The Sending (12 page)

I went over to the cottage with Ginny, pretending that it was just a friendly call. When Ginny saw Rita's eyes and the general mess—how different from the scented day when I had lunched there!—she exclaimed that she was going to stay and clean up until dear Miss Vernon could get somebody else, and meanwhile she was sure that Mr Alfgif wouldn't mind. She played her part brilliantly, shooing me away and filling the place with her calm and sweetness.

Only a fortnight ago I boasted to Rita that I had won; and she, seeing more clearly than I the dangers of this primeval cult into which I have blundered, answered: if you have won. I suspect that I have not, though Rita should be as invulnerable to a curse as any politician. She is a highly civilised, urban woman with none of the hunting receptors. I myself can be persecuted by a competent shaman. She, I should have thought, could not. And yet…and yet over and over again in the witch trials of England and in the present practice of African witch-doctors one comes across the sending of this singular apathy which ends in death.

How perfect an object for retribution, if that is what Odolaga wants! But can he know how important she is to me? I must find out what really brought him here again. Concha Pirrone, who entertains no suspicions, may be able to give me a lead. She said that she wanted to meet the famous Meg again and be shown my funny, square English house and its garden.

August 10

I asked her to tea. When the chauffeur opened the door of the car for her she waddled imposingly out, looking like an overfed Spanish princess in mourning, and greeted me with just the proper convent-trained graciousness. She became almost flirtatious as I took her across the lawn into hidden corners where old Walter, whose taste is for miniature effects, had imposed discipline. Her visit wasn't very correct, was it? Giggle, giggle. But she was sure that Victor wouldn't mind if—giggle, giggle—Miss Vernon did not. She looked up at me with her head on one side waiting for crumbs. I replied that Miss Vernon's interests ran to six hundred pages with footnotes, and added ‘unfortunately' to avoid the impression that I found Rita tedious—too gross a lie to be believed.

On so English a day, with wind lazily moving clouds in the upper atmosphere and the air motionless over the ground, tea in the garden was traditional, but I doubted if I had a chair that would hold her. The tough, ancestral canvas of my father's deckchairs was showing signs of age and she could not possibly fit between the iron arms of the white-painted garden seats. There was no Ginny to solve the problem, so I had embellished the curved stone bench in the bower of the too straggly rose garden with gay cushions and laid the tea table opposite with Meg in attendance.

Too straggly! How could I have written that? I find in myself a neat desire to clean it up and commit a lady-like water colour. To hell with this passivity! All my home and its valley used to be my garden. Have the forests of tiger brother, so rich with life, clean gone from my blood? And who painted the Holy Well and the Columns of the Sun?

Meg, after investigating the delicate feet (being born an Odolaga, Concha had no fear of her), decided that the rest was too ponderous and humped away with a slice of cake from which she extracted the almonds and currants, leaving the remainder for the birds. Undoubtedly bait, not charity.

I did not have to introduce the subject of Uncle Izar. Prattling sweetly about empty incidents of an empty week she did it herself, telling me that Victor had brought him down from London for the night and they had had such fun. They had been talking after dinner about hypnotism and things—Odolaga of course leading the conversation warily towards the ‘things'—and Victor had said it was all nonsense and got up to open another bottle, which he always did when people talked about what he did not want to understand. And then Uncle Izar said he would show him, and he hypnotised poor Leyalá who gave a squawk and fell off his perch. She told him he was very naughty and he was to put her lovely back at once, so he waved his hands and Leyalá got right way up and didn't seem to know what had happened to him.

So far I had two interesting revelations: the debriefing of Leyalá and the fact that she was sure to have gossiped about the suspected idyll between the two lonely neighbours far apart from each other but joined together by the clear water and the woods.

She told me that Uncle Izar could heal. Yes, really! She remembered that when she was a little girl she had fallen down and cut her cheek open and he had stopped the bleeding. Well, somebody had to know how to cure up there in the valleys where until recently, if medical attention were needed, patient or doctor had to ride or walk.

This gave me an opening. I dared not ask for Odolaga's address in case he heard I had done so and guessed why, so I asked what sort of country was that of her mother's family.

‘Oh, it's so hard to explain,' she said. ‘It's between two main roads to France and though it's in Spain it's easier to reach from France. Terrible, fierce country but so very green and beautiful.'

‘And doesn't Victor believe that Mr Odolaga can heal?' I asked.

Her artless babble of a reply was so packed with information that I must try to remember her own words and put them down for future reference.

‘He says he doesn't. He says he has had enough of that sort of thing from ignorant peasants in Sicily, but Uncle Izar is quite different. He's wonderful. When Victor first came to Bilbao he fell off the dry dock and had concussion and afterwards a sort of stroke and couldn't move his fingers on one hand. The doctors said it would be very long before he was well. So my mother sent for Izar—he's her first cousin, you see—and in a week Victor could hold a pen again and write.

‘Well, we were both so fond of each other already, but my father wouldn't hear of me marrying a Sicilian. He thought Sicilians were horrible people, all bandits and gangsters. But Izar kept on insisting that Victor was the right man for me and he went to Sicily himself to meet the family. And when he came back he said that they too had a mountain estate and we had a lot in common with them. My father declared that he couldn't see that the Odolagas and the Pirrones had anything in common except that they had no bathrooms and kept sheep. But my mother and Izar got their own way and we were married.'

It's sticking out a mile what the Pirrones and Odolagas had in common. And I have more understanding of Victor. In spite of the best proof of faith healing he could possibly want, he won't face it. He may resemble my father, who had not inherited the Alfgif faculties, showed no interest, wouldn't let himself believe and brought me up with no information beyond the most prosaic family history. Like him, Victor avoids the inexplicable. He knows a lot—I remember Rita saying that he was a rich source of footnotes—but dismisses it all as peasant superstition. I wonder if it has occurred to him to question his astonishing luck in material matters.

Myself I know nothing of luck, nor, I think, did tiger brother, though naturally he took credit for any stroke of luck that came the way of the clan. The conversation between Paddy and George Midwinter at the races is the only intimation I have that luck can be influenced. After saying that he would never use his gift to make money, Paddy added that if anything could make two liquids in the same glass remain separate when mixed it would be the interference of mind. He also made the odd remark that one could be director of a brewery without knowing how to pull a pint. Did that mean that he was aware of certain specialities of Robins but he himself did not or could not practice them? However that may be, he could bring luck to his friends without pulling any mysterious pints, as he brought to me when he sent round Molay, that stately Levantine customer of his who bought and did not buy the Holy Well. I wonder what his relations with Paddy were. At the time I had no reason for my present curiosity.

I parted from Concha Pirrone on affectionate terms. I like the woman and her gentle face. It is no fault of hers that her godfather is a murderer and as vicious a witch as ever deserved hanging. I could forgive him for what he did to me. I would at least listen to his dogma of why Paddy had to die. But his attack on Rita cries out for action and revenge.

Revenge. I don't really mean that. Revenge is pointless. What I do mean is: Stop it or else! But what ‘or else'? A miserable Robin I should make! I do not know enough to protect her. I merely guess at the realities of a tradition which Paddy and great great grandfather preserved. I'd give this Uncle Izar a sending of all the imps in hell if I could call them up—assuming of course that the illusion would frighten him.

Frighten him. There's the germ of an idea. I can remember tiger brother laughing with some embarrassment when I once accused him of descending to conjuring tricks. He replied that the power had left him, and it was understood between us—without coarsely referring to it in so many words—that his dependent clans must not be tempted to present him with second-rate cuts of monkey because he was giving a second-rate service. Conjuring tricks, yes. A betrayal but pardonable. When a priest, as must sometimes happen, finds that his faith is overwhelmed by flat and empty reasoning he does not black out the altar and take a cut in salary. Routine supports him till meaning returns to prayer.

Odolaga is probably afraid of me as rather more than an awkward witness in court. There is the behaviour and failure of Leyalá to be considered. There is Paddy's gift of his familiar. There is the rumour of esoteric knowledge picked up by me in India. If any sinister and unaccountable disaster were to strike him, his guilty conscience could very well jump at the so-called occult for an explanation rather than a tiger brother fraud.

Malevolence, I am sure, can be carried by the adept to the target through direct transmission or by way of the familiar. It may or may not have been the cause of that fool spraining his ankle when he distracted me as I was near to painting the Columns of the Sun. But there are simpler methods that I have learned from hunting man. If by close observation the shaman works out beforehand the probable course of his human prey he can set a trap—perhaps material, perhaps subjective, but always inscrutable—and afterwards can publicise his triumph as due to the excellent intelligence reports he is continually receiving from the ancestral spirits.

However, no shaman could preserve his secrets on the open downs of Wessex. More opportunities are offered by the country where Odolaga lives. Concha described it as terrible and fierce but beautiful, and Sir Victor had said something of precipices and pastures. All I had in the house was a copy of The Song of Roland in Norman French and modern French which Rita lent me—an 800-year-old authority—but the minstrel could not have gone far wrong on the general topography:

 

High are the mountains, high and huge and shadowed,

The valleys deep, their waters running fast.

 

That impulsive translation misses the melancholy refrain of the Norman French but tells of country where I should be at home, allowing for more clothes than the loin cloth I wore among the Birhors—so long as the forests are still there. ‘Tenebrus' must refer, I think, to trees as well as the north face of gorges. There may be language trouble, but so near the frontier French should carry me through. The real difficulty will be to keep the close presence of a stranger hidden from Odolaga.

Chapter Seven

August 16

THIS JOURNAL HAS BECOME more than a habit. Started as an attempt to analyse the sending and thus preserve my sanity, I keep it up for reference in case the unknowables of malice and geography become instant, sinister beyond my comprehension and demanding.

I am writing this at dawn of what should be the final day. I have made myself comfortable as any expectant carnivore at the edge of the tree line, where I have only to crawl up a little to watch and consider my objective. All senses are awake as they have not been since dawn in the hills of the Deccan and most certainly were not when I left Penminster in a state of stagnant apathy only relieved by anger.

So far as Penminster is concerned, I have gone to Paris to see an old friend in the Embassy of India. George Midwinter has taken Meg, and I can imagine him surreptitiously trying to prove a value in which he half believes; in any case they understand each other. Rita remained impenetrable, only saying a little formally that she hoped I had not decided to go away because I had lent her Ginny.

I must admit I am pleased with myself. Even tiger brother would have found it hard to slip through such country and remain unseen, except as a distant figure on the high pastures. My object has been to remain a ghost while in Odolaga's homeland. I intend to leave no shred of evidence for the Civil Guard and yet to allow Uncle Izar to suspect, when the time comes for it, that I might be responsible for whatever damage a ghost can do.

I crossed the Pyrenees from Pau to Huesca to avoid leaving a record of my passage through any of the frontier posts in the Basque country. I then drove west to Pamplona where I found a lock-up garage in which to park my car. Next morning I took a bus along the road to Bayonne and got off it, still on the Spanish side of the frontier, at what seemed a plausible point for a middle-aged hiker, well tanned and as impermeable as a tortoise, to start exploring the Pyrenees.

I was glad to find that the equipment of present-day youth, so neatly framed to carry on the back, was not as heavy as I expected and that so long as I only had to climb slopes, not rocks, I was easily fit enough to tackle any cross-country route. I brought along half a metre of Pamplona sausage, some bread, fruit, and a litre of brandy to mix with my water. I had no weapons beyond an old and trustworthy hunting knife, a length of whipcord, a handful of goose feathers and a dozen ballpoint pens. Nothing in that lot for Customs to suspect.

How long it would take me to run Odolaga to earth I had no idea, for I dared not ask questions and the only pointer was Concha Pirrone's remark that he lived between the two roads to France and was easier to reach from France than from Spain. After leaving the bus on the eastern road, I followed it on foot up to the top of the pass and there sat down to equate what I saw with the small-scale map which was the only one I could find. Eyes and the map agreed. There was blank nothing except green mountain swelling up over green mountain, not a visible village and not a road beyond donkey tracks disappearing into the valleys. In a sense that eased my problem, for if Odolaga had a profitable estate in the middle of nothing, there must be somewhere a wider track by which transport could come and go.

The most likely key to him seemed to be a village called Zugarramurdi, which could not be reached without going down the winding pass almost to the frontier and then turning back into the hills. One could say that it was easier to reach from France than Spain. If that was his nearest village it had to be avoided at all costs but offered an objective for the march. Another pointer—a hint rather than evidence—suggested that I was on ground which the officers of the Inquisition had searched before me. Just before the frontier and close to the road to Zugarramurdi the map showed a tourist attraction called Cave of the Witch. Tradition lingers on where there is so little to disturb it.

Choosing a moment when no one was in sight, I scrambled down to a river on the west of the road and followed it towards France until I came to a tributary rushing down from the broken range where I wanted to be. The Song of Roland now came into its own. Though I would not call the mountains high, they gave an impression of massiveness and the valleys were certainly deep, with racing water at the bottom. It was slow going, partly because I stuck to the banks of the stream, usually pathless, and partly because here and there the valleys opened out into little meadows, even more lovely than the Hollaston paradise where William Hutchins fattens his bullocks—either flowered lawns after the hay harvest or proud with the blades and russet tassels of the maize. Often there was a lonely farmhouse, invisible among the timber till I was on it, and I had to make a silent detour to avoid the smallholder, his dogs and children. During winter it must be impossible to travel far, and hard to communicate with a neighbour.

With an hour of daylight to go and seeing an easy slope to the south, I left the valley and came out on a ridge from which I had a view of the surrounding country. I reckoned that Zugarramurdi was about six miles away as the crow flies, and would be much further for anyone compelled to travel secretly across the grain of the land and depending on compass bearings. I was reminded of old days and roundabout routes forced by torrents and cliffs, where one might not meet another soul in the jungle for a hundred miles. Here my trouble was that I might meet someone round the next bend, unable to avoid his questions and the kindly meant escort to the right path for somewhere I did not want to go. To be seen on a distant skyline did not matter. I watched a party of hikers loaded much as I was and keeping to the high ground. Wherever I could do the same I should arouse no curiosity.

The key to the country seemed to be a steep cone, well to the west of Zugarramurdi and close to the line of the frontier. It was quite unlike the other hills, the base and sides covered with dark forest and the top bare so that it resembled a volcano where streams of green lava had poured down over black rock. I chose it as my first objective and made good time to the foot of the peak, since most of the way was over high pastures. In the lingering dusk I climbed up some eight hundred feet by way of a ravine where the snow water had washed away most of the dense cover of brush and bramble, leaving a stony passage through pools and over shelves of rock. When I came to a slender waterfall I camped beside it. However long I spend on this punitive expedition the half metre of Pamplona sausage will see me through. Marvellously concentrated stuff! And I need not have carried fruit. The first blackberries are ripe.

I woke just before dawn, unable to throw off a dream that I was within some vast Presence, swallowed as it might be by a giant. The mountain was surrounded by its own dawn like its own dark rock and foliage: an even ring of cloud below the pale sky. At sunrise this private cloud retired by wisps and layers into the hollows of the cone—formless shapes, but so dense that I could have made a wash portrait of them.

I continued the ascent as far as the beginning of the grass. It was a haunted but most convenient peak, for I could scramble most of the way round it in low cover, only climbing up to the open where the line of sight had to clear the tops of forest trees. To the east were the grander Pyrenees rising and falling like ocean swell and throwing up plumes of rock where tranquillity was shattered. Down a valley to the north was a glimpse of France; on the west the cone became more of a ridge, descending to a plateau broken by narrow, wooded valleys. White dots of sheep moved on the grass and lower down, in an amphitheatre of the hills, I could see cattle.

Neither house nor hamlet was visible, but a rough, paved track ran over the brow of the opposite hill leading towards the frontier. Everywhere else its course was hidden, never passing over open ground, so that it had to start from some settlement under the far edge of the plateau and out of sight. While I ate a late breakfast, stirring up imagination with a good mug of brandy and water, I was rewarded by seeing a small truck loaded with sacks bumping its way over the hill. I was then fairly sure that I had found Odolaga. The landscape and its stock suggested a single proprietor, not several.

It was essential that Uncle Izar should never be aware of what was on the way to him. Premonition would do him no good—if he possessed it and paid any attention to it—since the sending itself had as yet no plan of action. I went down the mountain by the ravine on the south side and circled round through the woods until I was below the pastures on the plateau. At last valley and stream offered thick cover and a way round to the west. After an hour of slow and very cautious progress—though the distance cannot have been more than half a mile—I saw before me a rough bridge of stone and timber where the track crossed the stream.

I crawled up the slope and put my head out of the scrub. Three hundred yards away was a splendid Basque manor house. The great gable was much longer on one side than the other, as in all the cottages I had seen. In the centre was a square postern leading to a courtyard and buildings. Windows were deep and narrow to keep out the snowstorms. Beams were massive. It was a castle, but a castle built against mountain winter. At the first attack the herds could rumble through the gate to comfortable quarters around the yard, and men from those isolated farms I had passed might later struggle in, desperate for help and waist-deep in snow, to the only relief they could reach. It's not surprising that the Basque witches were as famous for their healing as their dealings with the devil. I wonder if Odolaga, in this remoteness and at high festivals, still puts on his horns and tail.

And then I saw him—it could be no one else—standing on the terrace before the house and looking straight over my head. He was a broad, powerful figure in the flower of his age, dressed traditionally—I recognised the old-fashioned style from advertisements in Pamplona—in black shirt and trousers with a floppy Basque beret on his head. He was literally a Man in Black except for the flame-coloured sash around his waist. His bearing reminded me of a stout west-country farmer who will obstinately do what he thinks is right regardless of the consequences. Character and physique were formidable enough without counting the proficiency which had tortured me through poor, guiltless Leyalá and now had laid the witch-doctor's curse of apathy on Rita, employing some method which I could neither fathom by personal experiment nor the trances of tiger brother nor communion with Meg.

I waited where I was to see all I could of him, his servants and his environment. It wasn't much. There was no sign of a wife. She may have died young or never existed. Concha Pirrone had not mentioned Aunt Anything along with Uncle Izar. A farm hand or bailiff came round to see him and they had a cordial drink together on the terrace. Then a groom led out through that broad entranceway a good, stout cob which Odolaga mounted, trotting off round the house and up through the woods behind. It seemed likely that he was bound for the plateau to run his eyes over his sheep, so I returned on my route to the head of the valley, now sure that it was safe, and stealthily made my way up the edge of the plateau, leaving my awkward pack behind me in the woods.

This plain of rich, rough grass was bare of any sort of cover and sloped gently down to a valley on the north, containing the amphitheatre where I had seen a herd of cattle. As there was no sign of Odolaga I assumed he was down among the cows. Meanwhile I was in the only possible place for observation.

After an hour or so Odolaga rode up from the north, and by his side trotted the most handsome and vigorous billy goat I have ever seen: a magnifico of goats. It was pure black with short, dainty horns above the forehead curls, and in the prime of life. Odolaga dismounted, throwing the reins on the horse's neck and letting it loose to graze. Before doing so, it first nuzzled the goat and rested its head for a moment on the black neck.

Odolaga joined the pair, caressing both of them. He then walked off a little way and challenged the goat to butt his outstretched palms. It went for him, reducing speed just in time to slam forehead harmlessly into hands, and rose on hind legs with forelegs on his shoulders. I knew from the experience of my own familiar what the pair were expressing to each other, and I would have let myself surrender to the common joy if I had not also remembered why I was there and perceived to what precious object I must direct my sending.

As they came nearer, the low sun was full on Odolaga's face. It was massive and round but not fat, and topped by an unmanageable mass of grey hair. The grey eyes, in that light with a touch of green, were far apart and exceptionally large. Under the circumstances, my impression of him had to be more charitable than the first distant examination inspired by hatred.

After the play he rode off, leaving the black goat among the flock with a final caress. Dusk was now falling. I returned to my pack and ate and dozed a little till the moon should rise and give me enough light in that clear air to make a circuit of the plateau. In the heavy blue-black of twilight the Presence again threatened, created perhaps by the spent energies of former Odolagas which I did not fear but, being untrained, could not dispel. The cone was an uneasy place at any time, its shape so out of keeping with the general pattern of ridge, valley and great highlands. On this side of the mountain more birds were flying to roost than I had noticed on the south. Two pairs of ravens flapped over to some ledge in undiscovered cliffs, and when it was black night a loud Hoo-Hoo, close to and on a level with my face, made me lie still until I identified the caller: an eagle owl sitting under an awning of ivy on a branch lower down the steep slope, ears erect and staring at me with faintly luminous eyes so that it appeared a child-sized, fat, horned imp disapproving the intruder.

She could go on disapproving. A half moon was up and it was time to be on the move. I started off to do the round of the plateau, crossing to the curious outcrop of rocks where the escarpment began to rise from the ridge. The nesting place of the ravens was there, and with it a surprise. The plateau ended abruptly at a sheer precipice so deep that the slanting moonlight could not show me the bottom. I could hear water surging down the gorge. Its far side, worn down by freshets from the mountain, was not so sheer but quite unclimbable.