A World of Difference

Edmund Cooper

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Introduction

For many years I have written science fiction — a genre which, at its best, has always seemed to me to be concerned with the art of the possible. I do not like galactic empires, quasi-magic weapons, celestial cops and robbers. These are strictly for the kindergarten — and for such misguided folk who believe that “Star Wars”, “Star Trek” and “Dr. Who” are the quintessence of visual science fiction. If they would only take the trouble to read or re-read such novels as Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-four, Player Piano and A Clockwork Orange, they would discover what science fiction is really about.

It is concerned basically with the human predicament in possible scenarios usually set in the future.

There is another literary genre which is almost the antithesis of science fiction: it is fantasy. Good S.F. attempts to deal with the affairs of imaginary people in a potentially real world. Fantasy draws upon symbols and dreams and psychological archetypes for its literary potency.

Folk-lore and myth are the precursors of modern fantasy. Magic, good and evil gods and supermortals, symbolic quests, breathtakingly beautiful women held in thrall, ghosts, goblins, demons — these are all part of a cultural heritage that is lost in the mists of time.

I do not usually write fantasy; but, I suppose, everyone is haunted by dreams now and again — dreams that may persist even in one’s waking life.

Such a dream was “The Firebird”, a novella which takes up more than half of this book. For a writer, there is only one way to exorcise such a vivid dream; and that is to get it down on paper. Of course, the dream was not exactly as it has been recorded, nor was there such a wealth of detail. It was necessary for the writer to intrude upon the province of the dreamer. It was compulsive writing, almost automatic; as if I were simply taking dictation. The novella was written in less than three weeks, several years ago. It was first published in the U.S.A. where it was well received.

The American writer and critic, Lin Carter, in an introduction to the story, surprised me greatly. He made learned reference to mentions and use of the Phoenix symbol by the Roman historian Herodotus; and by Ovid, Dante and Milton. Apparently it also had religious significance as defined in the works of Tertulius, St. Ambrose and Cyrillus of Jerusalem. Even the great modern Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, discusses the myth of the Phoenix in his Book of Imaginary Beings.

I knew nothing about all this before or during the writing of “The Firebird”. I knew only what most people know — that the Phoenix was supposed to be a bird that consumed itself by fire, and rose again from the ashes. So perhaps I have touched upon a sort of racial memory …

One or two of the other fantasy stories in this collection are for more light-hearted. “I am a Ghost”, for example, was written in the 1950’s as a literary joke for a friend who was credulous enough to believe almost everything he had read concerning the supernatural.

Before I had established myself as a writer, I frequently received rather nasty letters from my bank manager; also I was still haunted by experiences in the Second World War. One evening I went to bed, having dined not wisely but too well. The result was a nightmare which I recorded as well as I could in “The Second Chance”.

“The Snow Crystals”, “Jahweh” and “The Diminishing Dragon” obviously have nothing at all to do with personal experience. They were just vague ideas that drifted into my mind; and, as a writer, I tried to explore them.

I do not think I shall write any more fantasy. You know what you are doing with science fiction, but not with fantasy. At least, I don’t. And that makes me just a little afraid …

Madehurst, Sussex.

October, 1979.

The Firebird

1

A Green Cathedral

Dawn.

It was a world of strange shapes and shadows, impossible colours. It was a world of silence and beauty — a dark and dancing world still shivering under the flimsy mantle of light. It was an oyster shell opened to reveal the pearl of exceeding wonder. It was a ripple of music — a moment of sadness in the long and terrible laughter of life. It was the beginning.

On the rolling stillness of the land, trees stood like tired soldiers, washed by the receding tides of mist. But there was no sound, or only the subtle whispers of a stillness before action; for all the hidden manoeuvres of the night were frozen by daybreak. And waiting lay heavily over the landscape, an invisible veil.

The house rose out of the mist, its mellow red bricks damp and shiny, its leaded windows glazed with a million drops of moisture. No smoke drifted from the chimneys, but tiny wisps of vapour hovered delicately upon lichen-daubed tiles, as if their lazy movement mimicked the slow turning of the sleepers below.

The boy looked back at the house and thought of his sleeping family. He was fond of them — as fond as one can be of strangers united only by blood and habit and love — but he had not told them of his intended departure. They would not have understood. They were too old — too old to imagine the shape of unimaginable journeys.

He stood a few paces from the door he had closed so softly behind him and gazed back at a house that had suddenly lost its meaning.

It was now no more than a chrysalis, a dead shell from which his spirit — his essential self — had crept like some bewildered imago.

Dominic was a strange child — strange as all children are until the light dies in their eyes and the fire goes out of their limbs, and their strangeness is swallowed by cities and civilizations, and the empty meaning of clocks. Dominic was a strange child, full of frightened courage and the urgency of forgotten dreams; full of death and immortality, and in love with both.

As he looked at the stillness of the house, he shivered, knowing that he would never enter it again. Dawn was a time of visions and decisions. They swirled about him as the mist swirled, plucking at his feet and fingers, creating in his eyes tears that he would never cry, and making his heart beat with hopes that might never be fulfilled.

But, whatever happened, he knew that he would not go back into the house again; knowing that footsteps can never be retraced, that every moment another moment dies, and that there are too many possibilities waiting to be born for any to have the gift of resurrection.

He did not need words for such thoughts. They were implicit in the transient dew on spider webs, the mist-hidden carpet of grass, the muted rustle of trees and the curdled fiery streaks along the eastern sky.

As the sun rose like a monstrous red balloon from distant pine trees, Dominic began to walk away. There was no sadness, only a sense of leaving.

Dominic half believed he would walk for ever through an eternal morning where mist drifted like a smoky ocean over the entire earth, where early sunlight sent fingers of day through a million cracks and openings in the trees’ rooftops, and where stars faded on the ebb-tide of the west.

He was alone, but there was no sense of loneliness; for the morning had become a green cathedral as he walked among leaning columns of trees, and watched the mist fight a slowly losing battle with the warmth of day. His thoughts were nowhere and everywhere, as daylight whispered of hidden destinations and the blood in his veins sang of a thousand miracles that might imminently happen.

And presently one of them did.

2

The Thousandth Miracle

Dominic had reached a small clearing, not far from the lake, where the ruins of a derelict cottage — long rough-hewn beams, studded doors and broken pantiles — were returning to the earth from which they had long ago been drawn. It was a scene of enchantment; for here, obviously, were ghosts — invisible and friendly, bound for ever to a home that was itself a ghost.

Dominic surveyed the debris with pleasure and surprise. He realized that, though he might have passed by the ruined cottage before, he was seeing it for the first time.

The walls of the cottage had been reduced; but with odd persistence one doorway, complete with door, still remained standing. It was surrounded by rubble and ferns and the climbing luxuriance of honeysuckle. It was a green door set in a green world.

But, above all, it was a door that had to be opened. No one, thought Dominic as he scrambled over beams and broken window frames and the mounds of clay that had once been clean white walls, no one could possibly pass by such a door without opening it.

He gazed with delight at the rusty knocker. It was a small iron hand loosely holding a massive ring. Below it, embedded in the door, lay the flattened striking piece, its face covered with a fine green cushion of moss. He lifted the ring and brought it down, but the moss muffled the sound of impact so that it could hardly be heard.

He tried again harder, but the bruised moss still held firm and the sound was swallowed. Dominic hammered on the door with his clenched hand; but the sound was no louder, and no one answered his summons.

He was disappointed. On such a morning such a door should have been opened. It was a time for mysteries and inexplicable happenings; a time for discovery.

Impulsively, he flung himself at the unresponsive door. It yielded easily — more easily than he had expected — and he half fell through the doorway on to what had once been a polished brick floor.

At the same time, his eyes were dazzled by an intense and shimmering light. In the moment that he stumbled, he saw — he thought he saw — a bird of incredible plumage, a thing of fire and radiance, rise silently from the ruins to circle above his head.

There was no sound at all and yet — and yet the air was shaking with music; and there was such a nearness of beauty and power that the earth quivered beneath his feet; and there was the message of bells from a distant temple.

The boy shaded his eyes and glanced up. The looking brought pain — and ecstasy. There it hovered against trees and sky — a creature of flame whose wings made the very air dance with excitement.

Slowly, the Firebird circled over his head. Then, with slow wing beats, it passed silently between the trees.

Dominic gazed spellbound after the bright majestic bird. He stood motionless, watching its fiery shape pass behind trees and over bushes — an unhurried flight that was neither a retreat nor an escape but a subtle invitation to follow.

In a single moment the boy’s life had changed. He had opened a door to nowhere, not knowing that on the other side of the door the Firebird waited.

He rubbed his eyes and thought that he was dreaming. He rubbed his eyes again and knew that he was not dreaming. The reality of the Firebird was beyond doubt. The air was still alive with its memory: the derelict cottage was still somehow radiant with its passing.

Dominic knew that he would follow. He knew that there was nothing else to do but follow; for if he turned back through the doorway there would be nothing left for him but an ordinary world in which to live an ordinary life.

Here on the other side of the door, where the Firebird had been waiting, it was as if the world were in sharper focus — as if the air possessed a sudden tremendous clarity so that colours were brighter, contours sharper, and every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass of immense significance. It was as if the morning had been locked in crystal and the crystal bathed in light.

The boy’s feelings suddenly changed to anxiety as he realized that the Firebird was already out of sight. He began to run, filled with a delicious fear that he had lost it — yet, at the same time, knowing that though he might never actually possess it neither would he ever completely lose it.

As he ran among the trees, Dominic caught another glimpse of the Firebird, perhaps a hundred yards ahead, in calm and unhurried flight. It hovered above a small colony of bramble bushes for a few moments — almost as if it were waiting for him — then it resumed its leisurely flight towards the lake.

3

The Golden Meteor

By the time Dominic had emerged from the long sprawling patch of trees, the Firebird was already skimming in graceful curves low over the still water. The heat from its wings annihilated the thin blanket of mist wherever it passed, describing hypnotic patterns which became themselves mobile, until it seemed as if the whole surface would soon be covered in fantastic tracery.

To Dominic the lake was more than a lake: it was a great inland sea with strange countries on the farther shore, and still stranger mysteries on the island that rose almost in its geometrical centre and was oddly like the elbow of a submerged giant.

There was a building on the island. It looked like a tiny Greek temple with four scarred stone columns supporting a carved portico, and round the base were broad circular steps. It was, in fact, a disused folly that had been built in the days when such architectural extravagances were considered necessary to any civilized landscape. Much time had passed, however, since the laughter of cultured gentlemen, the delighted prattle of delicate ladies and other sounds of sylvan gaiety had echoed from it across the lake. Now its only occupants were insects and mosses, flowers and small wild creatures, and the invisibly persistent shadows of things past.

Inside the folly there was a descending flight of steps leading originally to a semi-subterranean bower which was no doubt appropriate for the romantic foibles of an age of elegance. Dominic had been to the folly once before, but he had not ventured down the steps. He had no taste for grottoes that might house anything from a skeleton to an angry beast of darkness.

Now, as he stood at the edge of the lake, he saw that the Firebird, despite all its graceful digressions, was flying inevitably towards the island.

He remembered the boat he had used on the previous excursion and was relieved to see that it lay moored as he had left it by the broken-down wooden jetty — no more than a few planks on thin rotting piles — some fifty or sixty paces away. As he walked to the boat he began to think about the ruined cottage he had discovered, and wondered why he had not noticed it before. But perhaps it was simply because this was no ordinary morning. There was so much that he had already seen — and knew he would be seeing — for the first time.

He walked carefully along the loose planks to the boat, stepped carefully into it and cast off. The small rowing boat had settled a little on the mud of the lake bed; and he had to dig and push his way into free water with an old piece of weatherboard that did double duty as paddle and pole.

It was hard work getting away from the edge of the lake. By the time he was able to look up the Firebird was nowhere to be seen. Clearly, it had reached the island; for the heat of the rising sun had begun to disperse the mist, and almost the whole expanse of water was now visible. With utter certainty, he knew that the Firebird had not passed the island or crossed to the other side of the lake, and he was vaguely puzzled by the sureness of his conviction.

Dominic began to paddle expertly and rhythmically with the old weatherboard, so that the bows of the small boat pointed steadily at the distant target. Presently, the giant’s elbow loomed large ahead of him; and as he paddled he both amused and frightened himself by trying to estimate the dimensions of the rest of the body that lay petrified beneath the surface of the water.

Presently, he was close enough to the island to see the tiny crevices in the stone columns of the folly, and the flowers and weeds that had proudly allocated themselves a place in the sun along its waist-high, semi-circular parapet. But of the Firebird there was still no sign; and for the first time he began to have doubts — not so much of the Firebird’s destination as of its very existence.

After all, there were such things as daydreams. Perhaps the Firebird was part of a daydream. Perhaps the dream was now ending. The thought seemed to cut like a knife; and he was filled with a dismal fear that the island would prove to be empty — empty of everything save the folly, a few stunted trees and the bitter mockery of ordinary, everyday birds.

But even as doubts assailed him, he found a reason for disproving reason. The Firebird could not belong to a daydream because a daydream would only be part of him, limited by his own thoughts and imaginings. Dominic knew that, alone, he would never have been able to dream of anything so beautiful, so full of power and purpose as a bird with fiery head and wings of flame, radiant as the sun yet gentle in movement, and of such splendour and such strange destiny that whoever followed it would surely understand the meaning of miracles.

As if in response to his thoughts, the Firebird suddenly rose from a patch of tall grasses and circled high over the boat while Dominic prepared to land. He gave a cry of delight and jumped ashore, pulling the boat after him as high as he could get it on the narrow border of mud and sandy earth. Meanwhile the Firebird spiralled higher and higher, its heat and radiance mingling with that of the morning sun, until it seemed to be no more than a burning point in the now clear sky.

The boy watched, fascinated and afraid. Was this to be the end of the journey, with the Firebird disappearing eventually into those high blue reaches, and leaving only the memory of a brief pursuit that failed? He rejected the question even as he silently asked it. And it was as if he had signalled the Firebird’s impossible return.

Down it came, a golden meteor. Down, down in a falling curve, and with such speed that its passage seemed to leave an arc of light carved briefly in the sky. Down to the disused folly it streaked, to vanish behind the parapet in a moment of thunder and silence.

Dominic was appalled by the fierceness of that terrible dive. He gazed at the folly in an agony of suspense, half expecting some sign of the inevitable destruction. Surely the Firebird could only have dashed itself into a thousand fragments of light against the unyielding stone?

But there was no death glow, no explosive radiance, nothing. The folly continued to bask serenely and quietly in warm sunlight, as if all were entirely normal on this most normal of mornings. Presently, movement returned to the boy’s limbs, and he went forward cautiously to explore.

The folly was empty. The Firebird might never have existed.

4

The Eye of Darkness

But as Dominic sought futilely for even the slightest evidence of that fantastic fall to earth, his eyes were drawn to the narrow descending flight of steps, the dark stairway leading down to a concealed bower. Not a fern or a flower had been displaced, and the only possible explanation was that the Firebird had arrowed straight down into the darkness, either to shatter itself or — or to lead the way.

Carefully, the boy stood at the top of the steps and peered down. There was no sign of movement or radiance, nothing but a baleful eye of darkness staring back up at him. He stood indecisively for a few moments, trying to estimate the quality of his own courage, and the possible reasons for the Firebird’s descent — if indeed it had really vanished into the darkness of the bower.

The hesitation did not help. His conviction that the Firebird had gone down into the darkness increased in direct proportion to his own aversion for following it. The black inscrutable eye seemed to become larger, more menacing, until he knew that if he delayed any longer his fear would win.

Consciously blocking his thought and imagination, Dominic set foot on the first step. Then he ventured further, resolutely telling himself that he was merely going down eight or nine steps into nothing more extraordinary than a small dark room.

The cool air of the grotto rose up to meet him, and he felt as if he were slipping into a pool of night. He refused to count the steps, and so they became innumerable, leading perhaps to a cavern at the very centre of the earth.

Eternity passed and there were no more steps. He found himself standing on the floor of the bower. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he saw that what he had imagined as total darkness was nothing more than a sort of deep twilight relieved by a patch of sky which he could still see when looking back up the stairway. A few rays of light also filtered through a small high window which had been set into the wall of the folly just above ground level, and which could not be seen at all from the outside, screened as it was by ferns and grasses.

Something was slithering along the floor. Dominic peered anxiously through the gloom and thought that he could make out the shape of a small snake retreating to the far side of the bower. Probably it was a grass snake or a blindworm; but the possibility that it might also be a viper served to justify his apprehension about coming down, and restored his self-respect. Viper or not, he was determined to stay until he discovered what had happened to the Firebird, for it was not to be seen.

The wall of the bower, like the outside wall of the folly itself, was circular. Dominic, his mind filled with visions of secret panels and hidden springs, decided to explore every part of it. Surely the Firebird had gone somewhere. Such a bright and vital creature could not just cease to be alive.

The slithering of the snake had stopped and, as he moved slowly forward letting his fingers slide delicately over as much of the smooth stone wall as he could reach, he willed himself not to think about it. So intent was he upon exploring the possibilities of the wall that he did not notice another smaller pool of darkness that opened at his feet.

With the next step that he took, Dominic walked unexpectedly into space. There was a long, terrifying moment of falling — a strange, weightless interval when it seemed as if the whole physical world had suddenly dissolved, leaving him to be carried alone down the river of eternity — then his small body was shaken by a searing impact. Stars exploded in the darkness, cascading in showers of brilliant colours, dazzling and symmetrical as the patterns of a turning kaleidoscope, before they faded into a deep whorl of nothing.

Dominic did not know how far he had fallen or how long he had been unconscious. He was aware only of the ache in his limbs, the rhythmic throbbing in his head, the sense of isolation. Now he was in a world of total darkness, a cold frightening world where the sound of his own voice mocked hollowly as it bounced back at him from hidden walls of silence.

He wanted to die. He wanted the pain and the fear and the loneliness to be swallowed by a state of unbeing. He wanted to live. He wanted daylight and movement, the joy of recognizing himself in a recognizable background. Above all, he wanted to know that what had happened was neither pointless nor cruel, that at least there was a meaning even in disaster.

He was afraid to move, afraid that there might be yet another pit at the edge of which he could even now be lying. But as he lay there, waiting and wondering, he was surprised to find that he was becoming curiously calm.

At the same time, shapes seemed to be materializing slowly out of the darkness. He became aware of the uneven contours of the ground ahead, and of rough walls that seemed to be part of some kind of tunnel or passage. The air became warmer; and, glancing at his own legs and arms, he saw that they were taking on a subtly golden glow.

As he looked up he saw the source of light. There in the distance, where the passage seemed to open out into a broad cavern, hovered the Firebird.

Dominic scrambled to his feet. The pain and the sense of desolation were forgotten. All that mattered was that he had again found his burning talisman, that he had not yet failed in his pursuit of the creature with the wings of flame.

He gazed in delight at the distant Firebird, drawing strength from its serene radiance, drawing hope and vitality from its dismissal of the unknown dark. He began to run towards the cavern where it was now circling lazily; and as his feet moved over the rough floor of the passage, he suddenly realized that he must now be passing beneath the water of the lake.

He thought idly of the submerged giant he had imagined whose petrified elbow was the island. Perhaps he had fallen down into that gargantuan stomach and was doomed to wander along its dead, endless passages until he became exhausted. No matter! The Firebird was there also, and where the Firebird led he would follow.

5

A Pin-point of Light

As Dominic reached the cavern, where the Firebird was now circling high and with gathering speed, he saw that it was like a massive dome whose walls of rock were smooth as a mirror and honeycombed in all directions with small passages and tunnels.

The Firebird was circling at great speed now. It whirled round and round, high and low, executing beautiful curves and parabolas of light, carving bright spirals of fire in the darkness to be mirrored by the walls of the cavern until everywhere was a mobile tracery of flame.

Dominic watched with occasional cries of happiness and wonder. He would not have believed that anything so beautiful could exist — in reality or in dreams. The long swoops, the incredible turns, the swift soarings seemed like a kind of writing on the deep page of space or a sequence of pictures outlined in fire. But after a time it came to Dominic that the Firebird was actually dancing and that it was dancing for him alone.

Suddenly there was one last curved streak across the cavern. Then the Firebird vanished. For a moment or two Dominic was blinded by the darkness; and, until he remembered the innumerable passages, he was afraid that the beautiful creature had flown through solid rock where he could not hope to follow. But when his eyes had adjusted to the absence of those brilliant rings and loops of flame, he saw a tiny circular glow on the far side of the dome. That would be the passage the Firebird had entered, and where he was meant to follow.

Carefully he felt his way across the broad rocky floor. The passage from which the glow came was more than the height of his head above the level of the cavern; but there were tiny cracks in the polished wall — deep enough for two fingers here and the tip of a toe there — and inch by inch he was able to haul himself up. The skin was rubbed from his knees and fingers. As he pulled himself up the last few inches into the passage something sharp ripped the soft flesh of his leg, and he felt warm blood trickle slowly down. But he did not mind: he was still able to follow the Firebird.

He could not see it, but the whole passage glowed with its unmistakable light. He ran forward, noticing that the way ahead curved gently, and that the ground began to rise. But no matter how fast he ran, he could not catch the Firebird up, though the intensity of its reflected light on the rocky face of the tunnel told him that he could not be far behind. He ran until he could run no more. Then he began to walk; and finally he took to sitting down occasionally for short rests. But always the glow remained constant, fading behind him abruptly into darkness; and always there was the sense of nearness and the consolation that, somehow, the Firebird was aware of his limitations, and that the journey would not be harder than he could bear.

The passage wound steadily upward. Though it was never steep, the incessant climb made Dominic’s legs ache; and presently he began to feel that he had been climbing for ever. His movements became mechanical, then erratic. He began to stumble frequently — not because he did not see the stones in his path, but because he could not persuade his exhausted limbs to avoid them. His mind began to play tricks; and in imagination he could see the dance of the Firebird once more — the dizzy spirals, the hypnotic loops, all shrinking into one long awful whirl.

Suddenly he was snatched from his mild delirium by the realization that the fiery glow had disappeared and the passage was now dark. He rubbed his eyes and peered into the darkness. There was nothing — nothing but a pin-point of light directly ahead … White light … Daylight?

The impact upon him was almost physical. Daylight! It seemed so long now since he had been in the open that he could hardly believe he would once more feel wind and sunlight upon his body.

Dominic gathered his strength and began to walk faster. Despite the darkness in the passage, which had now straightened though it was becoming steeper, he moved with confidence. The Firebird was no longer near to guide him, but perhaps that was only because he would be drawn to the daylight.

The pin-point grew into a circle. The circle widened into a magic window. As he came closer to it, Dominic started to tremble with impatience and anxiety. He saw that the opening was set in the rock much higher than his head. Though it was a wider opening than that of the tunnel leading out of the cavern, with easier purchase for his hands and feet on the uneven rock face, he was afraid he might not have enough strength for the climb.

His fears were unnecessary. The nearness of daylight generated new energy in his body, and he sprang at the rock, scaling it without difficulty.

The energy lasted until he had swung his body up through the gap into an entrancing surface world. Then, before he could even satisfy his curiosity with a glance at his surroundings, fatigue overcame him. He lay there at the edge of the opening, his eyes closed and his heart beating with reproachful thunder.

6

The Meaning of Heresy

After a time, Dominic recovered himself. He opened his eyes and sat up. He looked around.

At first he had a fleeting impression that he had returned to the folly, having shrunk to a Lilliputian size on the journey; for he was sitting on the floor of a vast semi-circular building whose roof seemed to be lodged in the very sky, and was supported by massive, towering columns.

But the difference between this building and the folly was the difference between a house and a cathedral. Apart from its tremendous size, there was an atmosphere of greatness — of greatness and beauty and mystery.

The opening from which Dominic had emerged was perfectly round and set in the middle of a crimson floor that was made of some strange material, as smooth and shiny as polished steel, yet warm to the touch. The whole surface seemed to be one single piece and, apart from its warmth, was like a lake of dark frozen blood. On the other side of the hole, set on a tiny pedestal, was a transparent ball of glass or crystal, whose diameter was greater than Dominic’s outstretched arms. Inside it, imprisoned at the centre, its freshness fixed for all time, was a single red rose. Behind this there was a cone, also of glass or crystal, tapering to a fine point high above the crimson floor, although its base was no greater than the diameter of the ball. Inside the cone, motionless and eternal, was a slender tongue of blue and yellow flame.

There was no further ornament or decoration in the building — nothing but the great columns at the perimeter of the crimson floor; columns of blue-veined marble, so high that it seemed impossible to believe in their reality. The hollow, half-moon roof they supported was glowing brighter than silver, and seemed to be dancing in the clouds.

Dominic’s excitement bubbled up into exclamations of delight. The building could only be a Temple — the finest that had ever been imagined or created — and the journey he had made would have been worthwhile for the sight of this alone.

But he knew that, wonderful as it was, the Temple was only the beginning. For wherever the Firebird led, there would be beauty and meaning far beyond his ability to understand.

For a while he had lost himself in the sheer glory of his surroundings; but now he was reminded of the creature of flame and radiance that had shown him the way.

Dominic looked all around him. There was no sign of the fiery wings, no bright and sudden sweep through the startled air. He was alone in the great Temple — alone with a sense of pattern and purpose in a world that was as unreal as a dream, or a dream that was more real than the world.

He ran to the edge of the crimson floor and gazed at the surrounding countryside. The Temple stood in a broad valley, the mountains on each side being several miles away — blue and snow-capped. The valley itself curved in a long crescent, so that at first glance it seemed as if the mountains entirely surrounded the Temple as a distant, protective wall. But a broad river rippled along the plain like a grey and green serpent, and Dominic decided that the valley must be a very long one indeed.

The Temple had apparently been built in untamed countryside, for there were no fences or houses anywhere. There were, however, two straight roads, each leading to the foot of the Temple steps. One came up the valley, sometimes bridging the river, sometimes running along-side it, passing through woods and over grassland without any deviation at all. In the same manner, the other came straight down the valley; both of them meeting at the crimson steps.

Nowhere was the Firebird to be seen, and Dominic began to feel depressed. The sun hung in mid-morning splendour over the mountains, its rays giving a warm glow to the strange landscape. But its mood of pleasant optimism was not appreciated by the boy. He was alone in an unknown country.

Yet not quite alone.

Some distance away, on the road leading up the valley, Dominic glimpsed a movement. He could just make out the figure of a man with some kind of small trolley or cart.

Dominic ran down the steps — down the steps and along the cobblestone road. By the time he came up with the road-mender — for such the man proved to be — he was so much out of breath that he could hardly speak.

The old man, who wore a rough leather tunic and crude sandals, gazed at him curiously.

“Is there such a need to hurry, boy?” he asked with an amused smile. “Life holds a substantial number of days, each day contains no less than twenty four hours, and each hour is filled with minutes. Do you so bitterly regret the passing of a handful?” There was a lilt in his voice and the words came slow and musically.

“I am a stranger,” said Dominic. “I was alone, and I saw you … So I came.”

“You came indeed,” observed the road-mender drily. “You came as one pursued. And now you have arrived and the heavens have not fallen. Sit here and rest.”

Dominic sat down on the grass. “You are the first person I have seen this morning,” he remarked, feeling the need to say something. He wanted to ask about the Firebird, but held back for a reason he could not understand.

The old man laughed. “And you are the first child I have seen in half a hundred yesterdays. Children do not often visit the Temple of the Firebird.” Suddenly he gave Dominic a searching look. “How came you there?”

In his excitement, Dominic ignored the question. “Have you seen it?” he asked anxiously. “I lost it in the darkness and when I came out into the daylight there was nothing at all — except the Temple and —”

“What nonsense is this?” demanded the old man. “What are you talking about, boy?”

“The Firebird,” said Dominic patiently. “It must have come out of the Temple. I wondered if you might have seen it … You should have seen it because —”

“Enough!” The road-mender raised his arm as if to strike. There was anger in his voice. “Many have mocked me on the pilgrimage, for to be a mender of roads is not the highest dignity to which a man may attain, but none have yet mocked the Firebird and lived. Know you the meaning of heresy, boy?” His hand shot out to grab Dominic’s shoulder, and strong fingers dug forcefully into his flesh.

Dominic was terrified. “I — I am not mocking the Firebird,” he managed to say. “I only wanted to know if you had seen it, because I’ve been following it since dawn and —”

The old man’s grip tightened. “That is the heresy!” he roared. “It is written that none shall look upon the Firebird and live. It is written that only in the most divine and holy madness shall even the highest of priests envisage its terrible beauty. It is written that the heretic shall be consumed by its mystic flame … What now, child? What do you say now?”

“Please, you’re hurting my shoulder,” whimpered Dominic. “I’m sorry if I said something wrong. I didn’t mean to say anything that would make you angry.”

“Penitence will be of little avail when the Four Horsemen ride after you,” said the old man grimly. But his grip slackened. “Do you not know that if you continue to speak of seeing the Firebird you will surely be put to the question?”

“Sir, I’m a stranger here,” said Dominic, recovering himself a little. “I do not know the ways of this country. But I must follow the Firebird. I must follow it no matter what happens. That is the only thing I know.”

“A stranger indeed,” remarked the old man, marvelling. “You speak of the Firebird as if such a child as you could be familiar with its terrible presence.” Suddenly, he seemed to make up his mind. “See, boy. See this hammer wherewith I break the stones that are to be laid upon the road? Tell your story, and let it be but the truth. For I swear by the invisible presence that if it does not have the ring of truth, I will crack your skull myself and save the Horsemen a journey. Better a quick death than the eternity of the question.”

With surprising agility the old man swung his long hammer through the air, and brought it crashing down on a small boulder so that it was completely shattered by the force. “Now speak!”

Dominic swallowed. It seemed to him now that, no matter what he said, the end would be the same. Either he would tell the truth and be punished for the incomprehensible crime of seeing the Firebird or, if he invented something more acceptable, the road-mender would probably guess that he was lying and carry out his threat.

The boy gave a terrified look at the hammer and the tough, wrinkled hands that gripped its long shaft. Then he made his decision. Better to die for the truth than for what was without meaning.

7

Brighter Than The Sun

Dominic began to tell his story. He told of his discovery of the ruined cottage and the door that was still standing, and of what happened when he opened the door. As he described his first encounter with the Firebird, he saw the road-mender’s hands tighten round the hammer, and expected at any moment to see it swing through the air and come crashing down with the deadly gift of darkness. But, miraculously, the hammer did not move; and Dominic went on to tell of his crossing of the lake; the way the Firebird had gone down into the folly, and the way he had followed it. He described his journey along the underground passage, the Firebird’s dance in the great cavern, and his own eventual emergence in the Temple.

When he had finished there was a taut silence. He did not dare to look at either the old man or his hammer, for he was sure that he had said too much and that the punishment would be swift and final.

But nothing happened.

After a time, the boy dared to meet the road-mender’s piercing gaze.

“My son,” said the old man, his voice now strangely gentle, “it seems to me that there are three possible interpretations of this enigma. The first, that what you have said is true — which is manifestly absurd. The second, that you are the most original heretic yet to attempt the corruption of the people of this land — which is also absurd, for a boy could not devise such unusual blasphemy. And the third possibility is that you have been touched by the flame.”

“What does that mean?” asked Dominic, more afraid of the road-mender’s obvious pity than of his previous anger.

“It means, my son,” said the old man softly, “that you are mad.”

The boy and the road-mender gazed at each other. Dominic could not bear the look of pity he found in the old man’s eyes.

“Sir, I am not mad,” he said at last, and with a conviction that surprised him. “I have seen the Firebird.”

“Delusions,” murmured the road-mender sadly. “Heretical delusions. Speak of them if you must to no one but me, my son, or the Four Horsemen will surely ride … Better still, stay with me, share my cottage and help to mend the roads. It is lonely work, and you shall be as my own child … If they hunt you I will, at my peril, conceal you. And if it gives you pleasure, my son, I will try to believe in this country from which you say you came — for of a truth your words are strange and your manner is not of the people — but speak no more of seeing the Firebird, I beg. Already I imperil my salvation.”

“I am grateful to you,” said Dominic cautiously; and, for a moment, his glance rested on the hammer once more, “but I must go on. I must go on until —” he saw the tough old hands tighten round the shaft — “until I find the truth for myself,” he concluded hastily.

“So be it,” answered the road-mender. “Truly, the touch of the flame is upon you.”

Dominic looked at the empty roads, stretching on either side of the Temple as far as the eye could see. “Where do the roads lead?” he asked.

The old man laughed. “There are but two great roads in the country of Arcana, and I little thought that I would ever be asked their destinations.” He shook his head. “The touch of the flame is surely terrible.”

“Where do they go?” persisted Dominic.

“Boy, I will indulge your humour. I will instruct you as if you were properly the stranger you claim to be. From the Temple of the Firebird the two roads lead one to the City and the other to the Forest. In the Forest dwell the People of Darkness; and in the City, the People of Light. The Forest people are peculiar in their habits, and it is said that they do not understand even the meaning of heresy. They are sufficiently barbaric to attach more importance to clan loyalty than to the immaculate dogma; whereas the City people are devoted to order and orderly thought. But, despite their differences …” The road-mender stopped, having realized that the boy was no longer listening.

There was an expression of intense happiness on Dominic’s face. He stood quite still, gazing over the head of the old man. There in the sky the Firebird circled with majestic ease. Even in mid-morning it seemed brighter than the sun, and its blazing aureole seemed to set the whole landscape shimmering.

The road-mender followed Dominic’s gaze and saw nothing.

“What is it, boy?” he demanded hoarsely. “There is a vision in your eyes and glory on your face — such a look belongs only to one who foresees death or miracles. What is it?”

“The Firebird,” murmured Dominic, “there over the Temple, making circles of flame.”

The road-mender stared fearfully. “I see nothing but the clouds, the blue sky and the morning sun.”

“Now it swoops towards the river!”

“Delusion! There is only sunlight on the water.”

“And now,” went on Dominic, “it is skimming away to the trees.”

“Heresy!” roared the old man, trembling. “There is only the wind in the grass.” He lifted his hammer slowly and with resolution. “Better for you to die, my son, than be so tormented.”

With a sudden joyful bound, Dominic was away. He felt light and powerful and full of purpose again. His feet seemed barely to touch the ground. “Goodbye!” he called. “I must follow where the Firebird leads!”

Too late the old man’s hammer thundered down on the spot where he had stood.

The road-mender watched the boy, who had left the road and was running across rough grassland, leaping impatiently over small shrubs and bushes in his path. The road-mender rubbed his eyes. Was it a trick of light or the imagination — or was this boy, whose tongue confessed madness and whose eyes saw that which could not be, was he really gaining in strength and stature as he moved?

The old man watched until Dominic was out of sight. Then he rubbed his eyes once more and shook his head. “Of a truth,” he said, “the touch of the flame troubles him most grievously, and the Four Horsemen will surely ride, since his heresy endangers the people.”

With a sigh, the old man lifted his long hammer and resumed the breaking of stones. Up went his arms, then down came the hammer. Up and down, up and down — the rhythm became fast and fierce, as if the road-mender had sought heresy in the very stones he used and was determined to pave the way to the Temple only with the purest fragments.

8

A Sense of Belonging

Meanwhile, Dominic pursued the Firebird.

It seemed at times that the creature of radiance was bound to him by an invisible cord; that the cord pulled him along, lifting him over obstacles, relentlessly drawing him along the path he must take. His body felt oddly revitalized, and his stride seemed longer, his spirit more confident. Yet, at the same time, he was aware of a curious element of detachment. Even as he followed the Firebird he was able to stand apart, as it were, and observe the chase with the calm appreciation of a spectator.

Already, the events of the early morning seemed to have happened a long time ago — so long ago, indeed, that the small boy, who had burst through the doorway of a ruined cottage in the solitude of dawn, seemed almost to be another person. Only a few hours had passed, for the sun had not yet reached the height of noon, yet Dominic now felt as if his crossing of the lake and his subterranean journey had taken years to accomplish or had happened in another kind of time.

So preoccupied did he become with his odd confusion over the passage of time that he was not actually aware of the exact moment of losing the Firebird. His pursuit had developed into an almost unconscious response; and it was only when he was aware of a sudden loss of direction, a slackening of the invisible cord, a shadow passing in some dimension not of space or time, that he realized the Firebird had vanished.

He was in a pleasant glade now, surrounded by tall and mature trees. Even as he realized that the Firebird had disappeared once more, his legs stopped moving, as if the source of energy had suddenly been withdrawn; and he stood there, bewildered.

The clearing was small. The leaves and branches of great trees on every side intermingled high above the ground, forming a green roof that seemed to glow softly under the oblique sunlight, and through which hundreds of tiny irregular patches of pale blue sky looked like part of a distant stretch of calm water.

The grass beneath Dominic’s feet was short and soft and luminous, challenging even the brightness of the leaves. He thought that here would be a good place to rest quietly, to consider his situation — and, perhaps, wait until the Firebird returned. For he was sure it would return.

There was, he decided as he lay down and stretched luxuriously upon the grass, a mutual dependence. In some way and for some reason that he could not understand, he and the Firebird belonged to each other, needed each other. For he knew now that he was only properly alive when he was in pursuit of it — just as it, perhaps, could only generate its beautiful radiance for eyes that were capable of seeing.

Dominic gazed drowsily up through the roof of green and thought about this aspect of the relationship. He was surprised by the nature of his own thoughts — surprised even that he could consider the Firebird so dispassionately. Perhaps he was learning to grow up — or simply learning …

After a time, his thoughts turned to the road-mender and what he had been told about the country in which he now found himself. Arcana was its name, he remembered, and it seemed to be a very strange land with its People of Light and People of Darkness, and the two great roads.

It was a land, he felt, where he would always remain a stranger. No matter how long he stayed he would always feel apart, because he saw what it was forbidden to see, and because he followed what it was forbidden to follow. Perhaps, as the road-mender had said, he was mad. Or perhaps he was simply one who could see among those who were blind.

The thought of the solitude — and the danger — he might have to endure frightened him; and he began to wonder whether it might not be more comfortable, even more satisfying, to be blind. But then an image of the Firebird drifted into his mind, and the memory of its radiance was enough to convince him that life without such vision would be very dull indeed. There would be nothing to do but live, grow old and then die. Whereas the pursuit of the Firebird offered at the very least a reason for being alive. It gave purpose to a random journey. It created strange and indescribable patterns of feeling in his heart; a sense of belonging, moments of ecstasy and glimpses of perfection that were enough to justify whatever privation or danger the world would impose …

Lying there on the grass was pleasant. After a time Dominic grew tired of staring up at the green leaves and the tiny patches of sky. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander lazily down warm avenues of darkness. Presently he was asleep.

9

The Girl With Green Hair

The next thing of which Dominic was aware was a small cool hand moving lightly over his face. Restraining an impulse to move, he kept his eyes closed and tried to determine, entirely by the touch, what kind of person was exploring his features with such care. Obviously it was not a man. The fingers were soft and sensitive. They must belong either to a child or a woman.

However, the voice he then heard seemed to belong neither to a child nor a woman but to someone who was, perhaps, a little of both.

“Waken up!” she commanded impatiently. “Waken up, I say! Would you sleep your whole life through?”

Dominic opened his eyes and sat up. The girl beside him was lithe and slender. Her arms and legs and face were a golden brown. She was barefoot and her only clothing appeared to be a kind of short green gown. Her eyes were large and green and full of mischief. But what startled Dominic was the long lustrous hair hanging carelessly about her shoulders.

“Your hair is green!” he exclaimed.

“So are my eyes,” she said unconcernedly. “They match perfectly. What is so peculiar about that?”

“I’ve never seen anyone with hair the colour of grass.”

“And I have never seen anyone with hair the colour of ripe corn,” she remarked. “Furthermore, your eyes are blue and they do not match your hair at all, which is exceedingly curious.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” apologized Dominic, “but in my country no one has green hair.”

She regarded him with amusement. “In my country,” she mimicked, “it is fashionable to have hair and eyes of the same colour. You are certainly an odd person and quite possibly touched by the flame. You may kiss me.”

Dominic stood up and made an embarrassed gesture towards her cheek. She appeared to be enjoying herself hugely.

“No, on the lips,” she said regally. “Are you so uncivilized?”

He meant to touch her lightly; but she clung hard against him for a second or two, and her lips were strangely sweet. Then she sprang away, laughing.

He gazed at her uncertainly, not knowing what was expected of him. He had a sudden, tempting urge to run away, but he would rather have died than give in to it.

“My name is Dominic,” he managed at last.

“I do not need a name,” she flashed, her eyes glittering. “My mother was a forest and my father was a storm cloud. I was conceived where the lightning struck.”

Dominic’s feeling of bewilderment increased. In desperation he tried to think of some intelligent comment to make, but there didn’t seem to be any. Finally, he decided to tell her about his journey.

“I am looking for the Firebird,” he said. “Can you help me?”

Her eyes widened. “You have certainly been touched by the flame. No one looks for that which can never be seen. Besides, it is what they call heresy, which is quite a serious condition, I believe … Now I am looking for a youth whose mother was a snow-capped mountain and whose father was the burning sun. Can you help me?”

“No … At least, I don’t think so.”

She tossed her green hair. “You would be sure if you were the one, and you would be sure if you were not. On the other hand, it is possible you are so disguised that you cannot even recognize yourself. Perhaps I will help you to find out.”

Suddenly, she sprang at him with such force that they both fell to the grass, rolling down into a small hollow. When they came to rest, Dominic found that her hard and slender body seemed to have turned surprisingly soft.

“Kiss me,” she whispered. “I want to know. You need to know.”

This time her lips were softer and more sweet with mystery. He was surprised at the pleasure growing within him, disturbed at the urgency. He felt as if he had discovered something so fragile that a single touch would destroy it. He felt as if he had discovered the elusive secret of life, and would have to hold tight to prevent its escape.

Dominic kissed her again, and the feeling of confusion increased.

“You are too gentle,” she murmured. “He would hold me in the grip of ice, and sear me with a dark flame … No, boy with the hair like corn, you are not the one. Or perhaps your disguise is still too heavy to penetrate.”

She broke away quickly and sat back on her heels, gazing down at Dominic’s serious face with laughter in her eyes.

He was afraid of her mockery, and the fear turned to anger. “You are the one who has been touched by the flame,” he cried. “You call yourself a child of the storm and the forest — why, you are nothing but a green-haired girl with green eyes and green dreams in a green heart. Who would want a girl of only one colour? You will not outlast the summer. By autumn you will be dry and lifeless. And when winter comes you will have returned to the earth; and there will be nothing left to remember but a colour. Nothing but the memory of green.”

He was so angry that the words tumbled out and he did not understand them. He did not even know if there was any meaning in them at all. But their effect on the girl was startling.

The laughter went from her eyes, and was replaced by such a look of misery that Dominic was appalled by what he immediately regarded as his own unprovoked cruelty. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and her body began to shake with an uncontrollable sobbing.

“It’s not true,” she moaned. “Please say it’s not true. I want to be green for ever in a green world.”

He put his arms round her, stroking the long green hair and trying to comfort her. “I was lying,” he said gently. “You shall be green for ever.”

“No,” she whispered. “It is now that you are lying. There is such a look on your face — the look of one who sees.” Then she glanced up at him and smiled. “No matter. I shall not think about the things I do not want to understand. I shall not even think about tomorrow. I am alive, and that is enough.”

Suddenly she jumped to her feet. “There is a stream not far from here where brown-backed fish hide in the shadow of stones and water weed. I will show you how to catch them, and we will kindle a fire and eat their white flesh. I will show you where to find the early berries, and how to drink clear water from a green-leaf goblet, and we will steal eggs from the wild birds … Come.”

10

The Four Horsemen

The green-haired girl took him by the hand. Presently they reached the bank of a wide but shallow stream flowing lazily to join the deep waters of the river that Dominic had seen from the Temple. She showed him how to stand motionless by large stones and scoop the fish, flashing in sunlight, out on to the bank, where their silver bellies gleamed and quivered as they died. She showed him how to make fire with nothing but dry twigs and brittle leaves.

Presently a thin spiral of smoke rose by the bank of the stream, and the fish began to spit and sizzle in the heat of the growing flames.

Dominic thought that they had taken more from the stream than they could eat; but he had not realized how hungry he was or how sweet was the taste of food. They washed the fish down with long draughts of water. Then, while Dominic lay down and basked in the sunlight, the green-haired girl disappeared for a while to return with a handful of berries and a few pale blue eggs.

“Stay with me,” she said abruptly when they could eat no more. “Stay and share with me the wind and the rain, the sunlight and the sounds of life.”

Dominic sighed. “I do not think I was meant to stay anywhere.”

She pouted. “Why must you be so restless? It is against nature always to be a wanderer. There is a time to move and a time to stay.”

Dominic stretched lazily and gazed at the stream flowing almost at his feet. “I am like the stream,” he said. “I must always go on.”

“The stream is drawn to the river,” she retorted slyly, “and then it is no longer a stream. It is lost in something greater.”

He smiled. “And I am drawn to the Firebird. Perhaps if I should ever touch it I, too, should be lost in something greater.”

The girl moved closer to him; and as they lay side by side on the grass, her hand came to rest upon his arm.

“I will tell you what I would tell no other,” she murmured. “I, too, am a heretic.”

Dominic gazed at her, startled.

“You say you have seen the Firebird,” she went on, “and they say it cannot be seen!” She smiled impishly. “Personally, I do not believe that there is any such thing — visible or invisible.”

But Dominic was hardly aware of her words, for there was a feeling of thunder in the ground. The earth seemed to tremble, and the vibrations were echoed through his body.

“Horsemen,” said the girl unconcernedly. “Possibly the Four … They are coming this way. Perhaps they have seen the smoke above the trees.”

Dominic was afraid. “The Four Horsemen! Why should they come here?”

“To seek heretics — why else? That is their purpose.”

The rhythm of the hooves slowed down, but it was stronger, more insistent.

“Perhaps,” added the girl calmly, “they are looking for you.”

“Or for both of us,” said Dominic with emphasis. “Where can we hide?”

“We cannot both hide, for they will see the fire and then they will seek us. You will hide and I will stay.”

“But —”

“Away!” cried the girl impatiently. “Your heresy is necessary to you. It is in your face and in your eyes. Mine does not matter to me. It sits but loosely in my mind. I will believe what they wish me to believe. I am too silly to be a true heretic, too simple to be put to the question … Hurry! I see the sunlight on their masks.”

“Where must I go?”

She laughed. “Horsemen do not ride the tree-tops. But hide your head, boy with hair like ripe corn, for no tree bears such golden fruit.”

Dominic found a tall pine tree whose branches swung out stiffly from the trunk, providing firm if irregular footholds that climbed in an ever narrowing spiral. Up and up he went, while the tree seemed to be growing ever taller. At last he came to a point where the trunk was too slender for him to go on. So he sat astride the last firm branch and made himself comfortable. Then he looked down.

There had been no time to spare. As he peered through the intricate screen of branches and pine needles, he saw that the Four Horsemen had already reached the stream and were advancing in a leisurely way towards the girl with green hair.

Each rider was clothed from head to foot in mail, and each wore a silver mask, smooth and contourless, covering the whole face except for narrow eye-slits. One carried a drawn sword and one a slender lance. The remaining two were armed with mace and battle-axe. But, apart from the difference of weapons, all four were indistinguishable.

“In the name of the Inquisitors,” said the Sword, “Greetings!” His voice was loud and carried easily through the still air to the top of the pine tree.

“In the name of the Question,” answered the girl, “Greetings.” Dominic marvelled at the confidence in her voice and the innocence with which she regarded the Four Horsemen.

“There is heresy abroad,” said the Lance. “Therefore we seek it.”

“If there is heresy,” she answered in tones of evident fear, “the Four Horsemen will surely find it.”

“Girl,” said the Mace, “one who has passed this way is touched by the flame. He mocks that which may not be mocked: he sees that which may not be seen. Know you of such a one?”

The terror in the voice of the girl seemed to Dominic, as he sat motionless in the tree-top, to be completely genuine. “I have seen only a boy,” she said, “a boy with golden hair and blue eyes and a strange manner of speech … There did not seem to be any great madness in him. I spoke with him and gave him fish to eat.” She sank to her knees. “Have I then sinned?”

“In ignorance,” said the Axe, towering above her, “you have sinned, but the sin is not mortal. Where now is the golden one, child?”

“He spoke with excitement of what I did not understand,” she answered timidly. “Then he crossed the stream and passed through the woods with great speed … Is he doomed?”

“He is doomed,” said the Sword.

“Pray for him,” commanded the Lance.

“He will have need of prayer,” added the Mace grimly.

“Forward!” shouted the Axe.

The Four Horsemen rode at the stream, each clearing it in a mighty leap. Presently they were lost to view among the trees; and after a time, the thunder of hooves died into silence.

Dominic came down from the pine tree.

“Strength to the Four Horsemen!” cried the girl gaily. “They will ride hard this day. They will ride the length and breadth of Arcana.”

“Aren’t you afraid they will return?”

“Sir,” she said with irony, “I am but a poor green-haired girl and know nothing of the ways of the great ones … And if they return, what then? By that time the falsehood will have become truth, for I see in your eyes that you will never stay.”

“You do indeed see the truth,” said Dominic in a strange, far away voice.

For there over the stream hovered the Firebird — poised like a great burning kingfisher for the strike. In the shimmering radiance even the stream itself had become as a rivulet of fire; and the noon stillness quivered like music through a million dancing leaves. And power shone from the Firebird in dazzling waves of light.

The invisible cord pulled at Dominic, and the power surged through his limbs.

“What is it?” asked the girl with sudden fear. “You have the look of one who must endure greatness or madness. What do you see now?”

“The Firebird,” he answered softly, “there over the stream.”

“Is it not a shaft of sunlight arrowing between the trees?”

“It is the Firebird.”

“Or a trick of the light upon water?” she added desperately.

“It is the Firebird.”

Almost lazily, the creature of flame swung to the far side of the stream, gliding towards the trees on outstretched burning wings.

“Goodbye, girl with green hair. I follow where you cannot.”

“Goodbye, boy whose heart has been touched by the flame,” she called. “Remember me!”

Then Dominic was across the stream in pursuit of the Firebird with the long strides of one who might yet attain the stature of a man among men.

11

Sunlight Upon Silver

The brilliant, fiery wings were now beating the air rhythmically. The Firebird began to move quickly, and so did Dominic. The feeling of power was rippling through his limbs like music; the tide sang in his veins, and he was drunk with invincibility. There was nothing he could not do — no mountain he could not climb, no enemy he could not vanquish. So long as the Firebird led the way, so long as he was held to it by the invisible cord.

Through the woods and out into the open country he ran, across heath and grassland and marsh, over hummocks and gullies, across streams and even along the great road that led from the Temple to the Forest. The Firebird was dancing for him. It danced high and low, etching the journey in transient patterns of flame. And through the long golden afternoon, Dominic ran, not knowing or caring if the pursuit should last for ever.

In the distance there was the Forest, stretching dark and heavy across the land — rank upon rank of trees of tremendous height. As he came closer, he saw that their trunks were like rough-carved pillars set deep into the earth. Their leaves were heavy, sombre, presenting the sunlight with an impenetrable barrier. The Forest was a world of its own.

On and on towards it the Firebird danced, its bright shape gathering an even more intense lustre against the darkness of the now towering line of trees stretching far away on either side. And there at the edge of the Forest the creature of flame rose suddenly. High into the air it winged until it became small as a daytime star. The star glittered for a moment, then disappeared into the high blue haze of mid-afternoon.

Dominic was alone.

He stared wonderingly at the Forest. It was not at all like the sprawling patch of woodland where he had encountered the girl with green hair. The Forest was darkly primeval, a place of fear and visions and unseen eyes. A place of mystery and danger where none but the desperate would venture.

Dominic was tempted to turn away. But then he remembered that he had been led to the Forest by the Firebird. There must be a purpose in the journey, or, if no purpose, at least a pattern whose shape would have meaning. It was unthinkable that the long, intricate pursuit should be no more than a game of hide and seek on the grand scale. It was unthinkable because the Firebird itself was a strange and beautiful mystery. It had shown Dominic the way to a land of mysteries, and was guiding him, he felt sure, to the very source of life.

Besides, he knew that he would only find it once more — if at all — in the Forest. Therefore into the Forest he must go.

Before he passed the forbidding frontier of trees, he looked back over the sun drenched country through which he had passed. This country of Arcana was indeed a beautiful land, he thought. In such a land one might happily spend the rest of one’s days; living close to the earth and taking pleasure in the change of the seasons; inspiring the growth of love, perhaps, in one such as the green-haired girl; and, in the course of time, generating the brief and happy immortality of children … But for this unending pursuit of the Firebird and the strange crime of heresy it evidently inspired.

Why, thought Dominic, should it be considered wrong to see what was so beautiful, so pure, so full of power and significance? What harm could his pursuit of such a creature do to others? Perhaps they only used heresy as a way of describing whatever they themselves could not hope to see; whatever was strange and beautiful, greater than the power of men and beyond their understanding.

Suddenly he noticed a cloud of dust far away in the broad valley. There was the flash of sunlight upon silver and, in the ground at his feet, a faint but ominous throbbing.

The Four Horsemen! Already they were following him once more. Dominic turned quickly and stepped into the Forest.

The darkness closed round him like a shroud. He stumbled on; and after a time his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Now and then he heard rustlings and footsteps, sometimes ahead of him, sometimes behind, and sometimes on each side. It was strange, he thought, that he was not greatly afraid. But he felt taller, more confident, and there was power in his limbs and endurance in his heart — far greater now than the power and endurance of a child at dawn.

“Stay, my son! We have met each other and the meeting was foretold. I have waited for you. Come!”

An old man had stepped in Dominic’s path. In the half-darkness he seemed more like a phantom than a living person. He was dressed in a long, shapeless, tattered robe. His face was grey and wrinkled. Wisps of beard hung from his chin, and when he smiled Dominic could see the black and broken teeth in his mouth.

“Come, my son! You bring the secret for which I have waited all the days of my life.” He stepped closer, and his breath was foul.

“Who are you?”

The old man laughed. “I am your father, your spiritual brother, your true and only child. Come!”

He turned to lead the way. Dominic, filled with curiosity, decided to follow. The old man was loathsome and fascinating. There was an air of knowledge and power about him — and an air of death.

12

A Fountain Of Sparks

He walked with the old man in silence, but the silence did not last long for Dominic became aware of the sound of birds. It was like the crying and wailing of thousands of children, far, far away. He had never heard such a weird sound before. It was full of such despair, such bitter unhappiness, that his own spirit sank also; but the old man appeared to be quite unmoved by the tragic chorus and led the way with a firm step.

The sound grew. Presently they came to a patch of ground that had been cleared of undergrowth and shrubs — a stretch of earth that was without a single blade of grass.

An astounding sight met Dominic’s eyes.

In the middle of the barren stretch of ground was a pit; and from the pit thick dull flames leapt and cavorted, giving an orange glow to the scorched earth. By the side of the pit there was a small pile of bars of dull grey metal, and across the pile there lay a length of fine golden chain. But the most fantastic aspect of the scene was the far side of the pit where rows of cages, each containing a bird, were arranged in a great semi-circular wall, one row on top of another, so that their occupants faced the flames.

There were swallows, doves, thrushes, nightingales, sparrows, blackbirds, crows, larks, robins, cuckoos and magpies. There were owls, falcons, eagles, storks, kingfishers, gulls, kites, pheasant, partridges, woodpeckers and starlings. There was every kind of wild bird, a prisoner of terror by the burning pit. Piteous and hopeless cries rose from all their cages to be swallowed in the grim darkness of the Forest.

The old man turned and smiled his empty smile. “Here are all my family,” he said, “and you shall tell me which is the one. I have tested thousands, but never the right one. You shall tell me which it is, for you will know. You have seen it.”

“Old man, you talk in riddles,” said Dominic unable to take his eyes from the terrible wall of cages. “But enough of that. First I will set your prisoners free, and then —” he glanced grimly at the malevolent face of his companion, and moved towards the cages.

“I speak of the Firebird,” said the old man. “I speak of that which may not be spoken and that which may not be seen. But you have seen. It is in your eyes. Therefore you will know the one.”

“Old man, you are mad.”

There was a dry, harsh laugh. “Well said! We are both touched by the flame, you and I. But listen, I will tell you why the Firebird may not be seen by those who lack the gift of vision. It is because this creature of radiance and power, the winged elixir, the living lode-star, can assume the shape of an ordinary wild bird … That is why I lay my traps throughout the Forest; that is why I spend my days putting these miserable creatures to the test. For one day — one day I shall find a bird that will endure. And that will be the Firebird, whose lightest touch will surely transmute lead into gold.”

Dominic gazed at the old man to whose grey face the orange flames brought an eerie glow. He felt a cold anger growing inside him, harder than ice, sharp and violent and deadly.

“Old man,” he said in a voice that was ominously gentle, “what is the test to which you put these poor birds? Tell me, for I have truly seen the Firebird, and it is necessary to my judgement.”

The old man grinned. “Now that you have come, my son, my brother, the test will no longer be needed. You will look and you will know. The Firebird cannot maintain its disguise for one who has once seen it.”

“Nevertheless, tell me.”

“Surely, my son, my brother.” He laughed once more. “There can be no secrets between your heart and mine … The Firebird was born of fire and by fire it cannot be consumed. Therefore I take my wild ones, fasten their legs to the golden chain which you see lying by my store of lead, and cast them alive into the flames. Till now there are none that have risen, none that have defied the flames, none whose touch has turned the lead to gold, making me the master of the world … But now you have come, my son, and the search will soon be ended.”

“For you,” said Dominic, walking round the pit of fire to the cages, “the search is already ended.” He broke the fastening on the first cage and set its occupant — a nightingale — free.

The small bewildered bird flew crazily in circles for a moment or two then, finding its movement was not an illusion, soared joyously up through the darkness of the Forest, up towards the blessed daylight.

Dominic dealt with the next cage, and then another and the one after that. A blackbird, a starling and a robin followed the nightingale. The rest of the birds set up such a crying and calling that it was as if they realized liberation was near.

“What are you doing?” screeched the old man angrily. “You are not looking at them. You are not looking for the one!”

“Nor shall I,” retorted Dominic, letting loose a pheasant and a dove. “The Firebird cannot be found in a cage, madman. As you took their freedom, so I return it. Let that be enough.”

“Fool, you would destroy my life’s work!” roared the old man. He seized one of the bars of lead from the pile and rushed at Dominic. “I will kill you. The Firebird shall be mine!”

Dominic whirled and stepped nimbly aside, so that the lead bar, instead of shattering his skull, merely grazed his shoulder. Pain dimmed his vision for a moment; but he caught the old man’s arm and gripped it so tightly that the heavy bar fell from his fingers.

Dominic seemed to tower above the one who had tried to kill him. He looked down at a face twisted with hate and fury — an evil face void of humanity, beyond redemption.

“Old man,” said Dominic softly, “you have outlived your right to live. Seek the Firebird, then, in your own way and with your own body!”

With a sudden movement, he picked the obscene struggling creature up and hurled him bodily into the pit of fire. There was a short, high-pitched scream and a fountain of sparks. The fire crackled and orange flames leapt high for a moment, then settled down to burn softly and fully as before.

Dominic stared at the fire, hardly realizing what he had done, then he returned to his attack upon the fastenings of the cages. He worked quickly and methodically. Bird after bird soared freely and joyously up through the Forest gloom to the remote blue sky.

It was hard to believe there were so many. Dominic’s hands ached with snapping the small wooden fastenings and opening cage doors. But presently there were only three birds still imprisoned. As he paused and surveyed the litter of broken cages with satisfaction, he became aware of what he had been too busy to notice while he worked.

There was a faint throbbing in the ground, a subdued and recognizable thunder. The Four Horsemen must have already entered the Forest.

Hurriedly Dominic released the three remaining birds.

The leisurely rhythm of hooves was perceptibly stronger.

Most of all, he wanted to get away from this place of terror and death, this scene of insane futility. He wanted to put the memory of the old man, and all the tormented birds, behind him.

It was hard to determine from which direction the Horsemen were riding; but Dominic listened carefully. After a time he decided that they must be following the path along which the old man had led him. So he set off in the opposite direction, plunging deeper into the Forest.

13

A Time Of Death And Resurrection

As Dominic ran he was aware of fatigue and looked hopefully about him for a sign of the Firebird. But there was no exhilarating radiance, no tug of the invisible cord, no mysterious resurgence of vitality. On and on he stumbled, while the thorns and bushes tore at him, and all the sharp stones in the world seemed to have been placed in his path.

He had no way of knowing how long he wandered in the Forest twilight. It seemed at times that he had always been surrounded by the high, impassive trees; that the Forest itself was the entire world and he the only human being left alive.

He was filled with an intense loneliness. Such a loneliness, he felt, had never been experienced by anyone before. It was absolute. It drifted, an invisible ghost, throughout the endless gloom and entered his body with every breath he took. It dripped from the high tree-tops, oozed from the moist ground, and hung all about him like a tattered cloak of desolation.

Just as there was no end to it, so there could never have been a beginning. This, thought Dominic hopelessly, as he wandered among trees that seemed exactly the same as those he had passed a long time ago, was the whole of life — total loneliness, a solitary journey from nowhere to nowhere. An exploration without hope.

But, suddenly, he found himself at the edge of a large island in the Forest. An island of sky and sunlight. An island of sweet green grass and wild flowers and a feeling of peace.

There was a small tumbledown house standing by the bank of a lake that was hardly more than a broad pool. As he came nearer, Dominic heard a splashing and saw smooth rings of ripples spreading over the surface of the water. There was a woman bathing. As Dominic made his way round the pool towards the cottage, they saw each other at the same time.

“Greetings,” called the woman, swimming lazily near the bank. “So you have come at last.” Sunlight through the clear water had transformed her body into that of a slender white fish.

“I am a stranger,” said Dominic, thinking that she must have mistaken him for someone else.

The woman laughed, and brushed the hair back over her forehead, so that it trailed behind her in the water like strands of fine black weed. “All men are strangers … Come, now, and wash the day’s dust from your body while the sun is still warm enough to dry it afterwards.”

Dominic looked at her and at the cool water. Then he began to tear off his clothes. In a few moments he, too, was naked; and the feeling of freedom was intoxicating.

Cautiously, he put a foot into the water. The sudden coolness sent a shiver of delight through his body.

Swimming close, the woman splashed him playfully. Then he plunged in after her, and she led him halfway round the lake, diving suddenly when he came near enough to touch her, and swimming with such ease and speed along the sandy bed that it seemed at times as if the water was her true home.

Try as he might, Dominic could not catch her. But, after a while, she turned and came towards him, taking his hand.

“Let us dry ourselves now,” she said. “And you shall tell me whence you have come, for I see that there is a light in your eyes, and also a darkness that I do not understand.”

Together they returned to the bank in front of the tumbledown house. The woman walked unconcernedly out of the water and lay down on the grass, motioning Dominic to sit by her side. The sunlight seemed to lie intimately across both their bodies like a warm blanket of tranquility that would never be disturbed.

Dominic saw that she was truly beautiful — and at the same time conscious and unconscious of her own shapely body. She had spread her long black hair out to dry, like a fan upon the grass. As he gazed at her, Dominic had the brief illusion that the shiny wet tresses were delicate roots anchoring her firmly to the earth.

Her eyes were also dark — dark and luminous, and full of the wisdom of centuries. Yet she was neither old nor young, simply a woman of great beauty whose full breasts and rounded hips and delicately sturdy legs promised fertility and fulfilment — the strange richness of love.

“I have always known you would come,” she said softly, “and I was afraid.” She smiled. “But when I saw you that fear died and was replaced by a different one. But there will be time enough to talk of such things when the time comes … Did you know that you were looking for me?”

He shook his head. “I was looking for the Firebird. I have been following it for a long time — so long that I can hardly remember what it was like before …” He hesitated.

“Before you opened the door.”

Dominic was startled. “How do you know about the door?”

She sighed. “There is always a door — one, perhaps, that should not be opened. Many try the handle, then turn away with relief. But there is always someone who must enter — and you are such a one. … It is not the only door you have opened. That is why I am both happy and afraid.”

“You are a strange woman. You seem to know so much, and yet —”

“And yet,” she laughed, “there is so much that I shall never know, so much that is clouded in your eyes … Do you like me?”

“Yes.” Dominic felt the need to introduce himself. “My name is —”

She placed a finger on his lips. “No names,” she said softly. “You are man and I am woman. It is enough … Do you think that you could love me?”

He looked at her in bewilderment. “You are very beautiful.”

She took his hand and placed it upon her breast. “Then you will love me for a little while because you think I am beautiful.”

Dominic’s hand seemed to have a will of its own and cupped the breast tightly so that he could feel the sudden secret tremors, the pulse of excitement surging irresistibly through her body. His heart was racing. There was fire in his limbs. The sense of touch, the message of eyes and the incredible nearness all commanded him.

“No one else will ever be so beautiful,” he managed to say.

“And you will swear by what you hold, which none shall hold hereafter, that you will remember our love?”

“I swear it.” His arm slipped under her head and round her shoulders, disturbing the shiny black fan of hair.

She shivered slightly. “Let the memory always be bright,” she murmured. “Bright as the sky above and burning like the sun, and cool and clear like the quiet water.” She closed her eyes and lay quietly in his arms, letting her body become impersonal in its loveliness.

For Dominic there was a conflict between the fierceness of desire and a terrifying gentleness. He wanted to crush her, to make her cry out with pain and ecstasy and fear and frenzy. He wanted to hold her like that for ever, holding her only with his eyes so that no effort or compulsion or harshness would ever break the fragile moment of submission.

He looked at her; and the necessity came like a storm, raging through his hands and arms and body, whipped to a hurricane of impatience even in the lonely citadel of his head.

His arms tightened with all the cruelty of love. His body held hers close to the earth as if, otherwise, its lightness might cause it to drift away and be lost to his touch. As he let the urgency of his limbs lie heavily upon her, crushing her breasts against his, and thrusting himself into the warm and secret sheath of her flesh as if he would reach the source of life, a small cry escaped her. It seemed to come not from her throat, but from the depths of her being — a cry of acceptance and despair. A defeated cry of victory.

The movement became a rhythm; the rhythm became a hypnotic dance; the dance became a ritual of annihilation. And the ritual exploded into climax as life became joined to life, seeking to generate life, in the long throbbing moments of release.

For Dominic there was a time of darkness and tranquility. A time of death and resurrection.

14

Stronger Than Love

Afterwards, he lay quietly with his head on her breast, delighting in the intimate scent of her body. And the world was curiously still.

Presently she spoke. “Pray that I have conceived, my love — for of our embrace only a true love-child could be born. And I will pray that he shall be straight-limbed and with golden hair, growing into a man such as the man who held me. Then there will be a living image to keep the memory of this day bright.”

Dominic raised himself and gazed at her. There was fulfilment in her eyes. Fulfilment and sadness.

“I wish that I could stay,” he said gently.

“But you will go.”

“I wish that I could forget, that I could belong to you now and always.”

She smiled. “But you will go. You opened a door and you came. Now you have opened another door and you will go away … I have heard of the Firebird, though you are the only one I have known who has seen it. I do not understand the nature of your journey, my dear one, except that I know it is one that must be made. But before you go I would have you tell me whence you came, where you have journeyed, what you have seen and hoped … Then one day your story shall be told again, for surely I have conceived.”

Dominic touched her forehead lightly with his lips. “There is so little to tell,” he said. “I came from a world of darkness into a world of dawn. I opened a door and saw a vision. And my spirit seemed to know that this vision was the only true reality. So I followed wherever it led — even through a world of dreams.”

“I want to know about the journey,” she insisted. “I want to know all that has happened. I want to try to understand.”

Dominic lay back and gazed silently for a moment or two at the deepening blue of the sky. Then he began to speak. He told her of the great house in which he had been born; of his family who now seemed remote and shadowy; and of the ruined cottage where he had discovered the door. He told her how the Firebird had led him across the lake and how it had seemed to disappear in the earth. He told her of the long, dark passage; of the brilliant, fiery dance in the dome-like cavern; and of his own eventual return to daylight in the Temple. He told her of the road-mender, and the girl with green hair, and how he had found and destroyed the old man who imprisoned birds.

When he had finished she, too, lay silent for a while, her hand resting so lightly on his arm that he was almost unaware of its touch.

“I am glad the old man is dead,” she said at last. “I am glad that you were the cause of his destruction. Now the Forest will be clean once more, and I shall no longer be afraid.”

“You knew him?” asked Dominic. He saw that she was trembling.

“I knew him.” Her voice seemed strangely distant. “He was my father.”

“I — I am sorry.” Dominic was appalled.

Suddenly she roused herself and sat up, looking at him with eyes filled with tenderness. “Do not be sorry, my dearest love. You have taken away the threat of darkness and now I am truly myself. You have broken a nightmare and given me freedom. Do not be sorry, my own true heart; for life shall be renewed by life, and surely your seed lies in my womb.” She smiled. “I shall bear a son who is strong and golden, a son who is hard and gentle and so much alive that the earth and the sky will rejoice in his manhood … This and the freedom of the birds shall be our atonement.”

“But he was your father!” Dominic found it hard to believe that such a foul and despicable creature could have been connected in any way at all with the woman by his side.

“My mother,” she answered bitterly, “was no more to him than one of the wild birds he had caught. She lived and died a prisoner of fear. All she could ever give me was her love and her fear. Now you have destroyed the fear and only love remains.”

He held her hand, and they gazed at each other for a while without speaking.

Presently she let her head rest upon his shoulder. “It is said that none may see the Firebird and live, yet you have seen it.”

He began to stroke her hair. “Yes, I have seen it.”

“Tell me what it is like.” She sighed. “I should not ask. It should be enough for me to know that the Firebird is stronger than love — strong enough to draw you to follow it for ever … And yet …” She sighed once more.

“It is brighter than the sun,” he said gently. “It is a vision of purity and purpose, a dream of perfection, a feeling of peace and power and violence and truth. It is a fiery writing in the sky, a lantern in the darkness, a radiance of absolute beauty. To see it once is to see the living mystery of all things.” He shook his head sadly. “No, I cannot describe the Firebird. It is simply the light I must follow.”

As he spoke he became aware of a curious tension in his limbs. The earth seemed to be quivering faintly; and then the quivering became a rhythmic throb. He and the woman looked at each other anxiously, listening. Within a few moments the throbbing had grown into audible hoof beats.

“The Four Horsemen!” exclaimed Dominic in dismay. He had been so lost in the enchantment of finding the woman, of discovering her love, that for a while he had almost forgotten the inexorable pursuit.

She jumped to her feet and gazed apprehensively across the small pool at the dark ring of trees.

“Quick!” she whispered. “Go into the house. Perhaps they will not pass this way.”

“They will pass this way,” said Dominic grimly, snatching up his clothes. “As I follow the Firebird, so they follow me.”

“Quick!” she pleaded. “Go into the house before you are seen.”

“What about you?”

She gave him a bitter smile. “Why should they trouble to hurt a simple woman of the Forest who does not have the gift of heresy? I have nothing better to do than bathe in the pool and bask in the afternoon sunlight. Now go!”

15

Axe, Sword, Mace, Lance

Dominic ran up the grassy bank and into the tumbledown house. He threw his clothes on quickly and had just finished when the Four Horsemen came slowly round the edge of the pool. In his haste, Dominic had left the door open. It was too late to close it now. He stood back in the shadow and watched.

The woman was sitting unconcernedly upon the grass with her long dark hair spread loosely over her shoulders as if she was still waiting for it to dry. The Four Horsemen, their mail and silver masks glinting with the sun’s reflected fire, drew up in front of her.

“In the name of the Inquisitors, greetings,” said the Sword.

“There is heresy abroad,” said the Lance. “Therefore we pursue it.”

“One, touched by the flame, who sees that which may not be seen, has entered the Forest,” said the Mace. “Know you, woman, of such a one?”

“The Forest is wide,” she answered. “I have seen no man this day — touched by the flame or not.”

“Did we then speak of a man?” enquired the Axe softly.

She looked startled for a moment, but recovered herself.

“It is men chiefly who traffic in heresy,” she retorted. “Women have no taste for such matters.”

The Four Horsemen somehow appeared to regard her more intently, though no eyes could be seen behind the narrow slits in their silver masks.

“You are naked,” observed the Sword. “It is heretical to display the body without shame.”

“Until you came,” she said, “there was none to see my nakedness. I have bathed in the pool and the sun has dried my hair. And by your leave, I will presently put on my clothes.”

“You have lain here on the grass, woman?” asked the Lance.

“That is so.”

“And yet,” thundered the Mace, “there is the impress of two bodies — two bodies, I say locked together in lust and vileness and deceit!”

From inside the tumbledown house, Dominic saw that the woman was now half crouching in terror.

“Harlot!” roared the Axe, towering above her. “Liar! You have defied the Four Horsemen.” Slowly he raised his weapon.

Dominic could endure no more. With a cry of rage, he rushed from the house, and in one great leap, flung himself bodily at the grim figure. His attack caught the Horseman by surprise. Its impact toppled him from the saddle, so that he fell heavily to earth. Before he could recover, Dominic, already springing forward again, snatched the battle-axe from a mailed hand and brought it crashing down upon the silver mask still almost at his feet. Without pausing to see the effect, he grasped the terrified woman by her arm and threw her behind him. Then he whirled to face the three remaining Horsemen.

He was surprised to find that they were still watching impassively, while the riderless horse trotted slowly away into the Forest.

“Well met, heretic!” said the Sword. “Now you shall surely die.”

Dominic swung the great axe round his head so that it whistled through the air. A tremendous power seemed to be rising in him. He was invincible. No one, he felt, could stand against him.

“I am touched by the flame,” he taunted. “I have seen that which may not be seen. I have seen the glory of the Firebird, and I shall follow it always … Come! Destroy me before heresy spreads through the land. Destroy me — if you can!”

Without answering the Sword turned away, allowing his horse to move slowly along the edge of the pool; and the two remaining Horsemen following him. But when he had gone a short distance he turned suddenly, and then the earth shook with the thunder of his charge.

One after another they came, their weapons high and bright and menacing, as if the weight of the charge itself would hurl Dominic into oblivion.

“Die, heretic!” screamed the Sword. But even as he struck, a heavy blow from the battle-axe almost passed through his body and he fell with a gasp from the rearing horse.

There was no time to look, no time to think, no time to decide. Dominic leapt nimbly away from the riderless horse just as the Mace came upon him. He sensed rather than saw the terrible blow that was about to be delivered to his head; and then the axe whirled high, and the mailed arm wielding that heavy spiked weapon was severed at the shoulder.

The Lance came on.

Dominic saw that its bright point was aimed steadily at his chest. It did not seem possible that such an attack with such a weapon could be broken. And yet …

And yet it had to be broken!

In desperation, and with all the strength he possessed, Dominic hurled the axe from him. It seemed to fly almost along the shaft of the lance. There was a great cry as its blade struck the Horseman full in the chest.

For a moment, Dominic thought he had failed. Somehow the Lance managed to keep to his saddle and came on. But his weapon sagged, and the point buried itself in the earth, swinging the shaft up with such force that both horse and rider were overthrown.

The panicking horse struggled quickly to its feet, trampling its rider heavily. Then it swung round, cantering after the others into the Forest.

Suddenly, there seemed to be a stillness.

Dominic looked at the woman. Now that the struggle was over, there was time to think, time to remember. It seemed impossible that one could have stood against four — four who were armed and armoured, and on horseback.

“I have destroyed them,” he murmured wonderingly. “Alone, I have destroyed them!”

She was still trembling. The terror had gone from her eyes but she was still trembling. “Have you?” she said sadly. “Look at what you have destroyed.”

The mailed figures lay inert and sprawling as they had fallen. There was an emptiness, a flat and curious deadness about them that was more grotesque, more strange than death itself. One of them lay on his back — a crushed and oddly shrunken heap of armour with the silver mask turned blindly towards the sky.

Dominic went to the figure and knelt by it. There was something about the posture that was utterly macabre. He studied it for a few moments, then suddenly tugged at the enigmatic mask. It came away easily and revealed — nothing.

There was no face behind the mask, no body in the armour. No vestige of anything human.

Only emptiness.

The shock of discovery was more dreadful than the shock of battle. He had stood against four ruthless pursuers and had destroyed them. He had fought victoriously against four hollow enemies.

The woman came to his side. Dominic stood up and held her close, feeling the need to reassure himself of some reality, feeling a great need to experience the closeness of the living.

“So you have destroyed nothing,” she whispered. “They were never alive and so can never be killed. That is the nature of the Four Horsemen. They are immortal in their very lack of substance. They are tireless even in their lack of physical power. They are invulnerable and invincible.” She paused, shivering. “Their names are Distrust, Fear, Hatred and Envy. And they will pursue you for ever.”

But Dominic was hardly aware of her words; for there, against the dark background of trees, hovered the Firebird. Its subtle, shimmering radiance transforming the whole scene — the pool, the tumbledown house, the four mailed figures at his feet and even the dark-haired woman by his side — into a living tableau of gold.

There was music in the air and in his limbs. Music and power and purpose. The Firebird rose slightly, and an invisible cord pulled at Dominic while the power danced through his body.

“What is it?” whispered the woman. “What is it, my dear one? There is such a light in your eyes, such a darkness and a mystery and a burning vision that my heart grows cold — I know not whether with joy or despair. What is it, my only love?” She held closer to him as if, instinctively, she realized that he was already going from her.

“I can see the Firebird,” he answered softly. “It calls and I must follow.”

“If only I, too, could follow!” She clung desperately to him and gazed at his face as if she would memorize every single line — as if she would engrave his features in her heart.

But Dominic was no longer looking at her. He was no longer aware of her loveliness or the subtle warmth and pressure of her body against his. The Firebird seemed to be commanding him entirely. His eyes were fixed upon the burning wings, the body of pure flame. Once more the invisible cord pulled at him.

“Goodbye, my dear and lovely one,” he murmured in a distant voice. “I will remember the way our bodies played and the way our hearts were moved. I will remember our love throughout the rest of my life.”

The Firebird circled almost impatiently, and the cord pulled tight.

“Pray that I have conceived,” she cried, feeling the power that seemed to be physically tearing him from her arms. “Oh, pray that I have conceived!”

Suddenly, the Firebird began to glide towards the trees. And, at the same moment, Dominic was free and away. His limbs were light and his body was filled with energy. He leapt forward in pursuit of the Firebird and did not look back.

16

Yet Still He Ran

In a few moments he was surrounded by the gloom of the Forest once more. The trees rose high and motionless, their thick roof of intertwined branches and leaves shutting out the intensity of the late sunlight. But Dominic was untroubled either by the darkness or the brooding atmosphere; for the Firebird was there, wheeling and gliding between the trunks of trees, leading the way and annihilating the gloom with radiance wherever it passed.

On and on ran Dominic, his eyes fixed always upon the dazzling creature of flame with its slow, stately wing beats and its bright, purposeful beauty. On and on through the Forest. The pace was becoming faster now, but Dominic felt no fatigue. The thorns and undergrowth tore at him, the bole shoots of trees seemed to whip at his body as he passed; but he was heedless of the pain and his feet hardly seemed to touch the earth.

On and on. The passing trees became giant columns of blackness, receding faster and faster on either side as he sped after the fiery vision that danced always ahead.

Then, suddenly, Dominic passed out of the vault of darkness into the vaulted freedom of the open sky; and the Forest was behind him.

Higher and faster soared the Firebird, sending great ripples of energy along the invisible cord. Faster and yet faster ran Dominic, exulting in the sheer joy of pursuit, as if he, too, had wings and would presently rise into the sky.

And as he ran, his shadow ran before him — long and lean in the low-slanting sunlight. A giant’s shadow taking gigantic strides across heath and grassland and marsh, crossing gullies and streams in grotesque leaps, twisting and dancing and gliding over the uneven ground.

Time was meaningless, yet the cavorting shadow before creature, the bird of fire and beauty and purpose, Dominic knew that he had engaged in a race that could never be won — a race with eternity. But the knowledge was irrelevant. All that mattered was that he should follow the Firebird whenever he found it and wherever it led — even to the end of his life.

Time was meaningless, yet th cavorting shadow before him grew longer and longer, stretching and rippling and reaching out like a thin mobile strand, that presently would draw itself out to infinity.

Dominic had eyes for nothing but the Firebird. He might have been running over mountains and valleys; he might have been passing through arid deserts or sweet-smelling flower gardens, and he would not have known. He knew only that there was pattern and purpose in the journey; that this alone was enough.

The pursuit became a dream, and the dream was unending — until, abruptly, the shimmering creature of flame swept low before him in a wide circle, then soared almost vertically, with such speed that it became transformed into an arrow of fire …

And vanished.

Dominic stopped running. He stood bewildered.

The air was still, the sky was a quiet, deepening blue; and it was as if the Firebird had never existed.

He stood, bewildered; for there before him, some little way ahead, lay the City, its smooth wall gold and crimson in the rays of the sinking sun. He saw that he was standing on the road between the City and the Temple. Suddenly he was aware of a great fatigue.

The tiredness seemed to course through his body like a gentle acid, dissolving his muscles, softening his bones, eating through his will to move.

He looked at the City once more. Towers and spires and domes and high roofs were visible above the crimson wall. They seemed to be beckoning him, offering visions of rest, of peace and forgetfulness. There was a single broad gateway in the City wall. Slowly, painfully, he began to walk towards it.

Each footstep was a tremendous effort, an individual triumph. As he hobbled towards the City gate, Dominic let his mind dwell on that incredible pursuit of the Firebird. It did not seem possible that, so recently, he could have displayed such singlemindedness, and put out such immense energy for a pursuit that had always ended and would always end in the same mysterious way.

One moment the Firebird was suddenly there, giving him such courage, such faith and fixity that nothing could deter him from its pursuit. For a while, he would be godlike, invincible. He would cross the world with giant strides until — until, inexplicably, the Firebird disappeared once more just as mysteriously and unexpectedly as when it chose to appear. And then he would be alone again — alone and perplexed in a world that he would never truly understand. Dominic wondered how much of his life he had already given to the journey — and was oddly consoled by the knowledge that, in the end, he could only give it all.

He became aware of an unmistakable throbbing in the ground. He looked up in surprise and bewilderment. There at the City gates the sun’s low rays glinted on four advancing shapes — the indestructible Horsemen. They slowed down and finally became motionless as if they were waiting for him; as if they knew that, more than anything now, he wanted peace and rest and an escape from his loneliness in the nearness of men. They were waiting for him, their silver masks glowing like embers in the red light of the sun. They waited as if they knew that, at last, he would come to them.

Dominic realized that he was almost spent. Defeat was there at the City gates — defeat and comfort and rest waiting only for his acceptance. He took one more step forward and sighed, knowing that if he surrendered himself to the ways and customs and laws of other men he would never again see the Firebird, never again taste the lonely joy of unending pursuit.

He took another step and then another; but the ache in his heart became greater than the ache in his limbs. He stopped.

And knew that there was something within that could never accept defeat.

Slowly, and after some hesitation, he turned from the waiting Horsemen and looked back along the road towards the lowering sun. There in the distance rose a tall, familiar landmark whose roof seemed to support the great fiery ball.

Perhaps, if he could reach the Temple, he would be able to escape.

If he could reach the Temple.

Dominic put one foot forward, and instantly heard the subdued thunder of hooves behind him.

His spirit sent urgent commands to his weary limbs — commands that seemed to travel with leaden slowness along a burnt out filigree of nerves.

He began to run. He looked down at his legs in sheer amazement. It did not seem possible that limbs so tired and worn could obey him. Their very obedience seemed to renew his strength.

He ran painfully and with stumbling strides along the road to the Temple, remembering the speed and ease with which he had pursued the Firebird, and hoping that he would see its glorious life-giving shape once more.

Behind him the thunder of hooves was louder. The road seemed to be trembling under his feet.

Dominic glanced over his shoulder. The Horsemen were gaining rapidly, their weapons raised high, their masks glinting with malevolent intensity. He looked resolutely ahead. The Temple still seemed far away, and he knew that he could never reach it.

But still he ran.

Pain danced crazily along his limbs. There was a roaring as of great waters in his head; and mists of darkness threatened the blurred power of seeing in his eyes.

Yet still he ran.

The thunder of the hooves seemed all about him, filling the earth and the sky, beating their dreadful rhythm of emptiness and despair throughout the world.

The chase was a nightmare — a purgatory of tortured limbs and bursting lungs and heartbeats that threatened to tear his chest to pieces with their violence. The chase was a nightmare, but the nightmare was real.

And thunder rolled around him like a gathering tide of destruction. For the Four Horsemen were almost upon him. But there at the end of the road ahead — so near now and so hopelessly far — lay the broad steps of the Temple. They seemed to ripple at him strangely, tantalizingly, through waves of darkness; and he knew that both the darkness and the Horsemen were closing in.

17

A Ripple of Eternity

Then suddenly there was light.

Light and radiance shimmering in the Temple itself. Dominic knew with a great surge of joy that the Firebird was waiting.

There it hovered between the great columns of marble that seemed, in the intense radiance, to be themselves shafts of living fire.

Dominic goaded his limbs to a tremendous effort. The presence of the Firebird drew him; but there was no longer the pull of that invincible life-giving cord, there was no longer the surge of god-like strength. He was completely exhausted, yet he willed himself forward in a final agonizing drive to the Temple.

As he half fell on to the smooth steps, the thunder at his heels died abruptly into silence. He turned in surprise and saw that the roadway behind him was entirely deserted. The Four Horsemen were nowhere to be seen. It was as if, in reaching the Temple, he had somehow accomplished their disintegration.

He lay there on the steps resting for a few moments, allowing his poor hard-driven limbs a brief respite after their long endurance. Presently the tearing sharpness in his chest became dulled, and the pain in his legs began to die into a curious numbness. He lifted his head and looked up the broad flight of steps.

The Firebird still hovered, waiting.

He gazed at it, forgetting his weariness and the great sense of desolation that had tormented him. The fiery shape no longer seemed to be filled with violence and power. The character of its beauty was dominated now by a serene stillness, a frozen tranquillity that seemed to inspire a sensation deeper and calmer even than peace.

Dominic got to his feet and slowly ascended the steps. He was no longer conscious of his body. He felt, indeed, that he no longer possessed a body, that he was no more substantial than a dream, a whisper or a legend.

Slowly, the Firebird circled the Temple, then hovered for a moment on the tip of the high crystal cone that imprisoned a slender tongue of blue and yellow flame. From the tip of the cone it drifted gently down to the transparent sphere containing a single red rose. And from the sphere, the Firebird slowly passed through the circular opening in the Temple’s polished floor.

As Dominic watched, he remembered his first vision of the cone, the sphere and the Temple in the bright and early glory of morning. It seemed so long ago now — so long ago that perhaps it, too, was nothing more than part of an inconsequential dream.

Moving with trance-like deliberation, Dominic went to the opening and lowered himself through it. The radiance of the Firebird filled the subterranean passage; but, strangely, he did not need to look for footholds on the uneven rock face. He seemed now to be floating, drifting inevitably towards the hypnotic creature of flame and mystery.

The Firebird was gliding along the rough passage; and Dominic, too, was gliding — drifting without effort in pursuit of the unattainable.

On went the burning and dazzling shape, and on went Dominic. Already they had reached the great dome cavern, where the Firebird had carved the air into a tracery of flame as it danced with indescribable beauty. Again, as they passed through the cavern, the Firebird was dancing. But this time it was a dance of stillness. A dance of tranquillity and peace.

Dominic was closer now to the Firebird than he had ever been. Drifting along in a timeless dream of movement without motion, he felt that it would be possible at last to reach out and touch the fiery wings, to let the elixir of warmth and life flow into him in the moment of mystical contact.

But he did not desire to touch. He wanted only to follow, to offer the devotion of silence — a great and abstract love, the detachment of complete submission.

Now they had left the cavern and had once more entered the narrow tunnel that led to the folly. The long journey, Dominic realized, had resolved itself into a circle. It had started at the beginning, and its end would still be a beginning. But there was purpose in retracing the last steps. There was pattern and purpose and music in the mysterious dance of life.

His re-emergence in the tiny stone folly took Dominic by surprise. Still following the Firebird, he seemed to glide without any exertion up the stone steps of the bower — back into the world of reality. An ordinary sunset world slipping quietly into the ordinary stillness of an ordinary evening.

But perhaps that, too, was part of the great illusion. Perhaps this world was no more real than the one to which his pursuit of the Firebird had led him. Or perhaps neither had anything to do with reality at all.

Dominic stood in the folly and watched the Firebird float delicately over the lake towards a sun that was already sinking below the distant edge of the world. He stood for a moment, savouring the quiet glory of the landscape.

Beyond the thick belt of trees along the bank of the lake was the house where he had been born. A house that, even if he returned to it, could now only be filled with ghosts and memories — even if the ghosts were encased in flesh and the memories draped with texture and colour. And there, hidden in the woods, was the ruined cottage with its strange and wonderful door — the door he had had to open.

He remembered that far away dawn adventure with gladness. There were no regrets.

The Firebird was no longer drifting low across the still surface of the lake. It was beginning to soar up to the crimson-streaked reaches of the sky. Perhaps, thought Dominic, watching its ascent with a calmness that seemed to bubble inside him, it will rise to join the stars. And then he began to wonder if, perhaps, the Firebird itself was a star — a star that belonged to him alone. As he turned the possibility over in his mind, he automatically walked to where he had left the small boat that very morning — or perhaps it was a thousand years ago.

Presently, he found himself drifting upon the surface of the lake, still watching the slow, stately soaring of the Firebird. Now, it was no more than a brilliant point — a tiny golden spark set like a jewel in the deepening sky.

So this, he thought peacefully, is the end of the journey. He was both joyful and sad. He had seen much that was strange and wonderful, but he had achieved nothing. And yet — and yet the journey was its own fulfilment. And the challenge of the journey was all.

But it was not quite the end.

Suddenly the needle-point of fire began to grow. It grew quickly and beautifully into a great arc of flame as the Firebird swooped, illuminating the whole world with its transient light. Down it came; and it seemed to Dominic that the bright talisman of fire would pass straight through him. For surely nothing could halt such a self-consuming fall.

It was over in an instant.

Without creating even a tremble on the surface, the Firebird passed deep into the waters of the lake.

Dominic gazed down where it had fallen. There was no trace at all of that blinding radiance, that wonderful fiery plumage.

But, illuminated by the last rays of the setting sun, he saw his own face. He saw the thin and wrinkled features, the white hair and still bright eyes of an old man.

He gazed at it for a moment without either surprise or regret. Then with a great sigh of contentment he sank back into the tiny boat. For an instant only, his body became taut with all the magnificent purity and power of fire. Then it slackened as his spirit was borne outwards on a tiny, tremendous ripple of eternity.

And then there was nothing but the darkness of night, the remote compassion of the stars.

Jahweh

Jahweh knew only that his name was Jahweh and that he existed. He did not know that he had extraordinary powers because he had nothing, no one, to measure them by. He was neither content nor discontent, but he could be bored.

He created/imagined a throne for himself. The throne was of gold.

He sat on it between the stars and contemplated his boredom. He became aware of a near star that looked oddly pleasing. He moved his throne nearer — much nearer. His eyes which, at will, could enable him to observe molecular structures could also see great distances. He observed that the sun had nine planets. Most of them were dull, big, boring. There was one so far from its parent sun that everything on it must be frozen crystal.

But the third planet was interesting. Most of it was a bluish green. It had oceans, dry land and life forms. It had an abundance of sea life, plant life and animal life. Jahweh gazed closely. Some of the animal life walked on two legs and used hands for fashioning things. Jahweh was interested.

He took the throne down to land level and stepped off it. The force of gravity did not worry him.

He saw a woman picking fruit. He did not know how he knew the animal was female. He did not know how he knew many things. Although he was bright and powerful, he took care she should not see him. He probed her thoughts and was almost instantly able to reconstruct her primitive language system.

He saw something wriggle in the grass. A snake. Jahweh had a great sense of humour. He trod on the head of the snake and then transformed himself into a snake — a much bigger snake.

Whoever would have imagined a talking snake? While he was doing this, he probed the woman’s primitive culture pattern and her primitive emotional responses. Without her being conscious of the emotion, he temporarily cancelled the fear factor. Then he approached her.

“Your name is Eve and your man is called Adam. These are good names.”

The woman only registered surprise. “Who are you?”

Jahweh ignored the question. “Did God say: You shall not eat of any tree in this garden?”

“He only said we should not eat the fruit of the tree which is at the centre of the garden.”

“Why?”

“I know not.”

“See, the fruit looks very good. Try some and give some to your husband. You will be amazed at the results.”

Hypnotically almost, the woman took a bite from one of the large red apples.

“It is very ripe and very sweet.”

“So it should be,” said Jahweh calmly. “I created it. It is the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I am the Lord your God. But because you have let me as a simple serpent corrupt you, you yourself have become corrupt.”

He resumed his own glowing, magnificent form. The golden throne came to him at his will.

“My name is Jahweh. I am the Lord God. You have offended me by being so easily corrupted by a talking snake. It is my command, then, that you and the man Adam will leave this garden and go forth to grow your own food by the sweat of your brow. It is my command that you will help found a tribe and that the tribe will become a nation. There will be much blood shed because of the pursuit of knowledge. Go now. Jahweh has spoken.”

The woman fled.

Jahweh lifted off into outer darkness. He had played this kind of game many times before on many planets. And always the result was the same. People began to pursue knowledge and then began to fight for what they believed to be true. But, ironically, wars made for progress as nations tried to dominate each other.

Jahweh began to laugh. He did not quite know why he was laughing. The incident had been amusing, that was all.

He did not know that he was one of the ten greatest robots in the galaxy or that he had been designed by a far, dying race as a social catalyst for primitive peoples on many planets so that in the end, in sheer desperation and with indomitable purpose, civilizations would develop and people would put their minds to solving as yet undreamed of problems. People would die — many people would die — but eventually the arts and the sciences would flourish. And many would attempt to explore the cosmos in which they lived.

Again there was a burst of laughter.

Laughter among the stars!

The Diminishing Dragon

Roddy lay on his back on a small grassy knoll at the top of Bignor Hill in the Sussex Downs. Behind him, several miles away beyond acres of rich woodland, lay the sea — bright, blinding and beautiful on this golden September afternoon. He had gazed at it briefly, wistfully constructing a fantasy in which he ran away from home and school to join some ancient coal-burning ship with an eccentric skipper who took his shabby little vessel to far-away places in search of most improbable cargoes.

But there the fantasy had disintegrated. He knew that the Channel was full of supertankers and diesel ships with air-conditioned cabins for liner passengers and hydraulic derricks on the large cargo ships. Besides, any captain these days would want to see pieces of paper — ‘O’ levels and the like — as well as a parental consent form.

Roddy was fifteen years old, and in less than a week he would be back in prison at school, doing the autumn run-up for ‘O’ level examinations next year. It had been an uneventful summer holiday. His father had spent much of the time jetting round Europe trying to sell expensive computer systems to people who neither wanted them or needed them; and his mother, when she was not involved in the Jam-and-Jerusalem routine with the Women’s Institute, was attending countless gymkhanas and point-to-point meetings.

She had a thing about horses. Roddy thought it was basically Freudian in origin. When she put on her jodhpurs and the rest of her riding gear, she looked startlingly young and hermaphrodite. Perhaps he ought to be secretly in love with her. But the Oedipus syndrome had been done to death. Besides, it was tedious. Besides, he had recently ditched two girl friends who also had things about horses. Besides, he was unutterably bored.

During six precious weeks nothing had happened — well, nothing worth mentioning.

So now, here he was, lying on his back in the early autumn sunlight, staring fixedly at a signpost. It was of recent vintage — the protective coating of pitch still looked wet in places — and had probably been erected by such well-meaning idiots as supported Morris dancing, Mediaeval Mystery Plays and other grotesque survivals of the British Heritage (crash in with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ etc.).

The north-pointing finger of the signpost bore the legend ‘Londinium’, and the south-pointing finger was marked ‘Noviomagnus Regensium’. This was the route the Roman legions took as they marched to the metropolis. Idly, Roddy constructed in his mind’s eye a column of marching soldiers, their eagle glinting in the sunlight. He became one of them, then suddenly promoted himself to centurion. He felt that even in Roman times he would have been good officer material.

His meditations were interrupted by a rather loud cough; and instantly about a yard and a half of grassland not far from him became scorched earth as a gout of flame played briefly over it.

“Forgive me,” said a mildly cultured voice from somewhere behind him. “I hope you were not too surprised.”

Roddy sat up and turned his head. He saw a creature that was entirely beautiful. It looked just like a dragon that had escaped from an Arthur Rackham illustration in one of the children’s books he had at home. At least, it looked like a miniature dragon.

It was scaly, shiny and wonderfully iridescent. But its wings were neatly folded and it did not look very fierce. It was hardly more than three feet long.

There was no other living creature in sight. So it must have been the dragon who spoke.

“I was somewhat surprised,” confessed Roddy carefully. “But the summer hols have been very boring, and a little surprise relieves the tedium. Forgive my curiosity, but are you really a dragon?”

“I am indeed a dragon, probably one of the last — if not the last — in the British Isles. We are not just an endangered species, we are a doomed species. We are more rare now than even the great golden eagle.” The dragon settled itself more comfortably on the grass. Roddy could see more of its scaly legs and razor-sharp claws.

“You speak excellent English,” he said. “I never knew that dragons were able to talk.”

If dragons could smile, Roddy thought he detected a faint smile on the long snout which looked vaguely like that of a crocodile.

“I also speak fairly fluent Latin, Saxon, early Danish, some Norman French and a fair amount of that revolting Middle English. In fact, you could say in today’s idiom that I’ve been around.” The dragon glanced somewhat nervously at the patch of scorched earth. The last sparks were beginning to die. “Thank goodness it has not been a dry summer. Last year it was exceptionally dry and I regret to say that my coughing and sneezing disposed of two quite large forests. I hate to burn forests. It does not improve the local ecology greatly.”

“Do you have a permanent cold?” enquired Roddy.

“No, alas. Only consumption.”

“We have drugs for things like that. Probably penicillin would clear it up in no time.”

“Self-consumption,” added the dragon mournfully. “Whenever I get excited and have a coughing fit, I burn up a little of myself in the flame-making process. There are no medicines that will cure that. It is an hereditary weakness somewhat akin, I suppose, to haemophilia in your species. Rare but nasty and, eventually, quite fatal.” He glanced at the signpost. “You would not believe that when the twentieth legion marched from Noviomagnus Regensium to Londinium, on their way to Camulodunum to put down the rebellious Iceni, I was about thirty-five feet from snout to tail.”

“You are that old?” enquired Roddy incredulously.

“Much older, my friend. I was but in my prime then.” The dragon laughed. It was a thin wheezing sound, and fire dribbled lightly from his mouth.

“You actually saw the Roman Legions?”

“Saw them! I made a right mess of the twentieth, I can tell you. It was one of their crack legions — the Valeria Victrix. I saw them marching up to Londinium, a glittering column of invaders bringing their New Order to a pleasantly uncivilized island … Proud and disciplined soldiers, ready to belt the heads of a few simple folk in an outpost of empire. I am an English dragon, and I could never work up any enthusiasm for invaders or foreign tourists coming to see how best they could exploit the natives.”

“What did you do to them?” asked Roddy.

“I flew in from the sun — an old trick. First I burned their eagle, causing it to fall off the standard in a somewhat damaged condition. Then I swept the whole length of the column, breathing fire and half-roasting the legionaries in their light armour.” Again there was that thin wheezing laugh. “I never saw a roman legion break ranks so quickly. It was rather humorous. When the jaunt was over, I flew to some quiet place and fell about laughing. No doubt the Valeria Victrix thought they had been hit by an enraged tribal god … You may call me Bert, by the way. All my friends used to call me Bert. Actually, it is short for Ethelbert. But now I have no friends. They are all dead. It would please me if you were to call me Bert. What is your name, by the way?”

“My full name is Roderick, but my friends call me Roddy.”

“May I be one of your friends?”

“Yes, Bert. I would very much like you to be my friend.”

“Roddy and Bert,” mused the dragon. “They go well together.”

“Is there any truth in this story that dragons used to terrify the inhabitants of fortified towns and so on until being offered the most beautiful maidens as a kind of peace offering?”

Bert sighed. “It’s all lies, lies. We have been suffering from a thousand years of bad publicity — mostly put out by half-witted mediaeval knights who could neither read nor write but knew which side their bread was buttered on. Some of them even went to the miserable length of catching young dragons and training them to be ferocious on command. Then they would turn the dragons loose near a likely town or castle and get them to terrify the superstitious peasantry until something had to be done.

“Along would come the knight, brandishing sword and lance and signalling to the dragon to breathe fire. Then there would be a fake battle until the knight signalled to the dragon to play dead. After which, the knight would gather much gold from the grateful populace. And when the merrymaking and rejoicing had finished and everyone was drunk or asleep or both, he and the dragon would slip quietly away in the early hours and set up another town for the big con. Many reputations were made without a blow being struck in anger. I once knew a hermit who used to breed and train young dragons for such foul purposes. I was so enraged that I breathed on him and lost a little body length in the process.”

“But there must have been some element of truth in all those legends,” persisted Roddy. “You can’t have smoke without fire.”

Bert made the mistake of laughing. “That’s a good one, that is. Smoke without fire!”

He burned up another few square yards of grassland before he got the laughter under control. It was followed by a short but rather potent bout of coughing. More flame, more scorched earth.

“Now see what you have made me do,” he said severely when he had recovered himself. “I bet I have lost at least ten pounds in body weight. I shall have to be more careful.”

“I’m very sorry, Bert,” said Roddy contritely. “I did not mean to make you laugh. I didn’t even know that laughing had the same effect as coughing or sneezing. You should have told me.” It was sadly true that the dragon now looked about nine inches shorter.

“No matter, Roddy, my friend,” said the dragon tranquilly. “My time has almost come, and I am emotionally prepared for the inevitable … Now where were we? Ah, yes, I recollect. Basically, dragons are a peaceful and fairly harmless species. They used to live near towns or, preferably, castles because they liked to eat the bones, chicken carcasses, and waste vegetables that were sometimes thrown away. Mind you, they were not above taking the occasional stray lamb; but the prospect of consuming beautiful young maidens did not appeal to them greatly.”

Again, Bert made the dreadful mistake of laughing, and gouts of flame poured over already scorched earth. Again, Roddy fancied he could see the dragon shrinking before his very eyes.

“Whoops! Shouldn’t have done that,” said Bert. “Very carelessly, I am busy shortening my life. But I was reminded of the story about my great uncle Adelbert. There were lots of Berts in my family. I suppose it was some kind of tradition … Well, Adelbert had taken up residence outside a very large Norman castle somewhere in the Midlands. It may have been Nottingham, but I am not entirely sure. Those Normans ate like pigs; and there was enough waste food tossed over the battlements to make Adelbert plump and slack. He was quite happy, and paid little attention to the occasional arrows that came in his direction. Most of them missed, but the ones that didn’t simply bounced off his tough scales.

“But some idiot in the castle remembered the beautiful maiden routine; and some cretinous knight volunteered to take on the dragon if he went for the bait. One morning the beautiful maiden was brought with full pageantry out through the castle gates and chained to the nearest tree. She did not look entirely happy about it. Trumpets sounded, and the local baron delivered what can only be described as a brief party political broadcast; saying that he always had the common people’s interests at heart etc., before returning hastily to the castle in case the dragon should appear and prefer Norman beef to English lamb. The portcullis was not lowered. The idiot knight, astride his charger, with lance ready, remained beneath it keeping a beady eye on the damosel. Perhaps he thought she would grace his bed if the dragon was heroically dispatched.

“Now, Adelbert was an old softie, and he could not bear the sight of the lady’s tears. So he slithered up towards her and whispered that he meant her no harm.

“Unfortunately, the idiot knight took this as a sign of attack. He thundered towards Adelbert at a great rate of knots, lance at the ready. Adelbert reared up on his hind legs to protect his good intentions and received a foot of cold steel in his soft underbelly for his pains. Fortunately, the wound, though painful, was not mortal. Before he could explain his intentions, the knight withdrew the lance — somewhat clumsily — and rode back a short distance for another pass.

“Adelbert, being a gentle beast, could not bear the sight of blood — especially his own. So he thought his best plan was to frighten the horse and thus avoid further bloodshed. He waited until the point of the now bloody lance was about twenty feet away, then he breathed very gently towards the head of the charger.

“The wretched animal bolted, taking the wretched knight with it. The horse, partly dazed by smoke and terror, ran head-on into the nearest oak tree. The lance penetrated the massive trunk, and the knight went over the top of the already unconscious charger, his helmet hitting the tree with a reverberating clang. Both horse and rider sank noisily to the ground.

“Adelbert looked to the lady. Fortunately, she had not swooned during this brief and somewhat comical sequence of violence.

“‘I trust you are not too distraught by this affair, sweet lady. I will just melt your chains, then you may return to the castle. Doubtless the good knight will lead his charger back at his leisure.’ The horse had begun to kick feebly by the time Adelbert had breathed his hottest fire on the chains well away from the sweet lady’s arms; and the still prostrate knight was beginning to groan wonderfully.

“‘But you are wounded!’ exclaimed the damsel. ‘You must be attended to.’

“Adelbert had by now also registered the presence of a growing armed group of caitiffs and wretches near the portcullis. Their murmurings increased, and there was the occasional flash of sword and Morningstar. He did not think they were entirely interested in his well-being. He nodded towards them. ‘Dear lady, there is no time for first aid. Those people do not seem intent upon my welfare.’

“‘Can you fly?’ asked the damosel when her arms were freed. ‘I have never seen a dragon fly.’

“‘You shall see one now, sweet maiden.’ Adelbert unfolded his magnificent wings and took off. ‘Farewell, sweet maiden. Remember me.’ Higher and higher he flew, circling over the castle. Then from a great height he released some unwanted ballast on certain high-born gentlemen who had gathered on the battlements. Then he swooped low, breathing fire; and they scattered in disarray.

“The bleeding from his underbelly had stopped. As he winged his way south, he was amused to see the unseated knight staggering blindly and in erratic circles while his charger still lay on its side, kicking spasmodically. The knight received one of the kicks in a somewhat sensitive area. He let out a high-pitched howl and doubled up. It had not been one of his better days.

“That little story,” said Bert, “merely serves to indicate that we dragons, though much misunderstood and maligned, are really nice people.”

Roddy tried to contain his amusement for the sake of Bert. But he could not, and fell about laughing, the tears streaming down his face.

Bert permitted himself one very mild guffaw, burned up another yard or two of grassland and lost two or three more pounds of body weight.

“Sorry, Bert,” said Roddy. “I forgot. It was such a wonderful story … Did you make it up or was it all true?”

“I had the details from Adelbert himself. And he was not a dragon to lie.”

Roddy looked at his wrist watch. “Good grief! I’d better get back home. Mother likes us to have high tea punctually at six or, if it is her day for dinner, we dine at seven-thirty.” He stood up. “You have made my holiday, Bert. It is a great private pleasure to have you as my friend.”

“Where do you live?” asked Bert.

“That big house in the valley. You can’t miss it.”

“Good. Leave your bedroom light on and I’ll fly past at ten o’clock to wish you good-night.”

“But how can you tell the time?”

Bert smiled and stuck out a fore-limb. He was wearing a digital watch. “Some idiot took it off while picking blackberries last year,” he explained. “I found it but it took me two whole days to get it round my wrist. Those expanding straps are tricky things, especially if one only has claws … I have greatly enjoyed your company, Roddy. How about another session tomorrow afternoon?”

“You bet! I’ve never had such fun.”

“There is one small point,” said Bert. “Don’t drop any hints to the game-keepers. I have a little nest in the woods, and I sometimes get hungry in the small hours. I know they are not yet in season; but a brace of roosting pheasant, lightly grilled, seem to get me through the night.”

“Say no more, Bert. You are my friend.”

“That’s good of you, Roddy. We’ll meet tomorrow, then.”

Back at home, only just in time for high tea, Roddy ate his food slowly and with a far-away look in his eye while Mummy and Daddy disagreed ever so politely about the evening’s television. Being a somewhat with-it Mummy, she wanted to watch groups of apparently spastic teen-agers jerk about while screaming totally incomprehensible ‘lyrics’ to a background of strident and discordant ‘music’; this programme to be followed by a homely hospital serial in which an alcoholic nurse usually got all her patients’ shots wrong, while a staff nurse was beginning the histrionic run-up for an abortion (her own), and a brilliant negro doctor was probably saving a one-legged, mentally deficient octogenarian from cardiac arrest.

Daddy merely wanted to watch some football match, the result of which might give Britain a sporting chance for the European Cup, followed by free-style wrestling.

Mummy and Daddy were always very polite to each other. The trouble usually began when each decided to concede the other’s choice.

The trouble started.

Roddy tried for a diversion. “A small dragon is going to fly past my bedroom window at ten o’clock tonight.” Mummy and Daddy stared at him.

Mummy spoke. “What did you say, Roddy?”

“I said a small dragon is going to fly past my bedroom window tonight.”

Daddy spoke. “Roddy, this is neither the time nor the place for schoolboy humour. Your mother and I are discussing the evening television programmes.”

“His name is Bert,” went on Roddy desperately. “Well, Ethelbert, really. He wears a digital wristwatch and every time he breathes fire he burns up a little of himself, which is why I try not to make him laugh. It’s bad for him because it makes him breathe flame.”

Mummy spoke. “Roddy, we have both had enough of your nonsense. Kindly remain quiet.”

Roddy went kamikaze. “He speaks very good English and some Latin and Norman French.”

Daddy spoke. “It’s high time you went back to school. Meanwhile you will go to your room and stay there. That, I hope, will teach you not to interrupt rational discussion.”

Roddy went to his room. He could hear voices raised in rational discussion down below. Then he heard Mummy crying. That meant she would eventually win the contest by one submission.

He waited patiently, sitting on his bed with the curtains wide open. It was a clear starry night. Sure enough, at ten o’clock Bert flew by — very gracefully, very slowly. He gave a brief belch of flame so that Roddy could be sure.

Good old Bert. Now there was a dragon who kept his word. Roddy opened his window and waved. The dragon dipped in salute.

Roddy climbed into bed and closed his eyes. It had been a marvellous day. Soon he was asleep, dreaming about Bert’s treatment of the Valeria Victrix, and Adelbert’s encounter with the Norman knight.

The following afternoon — another golden September day — Roddy raced up to the top of Bignor Hill as soon as lunch was over. It was one of Mummy’s Jam-and-Jerusalem days at the Women’s Institute, so lunch had been a somewhat impromptu affair while she spent most of the morning practising her flower arranging. Not that that was important. Roddy was eager to rendezvous with his new-found friend.

Bert was waiting for him and basking in the sunlight. He seemed considerably smaller than on the previous day. Apart from coughing and laughing, the nocturnal grilling of pheasant must be taking it out of him.

“Hello, Roddy.”

“Hello, Bert. It’s another marvellous day, isn’t it?”

Bert stretched his wings, yawned, then settled more comfortably. “I like this kind of weather. There is just a hint of autumn in the air — a promise of fulfilment … I enjoyed our little rendezvous last night; but I don’t do too much flying these days, and the experience left me a trifle hungry, so I picked up a couple of plump cock pheasants on the way back to my nest. Those wretched birds made the devil of a lot of noise until they were silenced. Unfortunately, my antics were observed by a poacher patrol. One idiot had a go at me with both barrels of his twelve-bore. Fortunately, I was just about out of range, and the shot bounced harmlessly off my tail. In any case, I don’t think he actually believed what he saw. His shot gun seemed most unsteady. I suspect he had been drinking. But just to be on the safe side, I made a detour back to my nest before I grilled the pheasant. The smell of burning feathers made me cough somewhat, and the pheasants were a trifle overdone. It was all rather tiresome … Do I look much shorter?”

“Not a lot,” lied Roddy, though Bert now seemed to be somewhat less than two feet long. “You would be better off if you stuck to cold meat. I could steal some for you from the fridge.”

“A kind thought, Roddy; and I thank you for it. But I prefer to do my own foraging. I am too old a dragon to mend my ways. Besides, I shall not have to take roosting pheasants for much longer.” Again Bert stretched. “Yes, it really is a marvellous day. It reminds me of the kind of day on which cousin Cuthbert tried to drive the Normans back into the sea.”

Roddy was thrilled. He sensed that there was another uncensored piece of history about to be revealed. “Please tell me about it, Bert. What did he do?”

Bert smiled. “Before I do that, I must tell you something about Cuthbert’s character. Then you will appreciate the end of the story. He was a very orthodox dragon — an absolute patriot. Britain for the British, Land of Hope and Glory, and so on. It was no good telling him that practically everyone in this demi-paradise had been a foreigner at one time or another. He liked the Vikings and he liked the Saxons. Said you knew where you were with such people. Also he had done quite well for himself in the Danelaw. The Vikes got on splendidly with dragons and always made sure they had enough to eat. The Vikes even had carved figureheads of dragons on the bows of their long ships. So, even though the Vikes were Danish and the Saxons Teutonic, in Cuthbert’s orderly mind they were true Brits.” Again Bert smiled. “The truth of the matter is that Cuthbert was full of ethnic prejudice. He just hated the French. He hated their food, their showy ways, and even their language. Also, he had heard some rather tall tales about the antics of fancy French dragons that caused his stiff British upper lip to quiver.

“So when he discovered that William of Normandy was planning an October holiday on this side of the Channel, he began to breathe rather heavily; and everyone knows what that means for a dragon. He observed King Harold leading a body of sturdy and well-armed Brits to the agreed venue for the hurriedly arranged contest, and followed discreetly, determined to be in at the kill.

“The place was Hastings. Harold took his Brits to a hill called Senlac, where they made themselves as comfortable as possible and had a scanty picnic lunch while the decadent Normans were unloading their gear on the beaches.

“This gave Cuthbert his chance to teach the Froggies something about British mettle. He made several fiery passes over the Norman boats, causing some consternation and various profane Gallic utterances, and collecting several Norman arrows in his soft underbelly for his pains. But the stupid Normans were not to be deterred by a solitary dragon.

“Somehow, they got their gear onto the beaches and some order into their ranks while Cuthbert continued his strafing runs and endeavoured to convert as many of the Froggies as possible into French Fried. But he was running out of steam or, more correctly, fire. His fuel tanks were almost empty and he had lost a lot of body weight by his enthusiastic flame-throwing. Also, every time he made a pass the Normans discharged volleys of arrows into his belly. He began to look like an inverted pin-cushion. If he did not wear himself out with his aerial attack, eventually the sheer weight of metal in his body would bring him down.

“The Normans marched toward Harold and his Brits on the top of Senlac. Cuthbert had to be content with picking off stragglers. Regardless of casualties, the Normans began to storm the hill, while Harold, sitting on a nice white horse — presumably to advertise his presence, a fact which the Norman archers eventually registered — directed defensive operations.

“Cuthbert drew on his last reserves of energy and made a final pass. Oddly, it really discouraged the now out-of-breath Normans who turned and began to retreat down the hill — but not before one of their archers got in a lucky shot at Harold. He collected an eyeful, shouted one or two rather nasty Anglo-Saxon words, then fell off his horse, dead.

“The Brits, instead of being righteously angry at this Norman impertinence, took to wailing and gnashing of teeth and all that rot, and became thoroughly demoralized. When William of Normandy had stopped laughing, he regrouped his forces for the final and bloody take-over bid.

“Cuthbert, weak and dazed, was ashamed of his fellow Brits. He wanted to go somewhere and have a good rest and try to erase the memory. There was only one problem. If he touched down anywhere, he would only drive the arrows deeper into his body. He was a doomed dragon.

“He hadn’t enough energy to make any more fire, but he could still breathe foully; and you have to inhale a dragon’s smoky breath to know how foul it can be. He decided to sign off in a cloud of glory. He went kamikaze, hurtling at low level along the hillside, breathing heavily and stertorously at the advancing Norman ranks. In fact he ploughed straight into them, his feeble wing-beats still managing to break a few Norman arms and heads. Then, his strength spent, he did a belly-flop and drove a score of arrows through his heart. It was a sad but glorious end in the dying sunlight of a fine October afternoon.”

Bert smiled. “The death of a patriot,” he said. “I expect Cuthbert, being a true Brit, signed off happily in the sure knowledge that he had done his duty.” He began to laugh, but the laughter turned into a fit of coughing. As the flames poured forth, Roddy saw that Bert was getting smaller before his very eyes.

“You should not have done that.”

“I know,” retorted Bert tranquilly. “But the time has come when one no longer need count the cost. Look at me, Roddy, my friend. I am beginning to look like a small emaciated lizard. You must have seen better specimens in the local zoo.”

Roddy changed the subject hastily. “It was a wonderful story about Cuthbert — even if it was not true.”

“Why should it not be true?”

“Because neither you nor any of your family were present. So you couldn’t know what Cuthbert did and how he died.”

“I was present!” said Bert. “I watched the whole affair from a discreet distance.”

“Why didn’t you join in?”

“Because I am a devout coward. It is one thing to buzz the Valeria Victrix, then leave quickly before they have recovered their wits. It is quite another thing to take on an invading Norman army in a fight to the death. Besides, I did not hate the Froggies as much as Cuthbert did. I had become used to the peculiar ways of foreign tourists by 1066.”

Roddy sighed. “I think it is time to go and have tea with the monsters.”

“Same time same place tomorrow, then?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“It’s pleasant to talk about the old days with a friend. Somehow it makes the memories more vivid. It helps me to recapture, if briefly, the days of my youth.” Bert stretched one of his wings and regarded it mournfully. “I’ll fly past your bedroom window again tonight … God willing.”

“You mustn’t overtax yourself,” said Roddy. “It’s a pity I only have two more days before I go back to school.”

“Two days will probably be adequate,” observed Bert sombrely. “While I think of it, and because of our friendship, I should like you to start the new term with my digital watch. Being Japanese, it is frighteningly reliable. Shockproof, waterproof and even dragon-proof.”

“I couldn’t possibly —” began Roddy.

Bert cut him off. “You can and you will,” he said regally, “because it will give me pleasure. It will serve to remind you of the time you made a moribund dragon happy by listening to his ramblings. Now, be off with you. Tonight the fly-past. Tomorrow, same time, same place.”

Bert was waiting for him at the top of Bignor Hill; but what a different Bert it was. The dragon was now less than a foot long.

Bert saw the look of dismay on Roddy’s face and felt moved to explain. “After I flew past your window, I went back to my nest to get a good night’s sleep; but I felt hungry again. So I took a roosting cock pheasant for my supper. He was very hard to grill, because I didn’t seem to have much fire left in my belly. And even after supper, I couldn’t settle down. I spent half the night coughing and sneezing and unfortunately, burned my nest in the process. I began to feel rather cold until the morning sun brought a bit of warmth back … Still, I’m warm enough now — what’s left of me. It is another lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

“We must get you to a doctor,” said Roddy, not thinking very clearly.

Bert managed a wry smile. “Do you know any good dragon doctors?”

Roddy was at a loss for words.

“Never mind, old sport,” said Bert consolingly. “Our friendship may be short-lived, but it has given me great pleasure. I was beginning to feel rather lonely, but you took away the loneliness and seemed to enjoy my stories of times long past. Your pleasure has brought them near and has made me feel that it was good to be a dragon.”

Roddy was close to tears because he now knew what Bert already knew; the dragon was dying.

“Cheer up,” said Bert brightly. “I have had a good long life, and now I have a friend to mourn my passing. What more could a dragon ask?”

“I wish you would not talk like that. I can’t help it if I feel sad.”

“Then I shall cheer you up,” said Bert. “I have been saving my best story till the last. I think the time is now appropriate. But you will forgive me if I make it somewhat shorter than usual. Now pull yourself together and smile. This story you will like. It is about the dragon who really did save England.”

Roddy tried to put on a brave face, but his eyes were unusually bright. “I’ll try not to make you laugh, Bert.”

“Thanks, lad. But it doesn’t matter any more. Better for me to go to that great forest in the sky with a joyful heart than one oppressed by gloom. It is a fine afternoon for such an adventure.” He permitted himself some slight mirth, and driblets of fire trickled from his mouth. “Doubtless Cuthbert will be waiting to tell me — as if I didn’t already know — about how he almost stopped the Normans, and found a hero’s death. Now, to begin my story. Does the word Armada mean anything to you, Roddy? It’s one of those odd Spanish words that sound like a dessert consisting of chilled fruit and wine.”

“Yes,” said Roddy. “The Armada was built by Philip of Spain for the invasion of England. It was a fleet of more than 130 ships and took three years in the building. It was under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia.” Then he added apologetically, “We did the Tudors last term at school.”

“Quite so,” said Bert. “But I will now reveal to you a piece of Elizabethan history that has been corrupted for the purpose of credibility. Who was in command of the English forces?”

“Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral of the Fleet. His second in command was Sir Francis Drake.” For a moment or two Roddy began to feel that he was back in school.

“Yes,” said Bert blandly. “Two great British seamen in command of a much smaller fleet of much smaller ships. The only real advantage the Brits had was that their guns had a longer range. Howard’s gunners were able to pick off a number of Spanish stragglers — which unnerved that ass Medina Sidonia more than somewhat. He panicked and made a run for Calais, where he dropped anchor, took to meditation and a few flagons of wine and muttered a few well-seasoned Spanish imprecations about the perfidious Brits. During the night, more disaster was to follow. A number of Spanish galleons caught fire; and a number of Spanish seamen thought they saw the Devil flying in the sky, breathing flame upon their decks and rigging.

“The Devil they saw was Egbert, an English dragon who had always enjoyed short sea trips. On this occasion he had ventured somewhat farther than he usually did because he wanted to watch a great sea battle. Also, he had no great enthusiasm for an England dominated by Spain. Elizabethan England was good enough for him.

“So when the Spaniards slipped into Calais, he got very cross at their lack of sportsmanship. After dark, he flew among them breathing very heavily on every galleon he could find.”

Bert coughed somewhat, and Roddy pretended not to notice. When the bout of coughing had subsided, Bert went on in a thin and tremulous voice.

“Now Lord Howard thought Drake had sent in fireships, and Drake thought Howard had sent in fireships. The Spaniards were so confused and bewildered that they began to cut their cables and slip off to Dunkirk.

“At first light, a weary Egbert was making his way home when he spotted Howard and Drake on the quarter-deck of the flagship, heartily but very carefully congratulating each other on the stratagem of the fireships.

“Wearily, Egbert swooped low and circled. ‘I was your only fireship, you Elizabethan nincompoops. The Don has had enough of my antics and is making off to Dunkirk. If you don’t get a move on, poltroons, he’ll be half way up the North Sea before you can blow him out of the water.’

“Drake fell on his knees and uttered a brief Elizabethan prayer, while Howard of Effingham called for a very large glass of rum. Later, when the Armada was decisively defeated, they put their heads together to work out the press release. They both emphatically agreed that there would be no mention of a dragon. Elizabeth of England, as always, would prefer to think that English seamen had singed the King of Spain’s beard. Drake diplomatically suggested that it would be more fitting if the Queen learned that it was Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral of the Fleet, who had sent in the fireships at Calais.

“Meanwhile, a weary Egbert was flying home. There seemed an awful lot of sea between him and the coast of England. But he finally made it to the forest where he and his wife Roberta were busy raising two baby dragons to the ways of dragonhood. He flopped close to the nest, and feebly raised a fore-paw in greeting.

“Roberta was furious. ‘And where have you been for nearly two days?’ she stormed.

“‘I was arranging a hot reception for the Spanish Armada.’

“‘I don’t care what you were doing. You always were a lazybones, Egbert. If there is any work to be done, you can always be guaranteed to be elsewhere. The trouble with you is that you have never grown up. If ever you go away again without telling me about it, you will get a hot reception when you get back.’

“As if to emphasize what she was saying, Roberta breathed heavily on poor Egbert’s tail; and everyone knows that a dragon’s tail is somewhat sensitive.

“He let out a groan, then recovered himself a little. ‘I think Howard and Drake and I have stopped the Armada,’ he said defensively.

“‘I don’t care what silly pranks you have been up to. Now go out and find some rabbits or a small deer. The little ones are hungry. And don’t come back till you bring something to eat.’”

Roddy forgot himself and began to laugh. A fatal mistake. It caused Bert to laugh also. The laughter was pitifully thin.

Bert also began to cough.

“I told you it was quite amusing,” wheezed Bert. “Now, Roddy, as you are my friend, will you stand up and look back at the sea, and tell me what colour it is?”

Roddy got to his feet and turned to look at the sea, several miles away over forest and farmland. “The sunlight has caught it, Bert. It’s all blinding and golden — like a sea of liquid fire.”

“It is a beautiful afternoon,” said Bert with difficulty. “Most fitting for my departure.”

Roddy half turned, but Bert said intensely: “No, don’t look back, my friend. Not until this wretched noise has stopped. And don’t forget the digital watch. Wear it for me.”

Roddy, half-blinded by tears, obeyed Bert’s injunction and continued to face the sea.

“Did you enjoy my little fracas with the Valeria Victrix? I understand they were never quite the same again.”

“Very much, Bert.” Roddy desperately tried to keep his voice normal.

“And the story of the gallant Adelbert succouring a maiden in distress?”

“Yes, indeed.”

More coughing, more wheezing, but still some laughter.

“And Cuthbert, the true Brit, making his last stand against the Normans?”

“It was magnificent.” Roddy’s voice was breaking and, for all he knew, his heart was breaking. But he did his best and still gazed blindly towards the sea.

“And Egbert’s assault on the Armada?”

“Su-superb.” Roddy’s shoulders were shaking convulsively.

“Then I am happy. Farewell, my friend. No, don’t look back until, as the poet says, the rest is silence.”

There was some more spluttering and coughing, then a final burst of heroic laughter.

“By heaven or whatever,” said Ethelbert the dragon in a surprisingly strong voice, “it was good to be a dragon in England!”

Another burst of heroic laughter, then silence. It was almost a minute before Roddy could force himself to turn round. He could see nothing in lowering sunlight but small patches of smoking grass, a few fading sparks, and the Japanese digital wristwatch. Evidently, besides being shockproof and waterproof, it was also heatproof.

There was no sign of Bert.

Roddy picked up the still warm watch and put it on his wrist. As he was adjusting it, a few tears fell on the face.

It is given to very few to die laughing and with pleasure in their hearts. It is a splendid and memorable way of departing this life.

Sir Thomas Urquhart, translator of Rabelais, on hearing the good news of the Stuart restoration, had died of a fit of joyous laughter. Ethelbert, last of the English dragons, had also died of a fit of joyous laughter, remembering the great days of old and the droll adventures of his kind.

The Snow Crystals

It was there before dawn, because Fiona had crept out of the house like a ghost in the grey half-light; and then she had found it.

The house was a house of loneliness, and her tiny one-roomed apartment sat on the fifth floor above all the other bed-sitters. It was not a home, not even a refuge — more like a solitary confinement cell. It was just a place in which to pass the time, to lie awake in bed and listen to the night hours ticking by, and to think of loving someone — or being loved — as if the whole idea were nothing more than an enchanting legend.

But there actually were people who were not alone, and there were people who were loved. The only trouble was that Fiona was not one of them. She was just a lonely girl in a city that neither knew nor cared. And she nursed her loneliness and cherished it because there was nothing else to do, and because today was Saturday and the empty weekend stretched before her like a life sentence.

In the darkness of the night, the hours had dawdled into centuries, while the restless unending sounds of the city became echoes from another world. She had been impatient for daybreak, impatient for sunlight, desperately impatient for colour to come back to life. So, as the first pale promise of shapes and shadows filtered through her window, she got out of bed, dressed hurriedly and crept downstairs and out into the garden to watch the sunrise.

The sunrise would be an event; and to watch such a big event was almost as good as not being alone. She was looking for nothing but the sunrise, so when she found the snow crystal it was breathtaking. She felt she had discovered the secret of the world.

It was not an ordinary snowflake, however. Apart from the fact that the night had been exceptionally warm — even for high summer — the snowflake was like nothing she had ever seen before.

It was more than six inches across and lay serenely on the grass with all the glittering intensity of a finely cut diamond. But there had never been a diamond like this. It was a thing of frozen fire, a six-sided miracle of transparent ferns and tiny petals and buds that might imminently open. It was a structure of whirls and curves and exciting spirals. It was like one of the great nebulae of the night sky. Or, perhaps, a fallen star.

At first she was afraid to touch it, afraid that such delicate beauty might shiver into nothingness beneath her fingers. But then the curiosity and excitement became too much, and she did touch it. It was not cold like snow, nor did it melt. It was warm, pleasant to touch, strangely vibrant with life. The sheer vitality of it seemed to leap through her fingers and along her arm like an electric shock.

She picked it up, and there was something like music — like violins by the sea, or organ music in a green vault — yet she knew there was only silence.

But that did not matter. For the silence was singing. And she was no longer alone.

Timothy had the pain inside him again. It was a great knot of fear and unhappiness, twisting inside him like a restless snake; ready to eat up all the things he believed in, all the things he hoped for, all the brightness in the bright world of morning. It was almost more than a six-year-old boy could bear. But, on and off, Timothy had lived with the pain quite a long time. He was still too young to be completely discouraged. He knew that if you waited long enough something was bound to happen, and the pain would go away.

He had slipped out of the house soon after breakfast. He had slipped into the garden to escape from the vortex of hatred and resentment that whirled invisibly over the breakfast table and threatened to draw him to its centre, choking him with stiff, invisible fingers.

His parents often quarrelled; and sometimes it seemed as if they had always quarrelled. This time it was about whether or not Saturday was a suitable day for taking Timothy to the seaside.

He didn’t want to go to the seaside — and he didn’t not want to go to the seaside. He only wanted things to be all right. He just wanted the warm feeling of being loved and cared for — the feeling there used to be in the days when Mummy and Daddy smiled and touched each other, and there was a look of belonging in their eyes.

But now there was only hardness — the hardness of a battle which no one could win and in which no one surrendered.

Mummy, he supposed, was beautiful; but not when her eyes glittered, when her face became red with anger, or when the softness of her lips turned into bright red lines of pressure. Daddy was tall and strong — much taller than Mummy — but when his voice gathered explosive power, when the skin whitened on his knuckles or his chin seemed to jut out a bit more, there was something wrong with his strength, as if it had become a kind of weakness.

And at times like these Timothy was forgotten, or else he became a target in the battle, alternately attacked and defended by either side. He did not like that; and presently he learned the technique of escaping. It was simple. All you had to do was pick the right moment and disappear. Then, if you were lucky, they wouldn’t even know that you had gone.

They quarrelled about so many stupid things, about going to the seaside or buying things for the house or getting the car mended or even about Mummy changing the colour of her hair. Why couldn’t they realize that every single day was like a bright new penny waiting to be spent? You could buy sensible things or silly things with it; but you should never just throw it away.

Timothy wandered round the tiny garden, watching the spiders scurry along their dew laden webs, watching a dithery butterfly hover above a small sea of flowers, and trying to forget that he could still hear their voices.

But he couldn’t forget. And the waves of sound rolled into him, tangling in a knot of fear. He wanted something to happen. He desperately wanted something to happen — anything that would take away the pain.

And something did happen.

He found a snow crystal.

He found it lying on the grass, large and blinding like a fragment of sunlight. Six-sided and wonderful, with a million patterns shimmering on its crystal surface. Surely it was the largest snowflake in the world!

But snow could not fall in midsummer; and snowflakes such as this could never fall.

After a moment or two he touched it. And the power and the light seemed to shoot right through him, untangling the knot of fear.

He picked the snowflake up, no longer aware of the sound of strident voices still drifting out through the kitchen window. For there was only silence, and the silence was like music, and the music was like a friend.

Presently, he remembered them and wanted to show them the snowflake and tell them that he had found the most beautiful thing in the world. He carried it carefully towards the house as if it were more fragile than a butterfly.

When they saw it, they, too, became silent. And the silence seemed to drift round them both. Then the hardness went from their eyes and their thoughts. Presently, their hands touched …

Mr. Zaretoski was dying. After all, he had a right to die, he told himself grimly — because he was eighty-seven, and there was no one to look after, nothing more to do, nothing more to hope for.

His wife had been dead for over a year now. After nearly fifty years of married life, during which she had never once really complained about the tremendous changes in their fortunes, Catherine had quietly gone to bed one evening folded her arms on her chest very neatly — she had always been a neat little woman — and uttered a gentle sigh.

Everything had been gentle about Catherine, thought Mr. Zaretoski, even her dying. He had never been quite sure when death had claimed her; because there was no suddenness, no drama, only the gentlest change of all.

And now he himself would shortly face the same adventure. Not today, perhaps. Not tomorrow, even. But soon. He knew it with the kind of knowing that can neither be explained nor dismissed. He knew it simply because it was so. Because there was no one to look after, nothing more to do.

Mr. Zaretoski felt that he should have no regrets. He had lived a long and colourful life. There was a season for all things.

But as he gazed out of the window of the tiny house on the outskirts of a northern industrial town where, for the last thirty-five years, he had been a tailor, he knew at least one regret. He would have like to have painted just one small masterpiece. Not necessarily something that would have moved the critics; but something that would have moved himself.

Seventy years ago, as a student of art in the St. Petersburg that was now no more than a legend, he had believed that one day the whole civilized world would recognize the signature of Alexander Zaretoski. Indeed, it might have been quite possible for the dream to have come true — if the young student in St. Petersburg had not loved something else more than he loved art.

Mr. Zaretoski was an idealist. All his life he had loved freedom — personal freedom, political freedom, intellectual freedom. Seventy years ago, when the idealism burned with an intensity that he would never again experience, Mr. Zaretoski, in a desperate attempt to combat the oppression and claustrophobia of Czarist Russia, had joined a revolutionary movement. He had joined it twenty-five years too soon. For all that it brought him was imprisonment, disillusionment and, finally, exile.

The hand that had once held a brush became coarsened with hard labour; the eyes that had once found adventure in form and colour became dimmed with the rigours of existence on a near-starvation level. When, at last, he was able to get away from Russia, Mr. Zaretoski worked his way to Paris — the wonderful, notorious Left Bank — but the fire had not only gone out of his idealism, it had gone out of his vision and art.

He filled canvas after canvas; but it was no good. He was no longer a painter; he was just a man who could paint. The only good thing he had found in Paris was Catherine, the daughter of yet another Russian exile. He could have allowed himself to starve in the hopeless pursuit of art. But not Catherine. She deserved better than that.

And so Mr. Zaretoski had learned a trade. He had learned how to make suits. And was not that a form of art?

It was at the end of the First World War that he and Catherine had come to England. They came hoping to find prosperity, hoping to raise a family to enjoy the privilege of living in what was obviously the most progressive country in Europe.

They did not find prosperity. They only found a niche in a northern industrial town. There was not even any family — only the comfort of each other.

And now that, too, had gone.

As Mr. Zaretoski looked through the window at a world bathed in early morning sunlight, he thought he might take a walk in the park. But no, that was too far away. He might not be able to make it. It would be better perhaps just to stroll on the narrow patch of ground that, because it belonged to him, was the most beautiful garden in the country.

Mr. Zaretoski found the snow crystal lying beneath his solitary rose bush. At first he thought it was a trick of the sunlight. Then he knew that it was sunlight — a crystal of pure radiance. The ultimate fusion of all art and all freedom.

Mr. Zaretoski touched it; and the silence flowed into him. It was more lofty than the music of a cathedral; it was more intimate than the touch of Catherine’s hand.

He sat down on the grass and held the snowflake with trembling fingers. It was too big to be a real snowflake, but not too small to be a miracle.

The tears rolled down his cheeks — tears of fulfilment. This, surely, was the masterpiece he had never painted. Its symmetry, its mystery, its sheer surprise of form and texture all combined into the absolute of beauty.

Mr. Zaretoski had never prayed in his adult life; for prayer had seemed an admission of weakness, a statement of defeat. But now, when at last he wanted to pray, there was no need of it. For this, surely, was the true compassion of God.

The rendezvous was beyond the imaginings of men, out in the dark silence between the stars. It was a rendezvous that took place only once or twice in a thousand earth-long years. It was a meeting of the Great Ones.

The two star-ships seemed to leap into existence in the same instant — two slender silver fish surfacing upon reality from the depths of a non-spatial river. They hung motionless for a moment, while their occupants exchanged the ancient signals of recognition, then the two craft drifted slowly towards each other.

Their occupants did not meet physically, for this was unnecessary; but images were projected from the ships to come together against the backcloth of stars.

“To my brother, greetings,” said the One.

“Greetings to my father and my son,” answered the Other.

“You have made the journey?”

“I have made the journey and delivered the gifts.”

The One smiled. “But still you are unhappy.”

“I carry only the burden of their unhappiness.” The Other sighed. “There are so many of them — always so many. And the crystals are never enough.”

“In some,” said the One, “the crystals of faith already grow. They need no help, they ask for no sign.”

“They are the happy few,” murmured the Other. “They belong to us already. They are our children … But what of the millions who are born and perish in loneliness? If they — all of them — could only know that they are not alone? They need more than the crystals. They need us. Surely, if you and I were to walk openly upon the face of the Earth and tell them of the infinite forms of life —”

“Once,” interrupted the One softly, “we did no less. And we know the consequences. The legends that arose, the fear, the hatred and the envy. The doubt and the deceit. The fanaticism and the bloodshed.”

“They were not ready then,” protested the Other. “Their minds were unprepared.”

“Why should they be ready now? Have they found peace among themselves?”

The Other shook his head sadly. “But their lives, their tiny moth-like lives are so short.”

“While we,” said the One gently, “are immortal … One day they, too, will learn the meaning of life and death. Then they will understand the tragedy of our immortality, and we shall be released from the vigil. They will no longer need our compassion. Their own will be enough.”

“Meanwhile,” sighed the Other, “we can only give them a few small crystals.”

“Until they are ready for our return,” added the maker of crystals, the One with the radiant folded wings.

“Until our return,” echoed the crystal carrier, the Other with the cloven hooves.

Suddenly their images seemed to merge for a moment and then dissolve. Suddenly the silver star-ships sank beneath the currents of time and space. And then there was nothing but the remote constellations, the far dusty patterns of a thousand million suns.

Second Chance

There was darkness and silence. No feeling or fear; only awareness of self and the sheer immensity of waiting. But suddenly a point of light came hurtling through the tunnel of eternity. It grew and grew, expanding into an irregular shape — familiar but unrecognizable — until the appearance of contours made acceptance of its identity unavoidable.

It was an Angel — too bright to look at, and too hypnotic to ignore. An Angel without any face.

The man in the coffin sat upright, knowing that the long wait was over. With the presence of the Angel, feeling returned. So did coherent thought, curiosity, fear and hope.

When the Angel spoke, his voice echoed like the whisper of a giant in a small and empty room.

“Name?” demanded the Angel.

“Edward Simon Reeves.” The man in the coffin was surprised by his own calmness.

“Ah yes, the very man … Age at time of death?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know when I died.”

The Angel laughed. “Nobody ever does … No matter. My fault. It was a careless question. When were you born?”

“Nineteen twenty-six.”

“Nineteen twenty-six what?”

“A.D., I suppose.”

“Well, well! The second millennium of the Christian era! A somewhat primitive case. Now we can calculate your age. Approximately five hundred and fifty thousand years S.C.”

The man in the coffin opened his eyes wide. “What does that mean?”

“It means, my friend, that you enjoyed a heritage of five hundred and fifty thousand years of self-consciousness since the time when Man differentiated himself from the rest of the primates.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all. You deserved it. Your remote ancestors shouldn’t have been so damned inquisitive.”

The man in the coffin stretched his arms, yawned and looked about him. There was still nothing but darkness. Darkness and the Angel.

Suddenly, there was a question to ask. It seemed to be an important question. He looked at the Angel anxiously. “How long have I been dead?”

Again the Angel laughed. And his laughter seemed to shake the darkness, causing it to ripple and billow like a thin curtain shaken by the wind.

“How long is a moment?” countered the Angel with amusement. “How long is a minute or a year? When you are dead, you are no longer interested. When you are alive, you do not know … As a matter of fact, you have been dead for an eternity.”

“For eternity? Oh, my God!” The man in the coffin was shattered by the confirmation of what he had already suspected.

The Angel, however, seemed almost bored by the effect he had created. “I merely remarked that you had been dead for an eternity,” he pointed out in a tone of mild exasperation. “Not for all eternity. We do not care very much for absolutes here. Such concepts may be more appropriately employed by beings of low intelligence.”

The patronizing manner in which he was addressed seemed to generate a little more self-respect in the man in the coffin. He did not want condescension — even from an Angel.

“As a being of low intelligence,” he said with irony, “may I ask what you mean when you use the word ‘here’?”

The faceless Angel shrugged. “Here is a locative term, signifying at this point in time and space. Unless you have a frame of reference, it is meaningless. As yet, you do not possess a useful frame of reference.”

“Exactly!” said the man angrily. “And I never shall while you continue to display your stupid pedantry. If you have nothing constructive to say, why the hell don’t you go away and leave me in peace?”

“Peace?” echoed the Angel. He roared with laughter. “How would you know what peace is? You never had any!”

“At least, I had the peace of death!”

“Rubbish! Being dead, you were neither peaceful nor otherwise. You were simply non-existent.”

“Then what am I now?”

“You are awake. I wakened you.”

“That’s a lie! I was awake before you came. I was waiting for something, and then I saw a point of light … Unfortunately, it turned out to be you.”

The Angel, though faceless and therefore expressionless, managed to convey evidence of his delight at this outburst.

“My dear second millennium Christian savage, it will doubtless impress you to know that I am capable of a certain amount of remote control. If you knew the trouble I and my colleagues have had, searching all possible universes in all conceivable stages of evolution merely to collect enough data to reproduce what was once your personality, you would explode with self-importance. Although you may be a very small handful of dust, that dust has been scattered through the galaxies along multiple planes of time.”

The man in the coffin was silent for a moment or two, then he said quietly: “In that case, will you tell me something?”

“Certainly, if you are able to formulate the question and understand the answer. But I am afraid there are very few serious questions that people of your era are intelligent enough to ask.”

“For me, this is a very serious question,” said the man drily. “It is also, I suppose, quite simple … Why was I wakened?”

This time the Angel exploded into laughter. And for a while it seemed as if the laughter would never stop. But it did — eventually.

“Dear me!” gasped the Angel. “You are an amusing fellow! I thought everyone knew the answer to that.”

“But I’m just a poor savage from the second Christian millennium.”

“Precisely! Therefore you, certainly, should have known the answer.”

The man in the coffin felt another surge of anger. How he would have liked to smash in the face of this insufferable Angel. But, of course, there was no face.

“Unfortunately, I don’t,” he said, forcing himself to remain calm. “And I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

The Angel began to glow, until his brightness reached such an intensity that the man in the coffin was compelled to shield his eyes.

“You were wakened,” explained the Angel with great amusement, “for the Last Judgment.”

The man felt a small bubble of laughter beginning to grow inside him. He knew that if he allowed it to burst, it would result in hysteria. So he fought to control it, and tried desperately to think of something to say. Something that would relieve the tension. Something banal and useless — any old remark would do.

“Oddly enough,” he managed at length, “I never did believe in the Last Judgment.” The radiance had softened a little, and his eyes no longer hurt.

“Oddly enough,” repeated the Angel, “few people ever do. Otherwise, they would be more tidy in their living — and a trifle less obtuse. Now, if you are sufficiently awake, we must be on our way.”

“Where to?” The man climbed out of his coffin, realized that he was standing on nothing at all, and was suddenly embarrassed by the discovery of his own nakedness.

“The Seat of Judgment, of course,” answered the Angel. “What would you like to wear?”

“Does it matter?”

“That is for you to answer. Perhaps you do not care what impression you make.”

The man smiled. “What would you suggest — white tie and tails?”

“I would suggest that you make up your mind.”

“Then I’ll wear what I liked to wear when I was alive,” said the man with a trace of defiance. “For sentimental reasons … An old check shirt, shabby jacket, faded corduroy trousers, and —”

“All right, I know about the rest,” interrupted the Angel. “And here they are.”

Instantaneously, the man was fully clothed. He examined the old familiar things with amazement, and his eyes filled with tears.

“How do you wish to travel to the Judgment Seat?” continued the Angel. “Some prefer to walk, and some to swim or fly. Some use rafts, galleons, chariots, air or space machines, and every other mode of conveyance used by animal life.”

“Where is the Last Judgment?”

“Elsewhere,” came the dry answer.

The clothes were increasing the man’s self-confidence. “Then I will travel by car,” he said firmly. “And let it be the first car I ever had. I’d like to see that one again. It was a real shocker. A battered nineteen thirty-two —”

The Angel made a slight gesture, and the car stood before them. “Shall I drive?” he enquired politely.

“No thank you. The pleasure is entirely mine.”

The Angel folded his wings neatly and sat in the passenger seat. The man pressed the starter button; and the battery, which evidently had one collapsed cell, just as he remembered it, produced enough power to turn the engine very feebly. It was with genuine pleasure that the man climbed out of the old car and used the starter handle. After about a dozen swings, the engine fired — and the Angel obliged by manually accelerating until he climbed back into the driver’s seat.

“Thank you,” said the man. “How the devil did you know about that?”

The Angel sighed. “I remember a lot of things,” he said wearily. “You always had to race that engine if you wanted to keep it going after a cold start.”

Presently, with the occasional cough and jolt of a back-firing, the ancient car proceeded on its way along the tunnel of eternity. And, eventually, it reached the Seat of Judgment.

The building was small and of red brick. There was something strangely familiar about the swing doors and the frosted glass windows. The man switched off the car’s engine and turned to the Angel in bewilderment.

“This isn’t the Seat of Judgment!” he exclaimed. “I remember it too well. This is my bank!”

“Quite so,” agreed the Angel imperturbably. “Shall we go inside? I have an idea that we are expected … You see,” he explained as they got out of the car, “the Last Judgment is always given at the particular place which the victim — pardon me, I mean defendant — holds most in reverence and awe. For some it is a church or a temple; for others a cave or a clearing in the forest. Again, for others it might be a schoolroom, or a sound-proof cellar; a bathroom; a boardroom or a battlefield; a hospital or an execution chamber; a university or a hilltop … With you, it is a bank.”

“How did you know?” The confidence that had been put on with the clothes was gone, and the man felt even more naked than before.

The Angel shrugged. “When my colleagues and I were collecting the data necessary to reassemble the personality you displayed when alive, we were — at the same time — collecting evidence for the Prosecution. We observed, at various sample periods of your adult existence, a somewhat fleeting reverence for cloudy notions of God, certain pieces of music or poetry, one or two women, your own intellectual ability, and the type of motor car that you could not afford to buy … But this kind of reverence was transient. More permanent and effective was the awe with which you regarded your bank and its manager. If an increase of overdraft was sanctioned, it achieved the status of a dispensation. If a cheque dishonoured, your humiliation and penitence were greater than if you had put on sackcloth and ashes.”

They passed through the swing doors and stepped upon the echoing mosaic floor that the man remembered so well. They walked past the long mahogany counter towards the Manager’s office. There were no customers in the bank, no cashiers or clerks pounding away at typewriters and calculating machines. The place appeared deserted — except that an electric light in the Manager’s office transformed the bubbled glass of his door into a thousand frozen yellow tears.

The Angel knocked upon it gently.

“Come in!”

He opened the door and, with an elaborately polite gesture, ushered the man in to the room.

The Manager’s office was not quite as it had been formerly. The man remembered it as a small square room with faded walls and two high windows. There had been a desk and a swivel chair and two other chairs. One of them was a wooden high-backed chair to be occupied by those whose accounts were overdrawn; the other was a comfortable easy chair which was used only by those who either owed the bank many thousands or else made heavy deposits. There had also been a book case containing the complete works of Dickens and many impressive treatises on finance; and a small table on which there was sherry and whiskey and a few glasses.

But now the Manager’s office seemed to have expanded to the dimensions of a cathedral. There was no ceiling — only the night sky, unbelievably clear, pricked by the points of hard glittering stars. The Manager’s desk, now several times its normal height, stood on a dais over which a massive and invisibly suspended electric light cast its cold yellow glare. The far wall of the room, against which the bookcase had stood, no longer existed. It, too, opened on to the night sky. But from the edge of the office floor, a thin ribbon of road stretched out, then spiralled gently downwards to be lost in the distance and the darkness.

There were three figures in the office. Behind the immense desk, leaning negligently back so that he could be seen only when the man with the Angel stood on tiptoe, sat the Manager. He was dressed sombrely, the only concession to elegance being a deep crimson bow tie. The easy chair — also proportionately larger — supported a fat man in a loud check suit. And on the high-backed chair sat a thin and untidy individual who wore, incongruously, a jester’s cap and bells, a loin-cloth and a pair of spiked running shoes. All three figures had one thing in common with the Angel. They had no faces.

The Angel approached the desk. “Sir, the defendant is present and awaits the Judgment.”

“About time, too!” roared the Manager. He flicked through some papers on the desk. “Well, there doesn’t seem to be much difficulty about this case.” He leaned forward suddenly towards the man. “What is your name?”

“Edward Simon Reeves.”

“Then I have to inform you, Edward Simon Reeves, that you are now on trial for your life — that is to say, for the crimes committed therein, and for all the crimes that you failed to commit only because of intellectual or emotional deterrents. What was your age?”

“I don’t know.” The man glanced quickly at the Angel. “But I have been told that it is calculated as five hundred and fifty thousand years S.C.”

“He was born in the second millennium of the Christian era, sir,” explained the Angel. Then he added significantly: “On Earth.”

The Manager sighed. “Yes, I know … Another one of those! We have had far too many recently. This place is beginning to seem like a psychiatric clinic.” He turned to the man once more. “You inherited the benefits of five hundred and fifty thousand years of self-consciousness. You should have put up a better performance. However, that is beside the point. We are met here to decide whether you shall be permanently obliterated and your handful of dust scattered through the winds of time, or whether you shall be given the Second Chance.”

“The Second Chance?” echoed the man incredulously.

“Certainly. I am surprised you did not know about it. Half the crude religions on your home planet were sold on the basis of offering one free Second Chance with every packet purchased. It was a very competitive market, and some of them even threw in forgiveness of sins and life everlasting as well. But these were merely advertising tricks. They did not have Managerial Authority behind them.”

“I see.” It was not a very intelligent remark, but the man could think of nothing better to say.

“Possibly,” snapped the Manager drily, “but with some optical distortion … Now let us proceed. Here is the Prosecution.” He indicated the man in the check suit, who rose and bowed. “And here is the Defence.” He nodded briefly and with a disapproving glance towards the individual who wore the cap and bells.

Then the Manager turned to the defendant once more, at the same time putting on a judicial wig. “This is the Court of the Last Judgment, against whose verdict you have no appeal. You are now the Prisoner of the Court. However, it is permissible for you to object — if you so desire — to the constitution of this Court. But I must warn you not to do so lightly, since an irrelevant objection may be interpreted as contempt, which may be prejudicial to your case.”

The Prisoner was filled with indignation. He was on trial for his life in a court consisting of four faceless beings who did not even trouble to conceal their hostility.

“Yes, I do object!” he shouted. “I object to the whole bloody farce! I did not ask to be born. I did not ask to die — and I neither deny nor accept responsibility for what happened between … Also, I claim that this court is prejudiced. And if indeed this is the Last Judgment, I demand to see the faces of those present!”

“Objection overruled, statement irrelevant, claim unsubstantiated, and demand sustained!” thundered the Manager, in his capacity as Judge.

Simultaneously, faces appeared on the four faceless beings. The Prisoner gazed at them awestruck. He looked at the Judge, whose thin ironic smile mocked him. He looked at the Prosecution, whose broad and complacent grin indicated perfect confidence that he would obtain the desired verdict. And looking at the Angel, he saw an ambivalent expression that might resolve at any moment into derision or sympathy. Only the Defence appeared unhappy. Despite the cap and bells, there was an expression of sadness in his eyes; and an anticipatory glimmer of defeat.

The Judge began to laugh. But it was some time before the Prisoner understood the macabre joke. Then he looked at the four faces again, carefully. Each was his own face; and each expression was one which, with terrible certainty, he knew he had used himself when he was alive.

“You are now satisfied?” enquired the Judge with sarcasm.

“No! Why are you all wearing my face?” The Prisoner did not realize that he was screaming.

“Control yourself!” bellowed the Judge. “You demanded to see the faces of those present, and you have seen them. That should be sufficient … We are you, and you are us. All for one, and one for all — except that we each have different duties to perform … And now, perhaps, you will allow us to proceed.” He cleared his throat noisily. “Edward Simon Reeves, you are hereby formally charged with the Seven Unprofitable Sins, viz: hypocrisy, indecision, apathy, fear, complacency, self-deceit and ignorance. You are then further and most seriously charged with complicity in the following: mass murder and high treason. How do you plead on the first count?”

Before the Prisoner could speak, there was a jingling of bells as the Defence leapt to his feet. “Not guilty.”

The Judge frowned. “And how do you plead on the second count?”

“Not guilty.”

“And the third count?”

“Not guilty.”

The Judge yawned. “How tiresome. Now we shall have to hear the Prosecution substantiate the charges.”

The Prosecution rose, bowed to the Judge, and surveyed his opponent with a benign smile. He paid no attention to the Prisoner at all.

“I will begin, my Lord,” he said obsequiously, “with the Seven Permissible Sins. Item one: pride. Evidence has been obtained that the Prisoner of the Court has been erroneously proud of the following during his life: his intellectual honesty, his professional achievement, his spiritual perception — to name but a few of the most absurd. Item two: covetousness. He has coveted, generally speaking, whatever has seemed unattainable at various stages — from recognition to fame, from fame to power, and from power to infallibility. Item three: lust. The Prosecution asserts that the Prisoner has lusted persistently for women, wealth and wisdom — in that significant order. Item four: anger. He has frequently displayed anger towards human beings, machines, conventions and ideas. Item five: gluttony. He has eaten more than was necessary for survival and drunk more than was necessary for comfort. Item six: envy. The Prosecution will not press this charge. The Prisoner’s egotistical qualities tended to inhibit his capacity for envy. Item seven: sloth. He has raised procrastination to the status of a philosophy. He has rarely performed an honest day’s work, and has never been prostrated by exhaustion. He has frequently tolerated conditions which he could have improved. He has endured, through indolence, low standards of behaviour in himself and in others … On this count, my Lord, the Prosecution rests — for the time being.”

The Judge smiled cynically. “An admirable exposition … Now let us hear the Defence.” He gazed with an expression of distaste at the Defence, who had risen from his chair. “And don’t rattle those damned bells, fellow! We can see that you are a Fool. On such charges, none but a Fool would undertake the office of Defence … Proceed!”

The Defence clutched nervously at his loin-cloth, attempted to straighten his cap, and made the bells jingle.

“My Lord,” he began hastily, “if the Prisoner is guilty of pride — which is not admitted — it is justifiable pride. He was born helpless and became self-reliant. He was inarticulate and acquired eloquence. Out of pure subjectivity, he developed the gift of intellectual confusion. Ultimately, he was capable of creating abstractions which even he himself did not understand. In such circumstances, pride would have been inevitable. However —”

“Excellent!” interrupted the Judge. “The Defence changes the plea to Guilty. And guilty of one, guilty of all. For pride begets anger; anger inspires lust; lust involves covetousness; covetousness creates envy; envy produces gluttony; and gluttony results in sloth. The finding of this Court is that the Prisoner is guilty of the Seven Permissible Sins. Sentence to be announced later. Let the Prosecution proceed with the second charge.”

With a woebegone expression, the Defence sat down. He attempted to smile encouragingly at the Prisoner; but two large tear-drops fell upon his loin-cloth, and he sneezed to cover his confusion.

The Prosecution rose once more and bowed to the Judge. He glanced at the Defence, shrugged, beamed apologetically at the Prisoner, and began his account of the Seven Unprofitable Sins.

“My Lord, the Prisoner’s hypocrisy is easily demonstrated. He professed kindness to animals, yet he ate meat regularly. He abhorred human suffering, yet he took part in a war. Item two —”

“Does the Defence accept this statement?” thundered the Judge, cutting off the Prosecution in mid-flow.

The Defence rose to his feet unhappily. “My Lord, the situations in which the Prisoner found himself when alive are more complex than might be supposed. There are extenuating circumstances. And while —”

“Does the Defence then refuse to accept the Prosecution’s statement?”

“Yes!” shouted the Defence. “The entire statement is a wilful distortion of the truth.”

“My Lord,” said the Prosecution, rising once more, “I beg leave to call the following witnesses: nine thousand unborn chickens — unborn because of the Prisoner’s partiality for eggs; three thousand fish; twenty pigs; twelve sheep; seven bulls; and three hundred and fifty fowl. Calculated upon quantities consumed, these represent the Prisoner’s personal spoliation of the animal kingdom.”

As he spoke, the eggs, animals and birds he had listed came swiftly out of the star-pricked darkness, up along the spiral ribbon of road, and to the threshold of the Court. The eggs rolled end over end with organized and demonic purpose. Bouncing and wriggling, they arranged themselves into a formidable and oddly restless pyramid. The pigs, after much squealing and grunting, finally got themselves settled in two neat rows, one reclining and one standing, as prim and serious as a Victorian photograph. The fowl immediately roosted in a solid phalanx. The sheep followed their leader, whose nose eventually contacted the rump of the last one, whereon they continued to go round in circles. And the seven bulls, conscious of their dignity, assumed heraldic postures.

“Behold!” said the Prosecution, flinging out his arm dramatically. “The glorious dead! The convocation of martyrs! The victims of human tyranny!”

“Very touching,” observed the Judge. “How speaks the Defence now?”

“My Lord,” said the Defence quietly, “if hunger is hypocrisy, the Defence will change its plea to Guilty.”

“Don’t quibble, fellow! It would have been possible for the Prisoner to maintain good health on a strictly vegetarian diet.”

The Defence gave a bitter smile. “Doubtless the Prosecution would then have summoned further witnesses. A million nuts, ten thousand apples, a ton of corn — in fact any organic material whose prospects of regeneration, evolution or mere prolonged existence were ruined by the Prisoner’s natural appetite and digestive processes.”

Surprisingly, the Judge appeared to give serious consideration to this point. “What answer does the Prosecution make?”

The Prosecution shrugged. “We will concede the point, my Lord. It is immaterial to the charge. The charge is hypocrisy. And as to the state of mind of a man who professed kindness to animals — well, let the dead bear witness.”

As he spoke, the eggs cracked; the fowl squawked; and the bulls united in a bellowing that raised the entire cacophony to the dimensions of thunder.

“The present witnesses may now stand down!” roared the Prosecution. And suddenly the thunder stopped. There was a sound as of wind in the distance; and where all the witnesses had assembled, there was nothing to be seen.

“To return to the Prisoner’s persistent hypocrisy, and concerning what may be regarded as a more serious aspect of his crime, I now wish to call further witnesses.”

The Judge sighed. “I trust they will not be so fantastically noisy as the last lot.”

“No, my Lord. I think I can promise that their very silence will be eloquent enough!” His voice rose powerfully. “Stand forth the Silent Ones!”

And along the ribbon of road, spiralling up from the starlit darkness, a procession came. At its head, two figures were marching. They were spaced at some distance from each other, and considerably in advance of the main body.

The first to arrive at the threshold of the Court was an airman whose tunic displayed several bullet holes. His face was immobile, frozen into an expression of pain and the paleness of death.

“Witness Number One, Series Two,” intoned the Prosecution. “Slain in anger, and with supreme hypocrisy, by the Prisoner of the Court.”

The Prisoner, who had managed to endure most of the trial with an air of stoicism, suddenly lost his composure. He tried to turn away; but the Angel by his side laid a hand gently on his shoulder, and he was unable to move. Inexorably, his eyes were drawn towards the vacant gaze of the dead airman.

“Objection!” screamed the Defence, jingling his bells in agitation. “The alleged murder was an act of war. Witness Number One was pilot of an enemy aircraft. He was strafing a ship carrying a cargo of inflammable liquid, which it was the Prisoner’s duty to protect. The Prisoner himself was put in peril of his life by the attack.”

“The Prisoner survived, the Witness did not,” observed the Judge drily. “Objection overruled. Proceed.”

The airman relapsed into a rigid pose at the threshold of the Court just as the second figure arrived. It was the figure of a blonde girl who, when she was alive, must have been very beautiful. There were deep slashes on her pallid wrists.

“Witness Number Two, Series Two,” announced the Prosecution. “The affianced bride of the first Witness. Slain by her own hand as a consequence of the Prisoner’s hypocrisy.”

“Objection!” cried the Defence. “The Prisoner of the Court cannot be held responsible for a suicide! A woman of whose existence he was unaware!”

“Objection overruled!” snapped the Judge. “It is the ultimate hypocrisy for a potential murderer to ignore the emotional commitments of his victim, or to deny responsibility for the consequences of his act.”

“My Lord,” continued the Prosecution with a satisfied smile, “the cargo of inflammable liquid carried by the ship which the Prisoner so ably defended was used to power a thousand airborne vehicles of destruction. The missiles that they dropped demolished a city. The destruction of the city and great numbers of its inhabitants weakened the spirit and the strength of a nation. Its armies were demoralized, battles were lost, countries were overrun by the victorious legions, half a continent changed hands — and the triumphant nations were free to seek and find other enemies in their own midst.”

He gestured theatrically towards the ribbon of road and the bleak background of darkness. “I call upon Group Witness Number Three, Series Two! The unnumbered dead who perished in consequence of the Prisoner’s deliberate hypocrisy!”

And, instantaneously, the road was crowded with people as far as the Prisoner could see — a billion closely packed figures toiling patiently along the wide spirals of the road to the threshold of the Court. There was no roadway left to be seen — only a moving spiral of humanity, winding up grimly from the depths.

“Objection!” The frenzied voice of the Defence was drowned in the heavy and intolerable sound of all the marching feet.

Then, as the first wave reached the threshold, the Prisoner closed his eyes and screamed.

The Judge made a sign to the Prosecution, and the Prosecution held out his hand towards the threshold. Instantly, all along the road, the drumming of the marching feet stopped. And the legion of the dead stood still.

“Objection overruled,” said the Judge calmly. But the Defence was not listening. His cap and bells, his loin-cloth and his running shoes were discarded. He lay curled up in a tight foetal ball on the floor.

“It appears that the Defence has withdrawn,” observed the Judge sardonically. “The Prisoner’s hypocrisy has been adequately demonstrated, I think. This is the first of the Seven Unprofitable Sins. And guilty of one, guilty of all. For hypocrisy engenders self-deceit; self-deceit gives rise to ignorance; ignorance creates complacency; complacency produces apathy; and apathy is penetrated only by fear; while the usual result of fear is indecision. I therefore have no alternative but to enter a verdict of Guilty as the finding of this Court. Sentence to be announced later. Let the Prosecution proceed with the final charge.”

The Prisoner had opened his eyes once more. He seemed to have recovered a little. When the Judge had finished, he tried to speak. But the Angel touched his lips, and they would not move. For a moment or two, there was a strangled sound, an inarticulate rumble, in his throat. Then he relapsed into silence.

The Prosecution smothered a yawn. “Ah yes, my Lord, the final charge is complicity in the following: mass murder and high treason. And I contend, my Lord, that in his commission of the Seven Permissible Sins and the Seven Unprofitable Sins, the Prisoner is guilty of the highest treason to which any living creature can aspire. He has violated all that he most respects, all the he holds most dear, all that he loves most deeply. Throughout his life, he has persistently done the wrong things for the right reasons. Logically, there is only one betrayal that it was possible for him to make. And he has succeeded most admirably. For he has completely betrayed himself … I therefore request a verdict of Guilty.”

The Judge peered over his desk. “It appears that the Defence is withdrawn on this charge also,” he remarked blandly, “and no longer contests the charge or the evidence. It merely remains for me to pronounce verdict and pass sentence.”

He gazed sternly at the Prisoner. “Prisoner of the Court, it is the finding of this Court that you are guilty on the third charge as on the previous two. It is my duty to offer you the privilege of vocalizing your regrets, penitence, distress or confession before sentence is passed. Speak now, or — better still — say nothing. Because you may be sure that the Court of the Last Judgment has heard every possible variation on the theme of repentance. And — off the record — I wish to add that we do not believe any of them.”

Again the Angel touched the Prisoner’s lips, and he was able to speak once more. He took a deep breath, glanced scornfully at the still prostrate Defence, bestowed an ironic smile on the Prosecution, and finally gazed at the Judge with an expression of intense anger.

“Go to the devil! I’ve had quite enough of this damned silly farce, which seems to me to be in extremely bad taste … So I shall be quite grateful if you will rapidly conclude your little travesty of justice.”

“Silence!” roared the Judge. “You have been found Guilty on all three charges — to which may now be added a further proven charge: Contempt of Court … I had hoped that, if you had displayed apparent repentance, it would have been possible to take a more lenient view of your case and impose a less severe penalty. But, defiant to the last, you are even prepared to slander this Court by invoking the concept of Justice. I would remind you, Prisoner of the Court, that we do not deal in Justice here. We deal in Retribution.”

“Cheers,” said the Prisoner, with mocking approval. “Well done. Jolly good show.”

“I had hoped,” continued the Judge, ignoring the comment, “that it would have been possible to exercise clemency, and to sentence you merely to total oblivion. But this, also, is impossible.”

“Naturally,” agreed the Prisoner. “Not in the best interests of Retribution. A lie for a lie, a truth for a truth — and who the hell cares, anyway? That is the Eternal Law.”

“The Court notes your intelligent appreciation,” said the Judge pleasantly.

“I am gratified, my Lord … But for God’s sake get on with the sentence! As I am just a poor savage from the second millennium of the Christian era, I presume you are contemplating the appropriate prospect of Fire Down Below?”

“Precisely!” The Judge beamed, then formally placed a square of black silk on his head. “Prisoner of the Court, you have been found guilty of four capital offences. It is my pleasant duty to impose the supreme penalty. Therefore, Edward Simon Reeves, I order you to be taken hence from the Court of the Last Judgment to a place and time convenient for the execution of the sentence … And there to suffer the ultimate punishment of the Second Chance!”

The Prisoner was astounded. “That is the supreme penalty?”

The Judge smiled. “Certainly. You are condemned to endure once more all the misery and happiness of living. All the triumphs and disasters; all the frustrations and fulfilments; all the hungers and satiations; all the desires and disillusionments of being alive … What is the matter? Don’t you think the punishment is severe enough?”

“Severe enough!” laughed the Prisoner hysterically. “By heaven, it’s monstrous!”

“You seem surprised,” remarked the Judge benignly. He stood up. “This session of the Court of the Last Judgment is now concluded. Let the Universe be set in motion again. Let all things be as they were and shall be. And let the Prisoner return to that continuum wherein he may most conveniently inflict his own punishment.”

Suddenly, there was nothing. No Defence, no Prosecution, no Judge, no Court. Not even the darkness of space, or the fixed brilliance of the stars.

Nothing but the strange, inexorable light of Resurrection …

I Am a Ghost

As I remember, the spring of 1557 was unusually warm — in more ways than one. For Lady Elizabeth fell in love with Sir Robert Davenant; a most inconvenient procedure, since she happened to be married to Sir Giles de Malypense.

At the time, I was Sir Giles’s valet, butler, groom and messenger; for with the hereditary genius of his family, he had climbed on the wrong political bandwagon (if I may pretend to the modern jargon) and had lost a packet. I was also Lady Elizabeth’s messenger and confidant. And what with spending most of my time galloping across the countryside with either a love token for Sir Robert or a cipher message for Sir Giles’s fellow conspirators, I quite wore my horse to a shadow and my rump to a double blister.

“Simon, my lad,” I said to myself, “thou art verily a simpleton.” (Yes, we really used to speak like that.) “If thou dost not receive a dagger for treason to thy master, thou wilt surely gain a noose for treason to thy country. Is it not more profitable to remove thyself — and, mayhap, the fair Kate — to a less hazardous situation?”

Which is merely to say that I was fed up with the whole business and was contemplating marrying Lady Elizabeth’s tire-woman. Kate was, as they used to say, a comely wench, and would have made a fine tavern-keeper’s wife … I even knew where I could purchase a quiet but prosperous tavern.

Unfortunately, I was gifted with the unenviable knack of doing the right thing at the wrong moment. For by the time I had confided my plan to the fair Kate, and obtained proof of her co-operation in a most touching manner, the Lady Elizabeth had also decided that the present situation was a trifle tedious and had further decided to do something about it.

Apart from the fact that she did not approve of Sir Giles’s political diversions, she had reason to believe that he suspected her fidelity — which is a most dangerous condition for any husband to be in, especially if his suspicions are well-founded.

To my own knowledge, my master had witnessed the dawn departure of Sir Robert from my Lady’s chamber on three separate occasions. It was therefore now merely a question of who was going to kill whom first.

My natural curiosity on this point was resolved one afternoon when Lady Elizabeth sent for me. As I entered her chamber, I assumed that she wished me to carry some trifle to Sir Robert, who was conveniently lodged with his half-brother some ten miles away. Since I well knew that Sir Robert would join us at dinner that evening, I was not eager for the anticipated ride, thinking that he might reasonably receive the scented kerchief or whatnot from my Lady’s own hand. But I need not have concerned myself at the prospect of unwelcome fatigue, since that was afoot which would terminate my ability to be fatigued for ever.

“Simon,” said Lady Elizabeth, bestowing on me the kind of look she did not usually reserve for varlets, “dost love thy master?”

“Aye, my Lady.” I thought it was a stupid question.

“Liar,” said my Lady calmly. “I have heard thee call him a brainless Norman upstart with the courage of a chicken and the loyalty of a hog.”

I trembled. These were the very words I had used when justifying my intentions to Kate.

“My Lady,” I said, kneeling, “if I have used such foul language — which I humbly and respectfully deny — surely it could only be in the heat of wine?”

“Wine loosens the truth,” remarked my Lady drily. “Sir Giles is also a boor, a traitor, and — as thou knowest — a cuckold … You may kiss my hand.”

The Lady Elizabeth was very beautiful. But as my lips touched her fingers, I dreaded to think what service this favour would commit me to. Unhappily, I soon found out.

“Perchance thou also knowest,” she continued, “that Sir Robert is a gentleman of some standing at Court? Nay, I will tell thee more. He hath been charged with unearthing such paltry plots as my ninny husband dabbles in.”

“God’s wounds, Madam!” I cried (such exclamations being fashionable). “It will be the Tower for Sir Giles.”

“Then the axe,” said my Lady significantly. “So, good Simon, thou seest that the days of de Malypense are somewhat numbered.”

“More than somewhat,” I agreed boldly, “since methinks Sir Robert is not entirely disinterested in this matter.”

I expected her to be angry at that, but Lady Elizabeth merely smiled. “Beware that thy nimble wit, caitiff,” she warned amiably, “does not make thee lose thine own head … Sir Robert knows full well about the cipher messages carried in thy pouch.”

“Then I, too, am undone!” The vision of my quiet tavern appeared to be fast receding.

“Not so. At least, not yet … Thou hast an interest in my good Kate, I think. She would make a pretty bride, Simon, but widowhood would sit ill upon her …” She gave me a dangerously gentle look.

At this, I went down on my knees again (we were great ones for melodrama in those days). “Speak, Madam,” I implored. “What must I do?”

Lady Elizabeth took a ring from her finger and gave it to me. “If Sir Robert should arraign Malypense,” she said, “it would not be seemly for the widow to wed with her husband’s accuser … But Malypense is already doomed, therefore it would be no great crime to advance his demise a trifle and thus save him the inconvenience of the Tower — which, I am told, is draughty, damp and dismal.”

“My Lady, this notion likes me not … Is it truly necessary that I be the agent of such advancement?”

“As necessary as thine own neck, Simon. For none else will have such opportunity to administer the poison contained in this ring. I shall be too busy, and Sir Robert must be beyond suspicion.”

The reasoning was sound, but not such as to excite my enthusiasm. “Forgive my stupidity,” I said, “but will it not be evident that Sir Giles has died of a poison, and will there not then be some mild enquiry into the identity of his assassin?”

“Fiddle-faddle!” quoth my Lady haughtily. “Think you that I have not planned accordingly? First, the poison is such that it will be thought he died of a humour or an ague. Second, I will let it be known that he hath long been wont to take some secret physick. Third, I know of a chirurgeon who would swear his own mother to be a witch for a crown, and who will make some learned dissertation on the corpse therefore. Fourth, we may hang Sir Giles’s apothecary on suspicion if necessary. And fifth, thou thyself art beyond reproach, good Simon, since the illusion is cherished by many that thou art an honest knave.”

“Item the sixth,” I said, sounding more light-hearted than I felt. “The reward of success, Madam?”

“Thy tavern,” answered Lady Elizabeth, “my tire-woman, a purse of crowns and the patronage of Sir Robert and his lady …” She hesitated. “Simon, this I have told none. But Sir Giles hath been a cruel husband. He hath beaten me sorely, abused my dowry, and dallied with a low-born doxy even before mine eyes. Lord a’ mercy, he hath even tried to ruffle it with thy Kate.”

“Say no more, Madam,” I said firmly. “I love him not. Mine own backside hath a depression well fitted to his boot. His fate is sealed.”

So it was that I agreed to do the dirty work.

That evening at Malypense Manor, the atmosphere was unusually strained — especially so since Sir Giles had sent for me some time before the fatal meal, and had charged me with a delicate mission. He was a dark, saturnine man with a scar that twisted one side of his face into a perpetual smile while the other side wore a perpetual frown.

“Simon,” he began. “Thou art a treacherous hound. Moreover, I have a mind to chastise thee fearfully for the very intention. What sayest thou?”

For a horrible moment, I thought all was discovered. But happily, before I could confess and throw myself on his mercy, Sir Giles continued, “Thou hast spoken to the scullion of thine ambition towards a tavern — aye, and the hand of that slut of a tire-woman — to say nothing of quitting my service without a by-your-leave.”

“Sir,” I stammered, “it was but idle talk with no great substance!”

“Idle talk, forsooth! Thou art idle in many respects, I think. But I have work for thee — which, successfully accomplished, may yet further thine own poor dreams.”

“Sir?” My ears were positively flapping.

“Thou knowest I am a cuckold?” he said abruptly.

“Sir!” I trembled in my shoes.

“Thou croaking nitwit!” he roared. “Half England knows it.”

“I was aware, sir, of some small gossip,” I said carefully, “but I wot not the truth of such tittle-tattle.”

“Well, thou knowest this, friend Simon, that a Malypense ne’er took insult lightly … In short, the Lady Elizabeth dies — and by thy hand.”

Really, it was most tiresome. I went down on my knees yet again. “Sir Giles,” I implored, “use me not as the instrument of vengeance.”

“Get up, man!” he snapped. “Else I will use thy hide somewhat painfully. And prate me no nonsense, for I know thou hast the gut of a toad. Therefore do my bidding. Thy reward shall be the tavern, the tire-woman and, perchance, a purse of gold.”

I sighed. “What, then, is thy bidding, Sir Giles?”

He gave me a small box of curiously fashioned wood. “Here is wherewith to sweeten my Lady’s wine. Look to it well, Simon, for I brook no failure … By the saints, Sir Robert Davenant will behold a pretty sight ere this day dies.” He chuckled ghoulishly, and the skin tingled at the nape of my neck.

It wanted but a short time until Sir Robert’s arrival, and I took myself to my own chamber to meditate upon this thorny problem. Fortunately, I arrived at a reasonable solution. The Lady Elizabeth was a kind and gentle woman, driven only to this desperate strait by hatred of her husband’s coarseness and an uncontrollable tenderness for Sir Robert. Added to which, she was beautiful — and that was the most powerful argument of all. I resolved therefore to tip both poisons into Sir Giles’s cup; for if he survived the one, the other would surely do its work.

Presently, when the candles were lighted, and a log fire was roaring right merrily in the great hall, Sir Giles and Lady Elizabeth took their guest in to dine.

It was a strangely quiet meal, the only person who made any attempt at conversation being Sir Robert. Presumably, he had little on his mind — which, if I may say so, seemed to be a fairly permanent condition.

I did not, of course, present the poisoned goblet immediately. For one thing, my every movement seemed to be attended by Sir Giles and his Lady. Every time I touched a cup, it was as if their eyes were boring through my hands. Sir Robert was the only one who drank freely; the others seemed to have no stomach for good wine at all.

Presently, I thought my opportunity had come, and discreetly tipped the contents of the ring and the box into a plain silver goblet which I might easily recognize by a dent on its rim. The wine bubbled noisily for a moment, and it sounded to me like a river in spate. But none appeared to notice.

“Wretch!” roared Sir Giles suddenly, glaring at me and pointing to Sir Robert’s empty cup. “Should the guest of a Malypense lack wine?”

Hastily, I placed the poisoned goblet and two of its harmless brothers on a tray. First, I offered the tray to Lady Elizabeth. She took a goblet and gave me a questioning glance. I replied with a slight nod and the ghost of a smile. Then I presented the tray to Sir Robert who, being tipsy, ignored the goblet I offered and stretched his hand towards the fatal one. With great presence of mind and a certain manual dexterity, I spun the tray round.

“Villain,” snapped Sir Robert, “thou playest tricks I like not.” And with true perversity, he again reached for the fatal cup.

I repeated my trick, whereupon Sir Robert lost his temper: “An thou stay not still, jackanapes, I’ll pin thee to the wainscot!” Again he reached for the deadly wine. I marvelled that he seemed so determined to die, and I twisted the tray once more.

“Simon,” said Sir Giles curiously, “play not the buffoon. In this house, the guest is always right.”

I looked at my master in astonishment. Perhaps he had tumbled to the double-cross. And in that moment, the obstinate Sir Robert snatched a goblet. I tell you, I was afraid to lower my eyes to the tray. As one in a daze, I presented the remaining drink to my master. And I silently prayed.

“Give you a toast!” shouted Sir Giles gaily. “Long life, good fortune and sound sleep to all here.”

“Amen,” laughed Sir Robert. Lady Elizabeth said nothing. But she drank with the men just the same.

Then she and Sir Giles stared at each other — waiting, I fear, for the symptoms to show. I must say they both seemed highly surprised when Sir Robert suddenly murmured: “By heaven, I’m dead!” Then he leaped three feet in the air and dropped flat on his back to prove it.

Lady Elizabeth took one look at the corpse, snatched a dagger from I know not where and advanced upon me. “Traitor!” she hissed.

“Nay, my love, good Simon is naught but a bungler.” Sir Giles burst out laughing.

She turned to her husband with a look of hate and fury, and for a moment I thought she would find a more reasonable use for the dagger. But suddenly her gaze dropped to Sir Robert’s pallid face. With a stifled sob, she turned the dagger and thrust it into her own heart. Then she sank gracefully down by her dead lover.

“Saints protect us!” I cried. It was a most touching spectacle and I was of a mind to shed a tear.

But Sir Giles frustrated me. He had stopped laughing, and the implications of this tragedy were working through his mind.

“Simon,” he said, “thou wilt need the protection of more saints than there are in the calendar. Thou hast committed high treason. Sir Robert was sent to spy on me, as you know. It will be said that Malypense worked this deed, unless …”

“Unless what, Sir Giles?” I was shivering with fright.

“Unless Malypense first exposes the traitor himself … Fie on thee for plotting against the realm, good Simon. Fie on thy sinister murder of a loyal gentleman. Double fie on thee for dispatching my true Lady when she apprehended thy wicked designs … As an honest knight, I fear that I must surrender thee to justice. Thou knowest what form it will take?”

“Mercy, dear master,” I babbled. “Good Sir Giles, it was thine own instruction that —”

“The word of a caitiff against the word of a gentleman — and the verdict happily to rest with gentlemen … And if thou denyest, they will put thee to the question, friend Simon. And then thou wilt confess.” Sir Giles roared with laughter once more, and then he kindly poured me some wine. I needed it.

Unfortunately, Sir Giles was dead right. I had no stomach for torture. None at all. They had only to show me the instruments in a cellar that smelt of the Devil and was deep enough to have been his very lair, and I was a lost man.

As soon as I was informed of the crimes political, criminal, venal and heretical (and there were many) to which my confession was required, I promptly pleaded guilty to the lot. And a few more for good measure. The only problem left to be settled at my trial was whether I merited the stake or the rope. Beheading, of course, was reserved for those of gentle birth. So much for class distinction.

Eventually, after much debate among the learned gentlemen, I was deemed suitable for hanging; and one fine summer’s afternoon, when larks were on the wing and the London sewage stank right pungently, I was led to Tyburn; and there suspended clumsily with as much grace as I could muster in front of a goodly crowd.

It was an uncomfortable process, and over none too soon; but I was gratified to learn later that my corpse had indeed risen to the giddy heights of decapitation — which service was performed by a drunken butcher’s ’prentice with I know not what instrument or purpose.

The logical procedure upon discovering — somewhat to my surprise — that I was an earthbound spirit was to return to Malypense Manor and there haunt the author of my misfortune. This I duly did — much to his amusement. I haunted Sir Giles for a further twenty-three years, until he fell downstairs one night in a fit of laughter as he gazed at my woebegone face and remembered how neatly he had trapped me. Happily, he broke his neck.

The following decades were exceedingly boring. As Sir Giles had died without issue, Malypense Manor passed to his younger brother, an intensely studious young man who spent most of his time writing blank verse and giving his poor wife a quantity of quite ghastly sons.

Naturally, I continued to haunt the place as a matter of principle; but had it been possible, those brats would have been the death of me. They seemed to know instinctively when I was about to materialize, and would lay fiendish traps. It got so bad that I was afraid to use a door normally for fear a pail of water or a disembowelled frog would come hurtling at me; and I was reduced to escaping through the nearest wall whenever I heard their voices. Appropriately, all but one of them died a violent death either on the battlefield or in the Tower, being true to the Malypense tradition.

Life, or rather death, became so monotonous, in fact, that I took to sleeping it off a century or so at a time. And indeed, at the end of these bouts of hibernation, I would only waken up and prowl about for a few days out of idle curiosity. I liked to have the small satisfaction of discovering how many Malypenses had died violently during my prolonged slumbers.

So it was that the legend of the Malypense Ghost was born. It began to be said that I appeared only once every hundred years, and that I was condemned to haunt the Manor until I found some means of atoning for my error in the matter of Lady Elizabeth and Sir Robert.

I was naturally a trifle indignant about that because I do not consider the tragedy to have been my fault at all. However, the legend began to grow that I would only find peace if I could unite two unhappy lovers, and thus rectify the previous transgression.

I must admit that this notion found favour with my sense of the dramatic. Besides, I did not want to haunt Malypense Manor indefinitely. Perhaps some little act of inhuman charity might satisfy The Powers That Be, and thus enable my restless spirit to achieve oblivion.

Working on this theory, I made my first appearance as a disembodied Cupid in the early eighteenth century. The Manor had passed from the Malypense line by that time, and was occupied by a family with Puritan traditions. The daughter, Miss Prudence, was a pretty little thing who had formed an attachment for some roisterer of whom her father strongly disapproved. As was the custom, he therefore locked her in her room until by resolution and fasting she should overcome the weakness of her womanly heart.

I made myself known to her, and got into the habit of stealing tit-bits from the kitchen and slipping them through the Judas-hole in her door. Later, when she became less afraid, I used to materialise in her room, and we would spend half the night discussing how to end this sorry state of affairs.

Finally, it was agreed that I should procure a rope and at the same time cause a message to be delivered to her loved one. On a suitably dark night, we would then lower the rope from her window, and Roger — or was it Rupert? — would climb up and carry her away to freedom and happiness.

Having efficiently mastered the art of teleportation, I was able to deliver the note without being observed, and also to procure a stout rope of adequate length.

At the appointed hour on the appointed night, Roger — or maybe it was Rupert after all — duly turned up with a couple of horses and gave the agreed signal. Miss Prudence then lowered the rope. Unhappily, she had neglected to inform her lover that the whole thing had been arranged by a ghost. And it never occurred to me that this was the time to dematerialize; besides, I naturally wanted to see the matter through to a satisfactory conclusion.

However, after a somewhat exhausting climb, Roger finally reached the window. But when he saw me standing behind Miss Prudence, who was waiting to help him in, he was so overcome with surprise that he promptly let go of the rope and fell forty feet into a moat that had recently been drained. His death was instantaneous as, after investigation, I assured Miss Prudence; but that did not prevent her having the hysterics to such a degree that her father presently tired of all her prattle about ghosts and lovers. In the end, he had her confined to bedlam.

This, as you may imagine, discouraged me considerably; and it was not until dear Queen Victoria had occupied the throne for several years that I regained sufficient self-confidence to assist further in the promotion of romantic harmony.

At that time, the owner of Malypense Manor was Major Arthur Arbuthnot (late of the Indian Army, naturally). He had a dragon of a wife and a delicate son of about twenty-one, called Aubrey. Once every spring, they were visited by a timid shrimp of a girl who was the dragon’s niece, and whose name was Amelia.

Actually, I wasn’t interested in Amelia at all. She seemed to me as a most unprepossessing wench who did nothing during her visits but pick flowers, stitch samplers and read Jane Austen secretly. Aubrey was the target of my sympathy. Caught between the idiotic come-be-a-man-sir attitude of his father and the man-eating characteristics of his mother, the poor lad was practically a nervous wreck — until I took him in hand.

I materialized one day and, when his teeth had stopped chattering, introduced myself and eventually won his confidence with a few rather tall Elizabethan stories. He was, I later discovered, an admirer of the naughty Lord Byron; and was convinced that if only he, too, had a deformed foot he would be a hell of a fellow.

It was inevitable, of course, that he and Amelia should fall in love. A make-believe Byron and a pint-size Jane Austen. Doomed from the start. But I did what I could. Unfortunately, it was far too much.

The trouble was that Aubrey and Amelia had never learned the gentle art of being alone together. The dragon was always hovering in the background; or the Major, harrumphing like an asthmatic cavalry mule.

So I suggested to Aubrey that he and Amelia should pretend to go to bed early one night, then quietly slip out of their rooms and take a stroll in the orchard. It seemed only reasonable to suppose that, freed from the dragon’s surveillance for a while, they would find that moonlight and hormones would triumph over Victorian inhibitions. I mean, of course, that Aubrey would have the guts to propose, and Amelia would not swoon until the right moment.

The rendezvous was arranged — after I had spent a couple of hours coaching Aubrey in preliminary tactics — but Amelia failed to turn up. I suggested to Aubrey that he should go discreetly up to her room to find out what had happened. But the dear boy was dithering so much that he would have sounded like the Brigade of Guards.

Finally, in desperation, I said I’d go myself — unhappily forgetting that, so far, Amelia did not even suspect my existence. As luck would have it, I materialized just as she was about to blow out her lamp prior to keeping the assignation. She was so shaken that she dropped the lamp and fled shrieking.

The house, being crammed to bursting point with elaborate Victorian furnishings, was an admirable firetrap; and the whole second storey was blazing away merrily in no time at all.

The result was that, except for the West wing, Malypense Manor was gutted. The dragon escaped in her night attire — a most amusing sight — but the Major, who rashly returned to the library for an armful of hunting trophies, was hit by a falling chandelier and rated a most moving obituary in The Times …

I learned from Aubrey before the dragon exported him to the Colonies that Amelia considered the whole thing to be divine punishment for her unladylike intentions. She therefore entered a convent and never read Jane Austen again. Henceforth, she was, I believe, a model of virtue until her death at the ripe age of ninety-one.

After the fire, Malypense Manor was deserted — except by me. Somehow, I could not bring myself to leave the old haunts. There were four relatively inhabitable rooms left in the west wing; and these I ingeniously converted into a self-contained flat.

By this time, I had come to take a pessimistic view of my relationship with living human beings. I had tried to be helpful, but it seemed that there was some sort of curse upon my good intentions. Besides, according to local legend, it was I who had burned the Manor down in a fit of bad temper. This flagrant injustice was the last straw. I resolved to have nothing more to do with humanity — in fact, to become a hermit ghost and enjoy the consolations of solitude.

But when I had endured ten or eleven decades of solitary existence — interrupted only by an annual plague of small boys with catapults, camp-fires and blood-curdling games — I began to doubt that solitude had any consolations at all. Perhaps if I had found another ghost to keep me company, all would have been well. But I sadly feared that I was in danger of losing my reason.

Having given some thought to the problem of how I could establish contact with people who would be sufficiently broadminded not to be discouraged by my ghostliness, I had a brain-wave. The only people who would take me on face value, so to speak, would be those with a particular interest in the social problems of ghosts.

I had once heard — one Saturday afternoon in the early nineteen-fifties — a country parson (who was showing the ruins to a friend with a mild taste for history) remark that the Manor might interest the Society for Psychical Research. Being at that time unfamiliar with modern jargon, I had no idea what he was talking about. But the remark stuck in my mind, and I paid a nocturnal visit to the nearest public library to satisfy my curiosity.

I discovered that the S.P.R. was, to put it bluntly, a tribe of ghost-hunters. Here, I thought, was my opportunity to meet some cultured and enlightened people who would not throw fits when I materialized. I promptly took quill and parchment from my private store in the rafters of the west wing and wrote to the Society’s secretary. I explained the whole situation in best Tudor English, trusting that the style at least would arouse his curiosity. I enclosed the letter in a plain modern envelope and inscribed it ‘Postage to be paid on Delivery’.

There would be no reply, of course, since no postman in his right mind would deliver a letter addressed to Simon the Spectre, Malypense Manor. The weeks passed by, and I thought my invitation to a friendly ghost hunt had merely been dismissed as a joke.

However, one late September afternoon in 1959, a small car fought its way up the week-choked, pot-holed drive and pulled up by the ruins.

Three people got out, a woman and two men. Eaves-dropping invisibly on their conversation, I was delighted to learn that they were an investigating team from the S.P.R. There was something oddly familiar about those three; and the moment I began to listen in, I discovered what it was. At first, I could hardly believe it, but one must be prepared for anything to happen in this crazy world.

The woman turned to one of the men. “I don’t seem to be able to find the camera, Giles. Are you sure you brought it?”

“Of course I brought it,” he answered testily. “I stowed it with the tape recorder and all the other gear.” Then he rudely ignored her and spoke to his companion: “You know, Bob, this business about the name is too much of a coincidence … I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the Manor didn’t belong to some branch of the family once upon a time.”

Bob laughed. “Including the ghost … This is a glorious leg-pull, Giles. But we might as well enjoy ourselves … Here, let me carry that box, Betty. It’s too heavy.”

Giles snorted. “The analyst said that parchment was genuine, anyway … Look, you don’t need to treat my wife as an invalid, old boy — even if she enjoys playing the frail female.”

Betty gave her husband a stony glare. “So much for the age of chivalry,” she said.

Eventually, they carried their ghost-hunting apparatus and a picnic hamper into my drawing room. As the day died slowly into twilight, Giles busied himself placing thermometers and microphones at strategic points, while Bob and Betty set out flasks of coffee and sandwiches.

Now I had not previously taken the idea of reincarnation seriously. It had seemed to me just a shade improbable. But no sooner did I set eyes on those three than I knew that Providence had offered me a second chance. Especially when I heard what Bob and Betty were saying to each other while Giles was playing the efficient ghost-hunter.

As Bob was handing out the supper things, he said suddenly: “I wish to heaven you weren’t married to him, Betty.”

She gave him a wistful smile. “Two minds with but a single thought,” she said softly. “I suppose we all have to make mistakes.”

“You know I love you, of course?”

Betty nodded. “Probably before you did, darling … So, I think, does Giles. You’re not very good at concealing your feelings.”

“You are the only reason I came on this damn spook hunt,” he said. “Personally, I think ghosts are for children only.” Then he proceeded to kiss her with intense concentration and a justifiable enthusiasm — until they heard Giles’s footsteps.

“We must pull ourselves together,” whispered Betty. “Here comes the child.” And she poured out three cups of coffee as calmly as if they had just concluded a profitable discussion on the nature of ectoplasm.

“The idea was that you were going to help me, Bob,” said Giles irritably.

“O.K., skipper. What’s the drill?”

“You needn’t bother. I’ve just finished rigging the upstairs rooms. If either of you go up, by the way, watch out for that hole at the top. It’s dangerous.”

“Supper is ready now,” said his wife.

I was still keeping myself invisible, of course. As a matter of fact, I was utterly shaken by their physical resemblance to their remote ancestors. Take away those ridiculous modern clothes and put them in period costume, and you would swear — or at least, I would — that they really were Sir Giles, Sir Robert and Lady Elizabeth.

During the meal, a strained silence descended. Perhaps it was just my ghostly imagination; but from the far-away looks on their faces, I couldn’t help thinking that their preoccupation might be accounted for by vestigial memories. But presently Giles pulled himself together and announced his plan of campaign. “We ought to keep a steady watch — until after midnight, anyway,” he said. “And maybe stroll round the whole place once every half hour.”

“I don’t think I’d like to be left alone,” Betty said, shivering a little.

“You won’t be,” retorted Giles. “Bob will take care of that.”

“With your permission,” said Bob drily.

Giles gave a cynical laugh. “Not that it matters,” he said.

By this time, it was really dark; and the atmosphere was cosily working up to a nice state of tension. I felt I should be able to give an impressive performance. They had a small oil lamp with them; but when either of the men went on a tour of inspection an electric torch was used.

Throughout the evening, I restrained myself admirably; but a few minutes before midnight, I decided that the psychological moment had arrived. Giles had just started one of his little tours. I had previously done a few moans into one of the upstairs microphones, and this appeared to impress him. Complete with torch, camera and flash bulbs, he had set out to investigate. No sooner did I hear his heavy feet on the stairs than I went invisibly down to the drawing-room and puffed out the lamp — for artistic reasons. Betty gave a kind of half-hearted squeal; but Bob seemed to provide satisfactory reassurance.

Then I rushed upstairs again and arrived at the same time as Giles. I materialized about six inches from his nose, which — I am happy to say — gave him the shock of his life.

“I have waited a long time, Sir Giles,” I said, softly. “Four hundred years. Vengeance is excellently sweet — as you yourself well know.”

He made a noise that sounded like a goose in great pain. “Who — who … Who are you?”

“Simon, thy varlet,” I answered, slipping into the old way of speaking. “And thou, Sir Giles, are answerable for my death — which, I may say, was not exceeding pleasant.”

Suddenly and illogically, he rallied. “Come off it, man! This is a pretty good hoax — but I’m damned if you’re a ghost!”

“Then,” said I, removing my head and placing it under my arm so that he could see the lips still moving, “be damned by all means!”

He gave a great cry and stepped back — into the gap in the stairs, of course, for I had staged the thing perfectly. There was a most gratifying thud to indicate that he had come to rest in the wine cellar — which, bearing in mind his previous habits, was not inappropriate. Upon inspection, I discovered that he had landed upon his head in a butt that had once contained some quite excellent Malmsey.

Now, I thought, was the time to break the news to Sir Robert and Lady Elizabeth. (You must excuse me if I slip absently into the use of their previous titles.) They, on hearing the commotion, had lighted the oil lamp again but sensibly not troubled to investigate.

I materialized as gently as possible, but it was some time before the Lady Elizabeth’s understandable hysteria simmered down. Then I told them the whole story right from the beginning — just to refresh their memories. I must say they were a most attentive audience. But the flask of brandy which Sir Robert had thoughtfully brought was soon emptied.

To conclude, they did not quite believe me at the time. Nevertheless, they appeared grateful for services rendered — even if a few centuries late.

Eventually, they were married — as soon as it was decently possible, in fact. After the honeymoon, they came back to Malypense to see me. And it was then that Sir Robert made the very decent offer of accommodating me in their London flat.

He is not a knight in this life, by the way — only a barrister. I was a little disappointed at first, until it occurred to me that with a slight judicious clearing of the way on my part he might rapidly rise to the Bench. You see, I am at heart a snob, and much prefer serving the upper classes.

We get along very comfortably together — Sir Robert, Lady Elizabeth and I — in the London flat. I am the soul of discretion and always cough before materializing. In addition to my services as butler, there appears to be the further possibility of baby-watching — presently. That will enable me to view the television in peace; for I am afraid I have become somewhat of an addict. The only difference of opinion I ever have with my master and mistress concerns our taste in programmes. Personally, I prefer comedy revues; but I am outnumbered by a joint taste for drama.

However, I rarely materialize in company nowadays. Though occasionally, for one of Sir Robert’s special friends — such as yourself — I am always willing to narrate this brief history. I also have, I think, a unique collection of Elizabethan shaggy ghost stories. But some other time, perhaps …

Meanwhile, I thank you for your very kind attention. After a century or two, one tends to be a trifle garrulous. Therefore, I trust I have not bored you overmuch.

And so, give you good night!

If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …

For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …

Visit the SF Gateway www.sfgateway.com

Also By Edmund Cooper

Collections

Jupiter Laughs

Voices in the Dark

A World of Difference

Novels

All Fool’s Day (1966)

The Cloud Walker (1973)

A Far Sunset (1967)

Five to Twelve (1968)

Kronk (1970) (aka Son of Kronk)

The Last Continent (1970)

Merry Christmas Ms Minerva (1978)

The Overman Culture (1971)

Prisoner of Fire (1974)

Seahorse in the Sky (1969)

Seed of Light (1959)

The Slaves of Heaven (1975)

The Tenth Planet (1973)

Transit (1964)

Uncertain Midnight (1958) (aka Deadly Image)

Who Needs Men? (1972)

Ferry Rocket (1954) (Writing as George Kinley)

The Expendables (Writing as Richard Avery)

1. The Expendables: The Deathworms of Kratos (1975)

2. The Expendables: The Rings of Tantalus (1975)

3. The Expendables: The Wargames of Zelos (1975)

4. The Expendables: The Venom of Argus (1976)

Dedication

In Memoriam

Joyce Cooper 1922-1979

Joyce, my first wife, gave me much and shared my early struggles.

Edmund Cooper (1926 – 1982)

Edmund Cooper was born in Cheshire in 1926. He served in the Merchant navy towards the end of the Second World War and trained as a teacher after its end. He began to publish SF stories in 1951 and produced a considerable amount of short fiction throughout the ‘50s, moving on, by the end of that decade, to the novels for which he is chiefly remembered. His works displayed perhaps a bleaker view of the future than many of his contemporaries’, frequently utilising post-apocalyptic settings. In addition to writing novels, Edmund Cooper reviewed science fiction for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1982.

Copyright

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © The Edmund Cooper Literary Trust. Contact e-mail dfpcantab@yahoo.co.uk 1980

All rights reserved.

The right of Edmund Cooper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2012 by

Gollancz The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11664 1

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Content

A World of Difference
Edmund Cooper

Enter the SF Gateway …

Introduction

The Firebird

1 A Green Cathedral

2 The Thousandth Miracle

3 The Golden Meteor

4 The Eye of Darkness

5 A Pin-point of Light

6 The Meaning of Heresy

7 Brighter Than The Sun

8 A Sense of Belonging

9 The Girl With Green Hair

10 The Four Horsemen

11 Sunlight Upon Silver

12 A Fountain Of Sparks

13 A Time Of Death And Resurrection

14 Stronger Than Love

15 Axe, Sword, Mace, Lance

16 Yet Still He Ran

17 A Ripple of Eternity

Jahweh

The Diminishing Dragon

The Snow Crystals

Second Chance

I Am a Ghost

Also By Edmund Cooper

Dedication

Edmund Cooper (1926 – 1982)

Copyright