The White Wolf's Son (45 page)

A spear of rock detached itself from overhead and, whistling like a shell, landed ahead of us. More rock crashed from the
impact. We dived for any cover we could find. Another huge fragment fell, and another, but none too close to us. I was relieved
when at long last the shaking stopped.

“Bloody hell,” said Jack. “What was that?”

“Bastable’s bomb.” Oona paused. “So he’s done it at last! Targeted the seat of the Empire and blown it to bits. Whether he
survived or not, I guess we’ll find out later.”

“How do you mean? Wouldn’t a blast like that just wipe an airship out?” said Jack.

“Not if it’s Bastable’s,” she replied mysteriously. “He has a habit of being blown sideways, away from the result of his actions.”

This made St. Odhran smile, but it only baffled me and Jack.

“This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this,” said the Scottish aeronaut.

Lord Renyard still wanted us to hurry. We stopped and rested several more times, and although I tried to count the number
of days likely to be passing in my own world, I lost track somewhere.

Eventually Jack lifted his head, hearing something the rest of us did not, and pointed. Shortly afterwards we came again in
sight of that gloriously ethereal city of the Mu-Oorians, its pale, spiked towers rising into the cavernous gloom. Here we
were greeted as long-lost friends and treated to the best which that strange people could offer us, including their scholarly
conversation. We described our adventures, much to their awed approval. And then Lord Renyard announced his intention to spend
the rest of his days among this gentle people. “I pray you will not think me ungrateful for all the offers you have made.
But it would be best, I feel, if I remained with folk who see me not as an exotic sport of nature, but rather merely the last
of his race.”

The Off-Moo became agitated by the tale of the airship bombardment of Londra but accepted that an unspeakable
evil had been forestalled. How strange, they said, that so much energy was wasted on negotiating war, when peace could be
negotiated with exactly the same amount of effort and to far more profitable ends. They mourned all Londra’s innocents.

Invigorated by their integrity, we took our leave of the Off-Moo. We all found their world attractive. It offered a kind of
tranquility without loss of intellectual stimuli, a tranquility which could not be reproduced elsewhere. Lord Renyard was
happy to be with these old friends, he assured us. He promised to lead us to the surface and then would return to their city
after he had delivered us safely aboveground.

In our final journey we crossed underground hills and valleys washed by that peculiar silvery light. Sometimes, in the distance,
we saw herds of animals, pale descendants of creatures which had once roamed the surface of the world.

Less than a day later Jack lifted his head and pointed, sniffing the air, and we began the steep upward trudge to the surface.
I had hoped we might emerge just above Tower House on Ingleton Common, where I had first fallen into the World Below, but
that route was closed to us. Any caves which had temporarily opened up were filled in again. We finally squeezed into one
of the old mine shafts and crawled out through abandoned workings that the quarry blasting had closed off as dangerous. We
eventually got to the surface, emerging into one of Mr. Capstick’s fields, to the irritated surprise of his sheep. I forgot
my own happiness when I looked at Jack’s face. I never knew anyone who showed his joy so obviously. He took a deep breath
of that good dales air. “Are we home?” he asked.

I was blinking back my own tears. “It certainly looks like it,” I said.

Then Lord Renyard and I parted. I didn’t want him to go. He was just as upset. He gave me a lot of advice, most of it to do
with reading Rousseau and the Encyclopedists, and then he was gone, loping back into the darkness of the Middle March to continue
his lonely life among a people even stranger than himself. I was never to see him again.

We walked into a perfect dales morning, bright, crisp and clear. It was good to get some healthy northern air into my lungs.

“Come along,” said my grandmother briskly, stripping off her weapons and bits of her costume so she looked as if she were
wearing a fancy tracksuit, “let’s get down there, then. Your parents will be wanting to see you.”

A mile or so down the hill we soon spotted the grey granite tower of our house, where Mum and Dad were waiting for us with
some very bad news.

M
Y GRANDFATHER HAD
died the night before. He had waited in London to see if there was anything he could do to help, my parents said, but they
thought the anxiety had been just too much for his heart. Strangely, when they found him, he had seemed very much at peace
and had written, perhaps to cheer himself up, a note on his scratch pad. “She’s safe.” Nobody was entirely sure who “she”
was. He’d lived a fine life to a good age.

My grandmother, of course, took the train to town at once. She was very sad but soldiered on and made all the funeral arrangements
herself. It was amazing how many people came to old Count Ulric’s memorial service. The funeral picture appeared in most of
the papers, and they had it on TV. Grandma didn’t come back to Yorkshire. She had some family business to sort out in Mirenburg.
She said we weren’t to worry if we didn’t hear from her for a while.

Jack D’Acre was living with us. Oona had asked my mum and dad to make him part of our family. She left it to me to offer them
what details seemed relevant, but they were happy to have him. They assumed he was homeless, an orphan, the natural son of
some distant relative. He certainly had the family looks, they said. Alfy and Gertie
came back with us from London. They got on well with Jack.

Colonel Bastable had missed the funeral. He phoned from London later, then caught the train the following day. Dad picked
him up at the station. Bastable’s big Bentley tourer was still parked under canvas on the common. Red-eyed and laconic, he
asked if it would be all right if he stayed overnight and then drove out early the next morning, after he’d helped St. Odhran
inflate his balloon and get airborne. He needed a break, he said. Mum and Dad fussed over both men while they were at our
house. As they understood it, Bastable and St. Odhran had contributed enormously to my rescue when I was lost underground.

My parents were sorry they had missed Monsieur Zodiac, who had an engagement, St. Odhran told them, and sent his apologies.
They were glad to hear we wouldn’t be bothered by Klosterheim and Gaynor again. Those two had clearly been dynamiting new
routes down below.

Privately, I still missed Lord Renyard, but he had probably been right. My parents, though broad-minded and sophisticated,
weren’t ready for a man-size, talking, eighteenth-century-educated fox.

Colonel Bastable had apologized on behalf of Messrs. Lobkowitz and Fromental. He said some important national business had
taken them away.

I had one last conversation with St. Odhran. We went for a walk together over the tranquil hills above the house. I wanted
to know a bit about the Balance.

“The Balance was destroyed. Both sides wished to restore it for their own reasons,” he told me. He looked down at me. Those
eyes, which had managed to deceive me, were now frank, serious.

“Who destroyed it?”

He smiled sardonically and looked away up the fell. “The Champion,” he said.

“And the Champion restored it?”

“It looked that way, didn’t it?”

“Is nothing permanent? Even the Cosmic Balance? I thought it was the ordering mechanism for the multiverse!”

“It’s a symbol,” he said. “A useful one, but a symbol. Sometimes we fight to restore the Balance, sometimes to maintain it,
and very occasionally, to destroy it.”

“What point is there in all that? What logic?”

“The logic of context,” he said simply. “Context is all-important. One set of views, one faith, one idea, can be useful and
good for us at a certain time. At another, they threaten our destruction. The Eternal Champion fights to maintain equilibrium
between Chaos and Order. But his fight is not always a clear one. Not always sympathetic to most of us.”

St. Odhran was graceful as always in his leave-taking. A small crowd of locals and tourists gathered around the balloon. He
left as the sun got high, scattering what looked like golden confetti down on the cheering crowd. It turned out to be handfuls
of the little fake gold coins they throw over the bride and groom at Egyptian weddings. A few hours later, Colonel Bastable
made his excuses. He had another appointment he was bound to keep, he said. He roared off in his Bentley. And then it was
just us, the family. I think we were all a little glad to be together again with no one else around.

That next night was Midsummer’s Eve, and St. Odhran had told us to expect a great battle as Law and Chaos fought for the Balance
across all the realms of the multiverse.

From our Ingleton tower we watched the War among the Angels, as it was described in our part of the world. All of us were
crammed into those few square feet with windows all around, so that we could see inland up Ingleborough and across the rolling
hills out to sea at Morecombe Bay. The glaring silver and black sea was lit by the most intense sheet lightning I had ever
witnessed in Texas or the tropics. And silhouetted against the lightning (some would later describe them as intense black
clouds of unusual shape) were the forms of angels.

These weren’t the conventional Christian variety of angels, but the lords and ladies of the Higher Worlds, closing in pitched
battle, Law against Chaos, while elsewhere Elric’s struggle echoed theirs as he fought to herald in the Dawn. Lord Arioch,
Duke of Chaos, and Lady Inald, haughty Countess of Law, leading their troops, faced each other across the boundary of the
Middle March, fighting once again for control of the Balance.

I witnessed the chivalry of Law opposed, as ever, to the chivalry of Chaos, when they met on that Midsummer’s Night in the
worst summer storm England had ever known and which equaled, in the course of twenty-four hours, other huge storms across
the world.

A rather florid anonymous account appeared in the
Craven Herald
and was quoted extensively in later literature. It described an assembly of winged horsemen, wielding fiery swords, who clashed
in the heavens: one side representing howling Chaos and one side for stern, relentless Law.

As angels fought and fell, I tried to make out their true shapes: Lord Arkyn pointed his white sword Mireen. Lady Xiombarg,
spitting black blood and blue fire, challenged him with her massive twin-bladed ax.

Jack’s strongest memory, he says, is hearing the terrible smack of a winged body, the weight of an elephant, striking the
limestone pavement above Chapel-le-Dale. It was Lady s’Rashdee falling down when half her left wing was severed. You can still
see cracks in the rock. Large trees grow up through them now. Locals call it the Devil’s Pavement.

In America, two doctor friends of my parents, living in Inverness, California, reported the extraordinary view over the moody
marshland shallows of Tomales Bay. They were sitting on their deck that night, enjoying the clarity of the weather, when they
heard distant thunder and then watched a slowly darkening sky until, against it, a series of grey clouds formed the shapes
of twelve Amerindian warriors in great detail. These were without doubt tribesmen not of the West but of the Northeast, every
one of them slightly different in costume and features as they ran out of the sunset sky and headed inland.

I also heard how the folk of Marazion, the little port across from Saint Michael’s Mount, observed a gigantic figure in gold
and ebony armor ride his warhorse over to the castle, a blazing brand in his right hand and a shard of flashing crystal in
his left, make his horse rear, then bow in triumph and gratitude before galloping off across the water towards France.

I know most of it’s true, because I heard the parts I didn’t experience myself from Una Persson, as she calls herself now,
that mysterious adventuress who spends so much of her time in Eastern Europe and never seems to age.

Sometimes I think of putting a book together of all the accounts, but this is probably all I’ll write. To be honest, I’ve
had enough of supernatural adventures in other worlds, and so has my husband. We have two young children
now. We’ve resolved to live ordinary lives and let the fantastic past fade into an incredible dream, as we become plain old
Mr. and Mrs. John Daker.

Mum and Dad live full-time in Ingleton, where they work at their computer business. Jack and I are thinking of moving up there
to get the kids a decent education and some fresh air. London changes faster than I can take sometimes, and the price of houses
is ridiculous.

When I get crabby and think the world is becoming too heavily populated, though, I let myself remember the vast population
of the entire multiverse, in which nothing really ever dies, or can ever die, while the original universe still lives, where
there is always some other version of you and me. Then everything falls into perspective, and I cheer up again.

I prefer not to consider that too much, though. I’d rather think of myself and all those living souls within my extended family
who know that they can be pretty much whatever they want to be but who also know, better than anyone, that there really are
no free lunches, that wherever you are in the multiverse, everything must be paid for, usually with hard work.

Lately, Jack’s been having some bad nights. I think it’s stress. I’m beginning to wonder if the stock market is represented
by too few principled warriors like him. He gets sick of the lies and deceptions in the modern business world. We could do
with a bit more courage and determination in public life, not all this Hollywood-style brand-name politics too many people
fall for. People don’t take enough responsibility for themselves or their actions.