Maxwell Hyde stopped in his tracks. “Nick,” he said, “do I, or do I not, know this goat?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s Romanov’s. It must have followed you somehow.” I did wish it was Mini instead. I suddenly, hugely wished Mini was there. It was like being homesick.
“But why?” said Maxwell Hyde. The goat was frisking around him, making playful scything motions with its horns. I could see the rope we had tied round its neck and the frayed end where it had bitten it through.
“It’s fond of you,” I said. “You conquered its heart by taking hold of its horn and its rump and rushing it about.”
Maxwell Hyde managed to grab the bitten end of the rope. “Pooh!” he said. “I’d forgotten the way goats smell.” He tried to snatch the leaf hanging out of the goat’s mouth, but the goat deftly swallowed it as his fingers reached it. “I hope that dahlia poisons you; it was my Red Royal Button,” he said. “What was its name? I forget.”
“Helga,” I said.
The goat tried to bite a lump out of his trousers. He took it by the horns and held it off. “Helga, the goat from hell,” he said. “I think it’s starving. Toby, go and tell your mother to ring up the nearest animal feed merchant and order a ton of goat food. Nick, get to the garden shed. We need a stake, a mallet, and the strongest clothesline you can find.”
“Wouldn’t a chain be better?” I suggested.
“Yes, but I’m going to use magic as a temporary measure,” he panted. The goat was getting strenuous. “Hurry up!”
It turned out to be a violently busy evening.
Toby and I hammered the stake into the lawn—not very easily. Toby hit me on the toe with the mallet, so I took it off him, but the earth was so hard I could hardly get the stake to go in. But that may have been because I kept missing it with the mallet. When I got it sort of in, Maxwell Hyde wrestled the goat over, and we tied her to the stake, where she couldn’t eat dahlias.
This happened three times, because every time Maxwell Hyde walked away, the goat lunged after him and the stake came out of the lawn. Toby got her to stay put in the end by finding her a lump of stale prettybread. After that Maxwell Hyde hammered the stake in himself.
We had just finished when a motorized cart drew up at the front door, piled high with nourishment for goats. Toby and I staggered backward and forward through the house with bales of hay and sacks of nugget things. One of the sacks burst. We dragged it all out on to the lawn, where Maxwell Hyde surrounded the goat knee deep in food, and she weighed into it just as if she hadn’t already eaten half a bed of flowers and most of a prettybread.
“There. What did I say?” he said. “She was starving.”
It seemed to me that this was a permanent condition with that goat, but I didn’t say so.
The shock of meeting the goat seemed to have put Dora in touch with reality much more firmly than usual. She objected—just like an ordinary person—to the hall and the back room being covered with wisps of hay and rolling nugget things. She made Toby and me clear it up. While we were doing this, the phone rang. At least it wasn’t quite a phone. In Blest they call the things far-speakers, and they work mostly the way a phone does, except that they go off like an old-fashioned alarm clock at first. This makes you jump out of your skin. But if you don’t answer them straightaway, they go on to make a horrible, strangled, warbling sound, which is worse.
Dora gave a shriek and went to answer it before it got to warbling.
As soon as she did, she gave another shriek and held the phone thing out as if it was contaminated. “Toby! It’s your father! Come and talk to him.”
Things got difficult then. It turned out that Toby’s dad was insisting on his rights as a parent. He wanted Toby to come and stay with him. Dora refused to let Toby go near him. Maxwell Hyde had to tear himself away from watching Helga guzzle and talk to Toby’s dad, too. While he did, Dora sat on the old sofa at the side of the hall and kept saying, “If you let Toby go near that man, I shall go mad, Daddy, I really shall!” In between, she said, “Don’t forget it’s my magic circle again tonight. I don’t want to take my bad feelings there.”
I thought we were never going to get any supper. I went away and had a bath instead.
When I came downstairs again, the hall was full of drifting transparent creatures—the slender, wavy kind that seem to like emotions—and everything seemed to be settled. Maxwell Hyde was going to drive Toby over to his dad for the day on Friday. He said I should come with them so that I could see the country. Dora seemed to think that between us we could save Toby from his father, so that was all right.
I was sent out for some sticky cakes to celebrate, and to my great relief, we had supper. Afterward Dora decked herself out in her black outfit, and the rest of us settled down peacefully.
Toby and his grandfather had a complete ritual in the evenings. Everything happened in order. First, they turned on the media and sat in two special chairs to watch it. The media was like television, except that it looked more like a picture frame on the wall and only ever seemed to show news or hurley games. If you wanted soaps, you read a book. If you wanted music, you went to a concert or put on a cubette. I read a book because the news was always dead boring and I didn’t understand hurley.
The hurley came first. I heard dimly behind what I was reading that the Vox Vamps had lost their third game in a row and were sacking their manager. Sounds familiar, I thought, and read on. It was quite a good book that Maxwell Hyde had recommended.
I was deep in it when I heard, “Today the King himself met with Flemish trade officials in Norfolk, in an effort to solve the currency dispute …” and I looked up vaguely, hoping they were showing their King.
The King was in the picture as I looked. He was kingly and tall, with a neat beard, and there was a young fellow with him who was the eldest Prince. They were walking across some flat grass, where, in spite of the bright sun, you could see it was very windy. Their coats were flapping, and so were the coats of the businessmen walking to meet them. I had a moment, looking at all those gray suits, when I thought I was back home on Earth. But as the wind blew the coats aside, I saw they all had different bright linings—quite unlike businessmen on Earth.
I was going back to my book when the camera—or whatever they use on Blest—went panning round the rows of smartly dressed people in the background. I went on looking because I thought I might spot Roddy there. But they all seemed to be adults. The newscaster said, “Negotiations have been interrupted twice today by a dispute among the Court wizards …”
“Hey, what’s this?” said Maxwell Hyde.
“The dispute was only settled when the King agreed to accompany the wizards to an undisclosed site elsewhere in England,” the media said. Then they went back to a hurley game.
“What site? What is this? What are they up to?” Maxwell Hyde jumped out of his chair and rushed to the far-speaker.