And before long, Stan was gone. It was a slow fading, nothing sudden. By mid-afternoon, the Scarlatti tinkled to a gentle stop and the house felt empty.
For the rest of that day, I enjoyed the sense of peace enormously. It was a relief not to have an invisible presence likely to look over your shoulder whatever you happened to be doing. It was a relief not to sense silent disapproval at my work on behalf of the Empire. Above all, it was a relief not to have to listen to Scarlatti all the time. The next day, I tried to enjoy the same feeling of relief, and even told myself I was enjoying it. The following day, the Wednesday before the convention, I couldn’t settle to anything. I told myself I was nervous of going to this strange gathering to make a selection on which the future of worlds depended – but it wasn’t that: it was Stan’s absence. On Thursday morning, I sat having breakfast and feeling truly desolate. It seemed to me that I had lost Stan finally and for ever, by my own insistence. Them Up There don’t like you trying to change their decisions (which never seems to stop us Magids trying, but there you go). Th
ey tend to say, “If you don’t like it, you can do without,” and turn their backs on you. I opened my newspaper, but I couldn’t concentrate on it.
The back door opened. Icy wind blew in.
I whirled round. I don’t know what I expected – Stan in some way more incarnate, I suppose – and I hope the smile of delight and welcome didn’t freeze on my face too obviously when I saw it was only Andrew. He was standing there, on my threshold, with that tranced look again. Damn! I thought, and told myself I should have been expecting this. Andrew had somehow got himself tied in with the other fatelines. He had been bound to turn up.
“I’m sorry, Rupert. I need you to drive me again,” he said.
“And I’m sorry too, Andrew,” I told him. “I can’t. Not today. Not till Tuesday. I’m going to be away till then, leaving this morning. But come in and have some coffee anyway.”
Andrew advanced a step, then stopped. “Where are you going this time?”
“Wantchester,” I said, “for a conference – I mean, convention.”
Andrew stood there with that air he has of consulting parts of his brain so distant that it takes time to reach them. Then he smiled and his face looked intelligent again. “I’ll come with you to Wantchester,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Andrew,” I said, truly exasperated, “this is a convention for readers of fantasy, and you have to book in advance.”
“It doesn’t sound like your cup of tea,” he remarked. “It’s not mine either. But I’d like to see round Wantchester. You can drop me off in the centre of town somewhere. I shan’t be in the way.”
“All right,” I said. What else could I say? “I’m aiming to start at twelve-thirty.”
“I’ll be there,” he said and went out and shut my back door, cutting out the icy blasts of wind, to my relief. It had been an unusually cold Spring. April had come in with snow. I poured myself some coffee that had cooled considerably despite Andrew’s patent pot, and muttered things about Andrew as I tried to drink it.
Stan’s voice said, “He was a fool not to have some of that coffee. It smells good. I wish I could have some.”
“Stan!” I said. “They let you come!”
“With conditions, Rupert. With conditions,” he said. “They’ll let me come with you, but I shall be bound to your car, just like I am to this house. When you want to talk to me, you’re going to have to come and sit in the car.”
“Why? What are they afraid you’ll do?” I said “Haunt people?”
“It’s not that, lad. Wantchester’s one of the really potent nodes, and they don’t want any more trouble than they can help. They’re pretty nervous about you choosing it, as it happens. They say things could blow up in your face if you’re not careful. I got torn off a strip for letting you choose it. They said I should have reminded you of your Roman lore, and I said I couldn’t, could I?, when I’d forgotten it myself. It wasn’t,” Stan said, “a comfortable meeting.”
I should have remembered Roman lore too. Any town whose name ends in – chester will have been an ancient Roman camp. And the Romans always built these on nodes if they could. It was like plugging into the power-points of the country they were conquering. Roman survey teams had augurs with them as a matter of course, and most of these could divine a node at least as readily as a Magid can. I have always suspected that their chief survey-augur may have been a Magid: he was so accurate. And if there was a choice between one site with a lesser node and another with a greater, you can be sure he chose the latter.
“Ah well,” I said. “It’s too late now. We’ll just have to be careful. At least I’ve got a sound system in the car. Let’s get you a stack of Scarlatti tapes.”
Maree Mallory’s Thornlady
Directory: further extracts
[1]
I haven’t had the Thornlady dream for two weeks now.
The ten-pound notes were genuine. I have been renovating my appearance with them. I had my hair cut and bought some clothes. Some of my old clothes were so terrible that I wasn’t even going to take them round to Oxfam, until Nick said he didn’t approve of throwing away clothes, because there had to be people worse off than me, so why not mix them with a bag of things he had grown out of? And I was glad I did. I found a really good leather jacket in Oxfam for only £5! I suppose it was too small for most people, but it looks good on me. And I’ve kept my old specs as a spare, even though I can hardly see through them since I’ve been wearing the new ones. I hadn’t realised how much my eyes had changed since I was sixteen.
[2]
Uncle Ted has been making the air loud with grumbles and indecision. It seems he was invited to a conference of some kind – last year, he says, when it didn’t seem real and, for all he knew, the world would end before a year as improbable as 1996 ever occurred – and now it’s only a week or so away and he doesn’t want to go. At least once a day, he thinks of a new excuse for not going. “I shall ring up and tell them Maree’s got meningitis,” was his latest one.
“Don’t be silly, dear,” Janine says. She says that each time. “You’re a Guest of Honour. You’ll let them down terribly if you cancel now.” Janine is very keen for him to go because she wants to bask in reflected glory. And she’s already got new clothes for it. Nick wants him to go because he’s going to fill the house with his role-playing-game friends while they’re away. I am the only one who’s neutral.
“Not cancel it,” Uncle Ted said. “They want me to confirm that I’m going. They keep asking. They’re getting quite neurotic about it, if you ask me, but of course I can’t go if Maree’s ill.”