Power of Three (22 page)

“After him!” howled George.

As they pelted up the road, the lights came on in the farmhouse and Marianne leaned out of it, screaming abuse. The dog, released from whatever hold Titch had had on it, joined in the clamor. But neither George nor Titch could spare any attention for the farm. Jerry, having knocked the signpost crooked again, went through the hedge on the other side of the road and across the field beyond in a series of sumptuous loops. His companions scrambled after him, wondering if he could stop before he came to Edinburgh or not at all. Luckily, the tractor stalled on its way up the mound which held the Gallows Stone.

“I got here!” Jerry bawled proudly. “Backward.”

“Splendid fellow!” gasped George. “Eyes in the back of your head!”

The next step was to harness the tractor to the Gallows Stone. George and Jerry thought they did it rather well. They scrambled over and around that huge boulder, looping their chains, until it was in a sort of chain cage. Then they took the last length of chain to hook to the back of the tractor. But it became more and more evident that Titch did not trust those chains at all. He seemed to find it necessary to go round touching every place where the chains crossed or joined, muttering more of his weird words to them.

While he was doing it, Jerry and George suddenly found they were cold sober.

Now it may have been the drink wearing off with the hard work in the fresh air, but I think it was more likely the queer way Titch was muttering, combined with the fact that they could see the farmhouse from the mound, angrily lit at every window. At any rate, they both found themselves thinking of shotguns and Magistrates and suchlike unpleasant things.

“Look here, you!” Jerry called to Titch.

“If you've quite finished that muttering,” added George. “Who are you and why do you want this stone moved anyway?”

They did not mean to be unfriendly, you understand, just firm. But when Titch came from behind the stone, he was so downright dismayed to see them sober that they became thoroughly suspicious. It seemed to them that, if Titch was not wrong in the head, he was trying to get them into trouble.

“You've got us into a fine fix, haven't you?” said George.

“We'll have to pacify the farmer,” Jerry explained. “And my old man, too, I'm much afraid. Not to speak of all my relatives who are down for the wedding.”

“Not to mince matters, there'll be a Stink,” said George. “If you really want this stone moved, you prove your good faith and show us that gold you promised us.”

“Yes. Produce it. Prove yourself,” said Jerry. “We don't shift this ruddy rock an inch otherwise.”

Titch looked both dismayed and exasperated. But he seemed faintly amused, too, as if Jerry and George were behaving according to some absurd pattern. “All right,” he said. “But I shall have to fetch the gold. Will you wait here five minutes?”

“Uh-uh!” said George. “We know that one, little man.”

“I'm not trying to run away,” Titch said. Then he unbuckled the sword he had at his side and laid it in Jerry's hands. “You can keep that till I come back.”

They looked at it. It struck them as something you might find in a museum, and they thought it might fetch a fair price in an antique shop. George nodded. “O.K. Fair enough,” said Jerry.

Titch set off at a run across the field. It was hard to see far in the moonlight, but they both thought they saw him reach another, slightly lower mound there. Then he vanished. They were fairly sure they had seen the last of him, and they began to calculate whether the sword was likely to fetch enough to make up for the Stink. They were tinkering with the tractor, trying to start it again, when Titch suddenly reappeared beside them. He seemed breathless and rather triumphant.

“Got the gold?” George asked, not really thinking he had.

“Here,” said Titch. He held up into the moonlight a fabulous fiery green torque. It was not only solid gold. It glittered and twisted with the most intricate and delicate patterns. It was probably the most valuable thing either George or Jerry had seen in their lives. They both reached out to take the golden horseshoe. Titch, naturally enough, held it out of reach. “When the stone's moved,” he said.

“If you like,” said Jerry. “This is a bit of all right, eh, George?”

“I'll say!” said George. “Get her started, Jerry. Where to, Titch?”

“To that mound over there,” Titch said, and pointed to the mound across the field where he had seemed to disappear.

This did not seem a very tall order, for a thing like that collar. Jerry got the tractor started in seconds. It began to roar and vibrate. The chains scrawked and tightened. The stone jerked, then shifted. Titch stood there, and so did George, to tell the truth, marveling at the strength of that machine. It growled. It juddered. Once or twice it stood still with its great back wheels whirling, but the stone, securely netted in the chains Titch had muttered to, went on moving. It bumped down the mound it sat on, and Titch was not the only one who encouraged it with strange noises. George shouted things, too. And it began to crawl like a huge snail ponderously onto the level.

Then—this was the queerest thing of all—as soon as that boulder had reached level ground, George felt a gush of cold air and a whirring behind him. He and Titch both spun round to see what it was. There was nothing, nothing at all to see. But the whirring went on upward into the dark blue sky and, with it, faint sounds of laughter and music. Jerry heard it, too. He turned round and shouted from his shaking perch on the tractor, “What was that? Something went up out of the mound, I swear!”

George shivered and shouted to him to keep going and not to stall. “What was it?” he asked Titch.

“I don't know.” It was clear Titch had no more idea than George. “Something glad to be free, by the sound of it,” he said.

After that, the stone crawled and bumped over the field and then up the other mound almost without interruption. There was a bad moment when it was halfway up this mound, and the tractor was halfway down the other side, and the two forces seemed exactly equal. But George and Titch set their backs to the stone and heaved, and it went on again. A minute later, it was perched on top of this second mound much as it had been perched on the other. Titch walked proudly up to it and spoke a few more of his well-chosen words, whereupon the chains literally fell off it into George's arms and the stone looked as if it had been in that place for centuries. While George was staggering about with the chains, Jerry must have given Titch back his sword and Titch passed him the gold collar, but George never knew for sure. He became very vague about everything around then. In fact, neither he nor Jerry quite knew how they got home or what they did with the tractor. When the inevitable Stink started, they were both hard put to it to explain. George would have thought he dreamed the whole thing, but for the fact that, while he was looking for the tractor after Jerry had left on his honeymoon, he found the marks the stone had made being dragged across that field, and the stone at the end of them, perched on the lower mound.

“Well?” said Mr. Claybury. “What do you think of that?”

“Lovely!” said Brenda, clearing away the last of the plates. Ayna looked at Gair's grave face and was not so sure. It had become ever more clear, as the story went on, that Mr. Claybury's little man had indeed been Gest. She did not like to think of her father blithely passing two drunken Giants a collar with a curse on it. She could only hope Gest had not known it was cursed. So did Gair, but he was not at all sure. Gest had already parted with his own collar to the Dorig, and it had plainly been urgent to find another. He had an idea that the story, as told in Garholt, suggested that Aunt Kasta came into it somehow—but, as Gest had cheated Og by asking the Giants to move the stone, why should he not have cheated the Giants, too? Gair did not like it at all.

Mr. Masterfield, who had been laughing more heartily than anyone, and was still smiling, turned jokingly to Ayna. “The collar in question,” he said. “Whose is it going to be?”

Because he put it like this, Ayna's Gift took over. She might have vowed not to use it, but she could not help answering when people asked her things like this. “It's not going to be anyone's,” she said. “It's going back where it came from to have the curse raised from it.”

There was an uncomfortable little silence, except for Brenda's awed wheezing. “Coffee—?” suggested Aunt Mary.

Mr. Claybury stood up, looking at Ayna in a puzzled way. “You meant that, didn't you?” he said. For a moment, Ayna could have sworn he was connecting her with the little man in his story. But he said nothing else, and followed Aunt Mary to the room with the varnished statues.

They were perplexed to find that this was not holy after all—unless coffee was a special drink, like the Sun-wine you had at Feasts. If it was, Ceri did not care for it at all. The taste made him shudder. He felt more tired than ever and longed for this Giant gathering to be over, so that he could go to bed. But he was fairly sure no one would stop until they had asked Mr. Claybury not to make the Moor into a lake. And no one had so much as mentioned it yet.

Ceri thought this was ridiculous. Mr. Claybury must know why he had been invited. And, in his experience, you got a thing quicker if you asked for it straight out. “Mr. Claybury,” he piped up, “we don't want you to flood the Moor. You can't. You really mustn't.”

Ceri could tell from the reactions of the Giants and Ayna that they had wanted to lead up to this gradually. Mr. Masterfield hastily said something about “our young guest's unilateral enthusiasm,” which Ceri saw meant Mr. Claybury should take no notice of him. But a slow, Giant shrewdness, mixed with amusement, was spreading on Mr. Claybury's face.

“I'm glad the nipper spoke up, Jerry,” he said. “I'm not sorry for a chance to make myself clear. My position's going to be exactly the same, whether we talk all night first or not. May I explain?”

“Go ahead,” Mr. Masterfield said grudgingly. Behind him, Brenda gently put down the coffeepot and sat down to listen.

“Now,” said Mr. Claybury, “what you're all wanting to say to me in various ways is: Don't make this Moor into a reservoir because people live here. Right?”

“But people do!” Ceri said urgently. “Lots more than you think.”

“Ah yes,” said Mr. Claybury, but he was not really attending, because he was now making a speech, which was as much of a set-piece to him as his story had been. “But pause for a moment to consider the number of people who
don't
live here. There are over fifty million of them.” Ceri and Gair exchanged shaken looks. Never had they imagined there could be so many Giants. More than the stars in the sky! “And this number increases every year,” Mr. Claybury continued, “until it has got to the point when the ordinary rivers and lakes simply do not contain enough water for them all. If you reckon that the smallest amount each person uses every day for drinking, washing, cooking and so on, is ten gallons—and the actual figure is a good deal higher than that—you will see that it is an awful lot of water. And it has to come from somewhere. So my office had to start looking for somewhere, not too far from London, where we could store some millions of gallons of water. We needed somewhere that could easily be made into a lake—and the Moor can be, because of the ring of hills round it—and where fewer people live than average. We went over Southern England with a fine-toothed comb, and the Moor was the
only
place that will do.”

Gair spoke up despairingly. He knew this should be his opportunity to explain about his people, and about Dorig. Mr. Claybury had met Gest. He would have believed Gair. But Gair knew this would mean explaining also that his father had, perhaps knowingly, given an extremely evil thing to two harmless Giants. In the face of all those other Giants and their huge thirst, he just could not bring himself to do it. “But why should a few people suffer a lot,” he said, “so that a lot of people shouldn't suffer at all?”

“Couldn't they all use less water?” Ayna suggested.

Mr. Claybury smiled and shook his head. “Only as a last resort. This is a very old argument. The greatest happiness of the greatest number. If you think about it, you'll find it always works out that a few suffer for the good of the rest.”

“In stories,” Gair agreed hopelessly, “brave men die defending the rest. But this isn't like that!”

“Call it the modern version,” Mr. Claybury suggested kindly.

“I can't!” Mr. Masterfield said, so loudly that Gair's ears buzzed. “It isn't like that. The boy's right.”

Mr. Claybury turned to him. “I know. I do understand. Believe me, I'm not being vindictive, or anything ridiculous like that. I like this Moor. I've had some good times here. That's one of the reasons I was glad to come here today, to see it before it's gone for good. But I do not know any other possible source of water in the quantities we need. So what am I to do, Jerry?”

The two Giants looked at one another. Gair wondered if he would ever understand Giants. He was sure it was the curse on the collar that had caused one friend to flood the other's land. They ought by rights to hate one another. Perhaps they had, earlier in the evening, but, by telling that story, Mr. Claybury had somehow blocked that cold, pulsing curse. He still liked Mr. Masterfield. Probably he had come to visit him hoping their old friendship might revive. And the signs were that it was reviving, against all odds.