“I have to help two more people first,” I said. “Then I’ll ask Romanov what to do and be right along. That’s all I can promise.”
She wasn’t very pleased, but there didn’t seem to be much either of us could do about that. “I’ll see you soon, then,” she said.
“See you soon,” I agreed.
I turned sideways and squeezed past her patch of light. It was odd. The thing was like a flat disk with her inside it. When I was level with her, side on, all I could see was a curved line of daylight. When I was past that line, it was all gone. I looked back, and there was nothing. I even went back to where I had been standing, but there was nothing there now, just black rocks.
“Oh, well,” I said. I still don’t know whether I was more disappointed or more relieved. It would have been wonderful to meet Roddy properly, in the flesh. But if I did, it would seem to mean having to deal with magic and politics in a place I knew nothing about, and I didn’t feel up to doing that. So I went on, not knowing if I should chalk up one failure and try to help three more people, or if I really had agreed to help Roddy. And if so, did that count toward getting out of here? Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it was the thing I was going to do in the future that Romanov had been sent to stop me doing. Perhaps I could wait until I was grown up and then go to these Islands of Blest and sort them out then. Roddy would be grown up, too, then, and that struck me as a very good thing. I sort of smiled to myself and decided that I probably had promised to help her, and it probably did count toward getting out of here, and I only had to put it off a few years and everything would be fine.
I think this made me careless. I was thinking so hard about it all that I almost walked straight past the place where the path forked.
Two st
eps further on, I replayed what I’d just seen: the light on my head glistening off a high promontory of rock with a dark path winding away on either side of it. I stopped. I backed up the two steps, and there, sure enough, was the promontory and the two paths. I’d simply gone off down the left-hand fork without thinking about it. It had seemed to me that Romanov had gone that way. But when I stood in front of the promontory, I sort of knew he’d gone down both paths, both quite recently.
Since I didn’t think even Romanov could be in two places at once, I reckoned he must have been along one of the paths first, then the other, and it was the one he’d used last that I needed. But I couldn’t really tell which it was. I stood and dithered. And in the end I decided that I must have gone into the left-hand path because I’d known unconsciously which was the right one. So I went that way.
This turned out to be a truly colossal mistake.
5
RODDY
ONE
The following morning, after Grundo had pigged out on bacon and eggs—well, I did, too; the bacon was marvelous—Olwen brought us two heavy little knapsacks loaded with sandwiches. If I’d been on my own, I’d have asked to leave some of them behind. There were so many. As it was, I peered in at the several loaf-sized packages, thought of Grundo, and wondered if there was enough.
Then my grandfather came in with a map and showed us how to go. “The place you are making for,” he said, “is a ruined village where people lived before History began. You may recognize it by the small wood below it where a river runs. It is there they went to wash. The place itself is on the bare shelf just below the top of the hill. You will see the remains of the houses quite clearly. Be sure to visit each one.”
He gave Grundo the map and went away to his study, to his mysterious work.
We set off, as he had told us, straight ahead from the front door. This took us round the top of the hanging scoop where the valley that led to the manse ended. We looked down as we walked on the gray road zigzagging up the green mountainside toward us. Beyond that, the valley coiled into blue-green distance without a house in sight.
“I wonder where his congregation comes from,” Grundo said.
“Springs out of the earth, obviously,” I said.
For some reason, this made us both shiver, and we went a long way after that without speaking. It was a hot, blue day with only the faintest wind even up on the mountains where the map took us, the kind of day where there is a haze at the bottom of the sky, hiding the distance. It was quite hard to see the green and dun peaks as they wheeled slowly about us. The blue-black distance was only a suggestion. And it grew hotter and hotter.
“Dad must have forgotten to put the clouds back,” I said. I was a little puzzled because Dad is usually very particular to restore the weather systems to where they were before he moved them. I knew the King had wanted continuing fine weather, but there should have been signs by now—small clouds, gusts of wind—that Dad was beginning to bring the old weather back.
“The King probably ordered a heat wave until he’s met the Pendragon,” Grundo said. His mind was chiefly on the map. It was not like maps usually are. It was more like a little drawing of hills and mountains. Woods were put in as small trees, and marshes were drawn as pools grown with rushes. I found it easier to follow than a real map, but Grundo kept grumbling about it. “How am I expected to follow an artwork?” he kept saying.
It took us the whole morning to get to the place—or maybe longer than that, I suspect. We trudged slantwise across hillsides where dark gorse stood above us, blazing with yellow flowers smelling of vanilla, and beside crags, and up long slopes among pine trees, where the smell was sad and spicy. The only real incident was in a marsh strewn with black pools, where midges came out like smoke from a bonfire every time we trod on a tussock. Grundo got sick of the midges and went through an acre of fine emerald grass instead. The grass was growing on sucking mud. Grundo lost both shoes. We had to crawl for them and got very silly and laughed a lot and ended up covered with black, coaly slime. The slime flaked off in the sun as we walked on. By the time we reached the place, we had almost flaked back to normal again.
“It’s unmistakable, really,” Grundo said, staring uphill at it.
It was like an accidental garden strewn with heaps of regularly piled stones. Small rowans and hawthorns had grown up among the stones, along with heather and gorse, big bushes of broom and small shrubs of bilberry. In between, there was every kind of wildflower, from foxgloves and poppies and yarrow, through buttercups, down to speedwell and tiny heartsease. I was particularly enchanted with some flowers like dark blue trumpets nestling in sunny spaces and by the drifts of frail, wiry harebells. Blue is always my favorite color. Grundo discovered ripe bilberries and was squatting eating them almost at once, while butterflies flitted across him in all directions but straight. Bees murmured everywhere, and grasshoppers grated away all around.
“Let’s have lunch before we explore,” I said.
“Yes!” said Grundo, with his mouth all purple.
We sat down on the nearest sunny tumble of wall, just beside what looked like the ruins of a front door with very civilized steps up to it, where we ate an improbable quantity of sandwiches in peace and contentment filled with insect sounds. I said the people who once lived here must have been very well organized.
“But what a long way they had to go for water,” Grundo said, pointing to the little rustling wood down the hill, where you could just hear the distant trickling of the river.
“It didn’t matter if they were used to it,” I said. I had a sudden strongly imagined vision of that wood full of small pathways, some of them where children ran and laughed, others where sweaty men strode down to bathe, and others where women walked with baskets of washing, chatting and arguing. The part where the privet and blackthorn grew thickest and darkest, up near the waterfall, would have been—well—secret somehow. I didn’t know if this idea was correct or not, so I didn’t mention it to Grundo. I said, “If you’ve quite finished pigging, we have work to do.”