I suppose we were all tired, but we were a bit pathetic, really. We couldn’t wait to get indoors and get back to the evening routine. Dora was standing there, wringing her hands, not because we were so late, but because she had remembered to buy seven kinds of cheese and cooked some potatoes, but she couldn’t work out how to turn it into a proper supper. We didn’t care. We sent salamanders shooting in all directions as we rushed to the table and ate cold potatoes with slices of cheese. Then we pounded into the main room and turned on the media for the tail end of the hurley report.
Maxwell Hyde and Toby got out their game then. I settled down on a chair at one side and opened a magic theory book with a sigh of relief. I was really ready for a bit of quiet boredom. Dora sat on the sofa rustling through a magazine called The Meaning of Dreams.
They were well into the moaning stage of the game and I had read the same page four times without getting any of it into my head when Dora sprang up from the sofa and screamed.
The room was suddenly full of soundless men riding tall, soundless horses. A soundless wind came with them. It fluttered my book and tore Dora’s dyed hair sideways. She sort of grabbed at her hair as she screamed and clapped one hand down to keep her skirt from blowing up round her waist. The same wind billowed the cloaks of the horsemen. There were far more riders in among us than the room could possibly have held, and yet they were all definitely there. The one nearest me was carrying a thing like a battle standard, except that it was really just a rough stake with the skull of a horse skewered on to it, and pieces of raw, bloody horse skin blew out from it in the wind. I stared at it and felt ill.
The rider in front was on a white horse, and he was all in black except for the white lining in his flapping cloak. “I apologize for this,” he said. I ought not to have been able to hear him through the noise Dora was making, but I could hear him perfectly. He had quite a strong Welsh accent. “You must forgive me,” he said, leaning down to Maxwell Hyde. “I am constrained by an enchantment to do as I do.”
He reached out and took hold of Maxwell Hyde round his waist. He lifted him up as easily as you would lift a kitten and slung him over the white horse facedown. Maxwell Hyde said, “What the—” as he was lifted and then stopped as if he had passed out.
Toby was the only one of us who behaved at all well. He jumped in front of the white horse and shouted, “Stop it! Put my grandfather down!”
“I wish I could, young man,” said the rider. Then he rode forward just as if Toby was not standing there. The table, the game pieces, and one of the chairs went all over the floor when Toby had to fling himself out of the way, and the horsemen rode away out of the room, taking the wind with them. They didn’t ride through the wall. They sort of rode away in the space they were in and took that space and Maxwell Hyde with them.
Dora’s screams seemed even louder once they were gone. “He’s taken Daddy!” she shrieked. “That was Gwyn ap Nud! He’s Lord of the Dead, and he’s taken Daddy!”
She made such a noise that we almost didn’t hear someone knocking on the front door.
10
RODDY AND NICK
ONE RODDY
Mrs. Candace, besides being very old, is a bit crippled and has to walk with a stick. She didn’t come any further than her front door with us. There she shook hands with Grundo in a very formal, old-fashioned way and kissed me good-bye. I flinched a bit as her dry old mouth brushed my cheek, not because it was an unpleasant feeling, but because that one small touch somehow told me that it was her right hip that was the crippled part of her. It was just like the hurt lady in the ruined village. And I thought, Do all women with strong powers have to have a ruined hip, then?
“Go with Salisbury, my dears,” she said. “Everything’s arranged.”
We followed Salisbury’s striding green rubber boots outside and along the street
. By the time we got to the corner, the boots had been joined by two big, smooth-haired retrievers, a black one and a golden one, frisking sedately on either side of Salisbury. Grundo was delighted. “Are they yours?” he asked, staring up at Salisbury’s tall face.
Salisbury nodded. “I am never without a dog or two,” he said. “They have owners, of course.”
“Um,” said Grundo. “I think I see.”
However it was, the dogs came with us all the way to the edge of town, weaving to and fro, the way dogs do, until we came to a space in front of quite a tall little hill, whereupon they began weaving more widely. One cocked a leg and peed on the tire of a square, brown, old car that was parked there.
“Don’t you do that, you dirty brute, you!” someone shouted from the hill.
It really was a very odd little hill, if you looked closely. It seemed to be made of buried houses. You could see windows and doors and bits of walls half hidden under the grass, piled on top of one another all the way to the summit. Halfway up, where a tree leaned over a buried doorway, an old tramp was sitting on a turfy doorstep.
“Can’t you keep your bleeding dogs in order?” he yelled at Salisbury, in a high, cracked old voice.
“Easily,” said Salisbury. “They never foul my streets. This is my brother,” he said to us. “Old Sarum.”
We gaped up at the tramp. He got up and climbed nimbly down the hill. He was wearing rubber boots, too, only his were black and cracked and mucky, and a coat and trousers so old that you couldn’t tell what color they had once been. Beside the tall Salisbury, he looked almost like a gnome. His half-bald white head barely came up to Salisbury’s waist. He grinned a wicked grin, with crooked teeth in it, right in Grundo’s face, and said, “Elder brother, I’ll have you know. I had my charter before he was built or thought of. And I still send a Member to parliament in Winchester. I’m a rotten borough, I am.”
“My brother is not so attached to his buildings as I am,” Salisbury explained. “This is why he is able to take you to London.”
Old Sarum’s face contorted dreadfully. First, it went a long, long egg shape, and his lower lip stuck out so that we thought he was going to cry. Then it crunched together short with a snap, like an angry nutcracker. “Attached!” he said. “That’s a joke! How could anyone be attached to a heap of old ruins? I tell you, it’s no fun being a rotten borough. Got no people left, have I?” He wheeled round to look petulantly up at his tall brother. “Have you got any guarantee,” he demanded, “that London’s going to let me in? Well, have you?”
“Get them to the outskirts,” Salisbury said. “Then parley.”
“You get on to him, then, and make sure he’s expecting me,” Old Sarum retorted. “I don’t want to uproot myself all that way for nothing, do I?”
“If he won’t let you in, they can always go the rest of the way by bus or taxi,” Salisbury said, turning away on one green rubber heel. “But I’ll let him know. Get going.”