Then came the storm. The stars which had been blazing down hard-edged as diamonds vanished from horizon to horizon. The sky groaned. Balefires pranced along the parapet and flickered down the edges of the tower. A few drops of rain fell, warm as blood, and then the valley cracked with lightning. Geoffrey could see that the dogs were howling again, but he couldn’t hear them through the grinding bellows of thunder. There was no darkness. All down the valley the black cloud roof stood on jigging legs of light, blue-white, visible through closed eyelids. The shed next to the stables caught fire and burnt with orange flames and black, oily smoke. Maddox picked his way between the dogs and nuzzled under Sally’s fur, shivering convulsively. The world drowned in noise.
When the storm finished he thought he was deaf. His head was full of a strange wailing, which he decided must be the effect of ruined eardrums. But then a log on the fire tilted sideways and he heard it fall — the wailing was outside, coming from the sky, swooping in great curves around the tower. As it crossed the now blazing stables he thought he saw a darker blackness in the night, bigger than a bird, but wasn’t sure. The wailing rose to a tearing squeal and floated away westwards.
Then, he afterwards realized, the disturbances invaded his own mind. At the time it seemed like more portents crowding in round him. A new tower sprouted to the north, with people moving about at the top of it, carrying lanterns. A dark beast, toadshaped, big as a barn, heaved itself out of the forest and scrabbled at the stonework. Uncle Jacob stalked across the cobbles, cracking his thumbs in a shower of sparks; he looked angry, did not speak, and walked on into the dark. The whole landscape started to drift, to float away after the wailing noise, faster and faster, with a whirling, bucking motion, sucked on a roaring current of time which toppled over the edge of reality. They were falling, falling .. .
The rest, for a while, was dreams, meaningless; shapeless, a dark chaos.
When he woke up it was still dark. The clouds had gone, the moon was well down in the sky, a few red patches of embers showed where the stables and the sheds beyond them had been, and the earth was heaving in sudden stiff jerks and spasms. Tiles were clattering off the sheds all round the courtyard, and from the forest came the groaning of toppled trees. The steps on which they were sitting had tilted sideways. Sally lay across him with her head in his lap.
“Wake up, Sal. Wake up and be ready to run. I think the tower might fall.”
“Oh, Jeff, I’m frightened.”
“So’m I. If it falls straight at us we’re done for, but if it looks like going a bit to one side we must run the other way. Don’t try to hide in any of the buildings — they might cave in too. I hope Mr. Furbelow will be all right.”
You couldn’t prepare for the spasms, because they weren’t rhythmical, just shuddering jars from any direction, often with a deep booming noise under ground. Geoffrey looked round to see how the cottage was taking it, and saw in the moonlight a black ragged crack, inches wide, running up the stucco beside the door. They fell over twice as they moved away (it was like trying to stand in a bus without holding on and without looking where it’s going) . They had to be careful, too, where they put their feet, because of the way the gaps between the cobbles widened and snapped together. They found a patch of flagstones, which seemed safer, and sat back to back, looking up to where the dark wedge of the tower blanked out a huge slice of stars.
They waited for it to fall. It came down quite slowly.
First there were three grunting spasms, all together, and a section of the outer wall over to their right fell with a gravelly roar into the ditch, taking the timber store with it. Then they saw the ground in that direction humping itself up into a wave which came grinding across the courtyard, six feet high, throwing off a spume of cobbles in the moonlight. They stood up. Sally turned to run.
“Face it, Sal. Try and ride over it when it comes. Hold my hand. Run up”
The shock wave reached the paved area, tilting the stones over like the leaves of a book being flipped through. Geoffrey ran forward, dragging Sally with him, climbing and scrambling. Sally fell and he leaned forwards, heaving at her arm. The stone he was standing on tilted suddenly the other way, breaking his grip and shooting him up on to the crest of the wave and down the other side. A stone fell painfully across his leg, pinning him by the ankle, and then Sally came floundering on top of him.
“Are you all right, Jeff?”
“Yes. Oh, look!”
He pointed. The wave was past the tower now, but the tower was falling. First a big triangle of masonry slid out on the far side, broad at the top and narrow at the bottom, like wallpaper peeled downwards off a wall. The boulders slid, coughing and roaring, down in a continuous avalanche that spilled away from the base right out to the windlass and flagstone over Merlin’s chamber. Something deep underground must have given way, for the tower continued to tilt in that direction, slow as the minute hand of a clock it seemed, but spilling more small avalanches from the ruined lip. It tilted, still almost whole, until it looked as though it could not possibly stand at that angle. Then the flaw below the foundation gave way with a final shudder; the severe curve of the outline crumpled; it was falling in hundreds of colossal fragments; there was one last roar and the tremor of booming hammer blows jarring the ground beneath them; dust smoked up in a huge pillar, higher than the tower had been, a wavering ghost of the solid stone; silence.
The long hill of rubble, immovable thousands of tons, lay directly over the place where Merlin was buried.
XIII TIDYING UP
THAT was the last upheaval. Soon there was a faint staining of dawn light over the eastern horizon. The courtyard was a wilderness of tumbled stones and half the outer wall was down. Two of the dogs were dead and a third was whining miserably, its leg trapped between cobbles. Maddox stood with his back to the worst of the wreckage, as if to make clear that anything that had happened wasn’t his fault. At first Geoffrey, after he’d levered the flagstone away, had thought that his own ankle was broken, but he found he could just stand on it and hobbled over to see what had become of Mr. Furbelow. The shelter had collapsed, but the bench had fallen sideways across a protruding mound of cobbles and was still protecting the damaged leg. When Geoffrey cleared
the furs and timber away he found the old man staring placidly upwards.
“Would you like some more morphine, sir?”
“No, thank you. Aspirin will be adequate now. There is some on the second shelf behind my desk. What has happened?”
“The tower fell down.”
“Ah.”
There was a long pause before he spoke again.
“I thought it was beautiful. Strange that we are the only three who ever saw it.”
Geoffrey fetched the aspirin and took some himself. Then he tried to free the hound with the trapped leg, but it slashed with its teeth whenever he came close. In the end he threw a fur over its head and twisted the corners, making a sort of tough sack which Sally held tight while he unwedged the stones. They’d been loosened by the earthquake and gave easily. The dog limped away. The children lay down in piles of furs and slept.
They were woken by sunlight and hunger. Geoffrey’s leg was very sore, so he took more aspirin and sat while Sally fetched bread and apples; there wasn’t much left when they’d finished breakfast.
It was only then that Geoffrey noticed what had happened to the rockpile made by the ruins of the tower. It had contracted into a single solid ridge of unhewn rock, like the cliffs on the higher ground; small stonecrops and grasses already grew from its crannies. Merlin must still be alive, then, deep underground, and had drawn the whole ruin of his tower over him to keep him safe from any future Furbelows. Geoffrey tried to picture him, asleep in the greenish light, cold as solid carbon dioxide, waiting, waiting. . . . He spoke his thought aloud. “What do you think he’s waiting for?”