Next morning, while the birds were announcing the second quarter of the year, the remnant of the Punchkins – Fortinbras, Tim and Walt – silently made their exit through the private door of the Temple. Outside the darkness was damp with a fine drizzle. Erum had already been to fetch Mr. Proudfoot from the inn; the funeral cart, a simple dray, was under a street-lamp at the end of the temple precinct. The small coffin was plainly visible. A black horse stood between the shafts, munching his breakfast from a nosebag. The three companions opened the lid of the coffin and had a last peep at their leader. Egwise lay there, still and white and cold.
‘You’ve been busy, arranging all this,’ said Fortinbras. ‘Thank you so much.’ Tim and Walt gave heartfelt murmurs of agreement.
‘A pleasure,’ said Erum as he got into the driver’s seat. ‘Serving in the Temple is a fine duty and a privilege, but it doesn’t really give one enough to do… By the way, I’m sorry about your ponies. I couldn’t get any sense out of Bentliman Gough regarding them. I’m afraid he may have appropriated them and sold them on.’
‘Horse-thief,’ muttered Fortinbras.
Erum touched the horse with the whip and it moved off quietly. Its shoes had been muffled. He had attended to every detail. He drove through damp dark byways, unfrequented at this hour, to the cemetery. There was a Man waiting at the cemetery gate, a gravedigger, smoking a pipe. He had a pine-torch and a hand-barrow with a shovel on it. Erum unhooked his own lantern and the Punchkins transferred the coffin from the cart to the barrow. Pushing and steadying it carefully, they followed the torchlight down a winding path. Many tall monuments and gravestones rose up on either side, overhung with dripping yew-branches. Waltrot commented: ‘He’d have liked a memorial, wouldn’t he, like one of these here headstones.’
The others agreed. It was a pity that there was no time for them to procure one. (Aldred, however, had the same thought later, and took the opportunity to remedy the omission before he went home.) They came to the open pit. The taciturn gravedigger threaded ropes through the coffin handles; the Punchkins helped to lower it down. Erum read some prayers. Fortinbras, Waltrot and Tim stood with uncovered heads, sad and afraid, until the last ‘amen’ was said. They yawned and shivered; they turned and left Mr. Proudfoot in his unmarked grave while the earth was shovelled down on top of him. Grey dawn had come into the sky, and smoke was rising from many chimneys, and a few folk were appearing in the streets outside the graveyard. The Punchkins got back into the dray. It was only a short drive from there to Treatygate South, but it seemed long to them, for they were feeling overwhelmed, as they had not felt before, by a terrible sense of loss.
‘Stay in the cart,’ Erum’s voice said presently. ‘Keep covered up. We have to wait for Atan. At this hour the gatekeepers won’t let you through without him.’
At last they heard the sound of footsteps. Two figures, one tall and one short, were coming along the pavement. A third figure, that of a large dog, waddled after them. ‘Is that you, Erum?’ called a cheerful voice.
‘Me and our three missionaries, Atan,’ he answered.
The Second Highest Priest wore a black great-coat over his full-skirted robe. His attendant, none other than Melda, was coated and belted likewise; instead of the tall round hat, however, he wore the black skull-cap of the novice. He said no word to the Punchkins nor to Erum, but hovered behind Atan, holding the dog-leash and averting his face. Meanwhile Atan conversed with the Punchkins, towering before them in his tall hat, a severe examiner. In those days the Temple authorities set great store by precise dogmas and definitions. One question Fortinbras remembered later concerned the distinction between ‘gods’ and ‘angelic powers’. It all seemed a fairly meaningless rigmarole – far removed from the burial-scene in which the Punchkins had taken part – but they sufficiently remembered what Erum had taught them, and the humiliation of being thus catechized like children was gradually suffused with a sense of success. The guards were preparing to wheel back the great wrought gates. Yet one or two things troubled the Punchkins as they stood facing the Priest. At no time did he turn his back on them, so he was presumably unaware that Melda, having tied the leash to one of the hitching-posts inside the gates, had quietly stolen away; of Erum and the Punchkins, only Tim actually saw him go. Looking past Atan’s bulky form, the others became more and more aware of the old animal sitting patiently by itself, or scratching itself with a hind-paw, or squatting to foul the pavement disgustingly. It, or rather she, was a particular favourite of Atan’s, who kept many hounds in kennels. The reader may or may not be inclined to take this messy defilement as a token of the worth of the indoctrination; but for the Punchkins its smell was like a false note: an uneasiness, a real sense of something gone bad. After about ten minutes Melda returned as unobtrusively as he had departed. In the clearer light his hair seemed to gleam faintly below his black cap; now letting his face be seen, he turned on the Punchkins a smile of insolent familiarity, of self-satisfaction, almost of triumph.
‘Well, my lads,’ said Atan, ‘I find your answers satisfactory on the whole, and you may go. It has been a pleasure to meet you, and you have raised great hopes within me for the conversion of all your folk. Dru Almighty bless you and grant you a safe journey.’
‘Amen,’ they answered as sincerely as they could.
‘Goodbye!’ said Atan, shaking their hands.
‘Farewell!’ said Erum, doing likewise.
‘Bye bye!’ added Melda’s voice with a mocking intonation.
Through the gateway, past the grinning City guards and on to the close-set white stones of the broad straight road: southwards: back to Punchkinland. A few miles ahead, the gently undulating plain rose up to a range of moorland fells. This, as the Punchkins now knew, was the northern edge of the hills they called the Northern Downs. On the other side, perhaps as near as fifty miles away, was their own border. They might hope to reach it tomorrow evening; but at that end, as they reminded one another, it would be necessary to leave the road and to skirt round through the wild country, so as to bypass Bigginton and avoid the Reeve’s Men. Meanwhile their journey was pleasant. It was a parklike stretch of country, tended but unfarmed, where the City people came to ride or promenade. Stands of trees, some veiled in shades of misty green, were scattered amidst thickets of gorse, bracken and heather. On the left, the beautiful banks of the blue Aduchel were sprinkled with fresh spring flowers; and presently the young Bleck curved round from its source and towards the road, which then crossed over the laughing, sparkling stream. Squirrels and rabbits scampered over the short green grass, lambs raced, and the breeze was delightful after the smokes and vapours of the City.
After a couple of hours of brisk walking the Punchkins made out a curious structure that seemed to stand over the road like a large door-frame set on its side. This object was found, as the distance lessened, to consist of two tall brick pillars, stoutly built, twenty feet high, set on bases of artificial stone: one on each side of the road. Firmly secured to their tops by metal bolts, and thus supported high over the road like a bridge, was a large strip or board of metal. It seemed to be nothing more or less than an enormous sign; and what it said, in letters of white clearly painted on a dark green ground, was:
WAINROAD
Under this, with the same kind of disagreeable feeling that might be felt by bewildered travellers going between evil standing stones, the three companions passed; and indeed the prospect became less hopeful at once. The white road had been driven not over the hills but through them. While continuing to rise steadily it entered a long deep cutting, whose steep-sloping sides – exposed rock, with a lot of loose stones and shale – rose ever higher and higher. These slopes did not come down to the edges of the roadsides, but were separated from them by two outer lanes, three or four yards wide, with a shallow fosse below both kerbs. In many places these lanes were littered or blocked with debris from which sprouted scrubby plants, withered saplings, tough lilac and tall dead grey thistles. Not a single weed was to be seen on the road itself; but some of the white stones were loose and had sharp edges. When the Punchkins cut their feet, as presently began to happen, the road-surface burned them like a poison.
Yet to tell the truth this Road is a great marvel, a tremendous artifice without precedent in Midyard. Seventeen leagues it runs in a dead-straight course, through deep cuttings, on top of embankments and along two great viaducts, allowing the wagon-trains that set off from the goods-houses and yards of Bigginton to reach the City very regularly and speedily. The five years of its building had occupied armies of Men and whole clans of labouring Dwarves, with monstrous engines of destruction, drills, fire-blasters, moles and mechanical shovels that had been devised by the unique skills of Ruminas. Three engineers-in-chief, Men of the City, had died in its making, as had hundreds of the labourers and dozens of Dwarves for whom heavy ransoms had had to be paid. What a pity, then, that the work had been driven forward without any regard for beauty – for grim and unhandsome it certainly is; and what a shame, also, that those who wrought it should have received only meagre reward, with no fame, and praise far less than their due. ‘So this is the Road that’s left off the maps,’ said Waltrot. ‘Ugly, ain’t it. Must be why they leave it off.’
‘At least we can’t lose our way,’ said Fortinbras cheerfully.
On they went, deeper and deeper into the cutting. The sun was now well up, but its rays had far to go before they could penetrate the shadows that lingered on both sides of the glimmering Road. The walkers began to feel gloomy and anxious. Their escape from the City had gone too easily after all, if indeed they had escaped – if they were not still trapped. They felt themselves to be stumbling painfully in a new prison-yard constructed by the minds of Men: cold, bleak, shadowy, incomprehensible. Their errand had failed. They had been fools to come. Aldred would succumb to the City like poor Mr. Proudfoot, and they themselves would never reach the end of this dreadful canyon. The air grew colder. They plodded on and on, diminishing within their own imaginations, seeing themselves as insignificant specks.
About an hour after they passed under the road-sign two things happened at once. The keen-eyed Fortinbras, who some time ago had spotted a clump or small grove of trees a long way ahead on the right-hand side of the Road, now descried among them a small building, no doubt some road-menders’ hut or shelter. And Tim stopped and raised his hand. ‘Listen!’ he said.
They listened.
‘Horses,’ said Waltrot.
‘At least half-a-dozen,’ said Tim. ‘Coming up behind us. From the City. Gallopers.’
They looked at each other’s faces, reading each other’s certainty. ‘We’re in a mess, aren’t we?’ said Walt, using a cruder expression.
‘I knew this would happen,’ moaned Tim. ‘That little spy, he’s gone and betrayed us.’
‘Well,’ said Fortinbras, ‘we can’t stay here, we can’t climb far up those slopes, and we can’t go back, right? Let’s try to get to that hut. We’ve got our bows. Maybe we’ll fight them off, whoever they are.’
They set off at a run, cursing the pain of their feet. The refuge was less than half a mile away, but the pursuers, if such they were, and indeed none of the three had any doubt, were coming up terribly fast. Soon the sound of hooves was clearly heard. Fortinbras glanced behind him and saw the seven dark shapes in the midst of a cloud of dust. Waltrot tripped and fell, cutting his knees and hands. The other two stopped to help him up, then ran on. Fortinbras’s lungs were burning and a cruel stitch was jabbing into his side. The hoof-beats drummed and echoed in the rock-walled space, louder, louder and louder. Tim looked back and saw several things: their own intermittent track of bloody toe-prints, the troop’s black armour and golden plumes, and the glittering circling points of their lances, now held at the level. Waltrot kept his gaze ahead. He noticed the sunlight beginning to shine along the top of the right-hand wall, and a small stream, stained with sheen of oil, that reflected the bright sky as it trickled along the right-hand ditch. Birds were flying and wheeling in that blue sky, very high and far away. The refuge seemed now quite near, now impossible to reach. Fortinbras’s legs were wobbling. He thought about turning, getting his bow and aiming for the horses; perhaps he might disable enough of them to allow Tim and Walt a better chance? But he would have only a few seconds in which to collect himself, fit shaft to string, aim and shoot: not enough. Someone, some indistinct person, appeared to have come out of the hut. Sweat was running into his eyes, making it hard to see clearly. The thunder of hoofbeats was terrible, deafening. The lance-points were a few yards behind the Punchkins’ backs. Tim was weeping as he ran.
Fortinbras realised, with certainty, that they would not reach the hut. He decided to turn to face his death. As he slowed down he heard a voice say Off the road, into the ditch, into the ditch. The voice was low but distinct, and the air was full of whirling sparks of many-coloured light. The three Punchkins obediently swerved to the side of the road. Fortinbras fell into the stream. Then their executioners were upon them, seven lancers of the Palace Guard, mounted on powerful stallions, magnificent in their panoply, dreadful and inexorable, passing by, thundering onward, led by Crabanir their Captain, still in relentless but vain pursuit of the frightened Punchkins, who sat up in the ditch and wondered to see their enemies galloping on into the distance.
‘Come up, lads!’ said the voice.
Above them stood the tall white-haired Woman. She reached down with both hands. Her wrinkled brown face was wreathed in smiles.