“I’ll take the brake,” said Jonathan. Margaret had been so rapt in her world of stealth and silence that she was startled to hear him speak aloud. She reached up to pat Scrub’s neck and steady him for the descent, then heard the iron spike on the end of the brake-bar beginning to bite through the snow into the pitted tarmac. Scrub plodded on, unamazed; but when a hundred yards down the hill and just as they were getting to the steepest place, the moon came out and he saw the treacherous white surface falling away at his feet, he snorted and tossed his head and tried to stop. The brake grated sharply as Jonathan hauled at it, but even so the sledge had enough momentum to push the pony forward onto the frightening decline. She felt the wild tide of panic beginning to rush through his blood, and put her hand right up inside the cheekstrap, so that she could at least hold his head still.
“Easy,” she said. “Easy. Easy. You’ll do it easy.”
For a second she thought he wasn’t going to believe her. Then he steadied and walked carefully down. “That’s the worst bit,” said Jonathan.
The stream in the bottom was a black snake between the white pastures; it hissed like a snake too, and moonlight glistened off its wavelets as it might off polished scales. The old mill, which somebody had rebuilt just before the Changes, was a ruin again now; nobody cared to live so far from the village. They halted for a minute to allow Tim to move the witch round so that his feet would be below his head during the climb.
“We aren’t going fast enough,” said Jonathan. “It’ll be morning before we get back.”
“It’s not so bad after Edge,” said Margaret, “and it’ll be much easier with the moon out.”
She looked round at the black trees, the ruined mill, the white meadows with the black stream hissing between them; everything in the steep and secret valley looked magical under the chill moon. She’d never have dreamed that a world so dangerous could be so beautiful.
There are two very steep stretches on the far side.
Jonathan showed Lucy how to work the brake, then cajoled Tim into hauling on one of the traces on one side of the sledge while he took the other. Scrub stumbled on the second slope, but was on his feet and pulling almost at once, which was lucky because Lucy was thinking about something else and hadn’t even begun to use the brake. The pony’s knees seemed unhurt, thanks to the cushioning snow, and he toiled bravely on.
Edge, on the last rim of the Cotswolds, was fast asleep, and the road to Gloucester curved through it and into the darkness of beechwoods.
“Do you think you could ride him down here, and get him to trot for a bit?” said Jonathan as soon as they were past the last inhabited house. “There’s room for the rest of us on the sledge.”
It meant rearranging the sick man again, but they crowded onto the rough slats, with Jonathan at the back to work the brake and Tim clutching the sack of food Jonathan had stolen from the farm. Scrub was uneasy about the changed arrangement, and suspicious of the surface beneath his feet, but Margaret coaxed him into a trot. He faltered, changed pace to a walk and tossed his head.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Margaret. “It’s quite safe, and you’ll enjoy it. Come on.”
She felt his mouth with the reins and nudged his ribs and he tried again, and this time he kept it up. The slope was just right for the sledge: left to itself it would have stopped, with that weight on it, but it needed very little pulling to keep it going and in a minute Scrub had completely changed his mind about the whole affair and was tugging at the bit and trying to stretch into a canter. Margaret looked over her shoulder to her passengers as they passed through a patch of moonlight where no trees masked the sky. Tim was crouched over his sack, staring out sideways at the blinks of light between the trunks. Lucy was smiling her elf smile, looking as wild as the wind that slipped icily past her. Jonathan perched on a nook of sledge between the witch’s head and the brake-bar, looking intently forwards, ready for the next disaster. They could never have got this far without him: he knew what to do because he had thought about it before it happened — and he could think in secret because nobody could tell what was going on behind that funny crumpled face.
“Scrub wants to go faster,” she shouted.
“Provided you don’t miss your turn,” he shouted back. “Throw your hand up when you see it coming.”
The next few minutes were heroic adventure — real as the touch of timber but quite different, as different as dreams, from the everyday bothersomeness of roofs and clothing. The icy night air burned past her, long slopes of moonlit snow opened and closed on her left as the trees massed and thinned, Scrub covered the dangerous surface with a muscled and rhythmic confidence while she moved with his movement as a curlew moves with the northwest wind, and the road curved down the long hillside with the generous swoops imposed by the contours — and all the time a lower level of her mind kept telling her that what she was doing was dangerous. And right. Dangerous and right. Right and deadly.
Something nicked the corner of her awareness, the corner of her eye as they raced past — the cottage before the turn. She threw up her arm for a second (you could trust Jo to rely on the briefest signal) and busied herself with the problem of coaxing Scrub to a walk without letting him fall. The brake grated harshly just as she let him feel the pull of the bit.
“Too good to last, boy,” she said.
He understood at once, slowing as fast as was safe on that surface and with the danger of the sledge banging into his hind legs. (No horse is really happy about pulling something which hasn’t got shafts down a slope — he can’t hold it back.)
The ten yards into the lane after the turn is very steep, as steep as Edge Lane, but they took it slowly. After that it levels out and they were able to trot several times, but the exhilaration of the ride down the main road was lost. The night was wheeling on; the high, untended hedges closed them in; they began to feel the secrecy and strangeness of the Vale; the empty city now seemed very near.
“Cheer up, Marge,” said Jonathan while they were all rearranging themselves to allow Scrub to cope with a slight rise. “We’ve just about caught up with the time now. You tired?”
“Not if I don’t think about it.”
“Is there any way round Hempsted? Someone’s bound to hear us with everything so quiet.”
“I don’t know. Anyway, I probably couldn’t find it. This is much the best way in, because the houses are only just on both sides of the road, and not spread out in a great mass. If we try some other way we might meet the dogs.”
“All right.”
If anyone heard them in Hempsted they gave no sign. It was impossible to tell when they were out of the little inhabited village and into the derelict suburbs. Scrub was tiring now, difficult to coax out of his stolid walk. Margaret dismounted and walked beside him. Tim came and strode on the other side of him, as though he felt some mysterious sympathy with the weary limbs. The moon blanked out, and then there was a swirling flurry of snow, much more wind-driven in this open flatness than it had been up in the hills. Margaret bent her head and plodded on, looking only at the faint whiteness of the road a few feet in front of her. The level crossing told her that they were nearly there — otherwise she might have trudged on forever.
The snow-shower stopped again just as they reached the docks, but the moon didn’t come out for several minutes, during which she edged forward onto the quay in a panic lest someone would fall into the bitter water. Her memory was mistaken, too; there seemed to be far more obstructions and kinks in the quayside than she’d remembered in the quick glance from the bridge. Then suddenly the light shone down between the blind warehouses and they could all see the whole basin.