Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 01 (7 page)

 
          
After
a moment, he turned the crooked handle of the cane around and freed the silver
blade. He extended the point and touched the Dream Rock with it.

 
          
The
blade sang audibly, shimmered. He felt the tingling shock so strongly that he
fairly snatched his blade away. Some force was in that stone, and whatever it
was strove hard against him. He returned the silver weapon to its cane, and
bent to lay his hand flat against the fallen pillar.

 
          
No
sensation this time. Apparently the Dream Rock responded only to the silver
that St. Dunstan had wrought. Thunstone turned away and went back along
Trail Street
.

 
          
He
looked across to Chimney Pots. Two men were in the frontyard near a
white-flowered bush, apparently in conversation. Thunstone crossed over and
entered the yard along a pathway of moss-tufted gravel.

 
          
The
two men looked at him. One was squat and elderly and roughly dressed, and
poised a hoe in his hand. The other was taller and almost gracefully slender,
and wore a tailored jacket of small black and white checks and gray slacks. As
Thunstone came nearer, he saw that this man was smooth-shaven, long-nosed, with
creamy gray hair.

 
          
He
moved with confident steps to meet Thunstone and looked at him searchingly,
with eyes that were as dull blue as lead.

           
“Mr. Thunstone, as I think/' he said
evenly. “My name is Gram Ensley. So you got my note, did you? So glad you
came."

 
          
“I
got
it,
and thank you for inviting me."

 
          
“Carry
on here, Hob," said Ensley to the squat man. “I’ll see Mr. Thunstone to
the house."

 
          
“Yes,
sir, right you are," croaked the other man, and put his hoe to the ground.
Thunstone followed Ensley to the porch.

 
          
That
porch was high, made of rough, clinkery stone like the rest of the house. Its
pillars rose to a high canopy of fitted slabs two stories above, and the porch
floor was faced with rosy-looking old bricks. Ensley led Thunstone up three
wide steps and pushed open a massive door of black-painted planks to usher him
into a gloomy hallway, paneled in dark wood. Against a broad staircase that
mounted upward stood a clothes tree hung with wraps and
umbrellas,
and next to that a suit of plate armor. Beyond in the house, a piano sounded.
Someone was playing Schubert's “Moment Musicale," melodiously but offhand,
as though it were more or less a memory of the music itself.

 
          
Thunstone
stopped in front of the suit of armor, which stood like a steel image, masked
with its visor. It was a fine specimen, delicately patterned here and there. He
judged it to be of the early fifteenth century. Against it leaned a great
hammer like weapon, with a rusty steel haft some forty inches long. He leaned
his cane against the thigh piece of the armor and studied again.

 
          
“How
beautiful," he said.

 
          
As
he spoke, the music farther into the house came to an abrupt stop.

 
          
“I
fear I can't properly identify that armor," said Ensley. “It must have
been bought by some Ensley in the past, and set up here. As you see, it was
made for a fairly upstanding man, one even of your size, but I wonder if the
mace—the hammer there—belongs with the suit. That's a gigantic weight to wield.
Hard to pick it up, even with both hands."

 
          
“May
I try?"

 
          
“Of course."

 
          
Thunstone
stepped closer, put out his big right hand, and lifted the hammer. It was
heavy, he knew at once, heavier than sledges used to spike down rails on ties.
He studied it a moment,
then
muscled it out until his
arm was straight and horizontal. He could do that. Ensley made a silent gesture
as though clapping his hands.

 
          
“You’d
have been a famous man-at-arms a few hundred years ago,” he said.

 
          
Smiling,
Thunstone leaned the heavy hammer back against the steel figure. Ensley led him
to a great side door, opened it, and ushered Thunstone into a spacious room
with dark, rich furniture. One wall of the room was shelved, with books on the
shelves all the way up to the ceiling. The other walls were hung with drapes of
rough, tawny cloth, and upon these were paintings in frames. They were curious
paintings, cloudy-looking. A grand piano stood in the center of the floor, but
nobody sat at it.

 
          
“Who
was playing as we came in?” inquired Thunstone.

 
          
“Someone
I have staying with me here,” was the reply. “Won’t you sit down?”

 
          
Ensley
gestured him to a leather-cushioned armchair.
“Cigarette?”
Ensley offered a silver box with cigarettes so dark as to look almost black.
Thunstone could not tell their make.

 
          
“Thanks,”
said Thunstone. “If you don’t mind, I’ll stick to an old friend I brought
along,” and he produced his pipe and pouch.

 
          
“Of course.”

 
          
Ensley
took a cigarette and sat in another chair. Thunstone filled his pipe and struck
a match to it.

 
          
“Now
then, Mr. Thunstone,” said Ensley, “I'll admit to a certain curiosity about
you, a curiosity which, by the way, seems to be felt by others in Claines.
That’s why I asked you to call. What brings you here, may I ask? And how may I
help you, if it’s help you need?”

 
          
He
asked the question so winningly, so hospitably, that Thunstone wondered if
there
were
any sincerity in it. He drew on his pipe
and smiled.

 
          
“Call
it curiosity,” he said. “I came to
England
to speak at a meeting and to study in
libraries, visit a few sites of old remains. Some friends spoke of this
village
of
Claines
, told about the figure of Old Thunder on
the slope out there, and of the Dream Rock. They also mentioned some difficulty
about getting permission to research such things. So, as I say, I came here
from curiosity.”

           
‘‘Curiosity,” Ensley repeated him.
“I take you at your word, Mr. Thunstone. You're from abroad, and so you can't
be representing National Trust or the Department of Environment or any of
those. If there's been difficulty about researching here—dragging through land
that belongs to me, disturbing the people of Claines—perhaps it can be charged
to me and to my people before me. I've even had to go to court a couple of
times, but so far there haven't been digs or upheavals at Claines.”

 
          
“I
take it you feel justified in that,” said Thunstone. “I might feel the same way
if this place belonged to me. I hear that you own most of the houses in
Claines, and lands beyond.”

 
          
“Including
Sweepside,” nodded Ensley. “I inherited the property, yes. But I’ve been busy
on my own part, making researches as I can. I've tried to inform myself on what
to look for, and how to look for it. See here.”

 
          
He
reached from where he sat and from an end table took a flat case the size of a
big book. It was covered with a rectangle of glass and exhibited, on a bed of
cotton, several flint points. He offered it to Thunstone.

 
          
“I've
found those on my land,” he said. “Found them right here in Claines. I have
others; when someone comes upon one, I pay him to bring it to me. Look at the
workmanship of those stones.”

 
          
Thunstone
knew something of stone artifacts, and immediately recognized these as fine
examples. The largest of them was like a knife
blade,
say five inches long, tapering, finely flaked along one edge. The others were
slender and tapered, like willow leaves. So beautifully were they worked that
they suggested jewelry. The colors of the flints were various—rosy, slate-gray,
tawny. These were magnificent examples of stone-working skill.

 
          
Thunstone
studied every item of the collection, and handed it back to his host.
“Beautiful,” he pronounced.
“Skillfully done.
I wish a
friend of mine were here to look. She’s Jean Stuart, at National Geographic in
Washington
; she knows the Stone Age. Some of those smaller
points may have been arrowheads; those people may have had bows.”

           
“Very likely,” nodded
Ensley.                            
•

 
          
“They
could kill game from far off with bows/’ said Thunstone. “They could kill men,
too, if they understood enemies and war.” Ensley chuckled, rather sardonically.
“Undoubtedly they understood enemies and war, and waged war on enemies,” he
said. “War had already been on earth, for many millennia. Do you read Pfeiffer?
There’s his book on the shelf there,
The
Emergence of Man.
Pfeiffer suggests that Neanderthal man invented war,
maybe sixty thousand years ago.”

 
          
“I’ve
read Pfeiffer,” said Thunstone. “In that same sentence, as I remember, Pfeiffer
says that Neanderthal man seems to have invented religion. He describes Neanderthal
burial sites, with traces of the flowers draped over the skeleton that once was
a body.” His voice grew sad, for the thought always roused his compassion for
those long-ago creatures that were striving to be man, to be Homo sapiens.

 
          
“War
and religion,” said Ensley. “They seem to go together; they seem to have gone
hand in hand all the way to the present.” “Whoever your flint-chippers were,
they were splendid workmen,” said Thunstone. “Where did you find these
specimens?”

           
Ensley smiled at that, a strange,
tight smile made by clamping his lips wide across his face. “I dug up those
points myself, here on my own property.”

 
          
“Your
property in Claines,” said Thunstone.

 
          
“Specifically,
up yonder on Sweepside. That land, this house—all my property in and about
Claines—has been in the Ensley family for hundreds of years.”

 
          
“And
you say you want no explorations on it.”

 
          
“No
explorations that will complicate my own,” said Ensley. “I’ve posted Sweepside
against trespassers, but I don’t forbid everyone. Mr. Gates, our worthy curate
at St. Jude’s, may go up there if he wishes and if he promises to be
circumspect. But he seems to want to interfere with the figure of Old Thunder;
he’s outspoken against what he calls paganism.” Again he smiled tightly at Thunstone.
“Who’s the true god of the world, anyway? The god you probably worship has his
faults and admits them. In the Ten Commandments he calls himself a jealous
god—admits to meanness. Somewhere else he says he won't forgive unto the third
and fourth generation."

 
          
"You’ll
find that in the Third Commandment," said Thunstone. "The fifth
chapter of Deuteronomy, isn't it? Anyway, that was a long, long time ago."

 
          
"Not
so very long," shrugged Ensley. "I don't know just how long ago Moses
is supposed to have brought down his tables of stone from Mount Sinai, but I’d
hazard that Old Thunder's figure on Sweepside was first cut out before
that."

 
          
He
spoke as though he knew what he was talking about. Thunstone drew on his pipe.

 
          
"I
walked through your little town last evening after supper, as far as your fence
at the edge of Sweepside," he said. "When I came back, I saw that I'd
been followed by someone, who headed away among some trees behind your house
here. I wondered who it was."

 
          
"Ah,
who indeed?" said Ensley. "What did the person look like?"