WEATHERMONGER
by
PETER DICKINSON
An Atlantic Monthly Press Book boston Little, Brown and Company toronto
I THE ISLAND
He woke up suddenly, as if from a deep sleep full of unrecoverable dreams. He was very uncomfortable. The light was too bright, even through closed eyes, and there was something sharp and hard jutting into one of his shoulder blades. His head hurt too.
He moved his right arm in search of something familiar, a sheet or a wall, and found a quite different feeling — hundreds of rough, scratchy lumps on a warm but slimy surface, like iron pimples. Familiar, though — barnacles on a sea rock. He was lying on a rock. He opened his eyes and sat up.
His skull yelped with pain as he did so, and his hand moved instinctively to touch the smooth round thing that should have been hanging round his neck, and wasn’t.
A voice beside him said “They took it away. They hit you on the head and took it away, so that you wouldn’t be able to use it.”
She was a girl, about twelve, a kid with pigtails, very dirty, her face swollen with crying, but wearing what looked like an expensive dress of green brocade with gold trimmings that would have come right down to her ankles if she'd stood up. She was sitting beside him, her knees under her chin. Beyond her the sea lay flat as a Formica tabletop, hard blue, joggling in one patch by a sunken rock just enough to catch a few glints of the vertical noon sun. A perfect day.
“Who took it?” said Geoffrey, not even remembering what “it” was.
“They did.”
Without looking round she jerked her chin over her shoulder and he turned. He was on a tiny rock island, which shouldn’t have been there, in the middle of Weymouth Bay. The pretty dollshouses ranged right and left along the Front above the crowded beach, and George IV’s great gilt statue stood pompous at the far end. The pier was gone though, with only a few tarred and tilted timbers to show where it had been, and the crowd wasn’t a holiday crowd either. They were all standing, shoulder to shoulder, looking out to sea, and all fully dressed. There wasn’t a bathing suit anywhere. As he turned they roared, a long jeering moo. They were looking at him.
“What on earth are they up to?” he said.
“They’re waiting for us to drown. When the tide comes in.”
“Well, don’t let’s wait for them. It’s still quite shallow. Come on.”
“They won’t let you ashore, but they want you to try. That’s what they like. I’ve seen it.”
“Oh, piffle! Come on.”
Without waiting to see whether the girl would follow, Geoffrey hitched up his robes and stepped into the sea. A pleased hum throbbed through the crowd, like the purr of a huge cat. The water was beautifully warm; it must have been a first-rate summer; he couldn’t remember. He sploshed towards the shore, hampered by his silly dressing gown of a robe, worried about spoiling its precious gold fabric with salt water, but comforted by the real, everyday feel of watery sand under his feet. As he waded the front row of the crowd opposite where he stood looped forward into the fringe of the sea. They were all men, rather small men, but carrying what looked like spears. The whole of Weymouth Bay seemed to have shrunk a bit.
Once they had worked out where he was aiming for, the spearmen bunched there in a close line and lowered their spears. They weren’t only small — they were oddly dressed, with a history-book look about them. Most of them had ordinary jackets, very patched, but some were wearing crisscross leggings and others a sort of sacking kilt, and they all had beards. When he was a couple of feet from the spearpoints, which looked dead sharp, he stopped. The crowd was still as an empty beach.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?’’ he said to the man directly in front of him. “Come off it.”
It felt odd to be talking to a grown-up like that, but they were really behaving a bit daft, and anyway he was quite as big as they were. His voice came out round and firm, without that dratted squeak.
The man (he was bald, with a coppery beard, his face tanned dark as a gypsy’s, with a mesh of tiny crimson veins running under the tan on his bulgy nose) said nothing, but the line of spearmen moved another pace into the water, and the man’s spear touched Geoffrey’s robe, pierced it, pricked his skin. Quite right, the points were sharp, so it hardly hurt at all. Geoffrey stood his ground.
With a happy grin the man prodded the steel a quick half inch further in and twisted. That hurt like mad. Geoffrey forgot his robe and the water and tried to jump back, but tripped and sat down in the clammy wetness. The crowd bayed and cheered. Geoffrey scrambled up from his defenseless sprawling, but the man made no further attack. He just stood, watching and grinning. Geoffrey looked down at the gold robe, where the blood was beginning to make its own pattern among the threads; he felt the tears of pain and defeat in his eyes, and (so that the crowd on the beach shouldn’t see them) turned and waded back to the tiny rock island that shouldn’t have been there.
As he was climbing on to it, he saw that it was really a platform made of broken slabs of concrete roughly heaped together — a platform for drowning people from. The girl had been crying again, but had stopped.
“I told you so,” she said. She sounded not smug but sympathetic and miserable. Geoffrey stared at her, wondering who she was and what the people on the beach could be up to, trying to drown a couple of kids. He felt again at his chest, where the round, smooth whatever-it-was should have been, dangling from its gold chain.
“They took it away,” she said. “I told you. Can’t you remember anythingV*
“Not much.”
“Don’t you even know who I am?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She started to snivel again.
“I'm Sally,” she said between gulpings, “your sister Sally.”
Oh, Lord! Geoffrey sat down on the concrete and stared out to sea. The water had only a couple of inches to come and it would cover their island. And somewhere he’d lost five years. No wonder the Bay was smaller and people were smaller. But why had they all gone mad? He’d have to do something for Sally now, anyway, even if she was a different Sally and not the cocky six-year-old clown he knew.
“Why do they want to drown us?”
“For witches. They came to ask you about making weather and found you putting a bit of machinery from the boat into the oven. Then they banged you on the head and took your talisman away, and then they rummaged round the house and found my pictures, so they rang the church bells and brought us down here to drown.”
“Making weather?”
“Yes. You did it with your talisman. You’re the weathermonger in Weymouth. Every town has one. I think that’s really why they want to drown you, because you’re one of the richest men in Weymouth and they want your money. They paid you pounds and pounds for a good harvest.”
“But Quern's still there?”
“Oh, yes, that’s where the bit of engine came from which told them you were a witch. You sneak down and fiddle with her almost every week. I’ve seen you out of my bedroom window, though what use she is without sails I don’t know.”
“What would happen if we tried to swim round to her?”
“They’d run along and get into boats and prod you in the water. We saw a man try it last Whitsun. I laughed and laughed. Oh dear.”
She started off on her gulping again. Geoffrey stared glumly at the rising water. Only half an inch to go now.
“Look,” he said, “I think our best bet’s to wait until the tide’s right in and try and float round with our noses just out of the water and perhaps they’ll think we’ve drowned.”