The Hounds of the Morrigan (22 page)

‘Did it?’ echoed Melodie Moonlight.

‘Did it?’ said Breda as she deftly flambéd the mess in the pan.

The hound cringed and stayed silent.

‘What will I do with you?’ asked The Mórrígan thoughtfully.

‘Turn him into a sausage while I’ve got the pan on,’ said Breda Fairfoul.

‘Dogskin slippers might be romantic,’ Melodie Moonlight sighed sweetly.

The Mórrígan looked at the thrush where it had struggled to a perch near the roof of the glasshouse. It looked bedraggled and extremely flustered. She had a thought of her own.

‘Change,’ she said.

And now, the thrush became the hound. And the hound, who was the one called Fowler, turned into the thrush.

They had become each other.

In the instant that the change had happened, the real thrush had jumped down because it had lost its perch with its form and would have fallen. It was now snatching and snapping at the terrified Fowler who flew in a demented panic all round the glasshouse.

‘How funny,’ said Melodie Moonlight.

‘Very merry,’ said Breda.

But the fair woman, who was The Mórrígan, soon tired of it and allowed each of the creatures to turn back into being itself.

Fowler looked humbled and wilted beyond description. The thrush looked slightly drunk and a little bit cocky. It found an open pane and flew away, dizzily. It hadn’t a true idea of how lucky it really was.

‘Eating on duty is forbidden, Fowler,’ The Mórrígan said.

He was far too shaken to reply.

The Mórrígan threw her chessboard and its men aside. As the pieces fell, they lost the artificial life that she had put into them for fun; and were made of insensible wood.

‘Findepath must sharpen his nose. I am not pleased with his lack of craft. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Great Queen,’ Fowler whispered faintly.

‘You have leave to go.’

‘Thank you for my life, Great Queen,’ he whispered almost inaudibly; like the true subject of any tyrant, showing gratitude for being allowed to keep what was his own.

‘A modest gift,’ was the reply, in a tone that clearly said his life was not worth thinking about. The glasshouse door opened.

Fowler left the glasshouse as quickly as he could, grateful to be alive and with his legs still shaky from terror. But a small seed of anger spasmed inside him and bold thoughts came into his head.

‘I don’t think I care much for Domestic Science,’ Breda remarked and she threw the disgusting and poisonous mess out.

Melodie put the hedgehog down on the floor and plaited up her hair in a high crown on top of her head.

‘Let us begin,’ The Mórrígan said, and picking up a cat, she dusted a great big table that now appeared in the middle of the glasshouse.

‘You have made the inside of this place bigger than the outside and broken some Laws of Physics,’ Melodie observed admiringly.

‘You have your charm bracelet?’ Breda enquired.

The Mórrígan showed a wrist, where a charm bracelet, hung down with all kinds of gold replicas of things, dangled heavily.

The table-top shimmered and now it was a very small version of the landscape where Pidge and Brigit walked. It was possible to see them—two tiny, live figures travelling along.

The Mórrígan detached an object from her bracelet and placed it on the landscape at some distance ahead of the children.

Then the three women sat round the table and waited. They had long, pointed sticks which they held ready.

In time, another little live figure appeared on the scene but as yet, only just on the edge. He was only just discernible before he was enveloped in mist, but they knew who he was.

‘Findepath is through!’ they all shouted triumphantly.

Other little figures appeared on the edge. The women prodded them with their pointed wands.

The hedgehog, lying on the floor in a ball, waited until they were deeply engrossed in what they were doing, before he quietly uncurled himself and crept soundlessly out of the door that was slightly ajar, from when Fowler had left in his highly disturbed state.

The hedgehog shuffled along outside and wouldn’t have looked back if he’d been offered his weight in slugs.

‘It was only a funny dream,’ he told himself firmly and kept his nose to the ground.

T
HE
outsides of the walls of The Field Of The Seven Maines were blackened and scorched from the lashes the lightning had given, and when Pidge saw this, he blamed himself for being foolish and thinking it couldn’t hurt them; but he was glad and very relieved indeed that they had been lucky.

Leaving the field behind, they went on the diagonal the geese had flown and every so often, Pidge gave the glass ball a shake and saw that the hounds were still not able to find their way through.

Pleased by this, they walked on, and sometimes they found little sheep paths and sometimes they did not; and sometimes they climbed over walls and other times they crossed ditches and went through gaps and round bushes of thorn and hazel and such things.

All this time Brigit watched the ground, looking from side to side, mostly; but now and again, she stopped and looked at the ground behind her, as if he might have missed something.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m looking for that bloody pebble,’ she said with a glint in her eye.

‘Brigit, you’re not supposed to use language like that.’

‘Like what? You know he said it had that one’s blood on it?’

‘You’re just being smart. You just wanted the chance to say it.’

She didn’t say anything but made her face look very innocent and affronted.

‘Anyway,’ Pidge continued, ‘we’re not
supposed
to look for it; we’re just supposed to find it.’

‘How are we to do that?’

‘How do I know? We’ll just have to see what happens.’

‘Would you like a bit of chocolate?’ she asked and took it from her pocket.

‘Oh good. I’d forgotten about that.’

‘I hadn’t. I wish I could have given a bit to the Maines. I
was
going to at first; but I didn’t, ’cos—you know.’

‘What?’ he asked.

‘There was nowhere for them to eat it to. They could bite it and taste it and chew it, all right; but there was nowhere to swallow it to. Isn’t it an awful pity about them, Pidge?’

She broke the bar of chocolate in halves and gave Pidge his share.

‘Yes, it is. Sometimes you’re very kind, Brigit.’

‘I know,’ she said.

They ate their chocolate as they went.

Sometimes they walked on soft grass and sometimes they walked through coarse sedge and other times they tripped over stones and snags; but they were not at all tired. Brigit didn’t like the times they tripped over stones and other inscrutable nuisances and said so. Pidge didn’t like them either but he didn’t say anything. Mostly, they talked of the Seven Maines and Queen Maeve, and Brigit kept wondering things like: what kind of a Crown did she have, and did she have silver dresses and diamond shoes, and what kind of things would they have for their breakfasts, in the olden days.

Then a moment came when Pidge looked again in the scrying-glass and had to realize that the hounds had found the way through the stones; for he saw that the place was deserted but for the last hound of all, going through purposefully; and he saw its tail disappear in the mist.

‘If they come near
me
,’ said Brigit, ‘they’ll get a swipe on the gob and I mean it.’ Her eyebrows went together and her bottom lip stuck out as she practised how she would look, if they caught up.

But Pidge wasn’t really listening.

They had been warned it would happen and he knew that he should have expected it; but it seemed too soon. He had hoped for a better start.

At first he could barely believe it and stood in a bit of a daze, not thinking at all, while he stared into the glass ball with eyes that saw nothing.

And when he did believe it, he accepted that it really was so; and with Brigit keeping up with him easily, he strode resolutely on.

‘They still have to get our scent and even find the right spot where we got off the boat. They’ll have to run over every inch until they find it.’

‘There’s enough of them, the whelps!’ Brigit said, glaring.

Presently, they came to a small hill and they got a view of the mountains in the west at last; but there was a deep, screening haze like many thicknesses of gauze and only the tips were bare. They were the Twelve Pins, all right; that much, at least, was plain.

But there was a difference in the way they looked: they broke the skyline in an unfamiliar way, so that Pidge couldn’t know, even roughly, where they now were from the point in his mind, that said home.

He was beginning to be a bit uncertain of the direction the geese had taken and began to doubt his path. Was he going a bit too much to the left or the right? He couldn’t be sure, anymore.

In a short time, it was twilight. It would be dark soon.

They needed a place to sleep for the night. Just somewhere dry and sheltered, for fear of wind or rain, would do: it needn’t be a house.

He was half-tempted to keep walking to put an even greater distance between themselves and the hounds, but he well knew that if they walked across country that was strange to them, without light to see where they were going, they really could fall into a bog-hole and get drenched, or tumble over an edge or sprain an ankle; and they would certainly go even further off course than during the day.

He kept an eye out for a likely place. A cart-house would be great, he thought.

The day was almost entirely gone when they found themselves close to a pine forest.

They looked behind and saw no movement of any kind in the broad sweep of land they had crossed. Even in the gloom they would have seen movement, if any of the hounds had actually been following them, Pidge was sure. Hoping he was right in thinking this, he held Brigit’s hand and they ran the last bit.

There is nothing in the world as enticing as a wood of any kind, because of its mysteries. They went inside to see what it was like. Pidge was pleased to find that it was dry underfoot and that the air trapped inside by the roof of branches was warmer than when they were outside. It felt cosy and safe.

When it was dark, they had made a snug for themselves and lay down on the thick flooring of dry pine-needles.

The resinous scent was wonderful.

When it was pitch-dark, they fell asleep.

In the morning when they woke up early, so early that it was the day’s beginning, they found that they had slept very close to a part of the forest that was cleared of trees, where a small spring came out of the ground and threw itself in a modest waterfall over a few small boulders.

The sky was streaked with long, ruby gashes frilled with apricot clouds and they felt breathless at the sight of it, for there was not only colour but amazing light, so that the whole, mad, beautiful concourse, with the sun glinting behind it, could truly be the doorstep of Paradise.

For a long time they stood—heads tilted—and filled their eyes.

By and by, they went to the spring and drank; and Brigit whispered that she wished this little spring were in the Field Of The Seven Maines, so that they could look at it every day, it was so pretty.

The water tasted perfect.

It was a morning of wonderful stillness and the wood was a beautiful place to be; not the smallest movement of wind to make the trees rustle and sigh. And then the birds burst into the fullest flood of song, almost as if they had waited a little longer than usual to see the dawn themselves and were triumphant that it was so splendid and they were justified.

The boy and the girl touched the trees and smelled them: they saw the bright green of the ferns and the darker green of the pines, with smokey blue shadows all about the trunks of those further away, ready to faint away altogether if anyone came too close. They tasted the air with as much pleasure as when they had tasted the water, and they listened to the sound of the birds.

The forest satisfied everything, and most of all—the sense of mystery.

They walked through it in what Pidge hoped was the right direction, enjoying the birdsong until the very last note was sung. As they walked, they were visited by every wild thing, curious to see the creatures that walked on two legs through their world.

All of the birds flew down to low branches and observed them with their heads cocked sideways, for all the world as if they each had only one good eye to see out of—some old people, and a lot of pirates, seem to do this too. Squirrels scampered all around them, pausing at times to look, pleating the skin round their nostrils as they sniffed and tried to know them by scent. Rabbits sat in groups and did the same thing with greater bravura, as though it was their special skill. Other small animals watched keeping well-hidden, peering from behind boulders or clumps of bracken or fallen dead wood in a shy kind of prying, just as though they were people who were nosey but respectable; but they were only nervous, and far too natural to be respectable.

In the blue shadows, there was the outline of a small herd of deer which kept in a close bunch around a stag—all heads up and alert and his crowned with his proud antlers.

If they made a noise at all, the animals were careful to break the silence gently as if in church, and the dawn chorus of the birds had been a glorification; to be properly followed by a time of quiet, as the day was still so young. Later they would chatter and argue and sing again, when the sun was big enough to give permission.

Pidge and Brigit were totally wrapped up in this quietness: the whole world existed in what they were seeing with their wide-open eyes.

It was shocking then, when they heard from deeper in the wood, the sound of an axe going hard against a tree, as a woodcutter went to work:

BOK! BOK! BOK!

All the small creatures took offence at this brutal sound and, leaving the children, they made for their homes and safety.

And the chopping went on without mercy.

I
T
is easy to travel through a pine wood because the undergrowth is always sparse. Apart from the fallen dead wood which may be climbed over or walked round, there is little else that might be called an obstacle. True, there are always the occasional patches of fern and bramble, but these are never dense and are not the stubborn barriers that they can be, in an old wood of mixed trees that is mostly untrodden. Some people prefer one kind of wood to the other; some people are fond of both kinds.