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42

"THAT'S IT!" EDWARD SAID. "HARROW HILL! WHAT ELSE?" HE jabbed a finger at the map and looked up, beaming triumphantly.

Alice doubted things could be so easy. "They show standing stones there," she agreed, peering. "Why Harrow?"

"Anglo-Saxon. Hearh meant a hilltop sanctuary."

"Is there any language you can't speak?" Julian demanded.

"Chinese. And I'm not much good in Thargian. You need a sandpaper throat to pronounce it. But this looks right, and here's the village where we met the Gypsies—Vicarsdown. See the meadow by the river? It all fits."

The five of them were gathered around Mrs. Bodgley's dining room table, examining the maps Mr. Glossop had provided. He had also sent a list of half a dozen megalithic sites around Greyfriars, but obviously Edward was already convinced he had found the one he wanted.

Alice distrusted enthusiasm. "Second choice, just in case?" she asked. Harrow Hill was only nine or ten miles from the Dower House, so she could guess what was going to happen this afternoon.

She had had a busy morning, visiting old Glossop with Mrs. Bodgley and then shopping in Greyfriars. The town itself had not changed in three years, but the effects of the war had been depressingly obvious. That a wealthy lady would have to fetch her own groceries instead of having them delivered—that had been one big difference. The eerie scarcity of young men had been another. Not that their absence had been all bad. Buying men's underwear in Wickenden Bros. Gentlemen's Outfitters might have been a lot more embarrassing had the clerk not been a woman.

Edward completed his survey of the list and shook his head. "Looks like Harrow Hill or nothing. We can run over there after lunch. It's a lovely day."

"Is old Elspeth up to another outing?" Smedley asked.

Mrs. Bodgley shook her head. "Better not. Her wind isn't what it used to be. Mr. Glossop allowed us to borrow his bicycle, though. It's a lady's model of unimpeachable antiquity, but if you don't mind being seen on it, Edward, it should take you there and back."

"I don't mind being seen. Being noticed might be sticky. Running into old Inspector Leatherdale, for example."

"Why don't you take my bike?" Ginger suggested. "Miss Prescott will doubtless be pleased to accompany you." His expression was unreadable, light reflecting off his pince-nez.

About to suggest that Julian go in her place, Alice caught herself in the nick of time. She had not brought any clothes suitable for cycling, but Edward was beaming at the prospect. "I'd love to," she agreed. "Very kind of you."

"Then that's settled!" Mrs. Bodgley said heartily.

"Ripping!" Then Edward frowned. "One thing, though . . . we shall have to take an offering."

The lady blinked. "What sort of offering? Kill a white lamb, you mean? Or a five-bob note?"

"Something significant." He looked apologetically at Alice. He was flat broke, of course.

"I think I may have something." Mrs. Bodgley swept from the room.

An awkward silence remained. This was the twentieth century. Pagan gods were a permissible subject for conversation, but actually making sacrifice to one would be behavior beyond the bizarre.

"Blood, of course," Edward muttered, "but it would be more fitting to have brought something tangible in this case, I think . . . ."

Alice decided that blood sacrifice was out of the question. She could not possibly summon up enough faith . . . which was the whole point, presumably. Half a crown in the plate was as far as she would go for a pre-Christian woodland numen.

Mrs. Bodgley sailed back in majestically. "I presume you can deliver an offering from me, on your behalf?" She might have been referring to the church jumble sale.

"Certainly."

"Then take this to your, ah, associate." She handed Edward a small silver tankard. "Timothy's christening mug. As a token of my gratitude for his helping my son's friend. And this . . . I gave you this once, so it is yours, but it still has Timothy's name on the flyleaf and Inspector Leatherdale returned it to me. It has no real value, yet I expect it could be termed significant under the circumstances."

Edward took the book and glanced at the title. Then he blinked several times and swallowed, at a loss for words. Eventually he mumbled, "Thank you very much. It's a wonderful choice."

Alice looked away. Probably they all did, for nobody said any more. The English were never very good at dealing with emotion.

 

It was indeed a lovely day. Mr. Glossop's bicycle was Jacobean, or even Elizabethan, with a pedal brake and a flint saddle; but it worked. Despite a niggling worry that her skirts would catch in the chain, Alice realized that she was going to enjoy this outing. Three days ago she had believed her cousin dead, and here she was cycling along a country lane with him, under beeches and elms just starting to blush with autumn. Wild roses and chestnut trees were laden with fruit.

In the Grange park, the sheep had been herded aside, and the convalescents were indulging in a strange sort of cricket match. With half the players in bandages or even casts, the rules must have been specially devised. She turned her mind from them; she wanted to forget the war today.

"England!" Edward sighed.

"Are the Vales comparable?"

He pulled a face, as if that was the problem he wanted to forget, but he answered. "Not many. Thargland comes close. The colors! I suppose a blue and purple forest sounds grotesque, but it has its own beauty."

A hill intervened then, and they concentrated on pedaling. As they started downhill, Alice put her doubts into words.

"Edward? This is fun. I am enjoying it, but are you seriously promising to introduce me to a genuine woodland spirit? Human originally but from another world and endowed with magical powers? Centuries old? I must admit—"

"No. Probably not. If we went at night, perhaps, but he's very shy. I don't think he'll appear in ."

That was a relief. "So what are you hoping to achieve? What will you do, actually?"

"Pray," he said solemnly. "Thank him again for what he did for me three years ago. Leave the offerings, explain that I need to send a message to Head Office. Tell him the message, probably, and just ask him to pass it on. That's all."

Even that sounded weird. With almost anyone else, she would have wondered about sanity; she would have suspected obsessions or just tomfoolery, but Edward had never been a leg-puller. Even as a boy, he had been trustworthy.

"So how will you know if you've been heard?"

"I think I'll know."

And then he would set off to wangle his way into the Army! She did not want to think about that. Why fight for a homeland that wanted to hang you? A hay wagon loomed in the road ahead, rumbling along behind a solitary horse. They pulled out to pass it and started up another slope. On either hand the fields were golden.

"You can't predict strangers," Edward said. "They don't face early death as we do. Their viewpoint is so different . . . ."

"How many have you met?" she asked. "Just Puck in this world, but how many on Nextdoor?"

"Four or five. That's if you don't count the Service people, of course. Most of them haven't been strangers long enough to lose their humanity. They're communal, too. That helps. The god types are solitary."

"Skulking on their nodes like spiders in a web?"

"Exactly! Well put. Mad as March hares, a lot of 'em. But charming! They all have charisma, you see, so you can't ever dislike them."

He frowned at some memory or other and fell silent.

She prompted. "Tion and the herder one?"

"Tion and Krobidirkin. Then Prylis—delightful, entertaining, and a thoroughgoing rotter!"

Intrigued, Alice said, "In what way?"

Edward pedaled in sulky silence for a while. "I suppose I shouldn't judge him," he said—but so reluctantly that he obviously did. "He was just playing the Great Game as he thought it should be played, and he did save my life because of it. A real Zath hater."

More silence.

"Tell me about him."

"Prylis? He's one of Tion's minions, god of learning. Originally he was from somewhere in Macedonia, I think. Don't know exactly when. His ideas of history and geography never seemed to match mine. He was delighted to have a visitor from his old world, more or less. The last one had brought him up to date with current affairs at the time of Charlemagne. We talked in a wild mixture of Greek and Thargian and Joalian, but his Joalian was centuries old, and whenever he got excited his Macedonian and Thargian accents combined to make him completely incomprehensible. He had more books than the British Museum."

It was not like Edward to hold a grudge, and he was not explaining this one.

"He sounds no worse than eccentric."

"Oh, he was personable enough—and knowledgeable, as you'd expect in a god of learning. He showed me maps of the Vales, he talked of the lands outside—deserts to the southeast and Fashranpil, the Great Ice, to the north. There are jungles west and south, with travelers bringing back tantalizing hints of salt water beyond, but even Prylis can't tell if it's an ocean or a closed sea. There's a trickle of trade goods coming across the desert: sapphires and spices, carved onyx and amber, but nobody knows who or where they come from.

"He spilled out centuries of history for me, biographies of gods, legends and beliefs, great poets and great art, politics and customs. I learned more about the Vales in those two days than I had in the previous year. Just about anything I wanted to know he could tell me . . . except where Olympus was, oddly enough. The Service wasn't in his books and didn't interest him. Reforms had been tried before, he said, and he quoted some examples, but whenever they became a serious nuisance the Five just took them over or stamped them out. But the quirks of the Vales and the vagaries of its peoples . . . anything I wanted to ask he would answer. Thargvale wasn't such a crazy place to put a temple of learning as it seemed. Thargians are Philistines who care about little except war, but they're usually strong enough to keep the war in other people's vales. Prylis had been left undisturbed for centuries. By arriving with an army, I'd earned a spot in the history books already, just out of ignorance. Lovers of learning shouldn't mind the pilgrimage to his digs anyway, he said, which was true enough. He did have humor! We sat up all the first night, talked all day, two days. He charmed me, beguiled me."

Edward scowled darkly. "He kept me from my duty."

Ah! That was the crime he could not forgive.

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