Weathermonger

VII THE STORM

FUNNY,” said Geoffrey. “It looks as if someone had been lighting a series of enormous bonfires down here. D’you think they’ve been trying to burn the Motorway?’"

“It isn’t quite like bonfires — it’s too clean. There’s always bits and bobs of ends of stick left round a bonfire, and the ash doesn’t blow away either, not all of it. It makes itself into a sticky gray lump. It is funny. I suppose they could have come and swept it up.”

There was something else funny too. Geoffrey felt it in a nook of his mind as being wrong, out of key with the solid sunshine of the day. There was a flaw in the weather ahead of them, a knot in the smooth grain of the sky. Nothing to see, unless it lay hidden beyond the hills of the Welsh border. It worried

him, so much so that he kept glancing at the horizon and almost drove headlong into a vast pit in the road where a bridge had once carried the Motorway but was now a scrawl of rusted and blackened iron. He let the weight of the car take them down the embankment and stopped in the lower road to look at the wreckage.

“It must have been a bomb did that, Sal.”

“They don’t have bombs. It’s been burned, hasn’t it?”

Very odd. The destruction didn’t look as if it had been done by people at all. He felt thoroughly uneasy as he drove up the far embankment. The flaw in the weather was insistent now, either stronger or closer — he thought he could see a change in the hue of the air just north of one of the hills on the western horizon. Another three miles and he was sure. Soon the shape of the hammerheaded cloud that brings thunder was unmistakable. Odd to see one of them, all alone, but nice to know what it was that had been worrying him. He drove on, relieved.

But soon his relief was replaced by a greater unease. Thunderclouds didn’t move like that — they planed slowly across the countryside in straight lines, diffusing energy, grumbling, like an advance of arthritic colonels. This one was compact, purposeful, sweeping eastward down a single corridor of wind between the still regions of summer air. He increased his speed to get out of its path, the Rolls exulting up to seventy. At this speed they’d be clear of the cloud’s track in no time.

Or would they? He slacked off and gazed at the hills again. The corridor must be curved, for the cloud was still advancing towards them, moving at the pace of a gale. A few miles more and there was no doubt about it — the thing was aimed at the Rolls, following as a homing missile follows its target. He stopped the car.

“Out you get, Sal, and up the bank. Two can play at that game.”

He followed her slowly through the clinging weeds, gathering his strength, resting his mind. The Motorway ran here through a deep cutting, from whose top he could see for some distance. He unrolled his jersey, took out the robe and put it on. Then he sat beside Sally and stared at the charging cloud, blue-black beneath and white with reflected sunshine through its two miles of height. The thing to do was nudge it aside. Wind from the southwest.

The island drowses with heat. The hills are baked. The mown hayfields drink sun. The woods breathe warmth. And over them all lies air, air twice heated, first as the jostling sunbeams plunge down, again as the purring earth gives back the warmth it cannot drink. Isle wide the air swells with sunlight, lightening as it swells, rising as it lightens, sucking in more air beneath it, cold from the kiss of the Atlantic. Now it comes, broad-fronted over the Marches, comes now,

here,

now,

here,

now in this darkness, in this up-and-down roaring of black, rubbing itself together, three miles high, generating giant forces, poised, ready, smiting down with a million million volts on to the thing it was aimed at .. .

Mastered, overwhelmed, Geoffrey crumpled into a gold shambles. Sally alone, thumbs uselessly in her ears, watched the storm heave its bolts of bellowing light down on the Rolls. The air stank with ozone. The clay of the bank vibrated like a bass string. She rolled on to her belly, buried her face in the grasses and screamed.

The noise was gone, except inside her skull. Dully she sat up and looked down the embankment at the Motorway. The Rolls, charred and twisted, lay in the center of a circle of blackened cement like the others she had seen. Tires and upholstery smoked, the stench of burned rubber, leather and horsehair reeking up the bank on the remains of Geoffrey’s wind. The wind had carried the cloud away, appeased. Her brother lay beside her on his back, with bruise-blue lips and cheeks the color of whitewash. She thought he was dead until she slid her hand under the robe and felt the movement of his breathing.

When a person faints you keep him warm and give him sweet tea. She must get his jersey on, but not over the robe in case someone came by. It was like trying to dress a huge lead doll, and took ages. But it was three hours more before he woke.

Geoffrey came to to the sound of voices. There seemed to be several people about. He kept his eyes shut for the moment.

“You’m sure he baint dead, Missie?”

“Yes,” said Sally. “You can see. His face is the proper color now.”

“Ah, he's a brave one to call a storm like that. I never seed our own weatherman do the like, not living so near the Necromancer as we be. It’s surely taxed un.”

“It always does,” said a voice like a parson’s. “You say he’s a bit simple, young lady?”

“No, I didn’t. He’s quite as clever as me or you, only he can’t talk and sometimes he looks a bit moony.”

“Did you see no one in the wicked machine then?” asked one of the rustic voices. “We did get word as how there was two demons a-driving of it, spitting sparks and all.”

“They been hunting un,” said another peasant, “all along up from Hungerford way. Lord Willoughby seed un out hawking and give the word. And they damn near caught un last night, I do hear/’

“Only she go so mortal fast.”

“Hello,” said the parsony voice. “I think he’s stirring.”

Geoffrey sat up, groaned and looked about him. There were more people round than he’d expected, mostly tanned haymakers, but also an oldish man in a long blue cloak with an amber pendant round his neck. Down on the concrete the superb car reproached him with smoldering, stinking wreckage. He smiled at it, what he hoped was a pleased, idiot smile.

“Yes, Jeff,” cooed Sal. “You did that. You are a clever boy.” He stood up and shifted from foot to foot as the people stared at him. “Please,” said Sally, “could you all go away? I don’t want him to have one of his fits. It’s all right, Jeff. It’s all right. Everybody likes you. You’re a good boy.”

Geoffrey sat down and hid his face in his hands.

One of the rustic voices said, “S’pose we better be getting back along of the hayfield then. Sure you be all right, Missie? We owe you summat, sort of.”

“No thank you, honestly. We don’t want anything.”

“You get along, chaps; I’ll set them on their road and see that they’re properly treated.” This was the parsony voice. Then there was a diminishing noise of legs swishing through grass, and silence.

“You made a mistake there, young lady. If he’d really made the thunderstorm you’d have asked for money, but of course he didn’t have anything to do with it. He might have made that funny little bit of wind from the southwest, but the storm came from the Necromancer, or I’m a Dutchman.”

“I wish you’d go away,” said Sally. “We’re quite all right, really.”

“Come, come, young lady. I have only to go and tell those peasants in the hayfield that I can see what looks like a spot of engine oil on cur dumb friend’s trousers, and then where would you be? Can he talk, as a matter of interest?”

“Yes,” said Geoffrey.

“That’s more like it,” said the man in the blue robe, sitting beside them and gazing down the embankment.

“What was it?” he asked. “Something pretty primitive, by the look of it.”

“A 1909 Silver Ghost,” said Geoffrey, nearly crying.

“Dear, dear,” said the man. “What a pity. There can’t be many of those left. And where were you making for?”

Geoffrey peered at the horizon, working out in his mind the curve of the thundercloud’s path in relation to the hills. He pointed.

“Curious,” said the man. “So am I. A pity we have no map. I was coming up from the south when I first sensed the storm, and you were coming from the northeast. We could do some crude triangulation with a map, but the point is academic. It would have saved us a deal of trouble.”

“I have got a map,” said Sally, “but I don’t know how far it goes. I was still holding it when we got out of the car, but I hid it under my frock when we heard people coming.”

“Oh, how perfectly splendid,” said the man. “You stay up on the bank and keep watch, young lady, while my colleague and I do our calculations down here out of sight.”

As he moved down, Geoffrey saw a gold glint beneath the blue robe.

“Are you a weatherman, too?” he asked.

“At your service, dear colleague.”

“Are you the local chap? Did you make the storm?”

“Alas, I am, like yourselves, a wanderer. And alas too, it is beyond even my powers to make such a storm as that — though I should certainly have claimed the credit for it had I arrived on the scene in time, and profited more from it than you did. You are something of a traitor to the Guild, dear colleague, refusing fees; but we will mention it no more.”

“I thought weathermongers stayed in one place and made weather there. What are you doing wandering about?”

“I might ask the same of you, dear colleague, and even more cogently. Your circumstances are dangerously peculiar. Why did you leave your own source of income, wherever it was?”

“Weymouth. I can’t remember much about it, actually, because they hit me on the head, but when I woke up they were trying to drown me and Sal for being witches.”

“Ah. They were trying to hang me in Norwich.” “For being a witch too?”

“No, no. For being a businessman. It had long seemed to me that the obese burghers of East Anglia did not adequately appreciate my services, so I announced that I proposed to raise my fees. Of course they refused to play, so to bring them to their senses I made a thunderstorm over Norwich and kept it there for three weeks at the height of the harvest. Unfortunately I had misjudged their temper, and when I heard the citizens come whooping down my street it was not, as I hoped for a moment, to yield to my reasonable demands but to stretch my neck. I left.”

“And why do you want to go to Wales?”

“Doubtless for the same reason as yourself. But no, you are too young. You go to find out, do you not?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And so, in a way, do I. In my journeyings after leaving Norwich — and let me advise you, young man, that folk do not welcome two weathermongers in a district, and still less does the operator already in possession — in my journeyings I began to hear talk of the Necromancer, subdued talk round inn fires when men had a quart or two of ale in them. Ignorant country gossip, of course, and full of absurdities, but pointing always, and especially as one drew westward, to a source of power in the Welsh hills.”

“Yes, that’s what we heard,” said Geoffrey.

“No doubt. Now, if I am to return to my easy life — oh, so much more agreeable than my old trade of schoolmastering — I need power, power to oust a local weathermonger in some fat district, power more than lies in a mere chivvying of clouds. Some such thing is hidden just over that horizon, and I mean to find it if I can. There is gold in them thar hills, pardner. Let us study the providential map.”

It was a one-inch survey, still crackling new, which they spread on the bank, banging it to make it lie level on the grasses.

“H’m, less providential than I thought. You must have been coming almost directly towards the source, and my poor legs do not carry me fast enough to make much difference. I fear we shall have a very narrow base for our triangle.”

“Well,” said Geoffrey, “we were up here when I first felt it, and about here when I really saw it. It brewed up a little south of west, beyond the north slope of a biggish hill, this one I think. My line runs like this.”

“Ah, more useful than I had feared. I had not realized that the Motorway curved north as if does, and I had forgotten how fast a motor vehicle can travel. Now, if I lay my line along here, where does that carry us to? Off the map. No, not quite. This is a painfully crude method of measuring, which would not have satisfied me when I had the pleasure of instructing the young in mathematics, but if we were to head for Ewyas Harold we would certainly be going in the right direction, though our destination must be a step or two beyond that.”

“It looks an awfully long way, without the car. You don’t seem to mind about the car.”

“I went through a period,” said the weatherman, “of revulsion from machines, but it has passed. Still, it is not safe to say so, though I suspect that there are more of us about than care to admit it. Certainly, the Black Mountains are a tidy step.”

“The thing is I don’t know whether Sal is up to it. Couldn’t we buy horses?”

“No doubt, given the wherewithal. I myself, I regret to admit, am in somewhat reduced circumstances, but if you have the equivalent of nine gold pieces on you I daresay we could purchase nags of a sort. It would not be money wasted. A horse that can be bought can always be sold again.”

“I’ve got some money.”

“Then let us be moving. We will eschew Ross-on-Wye. Townspeople ask tiresome questions of strangers. Which do you think is the better way round.”

“Look, we could head up here through Brampton Abbots, then jiggle down to the railway line and over to Sellack. Then, if we take this footpath we can cut through along the river bank here and get 011 to this road which runs all the way to Ewyas Harold.” “That will do passably well,” said the weatherman. “Marchons mes enfants. Good heavens, what a pleasure it is to be able to speak in a civilized manner after all these years. But we must be cautious. I think, dear colleague, that you had best revert to the dumb idiocy which you portrayed so convincingly to the yokels a while back. You might well be my servant. A leech — I usually travel in the guise of a leech, and do less harm than most of the profession — might well have picked up some poor creature brought to him for cure. I think, however, that we will not afflict the young lady with loss of speech — the strain would be too great for her. She shall be my ward, and as such should call me Dominus. Do you know Latin, young lady?”

“Yes,” said Sally. “I’m hungry, and where are we going to sleep?”

“You shall eat at the first likely farm, while I haggle for a horse. We are unlikely to pick up more than one at any one place, because horses are still scarce, now that the tractors are no more. Big farm horses command huge sums, but there is a plethora of ponies left behind by the pony clubs. We shall contrive something before dusk, I doubt not. Perhaps it would be more verisimilitudinous if Geoffrey were to disburse what coin I am likely to need while we are still hidden. It would not do for me to have to ask my servant for gold.”

Geoffrey brought out his purse and gave the weatherman ten gold pieces. He still felt dazed, and was glad after that hideous careering and decision-taking to put himself into the hands of this selfassured adult. He felt hungry too. They had breakfasted at dawn and missed lunch, and the world was now heaving over towards evening. At least they ought to be sure of a fine night, with two weathermen on the staff, if it came to sleeping out.

They crossed the Motorway, not looking at the ruined Rolls. Up on the other side, a field away, lay a small road along which they walked slowly, sending up puffs of summer dust at every step. Sally seemed very tired, her face drawn and sullen, mouth drooping, skin gray beneath the dirt and tan. In a mile they found a cottage beside the road where the weatherman, leaning on his staff, sent Geoffrey to knock on the door. A mild old dame, stained beyond the wrists with blackcurrant juice, came out into the sunlight and answered the weatherman's imperious questions. Yes, she knew for sure that Mr. Grindall up at Overton had a roan foal for sale. He’d taken it to Ross Market only last week but hadn’t been offered a price. And mebbe he had another. And at Park Farm they might have horses to spare. Folk were afeard, living so close to the Necromancer, and there wasn’t always men to work the horses. They’d all gone east, to easier climes, including her own two sons, and times were terrible hard . . .

The voice trailed away into a whining snivel. Unmoved, the weatherman stared at her, as if she were telling him lies, until she hauled up her long black skirts and scuttled back into the cottage.

“We must move on a few paces,” he said in a low voice, “so that we may look at the map unseen and hope that Overton is on it.”

“It’s up that track there,” whispered Geoffrey, back to the cottage. “I remember from the map. And Park Farm’s a bit beyond it.”

“What! Total recall! I have always regarded it as an obscene myth. Still, I must take advantage of your faculties just as you must take advantage of mine — social contract, in effect. Rousseau would have been pleased.”

At Overton Farm the weatherman’s demeanor was completely different. He became soft and smooth, rubbing his hands together and cooing at the girl who opened the door, and then at the sturdy farmhouse wife who pushed her aside. He was a leech from Gloucester, he said, hasting north at the command of my Lord Salting, to attend the birth of an heir. Now they were late, having stayed by the way to succor a village oppressed with a running sickness. They were tired and hungry. Could they rest awhile and buy milk and bread? And if by chance there were any illness in the house he would be glad to do what he could in recompense for hospitality.

The farmwife led them indoors to a room where the pattern of embossed wallpaper still showed through whitewash. The fireplace had undergone an upheaval in order to install a great open range, unlit at this time of year, with hooks for curing hams in the chimney and a bread oven jutting across the hearth beside it. The furniture was hard oak, crudely made. Sally and the weatherman sat on a long bench and Geoffrey stood against the wall, pulling faces at random to sustain his reputation for idiocy, while the farmwife and her maid clattered in the scullery beyond.

His dizziness was gone, and he was beginning to have doubts about the weatherman. There was something too slick about him, and he really had been horrid to the poor old woman at the cottage. But he did know his way about. He was being very useful now, and rather cunning not mentioning horses at all.

The farmwife came back with a leg of cold mutton, and the maid brought ale, milk, butter and rough brown bread. They ate for a while in silence, but soon the farmwife started asking where they’d come from and why they hadn’t gone through Ross. She didn’t sound suspicious, just curious, and the weatherman satisfied her by saying that Geoffrey tended to have fits in towns. They all sighed and glanced at him, and to keep them happy he pulled another face. Then the weatherman asked about crossing the Wye, and was told to take the path down to the old railway bridge, keeping an eye open for thunderstorms in case the Necromancer chose to throw a bolt at it. It was only at this point that he mentioned horses, in the most casual way, as though he wasn’t really interested and honestly preferred walking. It was just that they were so late for this important birth, and his lordship was not a man to displease. The farmwife’s face turned hard and greedy and she called to the maid to go and fetch the master from the cow-byre.

He was a small, dark, beaten-looking man, and even when he was there his wife did most of the talking, speaking of the superexcellent quality of the farm’s horses, and how exceedingly lucky the travelers were that there should be, at this moment, not one but two to spare, which were a bargain at seven sovereigns. The weatherman nodded and smiled until the two horses were led into the yard. One was a lean, tall roan and the other a restless piebald. The weatherman grunted and strolled over to them, feeling their legs and sides, forcing their mouths open, slapping their shoulders. At last he stood up, shook his head and offered the farmwife three sovereigns for the pair, or four with harness thrown in. At once there was a cackle of dismay, as if a fox had got into a henhouse, and they settled down to hard bargaining, with the weatherman holding the upper ground, as he could claim both that they didn’t want horses and also that two horses were no good to them in any case — they really wanted three.

The haggling grumbled back and forth, like a slow-motion game of tennis, until the farmer broke into a pause.

“If you be wanting three horses,” he said, “we got a pony as might do for the young lady. He’s a liddle ’un, but he’s a good ’un.”

He shambled off round the corner of a barn and returned with the most extraordinary animal, a hairy, square thing with four short legs under it, dark brown, the texture of a doormat, with a black mane and a sulky eye. It snarled at the people, and when the weatherman was feeling its hocks it chose its moment and bit him hard in the fleshy part of the thigh. He jumped back, his face black with rage.

“Ah,” said the farmer, “you want to watch un. He’s strong, but he’s wilful. Tell you what, you take the other two for five-an-a-narf sov, an’ I’ll give un to you, saddle an’ all. Ach, shut up, Madge. He eats more than he’s worth every month, an’ we’ve no use for un.”

The weatherman rubbed his thigh, pulled his temper together and looked at Sally.

“What do you think, my dear,” he said. “Can you manage him? He gave me a vicious nip.”

“What’s his name?” said Sally.

“Maddox,” said the farmer. “I dunno why.”

Sally felt in a pocket of her blouse and brought out a small orange cube. Geoffrey recognized it at once by the smell: it was a piece of the gypsy’s horse bait. She broke it in half and walked stolidly towards the pony, holding a fragment in the flat of her palm. The other two horses edged in towards the sweet, treacly smell.

“Keep them away,” said Sally. “This is for Maddox. Come on then, boy. Come on. That’s a nice Maddox. Come on. There. Now, if you’re a good pony and do what I tell you, you shall have the other half for your supper. You are a good pony. I know you are.”

She scratched as hard as she could through the doormat hair between his ears, and he nuzzled in to her side, nearly knocking her over, looking for the rest of the horse bait.

“Well,” said the farmer, “I never seed anything like it. I’ll just nip off an’ fetch his harness afore he changes his mind. Five-an-a-narf sov it is then, mister?”

“I suppose so,” said the weatherman, and counted the money out into the farmwife’s hand. She bit every coin.

The horses jibbed at the railway bridge, disturbed by the machine-forged metal, until Sally led Maddox up on to the causeway and the other two followed. It really was evening now, a world of soft, warm gold, with the hedge-trees black on their sunless side and casting field-wide shadows. They plugged on (Geoffrey very unhappy on the piebald) through Sellack, along the path by the river bank on to the road again near Kynaston, and up the slow westward hill. It was almost dark, with Sally yawning and swaying in her saddle, before the weatherman agreed to stop for the night.

The place he chose wasn’t bad, a disused huddle of farm buildings backing on to a field which was a wild tangle of weeds and self-sown wheat. There was a big Dutch barn of corrugated asbestos, half its roof blown off in some freak wind, but filled with rusting tractors, combines, balers, hoists and such. It didn’t look as though they’d been afflicted by any special visitations from over the horizon, no such holocaust as had destroyed the Rolls. Given time and petrol, Geoffrey felt that he could have got some of them to go. But the moment a cylinder stirred, the wrath of the Necromancer would be down on them.

They ate and slept in another barn, floored with musty straw. The weatherman had brought bread and a bagful of mutton at the farm, and they sat with their backs against decaying bales and munched and talked. Sally, curiously, did most of the talking — about life in Weymouth, and the respect Geoffrey was held in, and the inadequacy of other Dorset weathermen compared to him. When the weatherman spoke he did so in smooth, rolling clauses, full of long words such as schoolmasters use when they are teasing a favored pupil, but he told them very little about himself. His talk was like candyfloss, that huge sweet bauble that fills the eye but leaves little in your belly when you’ve eaten it. At last he gave them both a nip of liquor from a flask “to help them sleep,” and they wormed themselves into the powdery straw, disturbed by tickling fragments at first, then cozy with generated warmth, then miles deep in the chasms of sleep.

When they woke in the morning the weatherman was gone, and so was the roan, and so was Geoffrey’s purse.