“Oh, all right, all right,” Old Sarum grumbled. “I’m only a rotten borough. I do your dirty work. Come on, then,” he said to us. “Don’t just stand there. Or don’t you want to get to London?” He shambled to the old brown car and hopped up into its driving seat. “Get in, get in,” he called out of the window. “This is Salisbury’s pride and joy, this vehicle. He saves it for the Bishop or the Candace woman usually. We’re honored today, we are.”
Grundo and I exchanged a look as we hurried to open the polished brown door to the backseat. Neither of us was quite sure what a rotten borough was, but Old Sarum certainly smelled as if he were rotten. The whiff as he hurried past us was faint but nasty. Inside, among the shiny brown leather upholstery, it was really quite strong—or not so much strong as filling the space with a rotten sort of persistence, like a blocked drain on a hot day. And this was a hot day. Grundo and I wound down the car’s yellow-tinted windows as fast as we could. They would only go about halfway down, and because of the brownish yellow tint, looking out through them was a very odd experience. Through the lower half, the figure of Salisbury, walking away among the houses with the two dogs, seemed lit with unnatural thundery sunlight. Through the open part above, everything looked too blue by contrast. And the smell was still just as bad.
“Dogs’ dos,” Old Sarum muttered as he started the engine. “Won’t let them foul his streets, oh, no! So they come and do it on me all the time. I tell you, it’s no fun being a rotten borough.”
He kept on like this for most of the journey. We had no idea if he was talking to us or just muttering, so we slithered back into the shiny seat and said, “Mmm,” and “Oh?” and “Really?” from time to time, in case Old Sarum got offended, and tried to get the wind in our faces to counteract the smell. It did not help that it was a hot wind. I think Old Sarum took a strange route. Grundo says he did anyway. There seemed no reason, even to me, why we should before long find ourselves driving past Stonehenge.
“Look at that!” Old Sarum exclaimed pridefully. “Take a good, long look. There’s real stonework for you! That’s how to treat stones! And to think, in the old days, that all of it used to be mine! Enough to make you cry, it is.”
We leaned over to that side to look. Grundo said politely, “You must have owned an incredible amount of magic once, then.”
“Magic!” said Old Sarum. “That’s beyond magic into thaumaturgical transcendental, son! I could weep!”
Grundo said more polite things. I couldn’t speak. The sight of that compact ring of great stones, huge and small at once, and dense with strength through the queer thundery windows, did strange things to the inside of my head. I raised myself higher, so that I could see it above the glass in its proper strong grays, and discovered that some of the way I was feeling seemed to be due to the fact that Stonehenge had triggered one of the hurt lady’s flower files. Briar Rose: places of power. But I found that the knowledge was all swimming away from me, rotating like a wheel, in spinning spokes of wisdom. At first I thought that this was because I didn’t really need to know about Stonehenge. Then I realized that it was because this place was not in the file. The hurt lady’s knowledge went back to the days before Stonehenge was made. This made me feel so odd that I had to clutch one of the straps beside the window and shut my eyes until we had gone past.
After that we seemed to work our way onto the main London road, but whenever we came to a town, we left that road and zigzagged between dusty hedges on small white lanes, and only came back to the main road after we had passed the town.
“Have to give them a wide berth,” Old Sarum muttered. “Don’t want an argument. Don’t want all that about ‘You can’t come through me, you rotten borough!’ Oh, it’s no fun, I tell you.”
Back on the main road, we rumbled along beside dark trees, with a long green line of hills over to our right. Around the time sunset was growing up the sky behind us, Grundo and I both found our heads being snatched round toward that line of hills. There was something there. Back into my head came Briar Rose: places of power. This time it was odder still. Some of whatever power it was had evidently been old when the hurt lady made her files, but some of it was not there, and new, and quite as strong as Stonehenge.
“What’s that?” Grundo asked, rather dizzily. “Over that way.”
“Can’t say, I’m sure,” Old Sarum answered. “Some old stuff, nothing to do with me. I’m only a rotten borough.”
We drove, and the feeling died away gradually, almost reluctantly, as if something might have been trying to get our attention. Sunset blazed all round the sky. And quite suddenly the car began to zigzag around in the road and Old Sarum started to shout. “Gerroff, gerroff. Gerroff my windscreen, damn your eyes!” We stopped with a squeal and a dreadful jolt.
“One of you get out there and kill this thing, whatever it is! Bat or whatever,” Old Sarum commanded. “I can’t see a thing with it there.”
Grundo and I looked past him at the windscreen, but as far as we could see, there was nothing there but yellow-tinted glass and some flies stuck to it.
“Get it off!” howled Old Sarum.
We sighed and climbed out into the dusky road, where all at once everything was smelling of dew and damp hay. “I think he’s gone potty,” Grundo grunted under the noise of the car drumming and throbbing beside the hedge.
“Or he was potty to start with,” I agreed.
We edged along to the front of the car. There still did not seem to be anything wrong with the windscreen, until we reached the long brown bonnet and leaned over to look. Then the thing clinging to the windscreen wiper flinched away from us and tried to scuttle up over the top of the car. Grundo made a grab—with a touch of magic to help—and caught it by the filmy veiling along its back. He held it out to me in both hands, quivering and all but invisible.
“What do you think it is?”
“Kill it, come on!” Old Sarum ordered, leaning out of his window.
It was alive and terrified and bewildered. It was also beginning to glow faintly. “No, don’t,” I said. “I think it may be a salamander. They’re rare.”
“Ouch, it’s getting hot! I think you’re right,” Grundo agreed. “What’s a soothing spell, quickly?”
I began a spell for him, and he took it up, too, as soon as he remembered it. We bent over the quivering salamander while Old Sarum watched ironically. “It’s vermin,” he said. “That thing can set fire to a house, you know.”
“Yes, but it won’t now,” I said. “I think you can let it go into the hedge, Grundo.”
“It doesn’t want to go,” Grundo said. “It’s foreign. It’s lost. It’s escaped from somewhere horrible, and it doesn’t know where to go to be safe.”
“Speaks to you, does it?” Old Sarum asked sarcastically. “Don’t trust it. It’s just vermin. Throw it in the hedge.”
“Not speaks, exactly,” Grundo said, “but I think it’s tellin
g me the truth. Roddy, we’d better take it to your grandfather Hyde and ask him what to do about it.”