he looked younger than the El Greco grandee whom I remembered. That may have been due to his seat and his regal partnership with the horse: an Anglo-Arab stallion which, when I greeted it, put ears forward and bowed its head to my hand with proper eastern courtesy. It was a beauty, the epitome of graceful maleness with a touch of savagery. One could imagine it ruling the herd of mares in some illimitable grassland and challenging with complete assurance predator or rival. I asked Molay where he had managed to borrow or hire such a splendid creature, assuming that he had not brought it over all the way from the Syrian shore. He had bought it the day before, apparently paid lordly cash and taken delivery at once in person.

I am no horseman. In Indian days anything, horse or mule, that would get me reliably from place to place would do. But I knew enough to be sure that it was more than exceptional to take a full stallion which one had never ridden before out on a casual, cross-country tour.

‘It wasn't necessary,' he said. ‘We knew each other or our shadows.'

I let that go. What he meant is a little plainer now. However, I immediately suspected that art was an excuse and that his call had something in common with von Pluwig's, though what he wanted from me was unlikely to be as simple as persuading Arminius to stop trailing his off-hind, or as inexplicable as holding a brick at the point of balance.

We put the stallion up in the old cattle shed, clean and with a floor of stone flags, and I brought Paddy into the conversation by saying that when he rode over occasionally to see me we did the same, He used to insist that the loose box, long unused but in fair condition, was inhospitable—an adjective hard to justify but typical of Paddy's insight.

Over lunch, Molay fascinated me on the subject of the relationship between horse and man, and I thought he might be approaching the object of his visit. But then he led me on to talk about myself and my years in India, of which he already knew something from Paddy. I told him how I had spent all my leaves with a hunting tribe whose shaman had accepted me as a blood brother, and how I came to respect his beliefs and many of his practices.

‘What did he teach you?'

‘Nothing. He didn't teach. He explained, or tried to. And I found that my conception of the unity of life was the same as his. But I haven't any of Mr Gadsden's gifts and it's long odds against my being able to help you—if that is what you have come for.'

‘Ah well, there is always Meg,' he said.

I apologised for Meg's absence on business, saying that I had left her at the vet's while I was abroad for some days. She had escaped but would come back.

‘How can you be so sure?'

‘Because I know she is alive and well.'

It's hard to describe how I know; easier to describe how I would feel if she were dead. A blank. A wall. And grief rebounding from it.

‘I saw her as Paddy Gadsden's familiar spirit,' Molay said. ‘Now she is yours, I suppose.'

‘If you like to call our closeness that. But she meant more to Paddy than to me.'

‘In what way more?'

I answered that of course I had realised that Meg was a traditional familiar, and that I had been curious enough to read all that the witch trials could tell me. But still I could not understand, beyond dubious theories of my own, what the use of the familiar was, and I was puzzled by the open, fearless confessions of witches that they controlled imps and willed them to do whatever was wanted.

‘They must have really believed it,' Molay said.

‘Apparently. Another illusion like flying on a broomstick.'

‘Not quite the same. Drugs could create a fantasy of flying, just as in what now is called a trip. No, not illusion, Mr Hollaston, but a way of seeing—of seeing the object in terms of the object and the object in terms of its relation to you.'

I could follow his meaning, and I mentioned Meg's dancing and my impression that something accompanied her in the dance.

‘Exactly. But you could not see that something.'

‘In what shape?'

‘Whatever shape suited your desires. Imp or angel or that other Meg which throws no shadow.'

‘Then it is illusion.'

‘The shape you choose is illusion. The Presence is not. Take the divine Athene, the personification of a new society of justice, wisdom, beauty and civic pride! Did she exist? The question is absurd. She existed in that form because in that form she was needed.'

I accept, and always have, his example of the truth behind the myth. To see what he would say, I told him that while I was recently abroad I had camped for the night on a wild and sullen hill, and felt its Presence strongly but given it no form.

‘Were you afraid to give it form?'

‘Neither wished nor feared. In what form should it have appeared to me?'

‘Whatever you liked. Without you it has no form.'

‘But does exist?'

‘Since it is subject to the law of cause and effect it must in some sense exist. Mr Hollaston, Meg seems to be leading us away from the point. Would you show me again the picture you named the Holy Well?'

I carried the brandy into the studio and asked Ginny to serve us coffee there. She looked at my guest without her usual geniality, playing the stern housekeeper. I take it she had—forgivably—been listening at the door. She would not have made much of the conversation beyond resenting it as bearing upon an aspect of me which she distrusted. Myself, I still could not guess what Julian Molay expected from his visit. When he was speaking he had a trick of turning his head slightly away, keeping his eyes on me. His hawk nose and the keen, oblique glance reminded me of the brass eagle on the lectern of a parish church, though in his case the wings of revelation were folded.

When I set up the Holy Well he was silent for a while, seeming to look through it, not at it. That, in a way, was how I had meant it to be judged.

‘I see now why it is so precious to you. The Presence is there, but without form,' he said. ‘Have you been so inspired before or since?'

‘Perhaps in the jungle, and perhaps in this portrait of Meg.'

I took down the Holy Well and set up Meg. I did not expect that he would see more than the environment to which she belonged.

‘You have painted the Meg without a shadow,' was his comment.

‘She was not well. I painted it as if entranced—a direct importuning of her Purpose to heal her.'

‘As of course it did. Mr Hollaston, I have never realised that the concentration of the master craftsman was a prayer.'

‘Nor did I, till then.'

‘What was the matter with Meg?'

‘A sending, if you know what that is. From Meg it took away her joy. To others it caused terror and madness and death.'