Читать книгу The Merlin Conspiracy - Diana Wynne Jones - Страница 10

I think I went to sleep. It made sense to think so. I was quite jet-lagged by then, given I’d set off before supper, arrived at dawn and then flown all the way to the south of France, followed by running round the stadium three times.

But it didn’t quite feel like sleep. I felt as if I got up, leaving myself sitting there, and walked off along an inviting, bluish, shady path I’d suddenly noticed. This path led upwards and sort of sideways from the concrete passage, out of the smells and clamminess, into a cool, rustling wood. This was such a relief that I didn’t feel tired any more. I stretched and snuffed up the cool green smells – pine trees and a sharp, gummy scent from head high ferns, and bark and leaves and bushes that smelt almost like incense – and I kept on walking, deeper into the wood and uphill.

The incense bushes in front of me started rustling. Then the ferns swayed.

I stopped. I kept very still. I could feel my heart banging. Something was definitely coming. But I was still not prepared for it when it did.

The ferns parted and a smooth black head slid out and stared me in the face with huge yellow eyes. For just one instant I was nose to nose with an enormous black panther.

Then I was up a tree, the tallest tree I could find.

In between was a blur of absolute terror. If I think about it, carefully, I think the panther sort of said Oh, hallo in wordless panther talk, and I’m fairly sure I screamed. And I do, slightly, remember staring around with tremendous speed to choose the best tree, and then listening to my own breath coming in sort of shrieks while I shot up this tree, and I even remember yelling “Ouch!” when I peeled one of my nails back on the way up.

Then it all stops with me sitting shakily astride a branch watching the panther coming up after me.

“Bugger!” I said. “I forgot panthers could climb trees!”

Naturally we can, it said. It settled on the branch opposite mine with one great paw hanging and its tail swinging. What are we doing up here? it asked. Hunting?

There was no doubt it was talking to me. Well, I thought, this was a dream. So I gave in to it and answered, “No. I’m supposed to be keeping watch in case anything supernatural attacks the Prince.”

The panther yawned. It was as if its head split open into a bright pink maw fringed with long, white fangs. Boring, it said. I hoped you might want to go hunting.

“Let’s do that in a bit,” I said. I was feeling weak with terror still. “I agree,” I said, hoping to persuade it to go away, “keeping watch is really boring. I may have to be here for hours.”

Oh, well, the panther said. It let down its three other huge paws, put its black chin on the branch and went to sleep.

After a while when I couldn’t look away from it in case it went for my throat, and another while when I didn’t dare move in case it woke up and went for my throat, I sort of got used to the fact that I was sitting in a tree facing a big, black, sleeping panther, and I began to look about. Carefully and slowly. Arnold had said “pick up your totem beast” and I supposed that this panther might be my totem beast, but I didn’t believe this, not really. As far as I knew, totem beasts were a part of a shamanistic magician’s mind, which meant they were not really real, and I could see the panther was as real as I was. Anyway, I wasn’t going to take a chance on it. I sat and turned my head very slowly.

I was looking out over the tops of trees, but that was only the ordinary part of wherever I was. Tilted away sideways from the wood was – well, it was a bit like a diagram in lights. The nearest part of the diagram was a low-key misty map of a town and, beyond that, was a sparkling, electric hugeness that seemed to be sea. Nearer to me, at the edge of the lines and blobs that made the town, I could see a striking, turquoise oval. It was like a lighted jewel and it had a blob of whiter light at each end of it and two more blobs in the middle of each side.

“Oh!” I said, out loud without thinking. “Their magic did work! Those blobs must be them – Arnold and Dave and his mates!”

The panther twitched and made a noise in its throat. I didn’t know if it was a growl, or a snore, or its way of agreeing with me, but I shut up at once. I went on staring without speaking. It was fascinating, that lighted diagram. Little bright sparkles moved inside the turquoise oval of the stadium, and one brighter one stood still quite near the middle. I wondered if that was the Prince. But it could have been one of the umpires. After a bit, I noticed moving smudges of light out in the sea that were probably ships, and one or two quicker ones moving in straight lines that I thought were aircraft, because some of them made lines across the town. They were all in the most beautiful colours. None of them struck me as dangerous. But then I wouldn’t have known what a threat to the Prince looked like if it came up and hit me.

Anyway, I was stuck in this tree until the panther decided to leave. So I simply sat and stared, and listened to the rustlings and birdcalls in the wood, and felt as peaceful as anyone could be stuck up a tree a yard away from a lethal black panther.

The panther suddenly woke up.

I flinched, but it wasn’t attending to me. Someone coming, it remarked, head up and all four paws on the branch again. Then, like a big slide of black oil, it went noiselessly slithering away down the tree.

My forehead got wet with relief. I listened, but I couldn’t hear a thing. So, rather cautiously, I let myself down from branch to branch, until I could see the panther crouched along one of the very lowest boughs below me. Below that, I could see bare, pine-needled ground stretching away to bushes. Another animal was walking across the pine needles, another big cat, only this one was a spotted one, with long legs and a small head. This cat was so full of muscles that it seemed almost to walk on tiptoe. Its ugly, spotted tail was lashing. So was the panther’s, only more elegantly. The cat looked up, past the panther, and straight at me. Its eyes were wide and green and most uncomfortably knowing. When it got near the tree, it simply sat down and went on staring, jeeringly.

Then a man came out of the bushes after it.

He’s a hunter, I thought. This was because of the way he walked, sort of light and tense and leaning forward ready for trouble, and because of the deep tan on his narrow face. But I couldn’t help noticing that he was dressed in the same kind of suede that Arnold and his pals were wearing, except that his leathers were so old and greasy and baggy that you could hardly see they were suede. Hunters can dress in leather too, I thought. But I wondered.

He came up beside the ugly spotted cat and put his hand on its head, between its round, tufted ears. Then he looked slowly up through the tree until he saw me. “Nick Mallory?” he said quietly.

I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say my name was really Nichothodes Koryfoides, which is true. But Nick Mallory was what I had chosen to be when Dad and I adopted one another. “Yes,” I said. I meant it to sound cautious and adult, but it came out weak and defiant and resentful.

“Then come down here,” said the man.

As soon as he said it, I was down, standing on the pine needles under the tree, only a couple of feet away from him and his cat. That close, I could tell he was some kind of magic user, and one of the strongest I’d ever come across, too. Magics fair sizzled off him, and he felt full of strange skills and strong craft and deep, deep knowledge. He knew how to bring me down from the tree with just a word. And he’d brought the panther down with me, I realised. The poor beast was busy abasing itself, crawling on its belly among the pine needles, and pressing itself against my leg as if I could help it, absolutely terrified of that spotted cat. The cat was studying it contemptuously.

“I had quite a bit of trouble locating you,” the man said to me. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m supposed to watch the boundaries for anything that threatens the Prince,” I said. My throat had gone choky with fright. I had to cough before I could say, “You’re threatening him, aren’t you?”

He shrugged and looked around as if he was getting his bearings. To my surprise, although there were trees all round us, I could still see the lighted turquoise oval of the stadium and the sea shimmering beyond it. It seemed like something on a different wavelength from the wood. But the chief thing I noticed was that the man’s profile was like a zigzag of lightning. I’d never seen anything more dangerous – unless it was that spotted cat. I kept as still as I could.

“Oh, the Plantagenate Empire,” the man said. “I’ve no need to threaten that Prince. He’s going to lose the French part of his empire, and most of his German holdings too, as soon as he comes to the throne, and he’ll be dead a couple of years after that. No, it was you I wanted. I’ve been offered a fee to eliminate you.”

My knees went wobbly. I tried to say that I wasn’t a threat to anyone. I’d said I didn’t want to be Emperor. My father was Emperor of the Koryfonic Empire, you see, many worlds away from here. But I just harmlessly wanted to be a Magid and walk into other worlds. I opened my mouth to tell the man this, but my tongue sort of dried to one side of my mouth and only a surprised sort of grunt came out.

“Yes,” the man said, staring at me with his dreadful, keen eyes. They were the kind of brown that is almost yellow. “Yes, it surprises me too, now I see you. Perhaps it’s because of something you might do later. You strike me as completely useless at the moment, but you must have some fairly strong potential or that panther there wouldn’t have befriended you.”

Befriended! I thought. What befriending? I was so indignant that my tongue came unstuck and I managed to husk out, “I – he’s not real. He’s my totem animal.”

The man looked surprised. “You think she’s what? What gave you that idea?”

“They told me to go into a light trance and look for my totem in the otherwhere,” I said. “It’s the only explanation.”

The man gave an impatient sigh. “What nonsense. These Plantagenate mages do irritate me. All their magic is this kind of rule-of-thumb half-truth! You shouldn’t believe a word they say, unless you can get it confirmed by an independent source. Magic is wide, various and big. If you really think that animal is just a mind-product, touch her. Put your hand on her head.”

When that man told you to do something, you found yourself doing it. Before I could even be nervous, I found myself bending sideways and putting my hand on the panther, on the broad part of her head between her flattened ears. She didn’t like it. She flinched all over, but she let me do it. She was warm and domed there and her black hair wasn’t soft like a cat’s; it was harsh, with a prickly end to each hair. She was as real as I was. I don’t think I’d ever felt such a fool. The man was looking at me with real contempt and on top of it all I hadn’t noticed that the panther was a female.

But perhaps, I thought as I straightened up, I’m not very real here after all, because my body has to be in a trance back at the stadium. Then I thought, I keep having to do what this man tells me. In a minute, he’s going to say Go on, die. And I shall do that wherever I am.

I said, “So he – she’s not a totem.”

“I didn’t say that,” the man said. “She wouldn’t have come to you if she wasn’t. I simply meant that she’s as much flesh and blood as Slatch is.” He reached out and rubbed the head of the spotted cat. His hand was thin and all sinews, the sort of strong, squarish hand I’d always wished I had, full of power. The cat gazed at me from under it sarcastically. See? it seemed to say.

I knew it was only seconds before he was going to tell me to die and I started to play for time like anything. “And this wood,” I said. “Is this wood real then?”

His thin black eyebrows went up, irritably. “All the paths and places beyond the worlds have substance,” he said.

“Even…” I made a careful gesture towards the turquoise oval, making it slow in order not to annoy that spotted cat. “Even if you can see that from here? They can’t both be real.”

“Why not?” he more or less snapped. “You have a very limited notion of what’s real, don’t you? Will it make you any happier to be somewhere you regard as real?”

“I don’t kn—” I began to say. Then I choked it off because we were suddenly back in the concrete passage under the seats of the stadium and a little patter of applause was coming from overhead. I was standing in front of this man and his killer cat, exactly as I had been under the tree, but the black panther wasn’t there. She must be relieved! I thought, and I took a quick look round for my body, which I was sure had to be sitting against the wall in a trance.

It wasn’t there. I could see the place where it had been by the scuff marks that my heels had made on the floor. But I was the only one of me there. The time seemed to be much later. The light coming in from the grids slanted the other way and looked more golden. I could feel that the patter of clapping was faint and tired overhead, at the end of a long day.

This is only a dream! I told myself in a panic. Someone can’t have made off with my body! Can they?

“You were in the wood in your body too,” the man told me, as if I was almost too stupid for him to bother with. In here, he seemed even more powerful. He wasn’t much taller than me, and a lot skinnier, but he was like a nuclear bomb standing in that passage, ready to go off and destroy everything for miles. His cat was pure semtex. It stared up at me and despised me, and its eyes were deep and glassy in the orange light.

“If you’re going to kill me,” I said, “you might as well tell me who you are and who hired you. And why. You owe me that.”

“I owe you nothing,” he said. “I was interested to know why someone thought you worth eliminating, that’s all. And I don’t think you are. You’re too ignorant to be a danger to anyone. I shall tell them that when I refuse the commission. That should make them lose interest in you – but if they send anyone else after you, you’d better come to me. I’ll teach you enough to protect yourself. We can settle the fee when you arrive.”

He sort of settled his weight a different way. I could tell he was ready to leave. I was all set to burst with relief – but the spotted cat was not pleased at all. Its tail swished grittily against the floor and I just hoped the man could control it. It was a big creature. Its head came almost up to my chest and its muscles were out in lumps on its neck. I knew it was longing to tear my throat out.

Then the man settled his weight towards me again. I was so terrified I felt as if I was melting. His eyes were so yellow and cutting. “One other thing,” he said. “What are you doing here in a world that has nothing to do with you, masquerading as a mage?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This is a dream really.”

One of his eyebrows went up. He had been pretty contemptuous of me all along. Now he really despised me. “It is?” he said and shrugged his leather-covered shoulders. “People’s capacity to deceive themselves always amazes me. If you want to live past the age of twenty, you’d be well advised to learn to see the truth at all times. I’ll tell you that for nothing,” he said. Then he did turn and go. He swung round and he walked away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me any longer. The cat rose up on its musclebound tiptoes and walked after him, swinging its tail rudely.

“Wait a moment!” I called after him. “Who are you, for heaven’s sake?”

I’d expected him just to go on walking away, but he stopped and looked over his shoulder, giving me the benefit of his lightning-strike profile again. “Since you put it like that,” he said, “I’m generally known as Romanov. Ask your little mages about me if you like.”

Then he turned his head away and went on walking, and the cat after him, round the curve of the corridor and out of sight. In spite of the way he’d made me feel, I nearly laughed. He and that cat – they both walked the same way.

I hoped they’d run into the soldier on guard round there, but I knew they wouldn’t. The soldier would have come off worst anyway.