"Listen," be said, whispering, "I think it's all right for us to stay here the night. But, I keep expecting things to pounce on us when we stop. Doesn't it seem strange to you that we haven't been attacked or followed?"
"Yes, but remember how much that poor monk had to concentrate to get anything out of the book. Melichus may have given up on us. From what I can see, his work is progressing. Of course, he may be waiting for us to get to the cottage. He may-oh, let's not think about it till we have to. At any rate, I'm hungry. Let's go in and eat."
He got out of the carriage and followed Roger into the house. As they walked up the path, Roger pointed up to the buck-toothed pumpkin faces.
"If we had had one of those, we'd be traveling in a state coach."
Prospero managed a little smile. He was still thinking about the lettering in the churchyard. And, he knew Roger was forcing cheerfulness.
Later, inside, the two travelers from the south sat at a smooth pine table, talking to the farmer and his wife over the ruins of a large veal-and-ham pie. It was Prospero's private and crankily repeated opinion that veal-and-ham pie was next in tastelessness to raw potatoes, but he had forgotten that opinion this evening, with the help of a sharp brown sauce made from quinces. Roger usually warned Prospero about the effect of condiments on his stomach, but tonight he kept quiet, because his friend was beginning to come out of a dangerous depression that had been on him since the bridge-wrecking incident. Part of the reason for Prospero's sudden cheerfulness was the unlikely interior of the house. The farmer, it seems, was a woodcarver, and he had filled the shelves of this long low room with scenes from local mythology: Fat saints shoved pigs through fences, elderly ladies pelted ogres with rocks, drunken kings dropped chairs out of windows onto wandering minstrels. But, the best thing of all in the room was the clock over the mantel, a Nuremberg circus of cows with clacking jaws, stumbling ducks, frantically dancing angels, and waltzing bishops. In the center window over the dial was a little man who kept missing the bell with his hammer as the bell bobbed up and hit him on the head. All this, at least, is what the farmer said the clock was supposed to do. It wasn't running, and when Roger asked why, the farmers wife pointed at the dark window. Prospero sat there with a strange look on his face. He got up and walked the length of the room to the fireplace, and he stood there for several minutes, toying with the jointed wooden dolls. Then, grasping the mantel, he leaned up on tiptoe and put his lips to the keyhole in the side of the clock. He whispered so softly that no one in the room heard him.
"Melichus is a fool."
Picking up the wooden crank, Prospero wound up the clock and set the pendulum swinging. The cows flapped their jaws inanely, the ducks stumbled uncertainly over the wooden platform, bishops waved their crosiers and clicked their heels, and-Prospero shoved the hands to twelve-the bewildered wooden man swung twelve times at the painted bell and missed, while the bell caught him twelve times on his shiny brass nose.
Prospero went back to his seat. "I think," he said, "that I will sleep better tonight."
The next morning, at the chilly hour of six, Prospero stood at the front door of the cottage, thanking his host, while Roger hitched tip the horses and brushed hay off the carriage. The farmer had a tin box in his hand, and he was tapping it as he talked.
"I didn't think of this till morning. We-my family-have been living in this house for several hundred years, and a long way back an old man spent the night here. He did all sorts of strange things, like cleaning out a poisoned well and making the fire burn different colors. We've got all this written down. Now, before he left, he gave us this key, and said that a man with the initial of P should have it. Lord knows we've had enough people here that filled that bill, even in my lifetime; Pruett, Pillion, even Pickthatch. But, I have a feeling you're the one who's supposed to get it. And, if you're going north to try to do something about what's happening..."
"I didn't say that," said Prospero. "Please don't spread rumors like that."
"I won't," said the farmer smiling. "I wouldn't even if you had told me what you're doing. At any rate, here it is."
Prospero opened the banged-up old tin box. Inside, wrapped in a blackened rag was a little brass key. The teeth were cut out in a cross pattern, and except for a green crust in the molded ridges of the handle, the key was shiny. There was an inscription on the barrel in squat uncial letters, but it was written in what looked like Welsh.
Prospero excitedly handed the key to Roger. "Look! You know Welsh. What does it say?"
Roger looked at it, holding it up in the bluish morning air "Yes, it's Welsh it says 'Gwydion of Caer Leon made me. Turn twice.' There. Does that help your?"
Prospero put the key in the buttoned inner pocket of his heavy cloak. "No," he said, "not much." He turned to the farmer. "Tell me, did the old man have a Scottish accent?"
"I wouldn't know one if I heard it, sir. My ancestors wouldn't have, either. There's no record that any of them ever left this country hereabouts, much less the North Kingdom. They wouldn't know a Scottish accent if they heard it."
"I see. Well, thank you very much, and if you wonder what I was doing out back, I was laying down a little spell that will make your dandelion wine the best in the country next year And, use those pentacles I drew for you. They'll keep out many things, though I doubt if they'll help with what we're all worried about."
"Good luck to you," shouted the farmer as they drove out onto the crunching gravel. Prospero leaned out of one shield-shaped door, his foot on the round black carnage step that reminded him of a musical note. He waved and shouted good-by until he could no longer see the humpy loaf of the farmhouse, and then, he sat down next to Roger. For a long time, he did not say anything, because he was thinking of the key in his pocket.
9
9
Anyone foolish enough to stand on Barren Tor in the booming wind of a certain wintry day in late October would have seen a box carriage scooting past below, like a black beetle. The Tor, a treeless 300-foot-high hill shaped a little like a dog's tooth, was an isolated foothill of the unnamed range of peaks that bordered the Northern Highlands. Northerners did not name mountain ranges; they were afraid that doing so would wake the spirit of the mountains, the rock-buried elemental that had once split the Mitre, a strange double peak many miles to the south. Roger and Prospero, now many days' journey from the clockmaker's cottage, had passed the Mitre a week before: It was there that they heard rumors of the War Council on the Feasting Hill. The kings were gathering, getting ready for a march on the South; they had been told by their astrologers that the fear came from the South, and so, they had not destroyed the wooden bridges, as Roger thought they would; instead, they held both sides of the river with cavalry, and these men waited for the messengers from the Hill. The Southerners, no matter how well organized they were, had only fat plow horses to ride; they would be unable to prevent a march on Roundcourt, a city with beautiful walls of painted wood and a tiny, unreliable garrison. A quick surrender of the capital might save a lot of lives, but skirmishing and raiding could go on for a long time, and Prospero knew the temperament of certain southern rulers, who would-after the victorious northern kings had gone home-hold their own witch trials and take out their anger on "disloyal"-that is, weak-kings like silly old. Gorm.
Meanwhile, the strange early winter threw thin rags and fingers of gray snow over the dirty fast-decaying leaves that clotted the suddenly dry beds of streams; on the empty plain Prospero and Roger had just passed through, the snow moved in eerie swirls, falling into spirals and long lines too regular to be natural. People were terrified of the open spaces at night; in their homes, they sat with blankets over their windows, so that they would not see the mask of frost. Windows broke in the night, and the wind that blew through them had a voice.