Читать книгу Elidor - Alan Garner, Alan Garner - Страница 9

DEAD LOSS

By the time Roland was clear of the gatehouse the fiddler had reached the trees. Roland hurried after him.

For a while the road passed charred stumps of buildings, and field rank with nettle. Dust, or ash, kicked up under Roland’s feet, muffling his walk and coating his body so aridly that his skin rasped. Flies whined round him, and crawled in his hair, and tried to settle on his lips. The sky was dull, yet there was a brittleness in the light that hurt. It was no longer wonder that led him, but dislike of being alone.

Even the singing had lost its enchantment. For now that the old man had appeared again Roland recognised where he had heard the song before: the fiddler had played it. And so what he had imagined to be the music of his dreams was only the jingle of a half-learned tune.

Although Roland wanted to catch up with the man, he wanted less and less to reach the forest. He could make out nothing sinister at first, apart from a general atmosphere of gloom and stillness, and it was not until he was close that he knew why this forest was different from all others. The trees were dead.

Roland looked back: but he had nowhere else to go, and at that distance the castle was a tortured crag. He clutched a handful of gravel and rubbed it against his cheek. It hurt. It was real. He was there. He had only himself.

Within the forest the road dwindled to a line of mud that strayed wherever there was ground to take it: fungus glowed in the twilight, and moss trailed like hair from the branches. There was the silence of death over everything: a silence that was more powerful for the noises it contained – the far off crash of trees, and the voices of cold things hidden in the fog that moved in ribbons where there was no wind. Oaks became black water at a touch.

Roland could not tell how long he had struggled, nor how far, when the trees thinned on to moorland below a skyline of rock. The forest held neither hours nor miles, and all that he had been able to do was to wade from one bog into the next, to climb over one rotting trunk to the next, and to hope for an end to the slime.

He walked a few shambling steps clear of the trees, and collapsed in the grass. He had lost the road, and he was alone.

When he opened his eyes Roland thought that he would never move again. The chill had seeped through his body and locked him to the ground.

He turned on to his side, and dragged himself to a sitting position, his head on his knees, too cold to shiver.

However long he had slept, nothing had changed. The light was just the same, the sky unbroken.

He began to walk uphill towards the rocks. They were higher than he had thought – packed columns of granite, splintered by frost and ribbed by wind – but he scrambled amongst them up weathered gullies to the top.

Here Roland found himself on a broad ridge shelving away to a plain which stretched into the haze. Nothing showed. No villages; no houses; no light; no smoke. He was alone. Behind him the hill dropped to the forest, and he could see no end to that. The only proof that anyone had ever lived in this land was close by him, but it gave Roland little comfort.

A circle of standing stones crowned the hill. They were unworked and top-heavy; three times bigger than a man and smooth as flint. They rose from the ground like clenched fists. Roland walked into the circle which was easily four hundred yards wide, and at the middle he stopped and gazed round him.

From the circle an avenue of stones marched along the ridge, and these were sharp blades of rock, as tall as the circle, but cruel and thin. They went straight to a round hill, a mile away.

If possible, the air was quieter here: so quiet that it was as if the silence lay in Roland. He avoided making any noise, for fear that the stillness would not be broken.

But how many stones were there in the circle? Roland started to count from the left of the avenue – eighty-eight. Or did he miss one right at the end? Try again – eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven. It may have been that his eyes were tired, but the flick, flick, flick, flick, flick of the pale shapes as he counted them was making the stones in the corner of his vision seem to move – eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine. Just once more. One, two three, five, six – no. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven – the air was like a deafness about him.

Why am I bothering to count? thought Roland.

“You must stay until you have counted them all.”

Yes, I must – who said that? Roland caught himself looking over his shoulder.

I did. I must be cracked.

The silence was so complete that his thought had sounded as loud as a voice.

I’m getting out of this.

Roland sprinted across the circle, intent only on reaching the open hill-top, and he did not notice at first that he was running into the mouth of the avenue. He swerved aside towards a gap between the stones, but as he approached, the perspective seemed to alter, to become reversed, so that instead of growing broader the gap appeared to shrink. He could not pass through.

Roland changed direction, bewildered by his misjudgement of distance – and now he was going into the avenue again. Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Ninety. Stones don’t move. There’s plenty of room between them.

He fixed his eyes on one gap, and made for it.

These huge boulders were spaced many times their own width apart, yet as Roland drew near, instinct told him that the gap was not wide enough. He kept jerking back, as though from an unseen obstacle in the dark. Stones – don’t – move. There’s plenty – of room. He could see that there was, but even in the last yard he flinched from the stones, and the moment of passing through tore a great, wordless cry from his throat.

“I’m imagining things,” said Roland.

The abruptness with which his fear had left him was frightening in itself, for the instant Roland crossed out of the circle the stones shrank in his mind to their true size.

“You could drive a bus between them!”

But even so, the air was less stifled now, and nothing moved when he counted.—Eighty-one. Again.—Eighty-one. No trouble at all.

Roland decided to follow the avenue to the hill. He would have a better view from there, and perhaps something would give direction to his wandering: but he kept well clear of the standing stones, walking below them on the ridge.

It soon became obvious that the hill, for all its mass, was not a part of the ridge but an artificial mound, completely circular, and flat-topped.

The avenue ended at a dry moat, or ditch, that went round the hill. Roland slithered into the ditch, ran across its broad floor, and started to climb. The turf was like glass under his shoes.

From the top of the mound there was one landmark, in front of him on the plain, far off.

A heap of rocks. No, thought Roland, it’s towers – and walls: all broken. Another castle. That’s not much use. What else?

Roland screwed up his eyes, and after a while he thought he could make out a form that was more substantial than the shifting cloud, away to his left.

A castle. Black. Dead loss.—There’s got to be something.

But the view showed only desolation. Plain, ridge, forest, sea, all were spent. Even colour had been drained from the light, and Roland saw everything, his own flesh and clothes, in shades of grey, as if in a photograph.

Three castles.

He looked to his right. Here the dark was like thunder, impenetrable. Then—It came, and went, and came again.

It’s a light. On a hill. Very faint – like – a candle – dying – towers! Golden towers!

Roland could never remember whether he saw it, or whether it was a picture in his mind, but as he strained to pierce the haze, his vision seemed to narrow and to draw the castle towards him. It shone as if the stones had soaked in light, as if stone could be amber. People were moving on the walls: metal glinted. Then clouds drifted over.

Roland was back on the hill-top, but that spark in the mist across the plain had driven away the exhaustion, the hopelessness. It was the voice outside the keep: it was a tear of the sun.

He started for the castle at once. He crabbed down, braking with his hands. It would be all right now. It would be all right: all right now. He landed in a heap at the bottom of the mound. Close by his head four fingers of a woollen glove stuck out of the turf.

Four fingers of a woollen glove pointing out of the mound, and the turf grew smooth between each finger, without a mark on it.

Roland crept his hand forward and – the glove was empty. He dragged a penknife out of his pocket and began to hack at the turf. The root mantle lay only two inches deep on white quartz, and he cut back and peeled the turf like matting. It came in a strip, a fibrous mould of the glove below, with four neat holes. The fingers and the cuff were free, but the thumb went straight into the quartz.

Roland looked for the name tape inside the cuff. He found it: Helen R. Watson.

He stabbed the turf, but he could find no break in the quartz, nothing that he could lift. The glove was fused into the rock. There were no cracks, no lesions. The thumb went into unflawed rock, and turf had covered it.

Roland jerked the glove, but he could not move it. He threw his weight against it in all directions, and the glove twisted and swung him to his knees. He wrestled, but the glove dragged him down in exhaustion, handcuffed to the mound.

He knelt, his head on his forearm, looking at the quartz: white; cold; hard; clean.—But a stain was growing over it: his shadow, blacker and blacker. The light was changing. And from the drift of the shadow Roland knew that the cause of the brightness was moving up close behind him.