Equal Rites Read online

Page 13

  “Would you like to go to sleep in a big feather bed, all nice and warm?”

  Esk looked at her gratefully, even while vaguely realizing that the woman had a face just like an eager ferret, and nodded.

  You're right. It's going to take more than a passing woodchopper to sort this out.

  Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away. She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.

  It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mind than, say, the mind of a fox. The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur, wants to know why. This is why.

  Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, /c/ run away from, and /d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.

  The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There's thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband - and some of those stations aren't reputable, they're outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.

  Granny, trying to locate Esk by mind magic alone, was trying to find a straw in a haystack.

  She was not succeeding, but enough blips of sense reached her through the heterodyne wails of a thousand brains all thinking at once to convince her that the world was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.

  She met Hilta at the corner of the street. She was carrying her broomstick, the better to conduct an aerial search (with great stealth, however; the men of Ohulan were right behind Stay Long Ointment but drew the line at flying women). She was distraught.

  “Not so much as a hint of her,” said Granny.

  “Have you been down to the river? She might have fallen in!”

  “Then she'd have just fallen out again. Anyway, she can swim. I think she's hiding, drat her. ”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Granny gave her a withering look. “Hilta Goatfounder, I'm ashamed of you, acting like a cowin. Do I look worried?”

  Hilta peered at her.

  “You do. A bit. Your lips have gone all thin. ”

  “I'm just angry, that's all. ”

  “Gypsies always come here for the fair, they might have taken her. ”

  Granny was prepared to believe anything about city folk but here she was on firmer ground.

  “Then they're a lot dafter than I'd give them credit for,” she snapped. “Look, she's got the staff. ”

  “What good would that do?” said Hilta, who was close to tears.

  “I don't think you've understood anything I've told you,” said Granny severely. “All we need to do is go back to your place and wait. ”

  “What for?”

  “The screams or the bangs or the fireballs or whatever,” Granny said vaguely.

  “That's heartless!”

  “Oh, I expect they've got it coming to them. Come on, you go on ahead and put the kettle on. ”

  Hilta gave her a mystified look, then climbed on her broom and rose slowly and erratically into the shadows among the chimneys. If broomsticks were cars, this one would be a split window Morris Minor.

  Granny watched her go, then stumped along the wet streets after her. She was determined that they wouldn't get her up in one of those things.

  Esk lay in the big, fluffy and slightly damp sheets of the spare bed in the attic room of the Riddle. She was tired, but couldn't sleep. The bed was too chilly, for one thing. She wondered uneasily if she dared try to warm it up, but thought better of it. She couldn't seem to get the hang of fire spells, no matter how carefully she experimented. They either didn't work at all or worked only too well. The woods around the cottage were becoming treacherous with the holes left by disappearing fireballs; at least, if the wizardry thing didn't work then Granny said she'd have a fine future as a privy builder or well sinker.

  She turned over and tried to ignore the bed's faint smell of mushrooms. Then she reached out in the darkness until her hand found the staff, propped against the bedhead. Mrs Skiller had been quite insistent about taking it downstairs, but Esk had hung on like grim death. It was the only thing in the world she was absolutely certain belonged to her.

  The varnished surface with its strange carvings felt oddly comforting. Esk went to sleep, and dreamed bangles, and strange packages, and mountains. And distant stars above the mountains, and a cold desert where strange creatures lurched across the dry sand and stared at her through insect eyes . . . .

  There was a creak on the stairs. Then another. Then a silence, the sort of choking, furry silence made by someone standing as still as possible.

  The door swung open. Skiller made a blacker shadow against the candlelight on the stairs, and there was a faintly whispered conversation before he tiptoed as silently as he could towards the bedhead. The staff slipped sideways as his first cautious grope dislodged it, but he caught it quickly and let his breath out very slowly.

  So he hardly had enough left to scream with when the staff moved in his hands. He felt the scaliness, the coil and muscle of it . . . .

  Esk sat bolt upright in time to see Skiller roll backwards down the steep stairladder, still flailing desperately at something quite invisible that coiled around his arms. There was another scream from below as he landed on his wife.

  The staff clattered to the floor and lay surrounded by a faint octarine glow.

  Esk got out of the bed and padded across the floor. There was a terrible cursing; it sounded unhealthy. She peered around the door and looked down on the face of Mrs Skiller.

  “Give me that staff!”

  Esk reached down behind her and gripped the polished wood. “No,” she said. “It's mine. ”

  “It's not the right sort of thing for little girls,” snapped the barman's wife.

  “It belongs to me,” said Esk, and quietly closed the door. She listened for a moment to the muttering from below and tried to think of what to do next. Turning the couple into something would probably only cause a fuss and, anyway, she wasn't quite certain how to do it.

  The fact was the magic only really worked when she wasn't thinking about it. Her mind seemed to get in the way.

  She padded across the room and pushed open the tiny window. The strange night-time smells of civilization drifted in - the damp smell of streets, the fragrance of garden flowers, the distant hint of an overloaded privy. There were wet tiles outside.

  As Skiller started back up the stairs she pushed the staff out on to the roof and crawled after it, steadying herself on the carvings above the window. The roof dipped down to an outhouse and she managed to stay at least vaguely upright as she half-slid, half-scrambled down the uneven tiles. A six-foot drop on to a stack of old barrels, a quick scramble down the slippery wood, and she was trotting easily across the inn yard.

  As she kicked up the street mists she could hear the sounds of argument coming from the Riddle.

  Skiller rushed past his wife and laid a hand on the tap of the nearest barrel. He paused, and then wrenched it open.

  The smell of peach brandy filled the room, sharp as knives. He shut off the flow and relaxed.

  “Afraid it would turn into something nasty?” asked his wife. He nodded.

  “If you hadn't been so clumsy -”she began.

  “I tell you it bit me!�
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  “You could have been a wizard and we wouldn't have to bother with all this. Have you got no ambition?”

  Skiller shook his head. “I reckon it takes more than a staff to make a wizard,” he said. “Anyway, I heard where it said wizards aren't allowed to get married, they're not even allowed to -” He hesitated.

  “To what? Allowed to what?”

  Skiller writhed. “Well. You know. Thing. ”

  “I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,” said Mrs Skiller briskly.

  “No, I suppose not. ”

  He followed her reluctantly out of the darkened bar-room. It seemed to him that perhaps wizards didn't have such a bad life, at that.

  He was proved right when the following morning revealed that the ten barrels of peach brandy had, indeed, turned into something nasty.

  Esk wandered aimlessly through the grey streets until she reached Ohulan's tiny river docks. Broad flat-bottomed barges bobbed gently against the wharves, and one or two of them curled wisps of smoke from friendly stovepipes. Esk clambered easily on to the nearest, and used the staff to lever up the oilcloth that covered most of it.

  A warm smell, a mixture of lanolin and midden, drifted up. The barge was laden with wool.

  It's silly to go to sleep on an unknown barge, not knowing what strange cliffs may be drifting past when you awake, not knowing that bargees traditionally get an early start (setting out before the sun is barely up), not knowing what new horizons might greet one on the morrow . . . .

  You know that. Esk didn't.

  Esk awoke to the sound of someone whistling. She lay quite still, reeling the evening's events across her mind until she remembered why she was here, and then rolled over very carefully and raised the oilcloth a fraction.

  Here she was, then. But “here” had moved.

  “This is what they call sailing, then,” she said, watching the far bank glide past, “It doesn't seem very special. ”

  It didn't occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn't about to act ungrateful.

  The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal's mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.

  She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time - the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich - and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn't her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.

  Perhaps if she

  The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.

  “Well, well,” it said. “What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?”

  Esk gave it a stare. “Yes,” she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. “Could you help me out please?”

  “Aren't you afraid I shall throw you to the - the pike?” said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. “Big freshwater fish,” it added helpfully. “Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike. ”