Soul Music (7 page)

Whereas Gloria was banned from sport because of her tendency to use her axe in a threatening manner. Miss Butts had suggested that an axe wasn't a
ladylike
weapon, even for a dwarf, but Gloria had pointed out that, on the contrary, it had been left to her by her grandmother who had owned it all her life and polished it every Saturday, even if she hadn't used it at all that week. There was something about the way she gripped it that made even Miss Butts give in. To show willing, Gloria left off her iron helmet and, while not shaving off her beard – there was no actual
rule
about girls not having beards a foot long – at least plaited it. And tied it in ribbons in the school colours.

Susan felt strangely at home in their company, and this had earned guarded praise from Miss Butts. It was nice of her to be such a chum, she said. Susan had been surprised. It had never occurred to her that anyone actually
said
a word like chum.

The three of them trailed back along the beech drive by the playing field.

‘I don't understand sport,' said Gloria, watching the gaggle of panting young women stampeding across the pitch.

‘There's a troll game,' said Jade. ‘It's called
aargrooha
.'

‘How's it played?' said Susan.

‘Er . . . you rip off a human's head and kick it around with special boots made of obsidian until you score a goal or it bursts. But it's not played any more, of course,' she added quickly.

‘I should think not,' said Susan.

‘No one knows how to make the boots, I expect,' said Gloria.

‘I expect if it was played now, someone like Iron Lily would go running up and down the touchline shouting, “Get some head, you soft nellies”,' said Jade.

They walked in silence for a while.

‘I think,' said Gloria, cautiously, ‘that she probably wouldn't, actually.'

‘I say, you two haven't noticed anything . . . odd lately, have you?' said Susan.

‘Odd like what?' said Gloria.

‘Well, like . . . rats . . .' said Susan.

‘Haven't seen any rats in the school,' said Gloria. ‘And I've had a good look.'

‘I mean . . . strange rats,' said Susan.

They were level with the stables. These were normally the home of the two horses that pulled the school coach, and the term-time residence of a few horses belonging to gels who couldn't be parted from them.

There is a type of girl who, while incapable of cleaning her bedroom even at knifepoint, will fight for the privilege of being allowed to spend the day shovelling manure in a stable. It was a magic that hadn't rubbed off on Susan. She had nothing against horses, but couldn't understand all the snaffles, bridles and fetlocks business. And she couldn't see why they had to be measured in ‘hands' when there were perfectly sensible inches around to do the job. Having watched the jodhpured girls who bustled around the stables, she decided it was because they couldn't understand complicated machines like rulers. She'd said so, too.

‘All right,' said Susan. ‘How about ravens?'

Something blew in her ear.

She spun around.

The white horse stood in the middle of the yard like a bad special effect. He was too bright. He glowed. He seemed like the only real thing in a world of pale shapes. Compared to the bulbous ponies that normally occupied the loose-boxes, he was a giant.

A couple of the jodhpured girls were fussing around him. Susan recognized Cassandra Fox and Lady Sara Grateful, almost identical in their love of anything on four legs that went ‘neigh' and their disdain for anything else, their ability to apparently look at the world with their teeth, and their expertise in putting at least four vowels in the word ‘oh'.

The white horse neighed gently at Susan, and began to nuzzle her hand.

You're Binky
, she thought.
I know you. I've ridden on you. You're . . . mine. I think
.

‘I say,' said Lady Sara, ‘who does he belong to?'

Susan looked around.

‘What? Me?' she said. ‘Yes. Me . . . I suppose.'

‘Oeuwa? He was in the loose-box next to Browny. I didn't knoeuwa you had a horse here. You have to get permission from Miss Butts, you knoeuwa.'

‘He's a present,' said Susan. ‘From . . . someone . . . ?'

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind. She wondered why she'd said that. She hadn't thought of her grandfather for years. Until last night.

I remember the stable
, she thought.
So big you couldn't see the walls. And I was given a ride on you once. Someone held me so I wouldn't fall off. But you couldn't fall off this horse. Not if he didn't want you to
.

‘Oeuwa. I didn't know you rode.'

‘I . . . used to.'

‘There's extra fees, you knoeuwa. For keeping a horse,' said Lady Sara.

Susan said nothing. She strongly suspected they'd be paid.

‘And you've got noeuwa tack,' said Lady Sara.

And Susan rose to it.

‘I don't need any,' she said.

‘Oeuwa,
bareback
riding,' said Lady Sara. ‘And you steer by the ears, ya?'

Cassandra Fox said: ‘Probably can't afford them, out in the
sticks
. And stop that dwarf looking at my pony. She's
looking
at my pony!'

‘I'm only looking,' said Gloria.

‘You were . . . salivating,' said Cassandra.

There was a pattering across the cobbles and Susan swung herself up and on to the horse's back.

She looked down at the astonished girls, and then at the paddock beyond the stables. There were a few jumps there, just poles balanced on barrels.

Without her moving a muscle, the horse turned and trotted into the paddock and turned towards the highest jump. There was a sensation of bunched energy, a moment of acceleration, and the jump passed underneath . . .

Binky turned and halted, prancing from one hoof to the other.

The girls were watching. All four of them had an expression of total amazement.

‘Should it do that?' said Jade.

‘What's the matter?' said Susan. ‘Have none of you seen a horse jump before?'

‘Yes. The interesting point is . . .' Gloria began, in that slow, deliberate tone of voice people use when they don't want the universe to shatter, ‘. . . is that, usually, they come down again.'

Susan looked.

The horse was standing on the air.

What sort of command was necessary to make a horse resume contact with the ground? It was an instruction that the equestrian sorority had not hitherto required.

As if understanding her thoughts, the horse trotted forward and down. For a moment the hoofs dipped
below
the field, as if the surface were no more substantial than mist. Then Binky appeared to determine where the ground level should be, and decided to stand on it.

Lady Sara was the first one to find her voice.

‘We'll tell Miss Butts of
youewa
,' she managed.

Susan was almost bewildered with unfamiliar fright, but the petty-mindedness in the tones slapped her back to something approaching sanity.

‘Oh yes?' she said. ‘And
what
will you tell her?'

‘You made the horse jump up and . . .' The girl stopped, aware of what she was about to say.

‘Quite so,' said Susan. ‘I expect that seeing horses float in the air is silly, don't you?'

She slipped off the horse's back, and gave the watchers a bright smile.

‘It's against school rules, anyway,' muttered Lady Sara.

Susan led the white horse back into the stables, rubbed him down, and put him in a spare loose-box.

There was a rustling in the hay-rack for a moment. Susan thought she caught a glimpse of ivory-white bone.

‘Those
wretched
rats,' said Cassandra, struggling back to reality. ‘I heard Miss Butts tell the gardener to put poison down.'

‘Shame,' said Gloria.

Lady Sara seemed to have something boiling in her mind.

‘Look, that horse didn't really stand in mid-air, did it?' she demanded. ‘Horses can't do that!'

‘Then it couldn't have done it,' said Susan.

‘Hang time,' said Gloria. ‘That's all it was. Hang time. Like in basketball.
⁶
Bound to be something like that.'

‘Yes.'

‘That's all it was.'

‘Yes.'

The human mind has a remarkable ability to heal. So have the trollish and dwarfish minds. Susan looked at them in frank amazement. They'd all seen a horse stand on the air. And now they had carefully pushed it somewhere in their memories and broken off the key in the lock.

‘Just out of interest,' she said, still eyeing the hay-rack, ‘I don't suppose any of you know where there's a wizard in this town, do you?'

‘I've found us somewhere to play!' said Glod.

‘Where?' said Lias.

Glod told them.

‘The Mended Drum?'
said Lias. ‘They throw
axes
!'

‘We'd be safe there. The Guild won't play in there,' said Glod.

‘Well, yah, dey lose members in there. Their
members
lose members,' said Lias.

‘We'll get five dollars,' said Glod.

The troll hesitated.

‘I could use five dollars,' he conceded.

‘One-third of five dollars,' said Glod.

Lias's brow creased.

‘Is that more or less than five dollars?' he said.

‘Look, it'll get us exposure,' said Glod.

‘I don't want exposure in de Drum,' said Lias. ‘Exposure's the last thing I want in de Drum. In de Drum, I want something to hide behind.'

‘All we have to do is play something,' said Glod. ‘Anything. The new landlord is dead keen on pub entertainment.'

‘I thought they had a one-arm bandit.'

‘Yes, but he got arrested.'

There's a floral clock in Quirm. It's quite a tourist attraction.

It turns out to be not what they expect.

Unimaginative municipal authorities throughout the multiverse had made floral clocks, which turn out to be a large clock mechanism buried in a civic flower-bed with the face and numbers picked out in bedding plants.
⁷

But the Quirm clock is simply a round flower-bed, filled with twenty-four different types of flower, carefully chosen for the regularity of the opening and closing of their petals . . .

As Susan ran past, the Purple Bindweed was opening and Love-in-a-Spin was closing. This meant that it was about half past ten.

The streets were deserted. Quirm wasn't a night town. People who came to Quirm looking for a good time went somewhere else. Quirm was so respectable that even dogs asked permission before going to the lavatory.

At least, the streets were
almost
deserted. Susan fancied she could hear something following her, fast and pattering, moving and dodging across the cobbles so quickly that it was never more than a suspicion of a shape.

Susan slowed down as she reached Three Roses Alley.

Somewhere in Three Roses near the fish shop, Gloria had said. The gels were not encouraged to know about wizards. They did not figure in Miss Butts's universe.

The alley looked alien in the darkness. A torch burned in a bracket at one end. It merely made the shadows darker.

And, halfway along in the gloom, there was a ladder leaning against the wall and a young woman just preparing to climb it. There was something familiar about her.

She looked around as Susan approached, and seemed quite pleased to see her.

‘Hi,' she said. ‘Got change of a dollar, miss?'

‘Pardon?'

‘Couple of half-dollars'd do. Half a dollar is the rate. Or I'll take copper. Anything, really.'

‘Um. Sorry. No. I only get fifty pence a week allowance anyway.'

‘Blast. Oh, well, nothing for it.'

In so far as Susan could see, the girl did not appear to be the usual sort of young woman who made her living in alleys. She had a kind of well-scrubbed beefiness about her; she looked like a nurse of the sort who assist doctors whose patients occasionally get a bit confused and declare they're a bedspread.

She looked familiar, too.

The girl took a pair of pliers from a pocket in her dress, shinned up the ladder and climbed in through an upper window.

Susan hesitated. The girl had seemed quite business-like about it all, but in her limited experience people who climbed ladders to get into houses at night were Miscreants whom Plucky Gels should Apprehend. And she might at least have gone to look for a watchman, had it not been for the opening of a door further up the alley.

Two men staggered out, arm in arm, and zigzagged happily towards the main street. Susan stepped back. No one bothered her when she didn't want to be noticed.

The men walked through the ladder.

Either the men weren't exactly solid, and they certainly sounded solid enough, or there was something wrong with the ladder. But the girl had climbed it . . .

. . . and was now climbing down again, slipping something into her pocket.

‘Never even woke up, the little cherub,' she said.

‘Sorry?' said Susan.

‘Didn't have 50p on me,' said the girl. She swung the ladder easily up on to her shoulder. ‘Rules are rules. I had to take another tooth.'

‘Pardon?'