Chrestomanci - Charmed Life. The Lives Of Christopher Chant Part 14

"Why not?" said Cat.

"Because I don't want you to," said the dragon, and a regular roll of fire came from its mouth, making them back away again. "How would you like to see me taking human blood and playing games with it?"

Though Cat felt the dragon had a point here, Janet did not. "It doesn't worry me," she said. "Where I come from we have blood transfusions and blood banks. Dad once showed me some of my blood under a microscope."

"It worries me," said the dragon, uttering another roll of fire. "My mother was killed by unlawful blood-stealers." It crept to the very end of the bench and stared up at Janet. The flickers in its golden eyes melted and changed and melted again. It was like being looked at by two small, golden kaleidoscopes. "I was too small to hold enough blood," it flickered softly to Janet, "so they left me. I'd have died if Chrestomanci hadn't found me. So you see why it worries me?"

"Yes," said Janet. "What do baby dragons feed on? Milk?"

"Michael tried me with milk, but I didn't like it," said the dragon. "I have minced steak now, and I'm growing beautifully. When I'm big enough, he's going to take me back, but meanwhile I'm helping him with his magic. I'm a great help."

"Are you?" said Janet. "What do you do?"

"I find old things he can't find himself." The dragon fell into a flickering croon. "I fetch him animals from the abyss-old golden creatures, things with wings, pearl-eyed monsters from the deep sea, and whispering plants from long ago." It stopped and looked at Janet with its head on one side. "That waseasy," it remarked to Cat. "I've always wanted to do that, but no one let me before." It sighed a long blue fume of smoke. "I wish I was bigger. I could eat her now."

Cat took an alarmed look at Janet and found her staring like a sleepwalker, with a silly smile on her face.

"Of all the mean tricks!" he said.

"I think I'll just have a nibble," said the dragon.

Cat realized it was being playful. "I'll wring your neck if you do," he said. "Haven't you got anything else to play with?"

"You sound just like Michael," said the dragon in a sulky roll of smoke. "I'm bored with mice."

"Tell him to take you for walks." Cat took Janet's arm and shook her. Janet came to herself with a little jump and seemed quite unaware that anything had happened to her. "And I can't help the way you feel,"

said Cat to the dragon. "I need some dragons' blood." He pulled Janet well out of range, just to be on the safe side, and picked up a little china crucible from the next bench.

The dragon hunched up irritably and scratched itself like a dog under the chin until its wings rattled.

"Michael says dragons' blood always does harm somewhere," it said, "even when an adept uses it. If you're not careful, it costs a life."

Cat and Janet looked at one another through the smoke it had made with its speech. "Well, I can spare one," said Cat. He took the gla.s.s stopper off the big jar and scooped up some brown powder in the crucible. It had a strong, strange smell.

"I suppose Chrestomanci manages all right with two lives," Janet said nervously.

"But he's rather special," said the dragon. It was standing on the very edge of the bench, rattling with anxiety. Its golden eyes followed Cat's hands as he wrapped the crucible in his handkerchief and pushed the bundle cautiously into his pocket. It seemed so worried that Cat went over to it and, a little nervously, rubbed it under the chin where it had been scratching. The dragon stretched its neck and pressed against his fingers. The smoke came out of its nostrils in purring puffs.

"Don't worry," Cat said. "I've got three lives left, you see."

"That explains why I like you," said the dragon, and almost fell off the bench in its effort to follow Cat's fingers. "Don't go yet!"

"We've got to." Cat pushed the dragon back on the bench and patted its head. Once he was used to it, he found he did not mind touching its warm, h.o.r.n.y hide a bit. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said the dragon.

They left it staring after them like a dog whose master has gone for a walk without it.

"I think it's bored," Cat said when he had shut the door.

"It's a shame! It's only a baby," said Janet. She stopped on the first turn of the stair. "Let's go back and take it for a walk. It was sweet!"

Cat was sure that if Janet did any such thing, she would come to herself to find the dragon browsing on her legs. "It wasn't that sweet," he said. "And we'll have to go to the garden straightaway now. It's going to tell Mr. Saunders we took some dragons' blood as soon as it sees him." "Yes, I suppose it does make a difference that it can talk," Janet agreed. "We'd better hurry then."

Cat walked very carefully through the Castle, down and out of doors, and kept a hand on his pocket in case of accidents. He was afraid he might arrive at the forbidden garden with one life less. He seemed to have lost three of his lives so easily. That kept puzzling him. From the look of those matches, losing life number five ought to have been as much of a disaster as losing the sixth one last night. But he had not noticed it go at all. He could not understand it. His lives did not seem to be properly attached to him, like ordinary people's. But at least he knew there were no other Cat Chants to be dragged into trouble in this world, when he left it.

15.

It was a glorious start-of-autumn day, with everything green and gold, hot and still. There was not a soul around, and very little sound except the lonely crunch of Cat's and Janet's feet as they hurried through the formal garden.

Halfway through the orchard, Janet said, "If the garden we want looks like a ruined castle, we're going away from it now."

Cat could have sworn they were heading straight for it but, sure enough, when he stopped and looked around, the high, sun-soaked old wall was right behind them. And now he came to think of it, he could not remember how he and Gwendolen had got to it before.

They turned back and walked towards the high wall. All they found was the long, low wall of the orchard. There was no gate in it, and the forbidden garden was beyond it. They went along the orchard wall to the nearest gate. Whereupon they were in the rose garden, and the ruined wall was behind them again, towering above the orchard.

"This couldn't be an enchantment to stop people getting into it, could it?" said Janet, as they plodded through the orchard again.

"I think it must be," said Cat. And they were in the formal garden again, with the high wall behind them.

"They'll be coming out of church before we've found it, at this rate," Janet said anxiously.

"Try keeping it in the corner of your eye and not going straight to it," said Cat.

They did that. They walked slantwise with the garden, not really looking at it. It seemed to keep pace with them. And suddenly they came out somehow beyond the orchard into a steep, walled path. Up at the top of it stood the high old wall, with its stairway masked by hollyhocks and bright with snapdragons, breathing warmth out of its crumbling stones into their worried faces. Neither of them dared look straight at the tall ruins, even while they were running up the path. But the wall was still there when they reached the end, and so was the overgrown stair.

The stair made a nerve-racking climb. They had to go up it twice as high as a house, with one side of themselves pressed against the hot stones of the wall, and a sheer drop on the other side. The stairs were frighteningly old and irregular. And they grew hotter and hotter. Towards the end, Cat had to keep his head tipped up to the trees hanging over the top of the ruins, because looking anywhere else began to make him dizzy. He had glimpses of the Castle in the distance from more angles than he would have thought possible. He suspected that the ruins he was on were moving about.

There was a notch in the wall at the top, not like a proper entrance at all. They swung themselves in through it, secret and guilty, and found the ground beyond worn smooth, as if other people had beencoming that way for centuries. There were trees, thick and dark and close together. It was wonderfully cool. The smoothly worn path twined among them. Janet and Cat stole along it. As they went, the trees, as closely growing trees often seem to do when you walk among them, appeared to move this way and that and spread into different distances. But Cat was not altogether sure it was only an appearance.

One new distance opened into a dell. And then they were in the dell.

"What a lovely place!" Janet whispered. "But how peculiar!"

The little dip was full of spring flowers. Daffodils, scillas, snowdrops, hyacinths, and tiny tulips were all growing there in September in the most improbable profusion. There was a slight chill in the dip, which may have accounted for it. Janet and Cat picked their way among these flowers, shivering a little. There were the scents of spring, chilly and heady, clean and wild, but strong with magic. Before they had taken two steps, Cat and Janet were smiling gently. Another step and they were laughing.

"Oh, look!" said Janet. "There's a cat."

It was a large stripy torn. It stood arched suspiciously beside a clump of primroses, not sure whether to run away or not. It looked at Janet. It looked at Cat. And Cat knew it. Though it was firmly and definitely a cat, there was just a suggestion of a violin about the shape of its face.

He laughed. Everything made him happy in that place. "That's old Fiddle," he said. "He used to be my violin. What's he doing here?"

Janet knelt down and held out her hand. "Here, Fiddle. Here, puss." Fiddle's nature must have been softened by being in that dell. He let Janet rub his chin and stroke him. Then, in the most unheard-of way, he let Janet pick him up and stand up hugging him. He even purred. Janet's face glowed. She could almost have been Gwendolen coming home from a witchcraft lesson, except that she looked kinder. She winked at Cat. "I love all kinds of Cat!"

Cat laughed. He put out his left hand and stroked Fiddle's head. It felt strange. He could feel the wood of the violin. He took his hand away quickly.

They went on through a white spread of narcissi, smelling like paradise, Janet still carrying Fiddle. There had been no white flowers until then. Cat began to be almost sure that the garden was moving around them of its own accord. When he stepped among bluebells, and then big red tulips, he was sure. He almost-but not quite-saw the trees softly and gently sliding about at the sides of what he could see.

They slid him among b.u.t.tercups and cow-parsley, into a sunny, sloping stretch. And here was a wild rose, tangled with a creeper covered in great blue flowers. Cat could definitely feel the sliding movement now. They were being moved around and down somehow. If he thought about the way the garden had also been moving about in the Castle grounds, he started to feel almost as sick as he did in the car. He found it was best just to keep walking and looking.

When they slid through the trees among flowers of high summer, Janet noticed too. "Aren't we getting a lightning tour of the year?" she said. "I feel as if I'm running down a moving staircase."

It was more than the ordinary year. Fig trees, olives, and date palms moved them around into a small desert, where there were cacti like tormented cuc.u.mbers and spiny green armchairs. Some had bright flowers on them. The sun burned down. But they had hardly time to get uncomfortable before the trees circled around them again and brought them into a richer, sadder light, and autumn flowers. They had barely got used to that when the trees put out berries, turned amber and lost their leaves. They moved towards a thick holly, full of red berries. It was colder. Fiddle did not like this part. He struggled out of Janet's arms and ran away to warmer climes. "Which are the gates to other worlds?" Janet said, brought back to a sense of purpose.

"Soon, I think," said Cat. He felt them coming to the center of the garden. He had seldom felt anything magical so strongly.

The trees and bushes around them now were embalmed in frost. They could see bright berries in bright casings of ice. Yet Janet had scarcely time to rub her arms and shiver before a tree met them that was a wintry ma.s.s of pink blossom. Straight stalks of winter jasmine hung from the next, in lines of small yellow stars. And then came a mighty black thorn tree, twisted in all directions. It was just putting out a few white blossoms.

As it took them in under its dark hood, Janet looked up into its black twistings. "The one at Glas...o...b..ry looks like this," she said. "They say it blooms at Christmas."

Then Cat knew they were in the heart of the garden. They were in a small bowl of meadowland. All the trees were up around the edges, except one. And here it seemed the right season of the year, because the apples were just ripening on that one tree. It stood leaning over the center of the meadow, not quite overshadowing the queer ruin there. As Janet and Cat pa.s.sed quietly towards this place, they found a little spring of water near the roots of the apple tree, which bubbled up from nowhere, and bubbled away again into the earth almost at once. Janet thought the clear water looked unusually golden. It reminded her of the water from the shower when it stopped Cat from burning.

The ruins were two sides of a broken archway.

There was a slab of stone which must have fallen from the top of the arch lying nearby at the foot of the tree. There was no other sign of a gate.

"I think this is it," said Cat. He felt very sad to be leaving.

"I think it is too," Janet agreed in an awed, m.u.f.fled voice. "I feel a bit miserable to be going, as a matter of fact. How do we go?"

"I'm going to try sprinkling a pinch of dragons' blood in the archway," said Cat.

He fumbled out the crucible wrapped in his handkerchief from his pocket. He smelled the strong smell of the dragons' blood and knew he was doing wrong. It was wrong to bring this harmful stuff into a place that was so strongly magic in such a different way.

But, since he did not know what else to do, Cat carefully took a pinch of the smelly brown powder between the finger and thumb of his right hand, wrapped the crucible away again with his left hand, and then, carefully and guiltily, sprinkled the powder between the pillars of broken stone.

The air between the pillars quivered like air that is hot. The piece of sunny meadow they could see beyond grew misty, then milky pale, then dark. The darkness cleared slowly, away into the corners of the s.p.a.ce, and they found they could see into a huge room. There seemed acres of it. All of it was covered in a carpet of a rather ugly playing-card sort of design in red, blue, and yellow. The room was full of people. They reminded Cat of playing cards too, because they were dressed in stiff, bulky clothes in flat, bright colors. They were all trailing about, this way and that, looking important and agitated. The air between them and the garden was still quivering and, somehow, Cat knew they would not be able to get into the huge room.

"This is not right," said Janet. "Where is it?" Cat was just about to say that he did not know either, when he saw Gwendolen. She was being carried by, quite near, on a sort of bed with handholds. The eightmen carrying it all wore bulky golden uniforms. The bed was gold, with gold hangings and gold cushions.

Gwendolen was dressed in even bulkier clothes than the rest, that were white and gold, and her hair was done up into a high golden headdress which may have been a crown. From the way she was behaving, she was certainly a queen. She nodded to some of the important people and they leaped eagerly to the side of her bed and listened with feverish intelligence to what she was saying. She waved to some others, and they ran to do things. She made a sign at another person and he fell on his knees, begging for mercy.

He was still begging when other people dragged him away. Gwendolen smiled as if this amused her. By this time, the golden bed was right beside the archway, and the s.p.a.ce was a turmoil of people racing to do what Gwendolen wanted.

And Gwendolen saw Cat and Janet. Cat knew she did, from the expression of surprise and faint annoyance on her face. Maybe she worked some magic of her own, or maybe the magic in the dragons'

blood was simply used up. Whatever it was, the broken archway turned dark again, then milky, then to mist; and finally, there was nothing but meadow again between the pillars, and the air had stopped shimmering.

"That was Gwendolen," Cat said.

"I thought it was," Janet said unappreciatively. "She'll get fat if she has herself carried about like that all the time."

"She was enjoying herself," Cat said wistfully.

"I could see that," said Janet. "But how do we find my world?"

Cat was not at all sure. "Shall we try going around to the other side of the arch?"

"Seems reasonable," Janet agreed. She started to walk around the pillars, and stopped. "We'd better get it right this time, Cat. You can only afford one more try. Or didn't you lose a life on that one?"

"I didn't feel-" Cat began.

Then Mr. Nostrum was suddenly standing in the broken arch. He was holding the postcard Cat had sent to Mrs. Sharp, and he was cross and fl.u.s.tered.

"My dear boy," he said to Cat, "I told you two-thirty, not midday. It was the merest chance that I had my hand on your signature. Let us hope all is not lost." He turned and called over his shoulder, apparently into the empty meadow, "Come on, William. The wretched boy seems to have misunderstood me, but the spell is clearly working. Don't forget to bring the-ah-equipment with you."

He stepped out from between the pillars, and Cat backed away before him. Everything seemed to have gone very quiet. The leaves of the apple tree did not stir, and the small, small bubbling from the little spring changed to a soft, slow dripping. Cat had a strong suspicion that he and Janet had done something terrible. Janet was beyond the archway with her hands to her mouth, looking horrified. She was suddenly hidden by the large figure of Mr. William Nostrum, who popped into being from nowhere between the two pillars. He had a coil of rope around one arm, and there were shiny things sticking out of the pockets of his frock coat. His eyes were swiveling in an agitated way. He was a little out of breath.

"Premature but successful, Henry," he puffed. "The rest have been summoned."

William Nostrum stepped imposingly out beneath the apple tree beside his brother. The ground shook a little. The garden was quite silent. Cat backed away again and found that the little spring had stopped flowing. There was nothing but a muddy hole left. Cat was quite certain now that he and Janet had donesomething terrible.

Behind the Nostrums, other people came hurrying through the broken archway. The first one who came was one of the Accredited Witches from farther down Coven Street, puce in the face and very startled.

She had been to church in her Sunday best: a monster of a hat with fruit and flowers in it, and a black and red satin dress. Most of the people who followed her were in Sunday best too: warlocks in blue serge and hard hats, witches in silk and bombazine and hats of all shapes and sizes, respectable-looking necromancers in frock coats like William Nostrum's, skinny sorcerers in black, and quite a sprinkling of impressive wizards, who had either been to church in long black cloaks, or playing golf in very freckled plus fours. They came crowding between the pillars, first by twos and threes and then by sixes and sevens, all a little hasty and startled. Among them Cat recognized most of the witches and fortune-tellers from Coven Street, though he did not see either Mrs. Sharp or Miss Larkins-but this may have been simply that, in no time at all, he was being jostled this way and that in the middle of a large and steadily growing crowd.

William Nostrum was shouting to each group who hurried through, "Spread out. Spread out up the meadow. Surround the gate there! Leave no avenue of escape."

Janet forced her way among them and seized Cat's arm. "Cat! What have we done? Don't tell me these aren't all witches and warlocks, because I won't believe you!"

"Ah, my dear Gwendolen!" said Mr. Henry Nostrum. "Plan Two is under way."

By this time, the sloping sides of the meadow were crowded with witches and warlocks. The ground quivered to their trampling and buzzed with their cheerful conversation. There were hundreds of them-a nodding of garish hats and shiny toppers, like the audience at the opening of a bazaar.

As soon as the last necromancer had hurried between the pillars, Henry Nostrum put a heavy possessive hand on Cat's shoulder. Cat wondered uneasily whether it was just an accident that it was the same hand which held his postcard to Mrs. Sharp. He saw that the Willing Warlock had stationed himself by one of the broken pillars, blue-chinned and cheerful as ever in his tight Sunday suit. Mr. William Nostrum had put as much of himself as would go behind the other pillar and, for some reason, he had taken off his heavy silver watch-chain and was swinging it in one hand.

"Now, my dear Gwendolen," said Henry Nostrum, "would you care for the honor of summoning Chrestomanci?"

"I-I'd rather not," said Janet.

"Then I'll take it upon myself," said Henry Nostrum, perfectly well pleased. He cleared his throat and shouted in a fluting tenor, "Chrestomanci! Chrestomanci! Come to me."

And Chrestomanci was standing between the pillars.

Chrestomanci must have been on his way up the avenue from church. He had his tall gray hat in one hand and, with the other, he was in the act of putting his prayer book into the pocket of his beautiful dove-gray coat. The a.s.sembled witches and necromancers greeted him with a sort of groaning sigh. Chrestomanci blinked around at them, in his mildest and most bewildered way. He became even vaguer and more bewildered when he happened to see Cat and Janet.

Cat opened his mouth to shout at Chrestomanci to go away. But the Willing Warlock leaped on Chrestomanci the moment he appeared. He was growling. His fingernails were growing into claws and his teeth into fangs. Chrestomanci stuffed the prayer book into his pocket and turned his vague look on the Willing Warlock.

The Willing Warlock stood still in midair and shrank. He shrank so fast, he made a whirring sound. Then he was a small brown caterpillar. He dropped to the gra.s.s and wriggled there. But, while he was still shrinking, William Nostrum pounced out from behind the other pillar and deftly wrapped his watch-chain around Chrestomanci's right hand.

"Behind you!" shrieked Cat and Janet, too late.