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“I shouldn’t stay more than a few minutes,” I answered. “My men will be waiting for me-”

“But you’ve only just arrived!”

“We have to be back in Uroconium by tomorrow morning.”

“He wants to see the horse, whatever else,” the Yule Greave’s wife insisted.

“Oh, does he? You’d better go and show him, then,” he said, looking at me as if I had let him down and then turning abruptly away. He poked so hard at the fire that one of the logs fell out of it. Smoke came into the room in a thick cloud. “This stinking chimney!” he shouted.

We left the room, the Yule Greave looking after us red-faced and watery-eyed. Her gallery, I found out, was a mezzanine floor somewhere in the west wing. The sun was just coming round to it, pouring obliquely in through the tall lanceolate windows. The Yule Greave’s wife stood in an intermittent pool of warm yellow light with her hands clasped anxiously.

“Ringmer?” she called. “Ringmer?”

We stood and listened to the wind blustering about outside.

After a moment a boy of twenty or so came out of the shadows of the mezzanine. He looked surprised to see her. He had the thick legs and shoulders of the moorland people, and the characteristic soft brown hair chopped off to a line above his raw-looking ears. He was carrying a horse’s head on a pole.

“I see you have the rest of the Mari,” she said with a smile. “Do you think you could show Lord Cromis? I’ve brought the coat back with me.”

It was an astonishing specimen. Usually you find the skull boiled and crudely varnished, or buried for a year to get rid of the flesh, a makeshift wire hinge for the jaw, and the bottoms of cheap green bottles for eyes. This one had been made long ago, and with more care: it was lacquered black, its jaw hinged with massive silver rivets, and somehow the inside of a pomegranate had been preserved and inserted, half in each orbit, so that the seeds made bulging, faceted eyes. It must have been appallingly heavy for the operator. The pole on which it rested was brown bone, three and a half feet long and polished with use.

“It is very striking,” I said.

The boy now took the embroidered cloth and shook it out. Hooks fitted along its top edge allowed it to be gathered beneath the horse’s head so that it fell in stiff folds and obscured the pole. With a quick, agile movement he slipped under it and crouched down. The Mari came to life, humpbacked, curvetting, and snapping its jaw. It predated not only the Yule Greave but his house. Time opened like a hole underneath us, and the Yule Greave’s wife stepped back suddenly.

“ ‘Open the door for us,’ ” chanted the boy:

“ ‘It is cold outside for the Grey Mare

Its heels are almost frozen.’ ”

“I would admit you at my peril,” I said. The Yule Greave’s wife laughed.

Later I went to examine some manuscripts which belonged to the house. They were kept at the other end of the mezzanine. When I looked back the Yule Greave’s wife was standing next to the mast horse. Its eyes glittered, its lower jaw hung down. Her hand was resting on its back, just as it might rest on the neck of a real animal, and she was saying something to it in a low voice. I never found out what, because at that moment the Yule Greave came puffing and panting into the gallery, limping as if he had banged his leg and shouting,

“All right, come on, you’ve seen enough of this.”

The Mari reared up for a second, bared its white teeth, then retreated into the shadows, and the boy Ringmer, presumably, with it.

At the door of the staircase which led to the Yule Greave’s private room I took leave of his wife, in case, as she said, we did not meet again.

“We see so few people,” she said.

“Hurry up,” urged the Yule Greave. “It’s quite a climb.”

The staircase was so narrow that he rubbed his shoulders on the walls as he led the way up, brushing off great flakes of damp yellow plaster. His fat pear-shaped buttocks shut out the light. The little square room was right at the top of the house. From its narrow windows you could see one of the stone avenues stretching away, a sliver of brownish hillside, and a bend in the shallow stony river. The wind boomed around us, bringing quite clearly the bleat of moorland sheep.

The Yule Greave tried to open a trap door in the ceiling so that we could go out onto the roof, which was flat there. The bolts were rusted shut, but he would give up only after a lot of heaving and grunting.

“I can’t understand it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He hammered at one of the bolts until he cut the heel of his hand, then his eyes watered and he began to cry. He turned away from me and pretended to look out across the hillside, where the sheep were scattered like grey rocks. “If we fail,” he said, “the future will judge us very harshly.” He sniffed and blinked. He looked at his cut hand, then wiped his eyes with it, leaving a smear of blood. “Now look what I’ve done. I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

The tower smelled of the old books he had abandoned to the mould in haphazard piles. I picked up Oei’l Voirrey and The Death and Revival of the Earl of Rone. I asked him if he would show me his souvenirs, but he seemed to have lost interest. He kept them in a wooden chest: a few dolls made out of women’s hair and bits of mirror; some cooking implements; a knife of curious design. The damp had got at everything and made it worthless. “It’s just the sort of thing we all picked up,” he said. “I think there’s a mask in there somewhere.”

“The men of the community set out in the afternoon,” I quoted, “and, aftermuch parading and searching, discover the Earl of Rone hidden ineffectuallyin the low scrub…”

“You can keep the Oei’l Voirrey if you like,” he said.

We stared down at the ancient avenue stretching away from the house, its puddled surface reflecting the white sky. His wife appeared walking slowly along it with the boy Ringmer. They were smiling and talking like ghosts. The Yule Greave watched them sadly, until I said that I would have to go.

“You must at least have something to eat with us,” he said.

“I have to be in the city before morning,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

We went out, and I got on my horse in one of the muddy gateways. As I set off down the long avenue I thought I heard him say, “Tell them in the city that we still keep faith.”

The avenue seemed barren and endless. The sun had gone in and it was raining again by the time I led my men through a break in one of the walls; and with the cold wind of spring blowing into our backs we turned north and picked our way up to the rim of the escarpment.

Up by the Yule Greave’s abandoned quarries I stopped to have one more look at the house. It seemed silent and untenanted. Then I saw a stone cart move slowly down the valley towards the fortifications. Smoke came out of one of the chimneys. Above me the little grey hawk dipped and swerved on the wind. My men, sensing my preoccupation, huddled in a bay of the quarry, wrapped in their sodden cloaks and talking quietly. I could smell moorland, wet wool, the breath of the horses. Soon most of the valley was obscured by mist and driving rain, but I could see the fortifications lying across it in straight lines, and beyond them, towards the sea where a fugitive and watery sun was still shining, the light was reflected off the waiting encampments.

If I had the eyes of that hawk, I thought, I know what I would see down there, moving towards us.

One of my men pointed to the fortifications and said,

“Those walls won’t last long, however well they’re defended.”

I found myself staring at him for a long time before answering. Then I said:

“They’ve already been breached. That place down there is raddled.”

Even as we watched, the Yule Greave and his wife and their three children came out of the house with the boy Ringmer, and began to dance in a circle in the overgrown garden. I could hear the thin voices of the children carrying the tune, blown up the hill with the mist and the rain: