The Changes Trilogy (57 page)

“I am no more astonished that you have succeeded. With a weapon of that caliber.”

The staff officers smiled obediently.

“Thomas,” said the General, “envoyez des hommes chercher un bon cheval. Au delà de ces collines j'ai vu des petites fermes. We will talk to Mr. Furbelow in Paris. Goodbye, M'sieu.”

As the stretcher-bearers stooped to the poles Mr. Furbelow turned to the children.

“I trust I shall see you again, my dears,” he said. “I have much to thank you for.”

“You are not alone,” barked the General. “I too, England too, all have much to thank them for.”

“The General will send you to Weymouth to stay with us,” said Sally, “when your leg's better.”

“I should appreciate that,” said Mr. Furbelow.

He was lifted into a helicopter, which heaved itself rowdily off the ground, tilted its tail up and headed south. Five soldiers left to look for a second horse, but before they'd been gone ten minutes there was a noise of baying, followed by shots.

“Oh, Lord,” said Geoffrey, “I forgot about the wolves. I hope your men are all right.”

The Englishman grinned. “Excellent practice,” he said.

“This Mr. Furbelow,” snapped the General, “he will tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” said Geoffrey, “as much as he knows.”

The General looked at him, sucking his moustache, for ages.

“Could somebody please look at my ankle?” said Geoffrey.

The third man shouted again, and one of the stretchermen ran over. He had very strong, efficient hands, like tools designed to do a particular job, and he dressed Geoffrey's leg with ointments and a tight bandage. He spoke friendlily to Geoffrey in French, which the Englishman translated. Apparently there was only a mild strain, but the pain was caused by bruising. The General strutted off to listen to a radio in one of the helicopters. Watching him, Geoffrey realized why he had been so helpful about sending them back to Weymouth: it wouldn't do to have
two
heroes returning to France.

The soldiers began to lounge at their posts, but still kept a sharp watch on the forest, a ring of modern weapons directed outward against an enemy who all the time lay in their midst, deep under the ridged rock, sleeping away the centuries.

They rode south three days later. The General had left six men to guard them, and together they went up the higher track. Half the oaks had fallen in the earthquake, and the ride was blocked every few yards. They saw no wolves. On the shoulder of the hill they said good-bye to their escort and went on alone.

The countryside was in a strange state. At almost every cottage gate there would be a woman standing to ask for news. On the first day, as they passed a group of farm buildings, they heard a wild burst of cheering and a rusty tractor chugged out into the open followed by a gang of excited men. Later they passed a car which had been pushed out into the road. Tools lay all around it and a man was sitting on the bank with his head between oily hands. The sky was busy with airplanes. They bought lunch at a store which was full of people who hadn't really come to buy anything, but only to swap stories and rumors. One woman told how she'd found herself suddenly wide awake in the middle of the night and had stretched out, for the first time in five years, to switch on the bedside light. Other people nodded. They'd done the same. Another woman came in brandishing a can opener, and was immediately besieged with requests to borrow it. There was an old man who blamed the whole thing on the atom bomb, and got into an angry argument with another old man who thought it had all been done by Communists.

While they were eating their lunch it began to rain. They sheltered under a chestnut tree, but the rain didn't stop and drips began to seep between the broad leaves.

“Oh, Jeff, please stop it!”

Geoffrey felt under his jerkin for the gold robe, but didn't put it on. He realized, with a shock of regret, that now that the Necromancer lay asleep again other things had settled back into place, and his own powers were gone. Nothing that he could do would alter the steady march of weeping clouds, or call down perfect summers, or summon snow for Christmas. Not ever again.

And the English air would soon be reeking with petrol fumes.

A Biography of Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf's crazy twin, but he's just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn't get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather's sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn't have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

He's led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it's a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter's screams, not the boy's.)

And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine
Punch
and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

Peter says he didn't
become
a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can't be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They've probably clipped one of its wings so that it can't hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it's still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he'd still be a writer.

But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children's story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children's book was made into a TV series.)

Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he's got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all's well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he's heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter's mind and said, “Write me.” Then he'll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won't be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer's daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter's books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in
Perfect Gallows
.

The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan's, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.

This is a photo taken in 1936 during a family holiday at Stutton. The Fisons had been very good friends with Peter's father and stayed close to his family after his death. They invited the Dickinsons to stay with them for several vacations at their house on one of the Suffolk inlets. They would spend most of the day in boats on a local pond or on the nearby beach. Here you can see the kids lined up on the beach from tallest to shortest. From left to right: Elizabeth Fison, Peter's brother Richard, Peter, Gay Fison, and Peter's youngest brother, David. Peter doesn't remember why his brother Hugh is not in this picture. Perhaps he was taking the photo.