The Merlin Conspiracy (35 page)

Luckily, Maxwell Hyde grows vegetables in his back garden. Most people in London do, just as if they lived in the country. This meant that there was nearly always
something
to eat (though the night there was nothing but beetroot nearly killed me). And one of the first things Maxwell Hyde did was to rush out into his garden to see how things were coming on there. He grows dahlias in among other flowers around the lawn near the house and the veg down the other end. The dahlias weren't up yet, just cabbagey clumps sitting in hard, dry earth, but you wouldn't believe how proud he was of those clumps. He got a hose and watered them at once.

After lunch he took me into the main room, and with Toby leaning against him and peering under our elbows, he showed me a map of the Islands of Blest. These were—the way everything is in Blest—like and not like what I was used to. Their Islands are
almost
like the British Isles, but not really quite, as if someone had given the whole lot a big push from the direction of France and then stood on Ireland and pulled so that they stretched. Wales and Cornwall were a lot bigger, and Scotland was not nearly so frilly.

“You'll find the eastern coast of England has straightened out from your point of view,” Maxwell Hyde remarked. “Higher above sea level here.”

There wasn't much of Norfolk or Lincolnshire there actually, and Yorkshire seemed rather slender, too, but that was made up for by the south coast being much nearer France, so that the Isle of Wight was one of the Channel Islands. Then I spotted one big difference.

“Don't you have any railways?” I said.

“What are railways?” Toby asked.

“Trains,” I said. “Chuff-chuff.”

“No, just roads and canals,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Our industrial history is quite different from yours. You never discovered cokale.”

“You what?” I said.

“Cokale. Chuff-chuff,” said Toby, and laughed. That was my fault for taking Toby for a fool. He wasn't, not by any means, but I'm no good at telling, with people younger than me.

Maxwell Hyde told me all about their different history then, until my head went round. All I really remember is that their King never settled down in one place, but went round in an enormous Progress most of the year. I think this goes back to the fact that Blest has a hundred times more magic than we do. In the old days the King was supposed to keep the magic in the land healthy by visiting every corner of it. These days the Merlin and someone called the Lady of Governance look after the magic for him, but the King still travels.

I suppose I really remember this because Maxwell Hyde happened to say that Roddy traveled with the King, because her parents were part of the Progress, and I thought of what she had said about this Merlin of theirs. It was disappointing to hear that Maxwell Hyde didn't even know where the King and the rest of them were at that moment.

“What's the matter?” Maxwell Hyde asked me.

I didn't want to go on about Roddy. I was embarrassed. So I said quickly, “Those mages. Arnold and them. I think I got them into bad trouble....”

“Oh, the Plantagenate Empire. I remember,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Good thing you reminded me. I'll go and take a look in a couple of days when we've settled down here.”

We settled down almost at once, into a regular routine, and nobody talked about Roddy anymore. I
think
I was glad. After breakfast every day, as soon as I'd had enough coffee to get my eyes open, Maxwell Hyde gave me lessons in magic. That was terrific. I was really glad to be taught about magic at last, even though so much of it seemed to be just learning rules. I supposed there had to
be
rules or things wouldn't work, but after that short talk I'd had with Romanov, I couldn't help being a bit suspicious—you know, that the rules only applied to a small part of it all, and once I'd learned enough, I'd know that the rules wouldn't work with the rest.

But I did try to learn the rules. And here was a strange thing about magic. Some things I could do standing on my head, and the other half I didn't think I'd
ever
be able to do. There was never any middle ground, no things I could
almost
do. And it was the same with theory: some of it obvious and the other things I just couldn't
begin
to understand. Maxwell Hyde set me exercises in theory to do for the rest of the day, while he went away to his study and rattled away at his laptop thingy, writing a new detective story. Very familiar. My dad does that, too.

I used to sit there chewing Blest's version of a ballpoint pen and really envying Toby. His school was over for the year, and I could hear him playing outside with the other kids in the street. He was quiet as a mouse indoors, but outside you could hear him for miles. He used to come in all smoothly sweaty, laughing, while I got up from my theory feeling as if I'd put my head through Dora's coffee mill.

The weather got hotter and hotter, which didn't make theory any easier. And there was another difficulty, too, that made me wonder if I was as mad as Dora.

“This is becoming a regular drought,” Maxwell Hyde said, anxious about the precious dahlias. “I suppose Daniel knows what he's doing. It made sense to have fine weather for the King's meeting with the Pendragon, but if he doesn't call it off soon, I shall have to have a word with him.”

I was very interested to learn that this Daniel was Maxwell Hyde's son and Roddy's father. He was chief weather wizard to the King. Magic ran in that family like anything.

Anyway, it got so hot and dry before long that the streets shimmered. Dora tried to do her father a favor and water the garden for him. She got out the hose and unrolled it. I saw her out of my window, standing pointing the nozzle at a flower bed and muttering away to herself. But no water came out because she'd forgotten to hitch it to a tap. Toby came in from the street and quietly fixed it and turned the tap on. Water came squirting out all over Dora's shoes. She looked astonished.

That was typical. Toby was always quietly covering up for his mother's dottiness.

By then my other problem was really bothering me. I kept seeing these transparent creature things drifting about. They were all sorts of shapes. It almost seemed as if the long, thin ones didn't like the heat and came indoors to get cool. They floated around the bedroom while I was working, where I could only just see them, but there came to be more and more of them every time I looked. The rounder kind seemed to love the heat. They sat in the road in clusters, going gently up and down like people in a swimming pool. The ones with stranger shapes seemed to follow Dora around. This was what really bothered me. They were what she muttered to.

I didn't dare say a word about them until the morning Maxwell Hyde made another attempt to teach me to raise witchlight. “Slowly,” he said. “Steady. Think of the energy under your breastbone filling your hands with light.”

I almost did it. I almost got it. Then one of the transparent things came bumbling along and sat on my hands instead. I could see others crowding in at me from all sides of the room. I tried to shake the thing loose. “Get off!” I said, flapping my hands. “Get
out
of it!” Then I know my face went as red as last night's beetroot supper. “I—I—I …” I went.

“It's all right,” he said, calmly smiling. “The invisible folk are always attracted to magic working. Take no notice of them.”

“We don't have them on Earth,” I said defensively.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “I can always see them there, even though I can't see them here at all on Blest. It seems to work that way. Carry on.”

I tried to carry on, but I'd lost it by then. And I think I was too busy giving relieved looks at the floating creatures to concentrate. I couldn't help asking, “Why do they like Dora so much?”

“She's hung with charms. Lives in a stream of half spells, poor girl,” he said. He sighed. “Always trying to prove she's as good as her sister, Judith, I think. I hoped she'd snap out of it, and she did for a while after Toby was born. Then she got divorced, and that made her as bad as ever.”

Twice a week Dora got dressed up in black and lots of clattering jet beads and an enormous round hat and went out for the evening. The first time I saw her dressed up, she said, “I'm off to my magic circle,” and looked past my left shoulder in her dotty way. “Would you like to come, too, Nick?”

“Not unless you fancy taking all your clothes off and galloping round in a ring,” Maxwell Hyde said, quickly and warningly. Toby looked dreadfully ashamed.

“Er—perhaps not tonight,” I said. “Thanks all the same, Dora.”

“It's the most releasing and natural experience,” Dora said reproachfully. “You're like all Orientals: you spend far too much time watching your tummy button. Be liberated. Try it. My group is full of wonderful people.”

“Yes, yes, off you go,” Maxwell Hyde said. And after she had gone, he told me, “You may not believe me, but Dora is the
sane
one in that group. I'd better look in on them soon. After I've had a go at the Plantagenate Empire, I think. They sometimes get up to very silly, harmful stuff.”

He went to see the Plantagenate Empire two days later. He gave Toby and me some money and told Toby to show me London. Then he walked out into the street and vanished beside the bus stop. Toby and I got on a bus at the exact same spot.

Blest London was quite a bit different because they'd never had the Great Fire. There were thatched cottages in Mayfair, and the parks were all in strange places. Toby and I had great fun, in spite of the baking heat. I told Toby that I didn't want to see historic buildings, like the Houses of Parliament and so on, and he said we couldn't anyway because the parliament was in Winchester and not very important in the first place. So we saw the circus that was permanently in Piccadilly, and waxworks that really moved, and their London Bridge that had houses on it and tourist shops. They have the Tower, oddly enough, and a Tower Bridge that opens for shipping, though it doesn't look anything like ours on our Earth, and lots more boats on the Thames than in our London. Their ice creams taste a lot different.

Because it was so hot, we went back by water-bus. Toby showed me the ground where the hurley team he followed played. They didn't have football. Hurley is much more dangerous. Toby followed the Vauxhall Vampires, and two of them broke their necks at it last week. Vox Vamps, you say, or just Vamps, like we say Wolves or Hammers.

I liked Toby a lot. It was a new experience for me. I wasn't used to liking someone so much younger than me.

We got home to find that Maxwell Hyde had just come in, too.

“That was quick!” I said.

He gave his little soldierly grin. “Ah, I'm an old hand, Nick. I went straight to the head of things and made inquiries at the Academy of Mages. Told them I was the Magid looking into the recent infiltration in Marseilles.” That made me laugh. He looked solemn. “It's absolutely true. I am and I was. And they told me, without any beating about the bush. Those poor fellows did get into some trouble, I'm sorry to say. They were removed from any Royal Security that night. But nobody thought it was their fault. They were just blamed for not noticing you weren't the right novice. Inefficiency and so on. And because fully trained mages are much in demand, all four of them have found new jobs already. Charles Pick and Pierre Lefevre now work in France, and Arnold Hesse and David Croft are in Canada for Inland Security there.”

You can't imagine how relieved I was to hear that.

“Where's Canada?” Toby asked.

“A part of North America,” said his grandfather. “In some worlds, Europeans settled quite a lot in—”

He never finished that explanation. Dora suddenly dashed in, white as a sheet. She slammed the living room door and stood with her back to it, shaking. “Don't go into the garden!” she gasped. “I went for a lettuce.”

“What did it do? Bite you?” Maxwell Hyde asked.

She shuddered. “No. I never got that far. There's a white devil on the lawn. With
horns
!”

“What?”
said Maxwell Hyde. “Are you
sure
?”

Dora shuddered some more. “Oh, yes. It was quite real. I know I lose touch quite often, but I always know when something I see is real. It was eating the dahlias.”

At this Maxwell Hyde thundered, “WHAT?” and set off for the garden like an Olympic sprinter. Dora got whirled aside, and Toby and I pelted past her, full of curiosity.

In the baking garden the white devil looked up from a flower bed with a leaf fetchingly dangling beside its beard, saw Maxwell Hyde, and came prancing toward him, obviously delighted to see him.

Maxwell Hyde stopped in his tracks. “Nick,” he said, “do I, or do I not, know this goat?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's Romanov's. It must have followed you somehow.” I did wish it was Mini instead. I suddenly, hugely wished Mini was there. It was like being homesick.

“But
why
?” said Maxwell Hyde. The goat was frisking around him, making playful scything motions with its horns. I could see the rope we had tied round its neck and the frayed end where it had bitten it through.