Weathermonger

V NORTH

THERE was a breakfasty smell when Geoffrey woke, cramped on the back seat. Arthur had built a small wood fire and was frying bacon.

“I wasn’t certain as how I could get the Primus going/’ he said uneasily. “We’d better be starting on the old ram afore we can't tell one end of a spanner from t’other/’

Sally was mooning around in the long grasses of the clearing, not looking at the Rolls. When they sat down on groundsheets for breakfast she made sure she had her back to it.

“Are you really going to be all right, Bas?” said Geoffrey.

“I reckon so. We got some oldish things on, and we are sailors. We can say we’re going looking for work at Buckler’s Hard. On’y thing is, do we look right? They don’t all wear beards, do they, Sal?”

“No. It’s just that they don’t like shaving. It hurts. But the fussy ones go to the barber’s to be shaved once a week.”

The brothers sat around when they’d finished eating, as if they didn’t want to start work. Geoffrey noticed Basil glancing sulkily at the car, and looking away again. In the end he had to say “Come on,” and go and try to drag the ram round by himself. It was heavy and awkward, a pointed prow of cross-braced girders which kept poking sharp corners in under the mat of fallen grass and sticking. After he’d lugged it a few feet, Arthur came and helped. Between them they carried it round to the front of the Rolls, where Arthur tried to line it up back to front. “Are you feeling all right, Arthur?” said Geoffrey. “I dunno. I’m fine in myself, I suppose, but I don’t feel certain of anything no more. Here, catch ahold of this, Bas, and help me hold it up for Jeff to buckle on. He can’t do it hisself, not possibly.”

Basil came across, muttering, and helped his brother lift the contraption and hold it in place while Geoffrey clamped it on to the dumb irons in front of the car and then lay under the machine to fasten the long arms that ran back from it to the chassis. It took much longer than it should have, because the brothers were so awkward, Arthur giggling a little at his clumsiness, Basil sullen and ashamed. When he’d finished he went round to the front and looked at the result. Arthur came and stood beside him, hands on hips.

“Do you think it will really do the trick, Arthur?” “Should do. Leastways we worked it out pretty careful in France. But I wouldn’t be knowing now. Not beautiful, is she?”

Geoffrey wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the ram alone, or (now that the effect of England was clearly beginning to work on him), to the car itself. The ram was certainly ugly, crude in its red-lead paint, brutal, jutting out three foot in front of the proud radiator like a deadly cowcatcher. They’d feel pretty silly if they turned out not to need it at all, Geoffrey thought, as he primed the cylinders and pumped pressure into the tank.

“D’you feel like helping me with the tires?” he said.

“Not really, to speak honest, Jeff. You can manage ’em by yourself, surely.”

“I expect so. I’ll have to take her out on to the road so that the jack doesn’t sink, and perhaps you and Basil could keep a lookout for me. . . . What is it, Sal?”

She came running from the end of the glade. “There’s something enormous in the woods, Jeff. I can hear it crashing about. Do you think it’s a dragon?”

Geoffrey laughed. “Most likely a pony/’ he said. But neither Arthur nor Basil looked amused.

“Best get everyone into the car,” said Arthur. “Think you can start her by yourself, Jeff?”

They could all hear the crashing now. It sounded like a tank blundering about in the undergrowth. Then the noise changed, as the thing began to charge straight towards them, ignoring thicket and brake. Geoffrey swung the engine and ran round to the driver’s seat. They all waited, looking sideways towards the noise, where the mid-morning sunlight stood in shafts of warmth against the darkness under the oaks. A bush convulsed and opened, and in a patch of light stood a prodigious boar, tusked, hairy, slavering, not twenty yards away. It shook itself and swung its low-held head from side to side, inspecting the glade. Its tiny red eyes seemed to blaze as it spotted the car, and it grunted as though that was what it had come for. At once it was careering towards them, a wild, fierce missile of hard muscle and harder bone. Geoffrey let the clutch in with a bang. The wheels spun on the grass, then gripped, and they were moving, accelerating, out over the layer of leaves the brothers had spread to camouflage their tracks, into second, third, doing fifty over the potholes, away.

Three hundred yards down the tarmac he eased up and craned over his shoulder. The boar was sitting on its haunches in the middle of the arch under the trees, watching them go. It still looked enormous eighty yards back.

“They don’t come that big,” said Basil in a low voice. “ ’Tisn’t natural.”

“I don’t know,” said Geoffrey. “You get farm pigs as big as that, with proper breeding. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of farm pigs have escaped and gone wild since the Changes. How close did it get?”

“Six foot or so,” said Arthur. “Dunno that it would have done any real harm, unless it had nicked a tire. Hope there’s not many of them about, eh, Bas?”

“Looked like it was coming for the car, not for us,” said Basil.

They both sounded sick and bewildered, quite different from the calm and assured couple who had helped him steal the Rolls. Geoffrey realized that he had them on his hands now, and that he ought to make it as easy as possible for them to get back to the river by nightfall.

“Let’s have a squint at that map,” he said. “Look here. I think the best thing would be if I took you on up to Lyndhurst and then turned south. I’ve got to go there — there doesn’t seem to be any real way round it. Then I can run you down almost to Brock-enhurst and you can take the B3055 back to Beaulieu — it looks about six miles, and you don’t want to come back along the road we left by. You needn’t go into the village at all, actually, which is a good thing because it’s probably still humming. I can go off this side road here, almost to Lyndhurst, and then right up this one here, which’ll bring me back on to the road I was going to take anyway, up through the Wallops. Cheer up, Bas. I daresay you’ll feel better once you’re away from the Rolls/’

“Hope so.”

Lyndhurst was a ghost town, almost. There were no money-bringing tourists now, and the Forest, wilder than before, did not provide enough income to support a community. They boomed down deserted streets, left and left again. An old man leaning on a staff watching sheep graze a stretch of close-nibbled common turned at the sound of the motor, shook his fist at them and shouted something undis-tinguishable. But a curse, for certain.

When he judged he was just out of earshot of Brockenhurst Geoffrey stopped. The brothers climbed out and stood dully in the road.

“Now listen,” Geoffrey said. “You go down here for about half a mile and turn left. Got that? It’s just where the stream crosses the road. You’d better take your bag, Basil, but leave out anything modern.

Here; I’ll sort it out for you. Saw, hammer, chisels, cold chisel, these square nails should be OK, hand drill, bits, brace, no, not the hacksaw, I should think — that’ll have to do. Here are four gold pieces, in case you have to lie up for a bit, and need to buy food.”

“They’ll have to think of a story for them,” said Sally. “They’re a lot of money, and people always ask.”

“All right. Now listen. You’ve been working in a shipyard at Bristol as carpenter and mate, and the master died and you didn’t like the new master. So you thought you’d try your luck down this way. Got that?”

Basil glanced sideways at Arthur, doubtfully, but Arthur nodded. Geoffrey realized that he’d been speaking loud and slow, as if to a stupid kid. He went on at the same pace.

“Don’t go into Beaulieu if you can help it. Wait for two nights at the disused piles below the Hard. If you don’t meet Mr. Raison, steal a boat and sail south. Take food with you, and don’t try to do it in a rowing boat. It’s too far. It’s a hundred miles. Got it? OK, off you go. Good-bye, and thank you very much for all you’ve done. I’ll wait till you’re clear, off our road, so that people aren’t watching for anything special when you pass. Good luck.”

Basil spoke, slowly and thickly.

“I wonder if we done right, after all.”

He was looking with loathing at the Rolls.

Geoffrey caught Arthur’s eye and jerked his head sideways.

“Come along now, Bas,” said Arthur. “We best be stepping along. ’Bye, Jeff and Sally, and good luck to you, I suppose.”

The brothers turned together and walked off down the road, their shapes black in the stretches of sunlight and almost invisible in the shadows of the trees. At first they trudged listlessly, like tired men (which indeed they must have been), but after a while their backs straightened, their heads moved as if they had begun to talk to each other, and their pace became springier. At the curve of the road, beyond which they would no longer be seen, they stopped in the sunlight, turned and waved — a real good-bye this time, friendly and encouraging even at this distance. Then they were out of sight.

“I hope they’ll be all right,” said Geoffrey. “I was dead worried when they went all fuzzy like that, but they seemed to perk up once they were a bit away from the car. We’d never have got here without them. Does this thing worry you, Sal?”

“Some of the time. But I don’t think it really bothers me inside me, if you see what I mean. Not like Arthur and Basil. It was something in their minds coming out which made them go all funny. But with me it’s really only that I’m not used to engines. I’m used to thinking they’re wicked. Parson preached against machines every Sunday, almost. He said they were the abomination of deserts and the great beast in the Bible. He watched the men stoning Uncle Jacob.”

“But you aren’t suddenly going to drop a match into our petrol tank?”

“I don’t expect so. I don’t feel any different from France. I hated those little French beetles whining about, but I think some machines are lovely, like the train on the bridge. And this one too, I suppose.”

She ran a dirty hand over the old red leather. “Then you must be immune, too, or you’d have started going like the brothers. Do you think it runs in families? There was Uncle Jacob, and you, and me. Do you really think we’re the only ones?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel like an only one.”

“Nor do I. I think I must have been immune before I got hit on the head, or I’d never have been able to look after Quern. I suppose Uncle Jacob told me —”

“Jeff, I think there’s another animal coming. I can feel it.”

“OK, Sal."

He let the big engine take the car slowly away, trying not to disturb the murderous forest which had sent the boar, but it was too late. A gray stallion, wild, swerved into the road ahead of them, snorted as it saw the car and reared with whirling hooves to meet them. Geoffrey increased his speed, nudged the wheel over so that the ram pointed directly at the beast and pooped the horn. The stallion squealed back. At the last moment, when they were doing nearly forty, he jerked the wheel to the left and back again, so that the huge car skittered sideways and on. The horse, clumsy on its hind legs, couldn't turn in time to block them, but a hoof, unshod, banged on metal somewhere at the back of the car.

They drove quietly round the outskirts of Brockenhurst until they came on a group of children playing a complicated sort of hopscotch in the middle of the road. The girls ran screaming into the houses, but the boys picked up clods and stones out of the gutter and showered them at the Rolls, which clanged like a tinsmith’s shop as Geoffrey nosed through. The windshield starred on Sally’s side, where a flint caught it. A man came and stood in a doorway with a steaming mug in his hand. He shouted and flung it at the car, but missed completely in his rage and the mug shattered against the wall of a cottage on the far side, leaving great splodges like blood on the white stucco.

Geoffrey laughed as he accelerated away. “Tomato soup/’ he said.

Sally was crying. “It’s everybody hating us, even the children. It’s horrid.”

“They hate the car, really. They’d have been sure to hit one of us if they’d really been aiming at us. Cheer up, Sal. We’re not going through any more towns. We’ve chosen a whole lot of little lanes that ought to miss them completely, and you’ll have to do the map-reading. I’ll teach you as soon as we come to a safe bit of straight where we can’t get surprised.” They found a good place almost at once, by a stream under some willows. Geoffrey stopped the car and switched off the engine.

“It’s quite easy,” he said, “especially as we’re going north so everything’s the right way round. These yellow and green and red lines are the roads. That’s all that matters for the moment, but you’ll learn the other signs as we go along. That’s Brocken-hurst, which we’ve just been through, and we’re here. We want to get up to this road with the pencil mark beside it, which is the one we’re supposed to be on, so we go up here, see, to the A35. That’s about three miles. Then we turn right, and quite soon come to a bridge — this blue line is the river. Then a bit over a mile further on, when we’re almost in Lyndhurst, we turn left through Emery Down and we’re on our proper road. Try and tell me what’s going to happen next about a mile before we get to it. Right? Off we go.”

What happened next was a tree across the road. It had evidently been there a couple of years, but nobody had tried to move it. Instead, passers-by had beaten a rutted track round the roots, which Geoffrey had to follow. The Rolls lurched and heaved at a walking pace, with the ruts, hardened by months of summer, wrenching the steering wheel about. Geoffrey remembered what the military-looking gentleman had told him about Silver Ghosts being used in the First World War to carry dispatches through the shell-raddled terrain behind the trenches. He realized, too, that he still had the five-year-old tires on. The ram was a nuisance in the tight curve of the track, poking ahead and catching in brambles and weeds, but the big engine wrenched it through. It might come in useful soon: the A35 was the old main road between Southampton and Bournemouth, and there was that bridge. He swung back thankfully on to the remains of the old tarmac.

A couple of miles later he eased cautiously out on to the main road. Its surface was no better than that of the side lanes — worse, if anything, as it seemed to have seen more traffic — but it was wide enough for him to pick some sort of path between the potholes. They swirled past a cart, leaving the driver to shout the usual curse through their long wake of dust. Now that they were coming out of the forest, there would be more people about, of course. The road dipped towards the stream, and there was the bridge.

And there, on the bridge, was the tollgate. Sally had mentioned tollgates to M. Pallieu, who had informed the General. The ram had been built on his instructions. It was his sort of weapon.

The gate looked hideously solid, with a four-inch beam top and bottom, set into a huge post at either side. Geoffrey changed down to third and second, double-declutching anxiously. The tollkeeper, a fat woman in a white apron, came to the door of her cottage, stared up the road and screeched over her shoulder. Geoffrey changed down (beautifully — the military-looking gentleman would have been delighted) into first, glanced at the gate — now only twenty foot away — decided he was still going too fast and eased off, to a trot, to a walk. With the gate a yard off he accelerated. The whole car jarred through all its bones as the ram slammed into the bottom beam — they weren’t going to make it. With a deep twang the hinges gave, the structure lifted and leapt sideways, and the car surged forwards. A big man with an orange beard pushed out from behind the woman, swinging a sledgehammer, but before he got within smiting distance a yellow thing looped out of the car behind Geoffrey’s head and caught him in the face. Unbalanced by the swing of his mallet he fell backwards, bringing the fat woman down too. Geoffrey drove on.

“What on earth was that that hit him?” he asked. “I threw your smelly stove at him,” said Sally. “I never liked it anyway. I hope they aren’t all as excited as that.”

“With luck we won’t meet many. We’ll hardly be on main roads at all. But rivers are almost the only thing we can’t find a way round, so we’ve got to go over bridges. I didn’t expect the gates to be quite as strong as that.”

“We turn left quite soon,” said Sally. “When are we going to have lunch?”

“Let’s go on a bit. I don’t really want to stop till I need a rest from driving. There ought to be some biscuits somewhere. If we get a puncture we’ll just have to stop.”