“I suppose perhaps if we got close enough to the Necro man they might be too frightened to follow us.”
“It’s a chance — the best one probably.”
“I wonder if they’ll start hunting our weatherman too. That would surprise him.”
Indeed it might, but no doubt he’d talk his way out of it. Geoffrey decided not to stop for lunch but to eat walking. Maddox decided otherwise, and won.
They ate their bacon (smoked, not salted, and very fatty) and drank their sweet unbubbly cider a mile out of the village, where the hill sloped gently down in front of them. Maddox found a stretch of grass which appealed to him and champed stolidly. Geoffrey and Sally sat on the gate of an overgrown orchard and looked west. Now, for the first time, they could see how close the ramparts of the Black Mountains loomed, a dark, hard-edged frame to the green and loping landscape. Nothing on the near side of the escarpment looked at all peculiar. The haymakers were at work as they had been in Wiltshire; an old woman in a black dress, leading a single cow, came up the road towards them and gave them good-day. Perhaps fewer of the fields were worked here, and more had been let go, but that might be simply because the soil here was less rewarding than in the counties they had passed through yesterday. You couldn’t tell.
Maddox took nearly an hour to finish his meal. Without event they covered the long drop into Pon-trilas, where they crossed the Monnow and found a two-mile footpath up to Rowlstone. Here the country grew much steeper, so that Geoffrey realized how tired his hams were, and that there was a blister coming on his left heel. On the crest of Mynydd Merddin they rested and looked back.
“See anything, Sal?”
“No. They couldn’t be coming yet, could they?” “Not unless they were dead lucky. We ought to have three or four hours yet. What we really need is a stream going roughly the way we want to go, and then wade down it, but there doesn’t look as if there’s anything right on the map. This one at the bottom’s too big, I think. On we go.”
Clodock, in the valley, was an empty village with its church in ruins, but the bridge still stood. The mountains heeled above them. Geoffrey led Maddox up a footpath, very disused and overgrown; to Penyrhiwiau, where the track turned left and lanced straight towards the ramparts. Already it was steeper than anything they’d climbed, and the contour lines on the map showed there was worse to come. The hills were silent, a bare, untenanted upheaval of sour soil covered with spiky brown grass and heather. He’d been expecting to see mountain sheep and half-wild ponies, but not an animal seemed to move between horizon and horizon, not even a bird. He felt oppressed by their total loneliness, and thought Sally did too. Only Maddox plodded on unmoved.
His heart was banging like an iron machine and his lungs sucking in air and shoving it out in quick, harsh panting, like a dog’s, when they took the path southwest for the final climb. This path slanted sideways up the hill, so that they could look out to the left over the colossal summer landscape. No road could have taken that hill direct: its slope was as steep as a gable, and was topped with a line of low cliffs, where the underlying bone of the hills showed through the weather-worn flesh. Their path slanted round the end of these and then (the map said) turned sharply back, down through terrain just as bleak to Llanthony. It looked as though there was a stream they could wade down starting almost on the far path. His legs were too accustomed, by now, to the rhythm of hurrying to move at a slower pace, but when they rounded the cliff at the top he knew that he had to rest.
Sally slid off Maddox and lay on the grass beside him, looking back over their route. The pony nosed disgustedly among the coarse grass for something worthy of his palate. Geoffrey swung the map round and tried to work out exactly where they’d been. Mynydd Merddin seemed no more than a gentle swelling out of the plain, until you realized for how far it hid the country behind it. Then that must be their path, coming down by the tip of that wood, and into Clodock, which was easy to spot by its square church tower. Of course he would not be able to see the footpath from here — it had been so overgrown that . . ,
He could see it. Not the path itself, of course, but the horsemen on it. And, in a gap, the wavering pale line which was the backs of hounds.
He stared at them hopelessly.
“Come on, Jeff. We can’t give up now, after getting so far. Do come on.”
He shambled up the path, too tired to run, to the crest of the hill. Perhaps he’d be able to run a bit down the far side; then, if they could get to the stream, or at least if he could send Sal off down it, there might be hope. Eyes on the track, he weltered on.
“Oh!” cried Sally, and he looked up.
They were on the crest, and the Valley of Ewyas lay beneath them. It was quite crazy. Instead of the acid, barren hills that should have been there, he saw a forest of enormous trees beginning not fifty yards down the slope with no outlying scrub or thicket to screen the gray, centuries-old trunks. Beneath the leaves, beyond the trunks, lay shadows blacker than any wood he had ever seen. Above, reaching north and south and out of eyesight, the green cumulus obliterated the valley. Out of the middle of it, a single monstrous tower, rose the Necromancer’s Castle. It could be nothing else. Their path led into the wood and straight towards it.
IX THE SENESCHAL
A CROOKED tissue of wind brought the sound of hallooing from over the cliffs behind them.
“Come on,” said Sally, “it’s the best bet. Maddox, you’re going to have to see if you can go a bit faster.” With the help of the downward slope the pony managed to produce out of his repertoire a long-forgotten trot. In a way he was like the Rolls, a rectangular, solid, unstoppable thing. Geoffrey, now in a daze of tiredness, let the path take him down it in a freewheeling lope, which he knew would end in fainting limpness the moment the path flattened to a level. They plunged into the trees.
It was darker than he’d thought possible. This was a quite different sort of forest from the gone-to-pot New Forest which they’d breakfasted in yesterday. That had seemed, somehow, like a neglected grove at the bottom of a big garden — after all, its trees had been tended like a vegetable crop only six years before. But this one had not seen a forester’s axe for generations of trees. The oaks were prodigious, their trunks fuzzy with moss, and the underwoods were a striving, rotting tangle, tall enough to overarch the path for most of the way — this was what made the shadows so dark. The silence was thick, ominous, complete; even the noise of Maddox’s hooves was muffled by the moss on which they ran, a soft, deep, dark-green pile which would surely be worn away in no time if the road was used much — used at all. Why had the forest not swallowed it? It lay broad as a highway between the tree trunks, without even a bramble stretching across it.
“Jeff, what was that?”
“What?”
“That. Listen.”
A noise of dogs howling. The hunt, of course. But it came from the wrong direction, forwards and to their right, and was different from the baying they’d heard last night — deeper, more intense, wilder.
“Jeff, there aren’t any wolves in England today, are there?”
“I hope not. But anything —”
There it was again. No, that was the hunt this time, behind them and distinctly shriller — they must be at the crest now. The new noise welled up again, closer, but still to their right, up the hill, and the hunt behind them bayed its answer. And here, at last, was the stream.
“Look, Sal, this is the only hope. Get off and lead Maddox down there, keeping in the water. I’ll run down here a bit further and then come back. Keep going down the stream till I catch up with you.”
“You will come back won’t you? Promise.”