A Feast Unknown (24 page)

The rains started that night. We were miserable. Despite this, we slept well under the rain-proof ponchos and blankets. Trish was as worn out as an old knife by the grinding of the sixteen hours of battle to get through the cold wet tangle of the rain forest. She ate a few bites and dropped off, snuggling against me. And in the morning, after we had eaten and rolled up our supplies, we set off. There was no more loving beyond an abortive attempt by Trish one afternoon when we had rested a while and the sun had come out. It was a failure.

In three days, as I had projected, we were out of the mountains and at the mining company airstrip. This was used to shuttle executives to the capital and back.

The executives and the pilot of the twin-engined Cessna knew me, but they refused to let me go on the next scheduled trip. I would have to wait. And one commented that I was open to arrest for being in Uganda without a passport.

I took the plane anyway. After knocking the pilot out and
yanking the three executives from the plane, with Trish’s capable help, I piloted the craft downwind, towards the north. A few bullet holes appeared in the fuselage behind us as we left the ground, and the radio bleated in Buganda and English, warning us we would be shot down by military planes.

I swung west. And twenty hours later, I was approaching the southern shore of England (Land’s End) about ten feet above the sea. We were fully dressed and armed and I was flying another plane, a two-motored turboprop craft. My connections and my good credit and name had secured the plane, gas, and supplies on the way. We were now entering England unnoticed (we hoped) and without passports.

Trish had demanded that we try to get into contact with Caliban while our plane was being refueled at an airport near Rabat, Morocco. I did not object. Caliban should know that she was with me. He would no longer have any reason to attack me or Clio. Or I should say Clio, since the Nine had decreed that one of us must kill the other. On thinking this over, I decided that the news that she was now alive would not reassure him. I had her, and he would not know what I planned to do with her. He thought I was mad, and he might think I meant to harm her.

I did if he killed Clio.

Or did I? I felt like it. Had felt like it, rather. But I now was very fond of her, respected her, and knew her as a human being. Moreover, I could not harbor the idea of revenge on Caliban through hurting her. He was the one I wanted to kill.

No, I could not harm her. But I could make Caliban think I would if he did not lay off of Clio.

So I made every effort to contact Caliban. I sent radio messages to London and Paris and I sent other messages via several underground organizations I had worked with during the war and during a mission for the Nine.

They reported back that no one had managed to find him.

This did not upset Trish. She had full confidence that he would get the message. He might have it now but had not replied, because he was often strangely reticent. He acted instead of talking. In fact, he might even now be on his way to Castle Grandrith to help me against Noli.

I smiled but said nothing.

As we passed Land’s End on our right, she asked me a number of questions about our destination and its history. She had never been to the Lake District and knew little about it except that it was supposed to be England’s “pocket Switzerland” and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey had lived there.

I told her that Cumberland County was in the extreme northwestern corner of England. The mountains (I would call them foothills) are remains of a massive dome-shaped earth movement which took place about forty million years ago. The mountains were deeply cut by lake-filled valleys. The Cumberland County was one of the most densely wooded regions of England even long after the Norman conquest. The oak, ash, and birch were the principal indigenous trees, and sycamore and larch were common.

The earliest evidence of man there could be dated to the New Stone Age, about 2500
B.C.
There were a number of “druid” circles of stone in the Lake District. There was a circle, in fact, on the estate of Grandrith. Looking west from the windows of Catstarn Hall, you could see the massive upright stone slabs on a hilltop beyond the castle. Looking north, you could see on top of a hill that huge and queerly shaped slab of granite which was called, for some reason, the High Chair. There was a local legend connected with it. The people of the village of Cloamby say that when the two ravens come back, the old man will sit. No one seems to know what this means.

My ancestors included the aboriginals, of course, the short dark people who might have been related to the Picts of Scotland, which is close by, and to the Firbolg of Ireland. The Celts invaded the island and exterminated or absorbed them. Later, Romans conquered much of Cumbria, but their investment was mainly military. This area, until the nineteenth century, was a back country somewhat aloof from the mainstream but not entirely. After the Romans left, the English Northumbrians held the country. The Vikings came in 875
A.D.
and the majority of place names in Cumberland are of Norse origin.

An Eirik Randgrith, a Norwegian sea-king turned farmer, established a log-and-stone fort on the present site of the castle. This was near the small village of Graefwulf, which was destroyed fifty years later. The present village of Cloamby replaced it about thirty years afterwards. These events took place between 900 and 980
A.D.

Randgrith means Shield-Destroyer. Randgrith was supposed to have been a huge man, very strong, and given to fits of melancholy and violence. His grandson was presumably converted to Christianity, but the Randgriths were suspected of heresy for a long long time. At least twenty of them over a period of 600 years were burned or hung for witchcraft. Despite this,
the family managed to retain their lands and even add to them at times.

Cumberland was held alternately by the Scotch and Normans for a long time. In the seventeenth-century Civil War, the Cumbrians were generally loyal to the Stewarts.

Sometime in the thirteenth century, Randgrith became Grandrith by a metathesis probably influenced by the Norman “grand.” The name is now pronounced Grunith.

The family was always distinguished by a large size, great strength, and a tendency to mental instability and eccentricity. It has usually been content to keep to its own part of the country or to go far abroad. It has been conservative, if not reactionary. It had clung to the old religions fiercely, although often secretly. The evidence is that the family privately worshipped the old Germanic gods long after Cumberland was ostensibly Catholic, and that it remained Catholic long after Cumberland was ostensibly Protestant.

I told Trish that the Grandriths were related to the Howards and the Russells and the royal family, not that that meant anything to me. I told her the story that William II, or Rufus, the Conqueror’s son, had raped a Lady Ulrica Randgrith, who gave birth to his son. It is recorded in the family chronicle (but a hundred years after the event) that Rufus was responsible for the gray eyes of the family. (This is, of course, genetic nonsense.) It is also recorded that Rufus was killed in the New Forest, not by Walter Tirel or Ralph of Aix, but by the brother of the raped woman.

While I talked, the sun set behind the Atlantic to the left. England became a dark bulk with a few scattered lights, which
were actually large towns. Then I swung out towards the middle of the sea, still only about ten feet above the moon-sparkling waters.

I thought of my ancestors and their country. When I first came there as lord of Grandrith Castle, Catstarn Hall, and Cloamby Village, I had not known my family history. Or even the history of England. Later, after much reading and travel, I understood much more. Yet I have never been entirely at ease on my estate or in England. I feel as if I were born of African earth and have no ancestors. The past was dissolved when I gave voice to my first cry on the seashore by the equatorial jungle.

32

My agent, stationed in the forest near the castle, responded to my call. Trish listened in.

I said, “Any news of Lady Grandrith yet?”

“Nothing, sir,” the man said. “All we still know is that she left London to come here. She should have been here hours ago and may be. There were lights in the castle for about an hour, sir, but I couldn’t get close enough to see who was using them. The drapes in the hall windows are closed tight, sir. I can’t see any activity there, but I get the impression that there’s much going on.”

“Have you heard from the other man?” I said, referring to his companion.

“No, sir. The situation is the same as when I last reported. He went to investigate the castle and the hall; he said he might knock on the door and pretend to be a lost traveler; I never heard from him again.”

“Have you found out anything about the two strangers
who were buying such large supplies of food and liquor in Greystoke?” I said.

“Nothing, sir. They left before I heard about them so I couldn’t put a tail on them. If Noli’s men have moved in, as we suspect, then they may have been his.”

“Ask him if he’s heard anything from Doc or anything about him,” Trish said eagerly.

The agent said he had heard nothing, but then he’d been out of contact with the London men for about six hours.

“Have you been able to look in the garage or the barns?” I said.

“No, sir. They’re both still tightly locked and the windows are curtained. If there are an unusual number of cars in there, I can’t find out without trying to break in. And as you said …”

“That’s right,” I said. “I don’t want to let them know that anybody’s on to their game.”

His voice had not sounded quite right, but there was much static, due to the storm approaching from Ireland. I said, “We’ll be landing on the strip in approximately one hour. You be ready to cover us, because if Noli is in the hall or the castle, he and his men will come swarming out. We’ll run into the woods and then plan our strategy from there. Signals as arranged. Four blinks by me, six by you.”

“Right, sir. Four and six.”

I shut off the transceiver. The man had not quite sounded like my agent, but perhaps it was he, and he was taking this opportunity to warn me. The signals had been three blinks by me and five by him.

I told Trish what I suspected. She said, “If they’ve got him
alive, they’ll get everything out of him. And they’ll kill him when they realize he’s tricked them.”

“They’ll kill him, anyway. And he’s probably already dead. They must have gotten everything from him. That voice was close to the real agent’s, but not quite close enough.”

I did not, of course, tell her that the man holding Catstarn Hall and Castle Grandrith might be Caliban, although I doubted it. Noli had a head start on him. If Noli was there, then Caliban might be in as much danger as I. Noli would try to double-cross Caliban, and Caliban must know that. Perhaps Caliban was amused by this, and stimulated, since it made the odds greater against him.

I turned the radio back on. We were approaching a black wall, the storm from Ireland. The weather reports said that its front was now over Keswick and moving east. The rain was heavy with winds at forty miles per hour. The plane bored into the blackness and began bucking. At the same time, I pulled her up, because I did not want to run into a vessel. At three thousand feet, I was picked up by the coastal radar, and the challenges started coming. I gave them a false identity, said I was an Irish flier blown off course. The identity lasted about six minutes. On receiving information from Ireland, the station challenged me again and told me to land or I would be shot down. I did not know how they were going to manage that, since I doubted they would send a missile against a small plane and no military plane would find me while the storm was progressing.

However, I pretended engine trouble, made a last-minute appeal, and dived the plane. The lights enabled me to pick up the sea surface just in time; even so we must have been licked on the
underfuselage by the waves. Surface vessels or no, I clung to a twenty-foot ceiling and did not pull her up until I saw lights. This should be Whitehaven, and from here on I had to maintain at least a five-thousand-foot ceiling. If the weather had been clear, I would have hedgehopped in. It was not, so there was nothing else to do. I could not help Clio—if she was not past helping already— if we smashed up against the Skiddaw or some other mountain.