I want to put on record my own gratitude to Sadron and his team, for their saving of the King’s books – even though the ‘library’ theme is in danger of becoming over-prominent. It’s pleasant to sit here, to do my writing in this place, surrounded by so much richness and comfort. At the same time it brings back memories of the Wardens’ library at Kingsbridge. I should go back there, or at least send someone, to see if any of the manuscripts are fit to be retrieved, but I haven’t the heart. Let it fall into ruin.
*
During the first two-and-a-half centuries of the new realm, Kingsbridge School had flourished as Punchkinland’s chief place of learning. Copies of books from Middleton and Bailiwick were deposited there, with authentic elvish texts from Onduial, and many productions of both the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms that were procured from the annual book-fair at Tregg. The School was raised on the west bank of the river, purposely outside the Demesne, so that Men should be free to visit and study; and there was a trickle of correspondence between the Punchkin-scholars of Kingsbridge and the renascent colleges of Dunbury.
But when, by gift of Kedral II, the Demesne was enlarged to include the borders of the Baston Hills, taking in the region of Bleck Vale (sometimes called the Sixth Hundred), the School began to decline. Our authorities agreed that being now within the Demesne, it must henceforth closed to Men. The traditions of reading, teaching and copying were continued, but later, as the Demesne turned in on itself, these came to be regarded as venerable but pointless customs. The Punchkins lost interest not only in the lands outside but also in their own past. By the time of the events with which this narrative is concerned, many of the scrolls had rotted, the books become mildewy, the shelves worm-eaten and liable to disintegrate. Only a pair of ancient scribes, dependants of the Sherling family, remained to look after the collection and to compile the ‘Annals of Punchkinland’.
This sad state of things had often bothered Aldred. In the past he had attempted to restore some of the library rooms, and he still cherished plans and projects. With these in mind he had shaken hands with Hodgekin Dyer and resolved to relinquish all leadership to the one who had proved himself so able. Aldred was frankly relieved to say goodbye to Hodgekin after the battle, and Hodgekin was no doubt equally glad to see the back of Aldred. The latter rode home through the unfrequented country lanes, via the villages of Bootham and Link, washing his hands of wizardry and rebellion, determined now to stick to his own duties as the Warden of Kingsbridge and the Sixth Hundred.
Yet it was not to be. He went round to the School when he had a few hours to spare, and talked to its two custodians, and poked around the grimy, cobwebby bookcases, and tried to set a few things to rights; but after all his heart was not in the task. He found himself thinking more and more of the remarkable tidings that Walt Hardedge had brought.
He’s alive and well, though it’s my belief that something very strange happened to him... Strange, that tale Lord Melohtar told you, ain’t it? About him being killed by the dragon?
Aldred remembered his own last talk with Swin Gumasson: that morning at the inn, The Dragon’s Head. He had been lying in bed, ill and feverish, in pain from his wounded hand; at the memory, the same hand now tingled with pain. He flexed it, straightened it, and for a moment seemed to see small red scars, criss-crossed like stitches, or even an actual strand of yarn sewn into the skin. He remembered Swin coming in like a breath of fresh air, his friendly talk and the intriguing, comical tales he had told. Aldred remembered Swin pouring out the medicine, and the touch of his lips on his forehead.
And Melohtar! When Melohtar had returned alone from Lhygost, heavy-eyed and haggard with grief, Aldred had been one of the circle who had heard the first report, the very first news of the outcome of the Quest. Aldred had not doubted Melohtar’s word, nor could he do so now. It had happened. Swin had been murdered and dismembered by the cruel worm. And while Aldred rummaged through dull old pedigree-charts and books of genealogy, wondering if they were worth saving at all, his mind went back to the probability Swin had hinted at, concerning his own descent. Was not Swin a true prince-in-waiting, the hidden seed of Kedral? The strength and power that shone forth from him had been extinguished, but relit; the cut branch had been re-grafted; the true line had miraculously proved itself superior to all oblivion, to decay and even to death.
Kingliness! Kingliness dead and resurrected! It seems – it is but fairness to Aldred, to mention at least the possibility – that of all the many who saw Swin after his return, or who heard the news, it was Aldred who first felt the full impact of this miracle, Aldred who first glimpsed or guessed at its transcendent meaning. Previously it had been wondered or marvelled at, yes, but not over-long – and then set down in Men’s minds as a prodigy, some inexplicable freak of nature or sorcery, a thing beyond belief yet robustly present in the flesh. It had been accepted perforce, and the following events, the sequence of scandals and emergencies, had robbed it of its power to startle. Swin had been away, but now he was back; and there you were. But there Aldred was not. For the true King to have been betrayed, cruelly slaughtered, dismembered and sent out to sea; for the parts of his body to have been retrieved from the waves and rejoined; and then for his life to have been restored by some operation rarer and obscurer than the deepest, darkest resources of witchcraft or wizardry: all this made up a story that fascinated Aldred, attracted him like a hand held up with irresistible beckoning.
It took some time, a few weeks, for the attraction to be fully felt. At the outset, stooping in clouds of dust over those cobwebby volumes, Aldred was unwilling to give credit to Waltrot’s words. Still, why doubt them? As the spring wore on, and the wheat sprang green in the ploughed fields, and the birds of passage returned early, and the swifts cried, ‘news, news’, he doubted no more. He brooded on the miracle, and the more he brooded, the clearer the summons became; and the clearer it became, the more ominous. For he did not want – that is, he had not at all wanted – to leave his home once again. Let Hodgekin and the Constable take care of their war! The weeks went past, and the trees came swiftly into full leaf, and the miracle concentrated itself in his mind, coalescing and darkly reproaching him with a sense of being out of place. He might talk to his niece and her husband, or play with their young children; he might discuss accounts with his bailiff and the local reever, he might inspect hedges and fences and gates and livestock, give orders for a new wagon or the thatching of a barn; for a change he might spend hours digging in his own garden, or read his own books of tales and legends of bygone ages; but he could not ignore, he just could not allow himself to ignore the stupendous change that was quietly unfolding. The laws of nature had been re-ordered; some creative upheaval was in progress, some realignment, perhaps among the Gods themselves, of which process he, Aldred, had been made part, and from which he was now wilfully excluding himself. ‘Great things are afoot’ – the Elf had said that: the mighty Wave, now, and the one which Findir said he had seen before: Aldred was sure that they were parts of the – of the – what name would serve to describe this great background event? Call it, for now, the Unfolding. It beckoned to him as with the skinny finger of an old woman’s hand, and no pleading, no refusal, no counter-arguments were of any avail. The face of the beckoning figure was deeply shadowed by the cowl of its hooded robe or cloak, so that he could make out no feature; it was neither witchcraft nor any other form of magic that was influencing him; indeed the only power that this Unfolding had over him was to challenge his heart’s honesty. And what his heart concluded, despite the accompanying gut-feelings of terrible dread, was that he had no business to be absenting himself any longer. Truly, he did not desire to remain at the edge of things; truly, he wanted to be invovled and at the centre. His nature might be reticent but it was not that of the recluse, nor that of the aimless futile sort. He craved purpose. Whatever might be the outcome – and he had a strong premonition that for him the outcome would indeed be a terrible one – he must rejoin the conflict and seek Swin out once more. To go on sitting on the sidelines would be to lie to himself, to Swin, to the mysterious Gods, to everything. ‘The awful day of thine own judgement’ - when had he heard those words? After searching his memory (he found that he could recollect almost anything since he had drunk the beer of Caras Gulwen) he heard Swin’s voice, telling stories while the Punchkins trotted up the City Road, telling the story of his uncle Athelstan while they rested on that first evening. It was Athelstan who had had foreshowings of horror, but who had ridden away, nonetheless, with the elvish princess. It was his own judgement. And it was awful. And even so would he, Aldred, do.
Well, well. Let all that be as it might; the upshot was that Aldred wrote a letter, and received an answer, and left his home at the end of April. He formally handed over the stewardship of the estate to his nephew-in-law; he kissed his niece, embraced the children, saddled a pony and rode away. Forty-eight hours later he was sitting outside the front door of The Six Jolly Wizards, an old inn that stood off the main east-west road through the Demesne. There was a wooden bench, warm from the sun; he took out his tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe. Close at hand, the only sound to be heard was the singing of larks, and the indoor clattering and murmurs of the inn-girls. From farther off, through the still, bright air, came the bleating of lambs, and the distant clink of a hammer, with the thin white smoke rising from the smithy at Middleton; the rooftops of the town, red and grey, were visible through the fresh-clad trees. He had no reason to stay there any longer, for he had heard all the news that was current. But he felt lazy and peaceful. He did not want to go on and meet his fate, or Hodgekin; not just yet. So he sat and lingered an hour, finishing his pipe and beginning another, while little white clouds were borne into the sky and the lindens began to shimmer and stir. At last, as he was beginning to feel that there really was no excuse for not getting up and going on, a dark figure came into view on the white road. Aldred gulped, feeling afraid again, seeing his destiny coming towards him. It was the Wizard.
‘Good morning!’ said Aldred. The Wizard now wore a tall pointed brown hat and a brown cloak over a rough grey gown. His reddish-brown beard flowed down over the rope girdle that was tied about his waist; his bare feet, bound about with the thongs of leathern sandals, were as hard and knotty and old-looking as the staff he swung in his right hand. His eyes were very dark, his voice deep and not without irony as he returned Aldred’s greeting. ‘And where are you off to, Mr. Brown, on his fine day?’
‘Bigginton,’ said the Wizard briefly. ‘Hodge is expecting me.’
‘A strange but pleasant turn of fortune! Thither am I bound also! I trust that you will not object to my company? Please enter this inn and partake of refreshment while I say farewell to mine host.’
Mr. Brown ignored Aldred’s flippant manner; he came into the hall and waited patiently while Aldred collected his belongings and paid his bill. Then the Wizard and the Punchkin walked off together.
Their first day on the road was marked by silence: a silence not shared, but split: a complete lack of communication. Aldred was nervous and tense. He often wondered, as they walked along, what his companion was thinking about. But the Wizard’s face, shaded by the broad hat-brim, offered no response to Aldred’s upward glances. While at Kingsbridge Aldred had been able to research a little of the Demesne’s own wizard-lore, and his tentative conclusions were broadly in agreement with those of Ar the High Priest. The latter, however, had no prior knowledge of the Fox. As Aldred now guessed at the story, the Wizard had come to Punchkinland before the end of the last Age. He had come as a messenger, or else desiring to offer his own help, and he had come in the Fox’s shape, being thus able to travel more swiftly. He had come to the South Hundred, to the woods around Bailiwick, and there, somehow, he had got stuck. He had travelled too fast, perhaps, in that urgent time, or too far from his home, or had involved himself too deeply in the life of the beast. He had been unable to free himself from his assumed form, he had missed Fortinbras the dyer, and then the departure of all the other Wizards had made a void around him, an absence of any redemptive magic, a blank spell of endless prison-cycles in which he had been condemned, year after year, to repeat his last journey – until the three Punchkins, returning, should allow him to approach the source of a new power in Midyard.
That was an incomplete yet plausible reading. Others might be devised. For now, and for practical purposes, it sufficed that this Wizard had indeed survived into the wrong Age – had accidentally outlasted his mission. What, then, did he intend to do? Would it suffice him to cleave to the Punchkins, to defend the Demesne by his magic, to do their bidding as a tame sorcerer? And would his power be strong enough? Hodgekin’s answer to both those questions would be a confident yes, but Aldred was very much less sure. True, that power had enabled the Punchkins to win a battle, but Staffal, a mightier Wizard, had never seen his own magic as a weapon or a military asset. It had been his task to kindle hearts, to create unity out of dissension, to act as a leader or adviser or simply as a messenger, being guided by events and making each serve his turn. As Aldred’s thoughts dwelt on this comparison he became convinced that Hodgekin was resting in a very dangerous complacency. And if that was so, what would Mr. Brown do, and how might the Punchkins best ally themselves with him?
Aldred cast another glance up at him. Despite his stature, the Wizard went along with a light swing, the easy pace of a four-legged animal. Aldred had noticed how the stems and leaves of the longer grasses sprang up behind the hem of his trailing cloak – uncrushed, unbent. Mr. Brown carried a pack over one shoulder; his other hand held his staff, which he regularly swung and planted; but his face was dark and remote, his head bowed in thought.
‘Good master,’ said Aldred suddenly, his heart coming into his mouth: ‘Baranithron.’
Baranithron halted. He lifted his head, seemed to seek the direction of the sound he had just heard, then turn his face down to Aldred. His beard and whiskers were bushy, his nose long, his eyes deep-set beneath the reddish brows. There was now a faint green film over those eyes, a sheen of blindness.
‘What?’ asked the Wizard, his voice as cold as the bark of a fox.
‘Master, tell me: what is your purpose here amongst us?’
The evening was dull, the light thick and somewhat greenish amid the tangled trees. And the greenness of those eyes was very frightening – it was as if Aldred was no longer being seen, or was being seen merely as a nuisance, like some intrusive insect. His heart stopped in terror. He wondered if he in his turn was about to be made the victim of some irreversible spell.
‘Look for me tomorrow morning, at first light,’ the Wizard answered.
They bedded down in a dry hollow where one side of a hummock had fallen away to reveal a tangle of bare tree-roots, which had collected their own thatch of dead leaves, weeds and new soil. When Aldred woke up, he saw in the dimness that Baranithron had gone, leaving his rumpled blanket in its place. Aldred peered through the roots and saw him standing in the middle of the dewy field, as still as a standing stone.
The clouds were heavy. There would be no sunrise. The field was a small pasture, a perfectly ordinary half-acre, dotted with cowpats, surrounded by hawthorn hedges and banks of nettles. A five-barred gate led towards a cowshed on the other side of the hedge, and the roofs of another village were visible: Moseley, twenty miles north of the Middle Hundred. A cock-crow was carried through the air, shrill and distant. It seemed to cut through the oddly subdued voices of the woodland birds. People would soon be getting up over there, pumping water, lighting fires, putting the kettle on. Aldred felt that he had travelled a vast, irretraceable distance from that familiar world. Never since he started out on his first wanderings, never in all his life, had he had such a sense of being plunged into crude ancientry, into the primordial. Its traces still lay on the land. They had been started into life by the coming of the Wizard, who stood stock-still in the thin mist, the skirts of his cloak sloping steeply upward from the grass, so that he resembled a steep peak or cone. The hat on his head, a thing of recent make, looked incongruous without detracting from the awe, the threat, the grimness of the dark-cloaked figure. The dew on the grass had a strange bluish-white tinge; dew-drops were falling through the roof of Aldred’s hollow, pattering into the soil or falling cold on the back of his neck; no birds came to land on Baranithron’s shoulders, no rabbits or hedgehogs approached to sniff at his feet; Aldred backed away, curled himself into a ball and began to cry. All at once it seemed to him that he had solved the riddle of that cloaked purpose: it was the same as the riddle of his own destiny, and it was unbearable.
He felt a strong hand on his shoulder. Baranithron had come back to him. The old man’s face was kindly now, the unpleasant green veil gone from his eyes. He grasped Aldred’s shoulder and waited. ‘I understand,’ Aldred said at last. ‘That is, I see that it’s better for me not to understand fully. At least, not yet.’ He dried his eyes, and he has not wept since then.
The Wizard nodded. ‘Let’s have breakfast,’ he said.
Half an hour later they were on their way. The constraint between them had gone, and they were able to talk freely, though Mr. Brown volunteered no information about what he had been doing since the battle, and Aldred preferred not to question him any more. He asked Aldred more questions about the Demesne, the Kingdom and the regions beyond, and Aldred answered them to the best of his knowledge, as he had done before; but this time he fancied that his answers were merely serving to confirm a decision Mr. Brown had already made. In the evening they stopped at an inn. On the third day they made an early start and reached Bigginton at the end of the afternoon. There was a strong guard-post there; the leaders of the Punchkins were said to be all at the nearby settlement of Bootham. This was a poor village whose inhabitants had mostly been employed as carriers, packers and warehousemen at the great tribute-station. But now it was swollen with Punchkinry-at-arms and bright with clustered tents and pavilions. Aldred and Mr. Brown threaded through these to the village green. This was a small orchard surrounded by shabby dwellings, a shapeless expanse of scrubby turf with a dozen gnarled apple-trees which, however, looked better than usual, being bright with blossom. There were many Punchkins bustling about the scene, sounds of sawing and hammering, a feeling of expectation. Carpenters were making a long table out of planks and packing-cases; other folk were putting up a hurdle fence and nailing some sort of wooden objects to the trees. And there was Hodgekin, clearly enjoying himself, talking to a group of older Punchkins while directing all the business. He hailed the Wizard and greeted him with delight; but at the sight of Aldred his face fell.
‘Mr. Sherling, hello,’ said he. ‘What brings you back here?’