The Merlin Conspiracy (17 page)

“All right,” I said. It seemed unkind to say anything else. “I've come to you for advice, really. Do you mind me asking you for help? Will you need anything in return?”

“No, no. No return. Just need to hear big person talk,” he said, and hopped forward to sort of squat-sit in front of me on his wrong-way-bending legs. This put him so nearly out of Grundo's line of sight that Grundo had to roll both his eyes into the corners in order to see him. “Now you tell,” the small person said, and clasped his nearly human-shaped hands over his wrong-shaped knees. His smell drifted over me, like the smell of a very clean cat. “Make long story. Speak slow. I hear and learn.” He looked up at me, expectant and eager.

There is nothing that puts you off more, I find, than someone saying that. I explained very badly at first and kept thinking that I'd better put it more simply, and then thinking, No, he wants to learn more words. I said most things twice in the end. And he kept nodding and staring at me brightly, and I thought despondently, I bet he hasn't understood a word!

But he had. When I finally faltered to a finish, he flicked his earring and looked sober. “Is bad thing,” he said gravely, “they trap one so great as Gwyn. Strangeness is, they do without know who they got. Is using his another name maybe. The Strong all have names a lot. Stupids. Learn name from book and not know who meaning. And is most greatly bad that such stupids work great plot. A pause. I think.”

With his furry elbows on his peculiar knees, he rested his chinless face in both hands and considered. I waited anxiously. Grundo seized the chance to roll his eyes back straight.

After a while the Little Person remarked out of his musings, “Wise ones of my folk been say magics acting up. This why.”

“And do they know—” I began.

He held up his hand to stop me, sandy pink palm forward. “Still pause. I still think.”

We waited. At length he seemed to finish thinking. He took his face out of his hands and looked up at me, bright and whiskery. “I think two things you do. One not may work. Other fiercely danger.”

“Please tell me anyway,” I said.

He nodded. “Am do. But all mix together difficult. Like magics mix here in Blest. Blest magics all laid together close, over and under, like weaving. These stupids pull out threads. Come
could
unravel, and that bad. If you do thing also in Blest, that might worse be nearly. You do first either thing, you do outside, that right. That secret. Or either yourself do thing so big it chance unravel, fierce also danger. You see? I know you understand.”

I didn't. I had to think hard to get even some of this. “You're saying that magic is so interlaced here in Blest, right?” I asked. “That if I want to do it safely and secretly, I have to do something right outside this world? Or if I don't mind them knowing, I can do something so booming big
here
that it could untwist all the magics anyway?”

He seemed very pleased. “Booming big,” he said, several times. “Word I like.”

“Yes,” I said. “But what things?”

He was surprised. “Why, head of yours full of old knowings! Why need ask? I humble new person. But I tell. Outside thing, you call on person walk dark paths. Paths outside all worlds. No one here know you do. But not may work. Blest thing, booming big thing, you raise the land. Violent dangerous. Maybe blow apart—blow in small mess bits—blow—what call?” He made rocking movements with one hand. “What
call
?” he repeated appealingly.

I had no idea what he meant this time. “Sway? Wave? Rock?” I suggested.

“Balance!”
Grundo said deeply, unable to bear any more. “He means the balance of magic, you fool!”

The small person leaped wildly to one side, just like a grasshopper, he was so startled. “Man not dead!” he said feelingly. “He safe? Not. I think I go now.”

“No, no, it's only Grundo. Please stay!” I said.

“Talk he growl like deep earth,” said the small one. “Booming strong magic. I go.”

And to my great disappointment he went. He flipped aside a fold in the harebell patch, slipped around it, and vanished. “What did you have to interrupt for?” I said to Grundo.

He sat up and rolled his eyes to get the kinks out of them. “Because you were being stupid,” he said. “He was trying to tell you that raising the land—whatever that is—is going to destroy the whole balance of magic here and probably in most other worlds as well. That's why he was so anxious to make you understand. I think he meant only do that if the outside-path magic doesn't work. Whatever that is.”

“Then we'll do the other thing— Oh, I
wish
you hadn't frightened him off!” I wailed.

“He'd told you what he thought anyway,” Grundo said.

“Yes, but he wanted to practice his human language,” I said. “You must admit he needed to. He'd have stayed for hours if only you'd kept quiet.”

“Then we'd have missed lunch,” said Grundo. “Come on. Let's go.”

Always thinking about food! I thought. “Don't you even feel how marvelous it is to have talked to one of the Little People?” I said.

“No, not as the main thing,” Grundo grunted. “If you think like that, then you're treating him like something in a museum, not as a person. And I'm going back for lunch. Now.”

Do you know, Grundo is right! I
was
thinking of the small person that way. Even though he gave us some excellent, if terrifying, advice, I still had to try hard as I followed Grundo across the hillsides
not
to think of the Little Person as something very rare and strange that I had been to stare and marvel at. I think it would have been easier to see him as a real person if he'd agreed to speak his own language.

We tried to call help from the dark paths that afternoon. We sat in the grass above the manse while I called up the flower files and thought through them to find the knowledge I needed. I knew it was there somewhere, but I was quite surprised to find it under
Mullein
as a branch of
speaking with the dead
. I suppose that put me in a bad mood. I hoped, very strongly, that the person I found to help would not be dead. That would be no help at all.

Then I was put out again, when I looked in the right branch of the file, to discover that the file names were not simply names of flowers, but quite often the plant you needed for most of the workings in the file. This ought to have been obvious from
Harebells
this morning, but I didn't see it until that afternoon. It took practice to get used to the hurt lady's knowledge.

A torch of mullein held in the hand is necessary for all the dark paths
, this branch said. And
could
we find mullein? We could not. I got more and more impatient, and underneath I was just so
anxious
because while we searched about on the hillside and round the manse, Sybil and her friends were getting merrily on with their plans. We could be too
late
. I had only the haziest idea what mullein looked like anyway. Grundo knew. He had looked at the pictures in nature study lessons because of not being able to read as well as me. He said he thought it looked a bit like evening primrose. But when he added that any old plant would probably do just as well, we very nearly quarreled.

“Or try waving a turnip!” Grundo called over his shoulder. He went stumping off in disgust down to the chapel.

I ignored him and found rosemary and privet and ragged robin. Privet and ragged robin were two of those plants that my files had tagged as
Use only with great care
, along with briony, campion, hellebore, and lily of the valley. I was looking at them nervously, wondering what made them so dangerous, when Grundo came stumping back.

“There's a fuzzy plant covered with caterpillars against the back wall of the chapel,” he said. “Come and look. I
think
it may be mullein.”

It was, too. I knew as soon as I looked at it. It had pale, furry leaves and pale yellow flowers in clusters all down its stem, and as well as being covered in caterpillars, it was tall as a hollyhock. Grundo knocked the caterpillars off and handed me the flower with a Court bow. “There. Have you got them all?”

“I need dock,” I said.

“By the chapel gate,” he said. “A big bundle of it. And then?”

“Well, asphodel and periwinkle would help, too, but I've got all the main ones,” I said. “Let's go to the top of the hill. I need to face clear sky.”

All the way up the hill I could tell Grundo was brooding. When we got to the top, he said, “If doing this magic makes you like Alicia all the time, I'm not going to help you anymore.” He sat himself down facing toward the manse and humped his shoulders at me.

In the normal way I'd have been furious with him for even thinking I was like Alicia, but my head was so full of what I had to do that all I said was “
Be
like that, then!” and left him sitting there.

Oddly, as soon as I started the working, it was almost as if Grundo was not with me. There came a tremendous burst of energy from the bundle of plants in my fist, and from that moment on I seemed to be alone on the top of the mountain, walled off from the world. This made me less embarrassed than I would have been if Grundo had been standing beside me. The spell was a rhyming one. The files told me what to say in the hurt woman's language, and then they told me what the words meant. I had to put the words into thoughts and then into more words that rhymed. I felt really silly, waving a withering bundle of plants about and calling out, “Feet on the stony way, eyes that can't see, wizard man outside the worlds, come and help me!” Over and over. It felt pathetic. And futile.

I was quite sure it wasn't working until I saw a dark space open in front of me. It felt like a window into emptiness at first. “Help me,” I finished feebly. I nearly staggered away backward when the darkness flickered blue, showing rocks and wetness, and someone came stumbling from around a corner toward me.

The first and most important thing I noticed about this person was that he had a little blue flame sitting on his forehead, the way our wizards do on important occasions. “Oh, good!” I said. “You're a wizard.” But I was very nervous, because he was real
and
because he was somewhere else entirely.

I knew he could see me and hear me. But he didn't seem any too certain that he was a wizard. He mumbled something about being a beginner or just learning. My heart sank rather. He was more or less the same age as me. I could tell he was, although the blue flame distorted his face terribly. He looked demonic, with pits for eyes. But, I thought dubiously, perhaps this is how people from another world do look. In Blest, I would have said he was from India. I think. Anyway, he was dark and a lot taller than me.

Then I told myself that he
had
to be right. He was the one the mullein spell had summoned, so he
had
to be. The flower file was most insistent that the next thing you did was to get the person to say his or her true name. So I asked him his name, and he said it was Nichothodes. It sounded very foreign to me. And he was sort of frowning at me, as if he thought—rather like Grundo—that I was being very bossy and busy with my own troubles, which I was, but I couldn't help it. So I told him my name and tried to make a joke that we both had mouthfuls for names.

He still seemed dubious, but he said in a very businesslike way, “What way do you want me to help you?”

I explained or tried to. None of it seemed to mean very much to him, and we hit a snag almost at once, because he thought that the Merlin was a man with a long white beard from the days of some mythical king. I'd never heard of this King Arthur of his, but I said, “Well, a lot of the Merlins do have long white beards. The one who just died did.” I tried to go on to explain how the Merlins kept the magical powers and worked with the Kings, who kept the political powers.

He didn't seem to understand at all. I got a feeling he didn't want to. I went on explaining, quite desperately, that the whole
country
was being threatened, along with the rest of the world, and probably other worlds with it. I see now that this was a foretaste of what happened every other time I tried to get help from someone, but at the time it seemed that it was because we were totally separate, me on a hill in Wales and he goodness knows where in the dark. I felt helpless and hopeless.

And he couldn't walk through from his dark place to me. He tried. He put out his hand, and it was as if he had planted it against a glass wall. I could see his palm all flattened and white, with red lines in it.

“Okay,” he said. He seemed a great deal more cheerful about it than I was. He said he'd go and ask someone what to do. “Then I'll come back and try to help you and Grundoon sort it out,” he said.

“Grun
do
,” I said.

“Him, too,” he said cheerfully. “Where are you anyway?”

That made me feel as if the spell had let me down, because
surely
it ought to have let him know basic things like that. “I'm in Blest, of course,” I said.

“Then I'll see you soon,” he said, and went walking away past me, looming up blue and dark and then vanishing out of sight just beside me. The darkness stayed there for a moment, going denser and denser, and then faded back into the sky.