The Homeward Bounders
Diana Wynne Jones
You are now a discard. We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner.When Jamie unwittingly discovers the scary, dark-cloaked Them playing games with human’s lives, he is cast out to the boundaries of the worlds. Only then does he discover that there are a vast number of parallel worlds, all linked by the bounds, and these sinister creatures are using them all as a massive gamesboard.Clinging to Their promise that if he can get Home he is free, he becomes the unwilling Random Factor in an endless game of chance.Irresistible Diana Wynne Jones fantasy adventure, featuring an insect-loving shapeshifter, an apprentice demon hunter and a whole host of exotic characters clinging to the hope that one day they will return Home.
THE
HOMEWARD
BOUNDERS
Diana Wynne Jones
ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID WYATT
Copyright (#ulink_15d7d8f4-4da9-5dfb-8f63-0634c7676014)
First published by Macmillan Children’s Books Ltd 1981
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2010
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
THE HOMEWARD BOUNDERS. Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1981. Illustrations by David Wyatt 2000.
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Source ISBN 9780006755258
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN 9780007499991
Version: 2014–09–08
Dedication (#ulink_4558c001-5684-5751-8cb0-5890e5bf8cb5)
To Thomas Tuckett,with thanks for advice about War Gaming
Contents
Cover (#u3466cbb7-9e5a-5b20-b551-46c8f8f31df3)
Title Page (#u6d007d3a-222b-5fc1-b8b1-b622decf05ee)
Copyright (#ulink_4ade579b-f962-5818-9981-4e28e8895e25)
Dedication (#ulink_63c2f41a-df5e-5a53-a02e-4fab8e1ab635)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_7f330b65-604d-55eb-890b-b475232eca7c)
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman? No? Nor of the Wandering Jew? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you about them in the right place; and about Helen and Joris, Adam and Konstam, and Vanessa, the sister Adam wanted to sell as a slave. They were all Homeward Bounders like me. And I’ll tell about Them too, who made us that way.
All in good time. I’ll tell about this machine I’m talking into first. It’s one of Theirs. They have everything. It has a high piece in front that comes to a neat square with a net over it. You talk into that. As soon as you talk, a little black piece at the back starts hopping and jabbering up and down like an excited idiot, and paper starts rolling over a roller from somewhere underneath. The hopping bit jabbers along the paper, printing out exactly the words you say as fast as you can say them. And it puts in commas and full stops and things of its own accord. It doesn’t seem to worry it what you say. I called it some rude words when I was trying it out, just to see, and it wrote them all down, with exclamation marks after them.
When it’s written about a foot of talk, it cuts that off and shoots it out into a tray in front, so that you can read it over, or take it away if you want. And it does this without ever stopping jabbering. If you stop talking, it goes on hopping up and down for a while, in an expectant sort of way, waiting for you to go on. If you don’t go on, it slows down and stops, looking sad and disappointed. It put me off at first, doing that. I had to practise with it. I don’t like it to stop. The silence creeps in then. I’m the only one in the Place now. Everyone has gone, even him – the one whose name I don’t know.
My name is Jamie Hamilton and I was a perfectly ordinary boy once. I am still, in a way. I look about thirteen. But you wouldn’t believe how old I am. I was twelve when this happened to me. A year is an awful long time to a Homeward Bounder.
I really enjoyed my twelve years of ordinary life. Home to me is a big city, and always will be. We lived in a really big, dirty, slummy city. The back of our house looked out on to a lovely cosy courtyard, where everyone came out and talked in fine weather, and everyone knew everyone else. The front of our house was our grocery shop, and all the neighbours shopped there. We were open every day, including Sunday. My mother was a bit of a sharp woman. She was always having rows in the courtyard, usually about credit. She used to say the neighbours expected to buy things for nothing just because they lived in the court, and she told them so to their faces. But no one could have been kinder than my mother when a neighbour’s daughter was run over by a brewer’s waggon. I often hope they were as kind to her over me.
My father was big and soft-spoken and kind all the time. He used to let people buy things for nothing. When my mother objected, he used to say, “Now, Margaret, they needed it.” And usually that stopped the argument.
The arguments my father couldn’t seem to stop were always over me. The main one was because I was in my last year at school. School cost money. My school cost rather more than my father could afford, because it had pretensions to grandeur. It was called Churt House, and it was in a dreary building like a chapel, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. We had all sorts of pretend-posh customs – like calling our teachers Dominies and a School Song – and that was why my mother liked it.
My mother desperately wanted me to grow up to be something better than a grocer. She was convinced I was clever, and she wanted a doctor in the family. She saw me as a famous surgeon, consulted by Royalty, so she naturally wanted me to stay on at school. My father was dead against it. He said he hadn’t the money. He wanted me at home, to help in the shop. They argued about it all the last year I was at school.
Me – I don’t know which side I was on. School bored me stiff. All that sitting and learning lists: lists of spelling, lists of tables, lists of History dates, lists of Geography places. I’d rather do anything else, even now, than learn a list. About the only part of school I enjoyed was the feud we had with the really posh school up the road. It was called Queen Elizabeth Academy, and the boys there wore shiny hats and learnt music and things. They despised us – rightly – for pretending to be better than we were, and we despised them just as much for the silly hats and the music. We used to have some really good fights on the way home. But the rest of school bored me solid.
On the other hand, the shop bored me almost as much. I’d always rather leave the shop to my brother Rob. He was younger than me. He thought it was the greatest treat on earth to count change and put up sugar in blue paper bags. My little sister Elsie liked the shop too, only she’d always rather play football with me.
Football was the thing I really loved. We used to play in the back alley, between our court and the one behind, our court stick the kids from the other one. That usually boiled down to me and Elsie against the two Macready boys. We were the ones who always played. We had to have special rules because the space was so small, and more special rules for washing days, because people’s coppers in the wash-houses on either side filled the whole alley with steam. It was like playing in fog. I was for ever landing the ball in someone’s washing. That made the other arguments my mother had that my father couldn’t settle. She was always having rows about what I’d done with the ball this time, or with Mrs Macready because I’d led her boys into bad ways. I never was a saint. If it wasn’t football, it was something else that was a laugh to do. My mother always tried to stick up for me, but it was a lost cause.
The other thing I used to love was exploring round the city. I used to do it on my way to school, or coming home, so that my mother wouldn’t know. This is where They come in, so don’t get impatient.
That year I was taking a new bit of the city every week and going round it till I knew it. Then I’d move on. I told you a city is Home to me. Most of it was just like it was round our court, crowded and cheery and grimy. But I used to love the market. Everyone shouting like mad, and oranges to nick off every barrow, and big gas flares over all the stalls. I saw one catch fire one time. Then there was the canal and the railway. They used to go out of their way to criss-cross one another, it always seemed to me. Trains were clanking over the water every hundred yards, or else barges were getting dragged under iron bridges – except for one bit, where the canal went over the railway for a change on a line of high arches like stilts, with houses packed underneath the arches. Near that was the smart bit with the good shops. I used to love the smart bit in winter in the dark, when there were lights all wriggling down into the wet road, and posh people in carriages going up and down. Then there were the quiet bits. You’d come upon them suddenly, round a corner – grey, quiet parts that everyone seemed to have forgotten.
The quiet bit that was the end of me was right near the centre. It was round behind the smart bit, almost under the place where the canal went up on its stilts. I came at it through a sort of park first. It was a private park. I wasn’t particular about trespassing. I suppose you’d call the place a garden. But I was really ignorant in those days. The only other grass I’d seen was in a park, so I thought of this place as a park when I came over the wall into it.
It was a triangular green place. Though it was right in the heart of the city, it had more trees – and bushes – in it than I’d ever seen all together in those days. It creased down to a hollow in the middle, where there was grass, smooth mown grass. The moment I landed over the wall, the quiet shut me in. It was peaceful in a way, but it was more like going deaf. I couldn’t hear so much as a whisper from the railway or the roads.
Funny! I thought, and looked up to make sure the canal was still there. And it was there, striding across the sky in front of me. I was glad, because the place was so strange that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the whole city had vanished.
Which goes to show you should always trust your instincts. I didn’t know a thing about Them then, or the ways of the worlds, but I had got it right. By instinct.
What I should have done was climb back over that wall at once. I wish I had. But you know a bit what I was like by now, and I don’t think you would have gone away either. It was so strange, this silence. And there seemed no harm in it. I knew I was scared stiff, really, but I told myself that was just the way you feel when you’re trespassing. So, with my back like a mass of soft little creeping caterpillars, I went down through the trees to the mown grass at the bottom.
There was a little white statue there. Now I’m not artistic. I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on – I always wonder why it’s Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples – and this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn’t look as if he was enjoying himself, and small wonder. But the thing that really interested me was the way the artist had managed to carve the chains out of stone, all linked together in one piece, just as if they were real chains. I moved one to see, and it was just like a real chain, only made of stone. When I lifted it, I found it was fastened to the same place as all the other chains, down at one side, into the ring of what looked like a ship’s anchor, and this anchor was carved half buried in the white stone the statue was standing on.
That was all I noticed, not being artistic, because by that time I could see a stone building up among the trees at the wide end of the park. I went there, very softly, hiding among the trees and bushes. My back was still creeping, but I’d got used to that by then.
When I got there, I found it was quite a big building, like a small castle, built out of pinkish grey stone. It was triangular, like the park. The part I was looking at was the pointed end. It had battlements along the top, and some quite big windows in the ground floor. You could see it had been modernised. I slithered round until I could look in one of the big windows. I couldn’t get close, because there was a neat gravel terrace running round it under the windows. So what I did see was sort of smeary and dark, with the reflections of trees over it. I thought that was because I was ten feet away. I know better now.
I saw a fellow inside who seemed to be wearing a sort of cloak. Anyway, it was long and greyish and flowing, and it had a hood. The hood was not up. It was bunched back round his neck, but even so I couldn’t see much of his face. You never do see Their faces. I thought it was just the reflections in the window then, and I craned forward to see. He was leaning over a sort of slope covered with winking lights and buttons. I knew it was a machine of some sort. I might have been ignorant, but I had climbed up into the signal box on the railway under the canal arch, and I had been shown the printing press in the court up the street, so I knew it must be a kind of machine I didn’t know, but a bit like both and a lot smoother looking. As I looked, the fellow put out a hand and very firmly and deliberately punched several buttons on the machine. Then he turned and seemed to say something across his bunched hood. Another fellow in the same sort of cloak came into sight. They stood with Their backs to me, watching something on the machine. Watching like anything. There was a terrible intentness to the way They stood.
It made me hold my breath. I nearly burst before one of Them nodded, then the other. They moved off then, in a cheerful busy way, to somewhere out of sight of the window. I wished I could see. I knew They were going to do something important. But I never saw. I only felt. The ground suddenly trembled, and the trees, and the triangular castle. They sort of shook, the way hot air does. I trembled too, and felt a peculiar twitch, as if I’d been pulled to one side all over. Then the feeling stopped. Nothing more happened.
After a moment, I crept away, until I came to the wall round the park. I was scared – yes – but I was furiously interested too. I kept wondering what made that twitch, and why everything had trembled.
As soon as I was over the wall again, it was as if my ears had popped. I could hear trains clanking and traffic rumbling – almost a roar of city noise – and that made me more interested than ever. I dropped down into the side street beyond the wall and went along to the busy street where the front of the castle was. On this side the castle was blacker looking and guarded from the pavement by an iron paling like a row of harpoons. Behind the railings, the windows were all shuttered, in dark steel shutters. The upper windows were just slits, but they had harpoons across them too.
I looked up and I thought, No way to get in here. Yes, I was thinking of getting in from the moment I felt that twitch. I had to know what strange silent thing was going on inside. I went along the railings to the front door. It was shut, and black, and not very big. But I could tell, somehow, that it was massively heavy. There was an engraved plate screwed to the middle of the door. I didn’t dare go up the four steps to the door, but I could see the plate quite well from the pavement. It was done in gold, on black, and it said:
THE OLD FORT
MASTERS OF THE REAL AND ANCIENT GAME
And underneath was the stamped-out shape of a ship’s anchor. That was all. It had me almost dancing with interest and frustration.
I had to go home then, or my mother would have known I was out. She never did like me to hang around in the streets. Of course I couldn’t tell her where I’d been, but I was so curious that I did ask a few casual questions.
“I was reading a book today,” I said to her. “And there was something in it I didn’t know. What’s Masters of the Real and Ancient Game?”
“Sounds like deer hunting to me,” my mother said, pouring out the tea. “Take this cup through to your father in the shop.”
I took the tea through and asked my father. He had a different theory. “Sounds like one of those secret societies,” he said. My hair began to prickle and try to stand up. “You know – silly stuff,” my father said. “Grown men swearing oaths and acting daft mumbo-jumbo.”
“This one’s at the Old Fort,” I said.
“Where’s that?” said my father. “Never heard of it.”
Mumbo-jumbo, I thought. Well, those cloaks were that all right, but it doesn’t explain the machines and the twitch. Next morning, for a wonder, I went straight to school and asked my teacher before lessons. He didn’t know either. I could tell he didn’t, because he gave me a long talk, until the bell went, all about how real meant royal and that could apply both to tennis and to deer hunting, and how the old kings kept whole lumps of country to themselves to hunt deer in, and then on about Freemasons, in case that was what it meant. When the bell went, I asked him quickly about the Old Fort. And he had never heard of it, but he told me to go and ask at the Public Library, if I was interested.
I went to the library on the way home from school. The librarian there might have been my teacher’s twin. He wore the same sort of beard and half-moon spectacles and went on and on in the same way. And he didn’t know either. He gave me a book on chess and another on tennis and another on hunting – none of them the slightest use – and one called Buildings of Note. That was not much use either. It actually had a picture of the Old Fort, one of those beautifully neat grey drawings of the front of it, harpoons and all. Underneath that, someone had spilt ink all over what it said.
I was so annoyed that, like a fool, I took it and showed it to the librarian. And he thought I’d done it. That’s the worst of being a boy. You get blamed for everything. I still haven’t got used to it. He howled and he raved and he ordered me out. And I had to go. It made me more determined than ever to find out about the Old Fort. I was so annoyed.
That ink was no accident. I thought that even then. There was no ink anywhere else on the book. They don’t want people to know. It would have looked odd if there had been nothing about the Old Fort. Someone would have tried to find out. So They let it get into the book and then made sure no one could read it. That’s the way They do things.
“You think you’ve put me off, don’t you?” I said to Them in the street outside the library. “Well, you’re wrong.”
I went home. It was order day. In the shop, my father was packing piles of groceries in cardboard boxes to take round to customers. Rob usually took them. As I told you, Rob liked all things to do with the shop. But I was there, so I was roped in too. For once, that was just what I wanted. Rob was annoyed. He was afraid I was going to want to ride the tricycle. Rob loved that thing, and so did my father – I can’t think why. It weighed about a ton, and it had a solid metal box in front to put the cardboard boxes in. Once you had even one box of groceries aboard, your legs creaked just getting the trike moving, and the only way you could go was either in a straight line forward, or round in a tight circle. I let Rob have it. I took up the nearest box and carried it off. As soon as I was out of sight of Rob, I threw away the note on top which said Mrs Macready and carried the box, groceries and all, down to the Old Fort.
Not a bad idea, I thought, as I went up the steps to the thick shut front door. I rang at the brass bell beside it and heard it go clang clang clang in the silence deep inside. My heart seemed to be clanging too, so hard that it hurt. Then I waited. When one of Them came, I was going to say, “Your groceries, sir. Like me to put them in the kitchen for you?” Not a bad idea.
I waited. And I waited. The stamped-out anchor was on the part of the door plate level with my eyes, and now, while I waited, I stared at it and saw that there was a crown over the end of it – the part they call the shank. And, after a while, my heart stopped clanging and I began to get annoyed. I rang again. And a third time. By that time I was hating that crowned anchor personally – but nothing like I did later. I’ve come upon pubs and inns all over the place called The Crown and Anchor. No matter how desperate I am, I can’t ever bring myself to go into them. I always suspect that They are waiting inside.
Around five o’clock, I saw that it was no good. This is ridiculous! I thought. What do they do for groceries? Don’t they eat? But really what I thought was that five o’clock was after office hours, and that the fellows had probably taken off their grey cloaks and gone home.
Well, there was an easy answer to that one. Go and take a look. What a fool I was!
So round the corner to the side street goes this fool, carrying his box of groceries, along to the best place to climb the wall. I put the box down in the street and used it to tread on to get a leg up. There was an awful squishy crunching as I took off from it – eggs probably – but I took no notice and got on top of the wall. Maybe I was more scared than I would admit. I did stay on top of that wall a minute or so. I discovered that if I put my head right over, the noise from the city went, just like that. Then if I moved my head back again – pop! – the noises were back. I did that several times before I finally swung down into the silence among the trees. Then furious curiosity took hold again. I refused to be beat. I crept to the place where I could look in that window again.
And They were there. Both of Them, lounging in a sort of chatty way beside Their machine, half hidden from me by the milky reflections of trees.
That settled it. They must have heard the bell and hadn’t bothered to answer. Obviously it was very secret, what They did. So it stood to reason that it was worth finding out about. It also stood to reason that this park, or garden, where I was, was Their private one, and They must come out and walk in it from time to time. Which meant there had to be a door round on the other wall of the triangular fort, the wall I hadn’t seen.
I went round there, through the bushes. And, sure enough, there was a door, in the middle of that side. A much more easy and approachable-looking door than that front door. It was made of flat glass, with a handle in the glass. I looked carefully, but it seemed dark behind the glass. All I could see were the reflections of the park in it and the reflection of the canal too. Its arches were right above me on that side. But what I didn’t see was my own reflection in that door as I dashed across the gravel. I should have thought about that. But I didn’t. It was probably too late by then anyway.
The door opened on to a sort of humming vagueness. I was inside before I knew it. They both turned round to look at me. Of course I saw what a fool I’d been then. The building was triangular. There was no room for the door to open anywhere except into the room with the machines. I had assumed that it didn’t, because I hadn’t been able to see it through the glass door. There were the machines in front of me now, a triangular patch of them, winking and blinking, and I ought to have been able to see them just as clearly through that door.
An awful lot in that place was vague, including Them. The shadow of the canal was in here too, and the only things I could see clearly were those that happened to come in the slabs of dark shadow where the arches were. In between, it was white sky, with everything confused in it. They were in the sky. You never see Them clearly. All I did see was a huge table standing down at the wide end of the triangular room. There was a sort of flickering going on over it and some huge regular shapes hanging in the air above it. I blinked at those shapes. They were like enormous dice.
So there is a game going on! I thought.
But it was the queerest feeling. It was like having got into a reflection in a shop window. And, at the same time, I had a notion I was really standing outside in the open air, under the canal arches somewhere. I thought at first that it was this feeling that kept me standing there. I thought I was plain confused. It only came to me gradually that I was sort of hanging there, and that I couldn’t move at all.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_2c641211-c0ab-5a36-bc9b-aff0c081f96b)
The one of Them nearest me walked round behind me and shut the door. “Another random factor,” he said. He sounded annoyed. It was the way my mother would say, “Bother! We’ve got mice again.”
And the other one said, “We’d better deal with that before we go on then.” He said it the way my father would answer, “You’d better set traps again, my dear.”
“How?” asked the first one, coming back round me to the machines. “Can we afford a corpse at this stage? I do wish we could do without these randoms.”
“Oh but we can’t,” said the other. “We need them. Besides, the risk adds to the fun. I think we’d better discard this one to the Bounder circuits – but let’s get a read-out first on the effect of a corpse on play.”
“Right you are,” said the first one.
They both leant over the machines. I could see Them through the white sheets of reflected sky, looking at me carefully and then looking down to press another button. It was the way my mother kept looking at the colour of our curtains when she was choosing new wallpaper. After that, They turned their attention to another part of the machine and gazed at it, rather dubiously. Then They went down the room to look at that huge flickering table.
“Hm,” said the first one. “Play is quite delicately poised at the moment, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the second. “If it was on your side, it would help bring your revolution closer, but I can’t afford any urban unrest for a couple of decades or more. I claim unfair hazard. Let’s discard. Agreed?”
The first one came back and stood looking into the machine in the intent way They did. “It would make good sense,” he said, “if we could go back over the family of this discard and scrub all memory of it.”
“Oh no,” said the other, moving up too. “It’s against the rules for a discard. The anchor, you know. The anchor.”
“But we can scrub with a corpse. Why don’t we?”
“Because I’ve already claimed unfair hazard. Come on. Make it a discard.”
“Yes, why not?” said the first one. “It’s not that important. What’s the rule? These days we have to check with the rest in case the Bounder circuits are overloaded, don’t we?”
As I sit here, it’s true! They said all that, talking about me just as if I was a wooden counter or a piece of card in a game. And I floated there and couldn’t do a thing about it. Next thing I knew, They were punching more buttons, round the end of the machines.
And the place opened up.
You know if you go to a barber’s shop with a lot of mirrors, how you can sit looking into one mirror and see through it into the mirror behind you, over and over again, until it goes all blurred with distance? Well, what happened was like that. Over and over again, and all blurred, there were suddenly triangular rooms all round. They were slotted in on both sides, and beyond and behind that, and underneath, down and down. They were piled up on top of us too. I looked, but it made me feel ill, seeing two of Them walking about up there, and others of Them above and beside that, all strolling over where They could see me. They all wore those cloaks, but They weren’t just reflections of the first two. They were all different from one another. That was about all I could tell. It was all so blurry and flickery, and the reflection of the canal arches went striding through the lot, as if that was the only real thing there.
“Your attention for a moment,” said one of Them who was with me. “We are about to make a discard. Can you confirm that there is still room on the Bounds?”
A distant voice said, “Computing.”
A nearer, hollower voice asked, “What’s the reason for the discard?”
The second one of my Them said, “We’ve had an intrusion by a random factor, entailing the usual danger of feedback into the native world here. I’ve claimed unfair hazard against reinsertion as a corpse.”
“That seems adequate,” said the hollow voice.
Almost at once, the distant voice said, “The Bounds have space for four more discards. Repeat, four more only. Is the reason good enough?”
There was a little murmuring. For a moment, I thought I was going to end up as a corpse. I still didn’t know what I was in for, you see. Then the murmur grew – with an air of surprise to it, as if They were wondering what They were being asked for. “Reason sufficient. Sufficient reason,” came rumbling from all round, above and underneath.
“Then I must caution you,” said the hollow voice. “Rule seventy-two thousand now comes into play. The final three discards must only be made with extreme caution and at the most pressing need.”
With that, They all faded away, into the reflection of the sky again, and left just my two.
The second one came sweeping towards me. The first was standing with his hand ready on a handle of some kind. The second one spoke to me, slowly and carefully, as if I was an idiot. “You are now a discard,” he said. “We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are. The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can. If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner.”
I looked up at him. He was a grey blurred figure behind a sheet of white reflected sky. So was the other one, and he was just about to pull down the lever. “Hey! Wait a minute!” I said. “What’s all this? What are these rules? Who made them?”
Both of Them stared at me. They looked like you would if your breakfast egg had suddenly piped up and said, “Don’t eat me!”
“You’ve no right to send me off without any explanation, like this!” I said.
He pulled the lever while I was saying it. You might whack your egg on top with your spoon the same way. The sideways twitch came while I was saying “explanation”. As I said “like this!” I was somewhere else entirely.
And I mean somewhere else. It’s hard to explain just how different it was. I was standing out in the open, just as I’d half thought that I was out in the open under the canal arches before, only this was real, solid and real. There was green grass going up and down over hills in all directions. Across the valley in front of me, there was a group of black and white animals, eating the grass. I thought they were cows, probably. I’d never seen a live cow till then. Beyond that, going up against the sunset, was a spire of smoke. And that was all. The place was empty otherwise, except for me. I turned right round to make sure, and it was the truth.
That was shock enough, if you were a city boy like me. It was a horrible feeling. I wanted to crouch down and get my eyes to the top of my head somehow, like a frog, so that I could see all round me at once. But there was more to it than that. The air in that place was soft and mild. It smelt different and it felt different. It weighed on you in a different way, sort of sluggishly. The grass didn’t look quite right, and even the sun, setting down over the hill where the spire of smoke was, was not like the sun I was used to. It was making the sunset the wrong colour.
While I was turning round the second time, it came to me that the slanting dip in the valley just behind me was the same shape as Their triangular park, where the statue was.
Then I looked very carefully over the rest of the green slopes. Yes. The valley in front was where the smart part of the city should be, and the railway, and the hill beside me, and the one where the sun was setting, were the two hills the canal went between on its arches. The slope on the other side of me was going up to where our courtyard should have been. But the city had gone.
“I hate Them!” I screamed out. Because I knew then, without having to think it out, that I was on another world. This world seemed to have the same shape as mine, but it was different in every other way. And I didn’t know how to get back to mine.
For a while, I stood there and yelled every cussword I knew at Them, and I knew quite a few, even then. Then I set off to walk to that line of smoke going up into the sunset. There must be a house there, I thought. There’s no point starving. And, as I walked, I thought over very carefully what They had said.
They had talked of Bounds and Bounder circuits and discards and random factors and rules. I could see those were words in an enormous serious game. And I was a random factor, so They had discarded me, but there were still rules for that. And these rules said—The one who spoke to me at the end might have talked as if I was an idiot, but the way he had done it was rather like a policeman talks to someone he’s arresting: “Everything you say can be taken down and may be used in evidence.” They had told me the rules, and those said I could get Home if I could manage it. Well I would. I might be a discard on the Bounder circuits, but I was a Homeward Bounder, and They had better not forget it! I was going to get Home and spite Them. Then They had better watch out!
By this time, I had got near the cows. Cows are always bigger than you expect, and their horns are sharp. They have this upsetting way of stopping eating when you come up, and staring. I stopped and stared back. I was scared. I didn’t even dare turn round and go back, in case they came galloping up behind me and pronged me on those horns like toast on a toasting fork. Heaven knows what I would have done, if some men had not come galloping up just then to round up the cows. They were hairy, dirty men, dressed in cowhide, and their horses were as bad. They all stared at me, men, horses and cows, and one of those men was the image of the printer who owned the printing press in the courtyard up the road from ours.
That made me feel much better. I didn’t think he was the printer – and he wasn’t of course – but I got on with the printer, and I thought I could get on with this copy of him too. “Hello,” I said. “You don’t happen to want a boy for odd jobs, do you?”
He grinned, a big hairy split in his beard. And he answered. And here was another blow. It was gabble. I could not understand one word. They spoke quite a different language to mine.
“Oh mother!” I wailed. “I’ll get Them for this, if it’s the last thing I do!”
In fact, the hairy herdsmen were nice to me. I was lucky in a way. Some Homeward Bounders have to begin much harder than I did. Allowing for language problems, my start wasn’t at all bad. They helped me up on the horse behind the printer, and they rode off with me and the cows to where they lived. And they lived in tents – a set of large smelly leather tents with the hair still on them in patches. The line of smoke was from the sort of bonfire they used for cooking on.
I felt I could stand that. I told myself it was an adventure. But I couldn’t stand their Chief. She was a great huge wobbly woman with a voice like a train whistle. She was always scolding. She scolded the men for bringing me and me for coming, and me for speaking gibberish and wearing peculiar clothes, and the fire for burning and the sun for setting. Or I think she did. It took me days to understand the first word of their lingo.
I’ve got used to learning languages since. You get a system. But this one was a real shocker anyhow – they had sixteen words for cow and if you got the wrong one, they fell about laughing – and I think I wasn’t trying properly. I wasn’t expecting to be there that long. I was going Home. And it didn’t help that Mrs Chief decided to give me language lessons herself. She had the idea that if she scolded loud enough I would have to understand by sheer noise-power. We used to sit cross-legged facing one another, her scolding away at top shriek, and me nodding and smiling.
“That’s right,” I would say, nodding intelligently, “Yell away, you old squish-bag.”
At this, she would be pleased, because I seemed to be trying, and scream louder than ever. And I would smile.
“And you smell too,” I would say. “Worse than any of your cows.”
Well, it kept me sane. And it gave her an interest in life. It was pretty boring, life on the cattle-range. The only excitement they had was if a bull got nasty, or another tribe of herders went by on the horizon. All the same, I had to keep telling myself very firmly, “This is not so bad. It could be worse. It’s not a bad life.” That kept me sane too.
After six weeks or so, I had the hang of the language. I could sit on a horse without finding myself sitting on the ground the next second, and I could help round up cows. I was learning how to make leather rope and tan leather and weave hurdles, and a dozen other useful things. But I never learnt how to milk a cow. That was sacred. Only women were allowed to do that. And at this stage, they took down their tents and moved on to find better grass. They never reckoned to stay in one place much over a month.
I was riding along with them, helping keep the cattle together, when, about midday, I had the most peculiar sensation. It was like being pulled, strongly and remorselessly, sideways from the way we were going. With it, came a worse feeling – from inside me. It was a terrible yearning and a longing. My throat hurt with it. And it was like an itch too. I wanted to get inside my head and scratch. Both feelings were so strong that I had to turn my horse the way they pulled me, and as soon as I had, I felt better – as if I was now doing the right thing. And, no sooner was I trotting away in that direction, than I was full of excitement. I was going Home. I was sure of it. This was how you were moved along the Bounds. I had been right to think I was only going to be a short time in this world.
(That was about the only thing I was right about, as it happened. You nearly always get a feeling, when you first come into a world, how long you’re going to have to stay there. I’ve only ever known myself wrong once. And that time was twice as long as I thought. I think one of Them must have changed his mind about his move.)
On this first occasion, Mrs Chief sent two hairy riders after me and they rounded me up just like a cow.
“What do you think you’re doing, going off on your own like that?” she screamed at me. “Suppose you meet an enemy!”
“First I heard you had any enemies,” I said sulkily. The pulling and the yearning were terrible.
She made me ride in the middle of the girls after that, and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I’ve learnt to hold my tongue when the Bounds call now. It saves trouble. Then, I had to wait till night came, and it was agony. I felt pulled out of shape by the pull and sick with the longing – really sick: I couldn’t eat supper. Waste of a good beef steak. Worse still, I was all along haunted by the idea I was going to be too late. I was going to miss my chance of getting Home. I had to get to some particular place in order to move to other worlds, and I wasn’t going to get there in time.
It was quite dark when at last I got the chance to slip away. It was a bit cloudy and there was no moon – some worlds don’t have moons: others have anything up to three – but that didn’t matter to me. The Bounds called so strongly that I knew exactly which way to head. I went that way at a run. I ran all through the warm moisty night. I was drowned in sweat and panting like someone sawing wood. In the end, I was falling down every few yards, getting up again, and staggering on. I was so scared I’d be too late. By the time the sun rose, I think I was simply going from one foot to the other, almost on the spot. Stupid. I’ve learnt better since. But this was the first time, and, when there was light, I shouted out with joy. There was a green flat space among the green hills ahead, and someone had marked the space with a circle of wooden posts.
At that, I managed to trot and lumbered into the circle. Somewhere near the middle of it, the twitch took me sideways again.
You’ve probably guessed what happened. You can imagine how I felt anyway. It was dawn still, a lurid streaky dawn. The green ranges had gone, but there was no city – nothing like one. The bare lumpy landscape round me was heaped with what looked like piles of cinders, and each pile had its own dreary little hut standing beside it. I had no idea what they were – they were mines, actually. You weren’t a person in that new world if you didn’t have your own hole and keep digging coal or copper out of it. But I didn’t care what was going on. I was feeling the air, as I did before, and realising that this was yet another different world. And at the same time, I realised that I was due to stay here for rather a long time.
It was on this world that I began to understand that They hadn’t told me even half the rules. They had just told me the ones that interested Them. On this world I was starved and hit, and buried under a collapsed slag-heap. I’m not going to describe it. I hate it too much. I was there twice too, because what happened was that I got caught in a little ring of worlds and went all round the ring two times. At the time, I thought they were all the worlds there were – except for Home, which I never seemed to get to – and I thought of them as worlds, which they are not, not really.
They are separate universes, stacked in together like I saw the triangular rooms of Them before They sent me off. These universes all touch somewhere – and where they touch is the Boundary – but they don’t mix. Homeward Bounders seem to be the only people who can go from one universe to another. And we go by walking the Bounds until we come to a Boundary, when, if one of Them has finished his move, we get twitched into the Boundary in another Earth, in another universe. I only understood this properly when I got to the sixth world round, where the stars are all different.
I looked at those stars. “Jamie boy,” I said. “This is crazy.” Possibly I was a little crazy then, too, because Jamie answered me, and said, “They’re probably the stars in the Southern hemisphere – Australia and all that.” And I answered him. “It’s still crazy,” I said. “This world’s upside down then.”
It was upside down, in more ways than that. The Them that played it must have been right peculiar. But it was that which made me feel how separate and – well – universal each world was. And how thoroughly I was a discard, a reject, wandering through them all and being made to move on all the time. For a while after that, I went round seeing all worlds as nothing more than coloured lights on a wheel reflected on a wall. They are turning the wheel and lighting the lights, and all we get is the reflections, no more real than that. I still see it that way sometimes. But when you get into a new world, it’s as solid as grass and granite can make it, and the sky shuts you in just as if there was no way through. Then you nerve yourself up. Here comes the grind of finding out its ways and learning its language.
You wouldn’t believe how lonely you get.
But I was going to tell you about the rules that They didn’t tell me. I mentioned some of the trouble I had in the mining world. I had more in other worlds. And none of these things killed me. Some of them ought to have done, specially that slag-heap – I was under it for days. And that is the rule: call it Rule One. A random factor like me, walking the Bounds, has to go on. Nothing is allowed to stop him. He can starve, fall off a mile high temple, get buried, and still he goes on. The only way he can stop is to come Home.
People can’t interfere with a Homeward Bounder either. That may be part of Rule One, but I prefer to call it Rule Two. If you don’t believe people can’t interfere with me, find me and try it. You’ll soon see. I’ll tell you – on my fifth world, I had a little money for once. A whole gold piece, to be precise. I got an honest job in a tannery – and carried the smell right through to the next world with me too. On my day off, I was strolling in the market looking for my favourite cakes. They were a little like Christmas puddings with icing on – gorgeous! Next thing I knew, a boy about my own age had come up beside me, given me a chop-and, chop-and – it darned well hurt too – and run off with my gold piece. Naturally, I yelled and started to run after him. But he was under a waggon the next moment, dead as our neighbour’s little girl back Home. His hand with the gold piece in it was sticking out, just as if he was handing it back to me, but I hadn’t the heart to take it. I couldn’t. It felt like my fault, that waggon.
After a while, I told myself I was imagining that rule. That boy’s corpse could have had a bad effect on play, just as They said mine would have done. But I think that was one of the things They meant by the risk adding to the fun. I didn’t imagine that rule. The same sort of thing happened to me several times later on. The only one I didn’t feel bad about was a rotten Judge who was going to put me in prison for not being able to bribe him. The roof of the courthouse fell in on him.
Rule Three isn’t too good either. Time doesn’t act the same in any world. It sort of jerks about as you go from one to another. But time hardly acts at all on a Homeward Bounder. I began to see that rule on my second time round the circle of worlds. The second time I got to the upside down one, for instance, nearly ten years had gone by, but only eight or so when I got to the next one. I still don’t know how much of my own time I spent going round that lot, but I swear I was only a few days older. It seemed to me I had to be keeping the time of my own Home. But, as I told you, I still only seem about thirteen years old, and I’ve been on a hundred worlds since then.
By the time I had all this worked out, I was well on my second round of the circle. I had learnt I wasn’t going to get Home anything like as easily as I had thought. Sometimes I wondered if I was ever going to get there. I went round with an ache like a cold foot inside me over it. Nothing would warm that ache. I tried to warm it by remembering Home, and our courtyard and my family, in the tiniest detail. I remembered things I had not really noticed when they happened – silly things, like how particular our mother was over our boots. Boots cost a lot. Some of the kids in the court went without in summer, and couldn’t play football properly, but we never went without. If my mother had to cut up her old skirt to make Elsie a dress in order to afford them, we never went without boots. And I used to take that for granted. I’ve gone barefoot enough since, I can tell you.
And I remembered even the face Elsie used to make – she sort of pushed her nose down her face so that she looked like a camel – when Rob’s old boots were mended for her to wear. She never grumbled. She just made that face. I remember my father made a bit the same face when my mother wanted me to stay on at school. I swore to myself that I’d help him out in the shop when I did get Home. Or go grinding on at school, if that was what they decided. I’d do anything. Besides, after grinding away learning languages the way I’d done, school might almost seem lively.
I think remembering that way made the cold foot ache inside me worse, but I couldn’t stop. It made me hate Them worse too, but I didn’t mind that.
All this while, I’d never met a single other Homeward Bounder. I thought that was a rule too, that we weren’t supposed to. I reckoned that we were probably set off at regular intervals, so that we never overtook one another. I knew there were others, of course. After a bit, I learnt to pick up traces of them. We left signs for one another – like tramps and robbers do in some worlds – mostly at Boundaries.
It took me a long while to work the signs out, on my own. For one thing, the Boundaries varied so much, that I didn’t even notice the signs until I’d learnt to look for them. The ring of posts in the cattle-range world matched with a clump of trees in the fourth world, and with a dirty great temple in the seventh. In the mining world, there was nothing to mark the Boundary at all. Typical, that. I used to think that They had marked the Boundaries with these things, and I got out of them quick at first, until I noticed the sign carved on one of the trees. Somehow that made me feel that the people on the worlds must have marked the Boundaries. There was the same sign carved in the temple too. This sign meant GOOD PICKINGS. I earned good money in both worlds.
Then, by the time I was going round the whole collection another time, I was beginning to get the hang of the Bounds too, as well as the signs and the Boundaries. Bounds led into the Boundary from three different directions, so you could come up by another route and still go through the Boundary, but from another side. I saw more signs that way.
But a funny thing was that the ordinary people in the worlds seemed to know the Bounds were there, as well as the Boundaries. They never walked the Bounds of course – they never felt the call – but they must have felt something. In some worlds there were towns and villages all along a Bound. In the seventh world, they thought the Bounds were sacred. I came out of the Boundary temple to see a whole line of temples stretching away into the distance, just like my cousin Marie’s wedding cake, one tall white wedding cake to every hilltop.
Anyway, I was going to say there were other signs on the other two sides of the Boundaries when I came to look. I picked up a good many that way. Then came one I’d never seen before. I’ve seen it quite a lot since. It means RANDOM and I’m usually glad to see it. That was how I got out of that wretched ring of worlds and met a few other Homeward Bounders at last.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d450526a-9cd0-5023-876b-2b094abe6765)
I had got back to the cattle world by then. As soon as I arrived, I knew I was not going to be there long, and I would have been pleased, only by then I knew that the mining world came next.
“Oh please!” I prayed out loud, but not to Them. “Please not that blistering-oath mining world again! Anywhere else, but not that!”
The cattle country was bad enough. I never met the same people twice in it, of course. The earlier ones had moved off or died by the time I came round again. The ones I met were always agreeable, but they never did anything. It was the most boring place. I used to wonder if the Them playing it had gone to sleep on the job. Or maybe they were busy in a part of that world I never got to, and kept this bit just marking time. However it was, I was in for another session of dairy-farming, and I was almost glad it would only be a little one. Glad, that is, but for the mining horror that came next.
It was only three days before I felt the Bounds call. I was surprised. I hadn’t known it would be that short. By that time I had gone quite a long way down south with a moving tribe I fell in with. They were going down to the sea, and I wanted to go too. I had still never seen the sea then, believe it or not. I was really annoyed to feel the tugging, and the yearning in my throat, start so soon.
But I was an old hand by then. I thought I would bear it, stick it out for as long as possible, and put off the mining world for as long as I could. So I ground my teeth together and kept sitting on the horse they’d lent me and jogging away south.
And suddenly the dragging and the yearning took hold of me from a different direction, almost from the way we were going. I was so confused I fell off the horse.
While I was sitting on the grass with my hands over my head, waiting for the rest of the tribe to get by before I dared get up – you get kicked in the head if you try crawling about under a crowd of horses – the next part of the call started: the “Hurry, hurry, you’ll be late!” It’s always sooner and stronger if you get it from a new direction. It’s always stronger from a RANDOM Boundary too. I don’t know why. This was so strong that I found I couldn’t wait any longer. I got up and started running.
They shouted after me of course. They’re scared of people going off on their own, even though nothing ever happens to them. But I took no notice and kept running, and they didn’t have a Mrs Chief with them – theirs was a sleepy girl who never bothered about anything – so they didn’t follow me. I stopped running when I was over the nearest hill and walked. I knew by then that the “Hurry, hurry!” was only meant to get me going. It didn’t mean much.
It was just as well it didn’t mean much. It took me the rest of that day and all night to get there, and the funny coloured sun was two hours up before I saw the Boundary. This was a new one. It was marked by a ring of stones.
I stared at it a little as I went down into the valley where it was. They were such big stones. I couldn’t imagine any hairy cattle herders having the energy to make it. Unless They had done it, of course. I stared again when I saw the new sign scrawled on the nearest huge stone, some way above my head.
“I wonder what that means,” I said. But I had been a long time on the way and the call was getting almost too strong to bear. I stopped wondering and went into the circle.
And – twitch – I was drowning in an ocean.
Yes, I saw the sea after all – from inside. At least, I was inside for what seemed about five minutes, until I came screaming and drowning and kicking up to the surface, and coughing out streams of fierce salt water – only to have all my coughing undone the next moment by a huge great wave, which came and hit me slap in the face, and sent me under again. I came up again pretty fast. I didn’t care that nothing could stop a Homeward Bounder. I didn’t believe it. I was drowning.
It isn’t true what they say about your life passing before you. You’re too busy. You’re at it full time, bashing at the water with your arms and screaming “Help!” to nothing and nobody. And too busy keeping afloat. I hadn’t the least idea how to swim. What I did was a sort of crazy jumping up and down, standing in the water, with miles more water down underneath me, bending and stretching like a mad frog, and it kept me up. It also turned me round in a circle. Every way was water, with sky at the end of it. Nothing in sight at all, except flaring sunlit water on one side and heaving grey water on the other.
That had me really panicked. I jumped and screamed like a madman. And here was a funny thing – somebody seemed to be answering. Next moment, a sort of black cliff came sliding past me, and someone definitely shouted. Something that looked like a frayed rope splashed down in the sea in front of me. I dived on it with both hands, which sent me under again, even though I caught the rope. I was hauled up like that, yelling and sousing and shivering, and went bumping up the side of that sudden black cliff.
It was like going up the side of a cheese-grater – all barnacles. I left quite a lot of skin on there, and a bit more being dragged over the top. I remember realising it was a boat and then looking at who’d rescued me. And I think I passed out. Certainly I remember nothing else until I was lying on a mildewy bed, under a damp blanket, and thinking, “This can’t be true! I can’t have been pulled out of the sea by a bunch of monkeys!” But that was what I seemed to have seen. I knew that, even with my eyes closed. I had seen skinny thin hairy arms and shaggy faces with bright monkey eyes, all jabbering at me. “It must be true,” I thought. “I must be in a world run by monkeys now.”
At that point, someone seized my head and tried to suffocate me by pouring hellfire into my mouth. I did a lot more coughing. Then I gently opened one watery eye and took a look at the monkey who was doing it to me.
This one was a man. That was some comfort, even though he was such a queer looking fellow. He had the remains of quite a large square face. I could see that, though a lot of it was covered by an immense black beard. Above the beard, his cheeks were so hollow that it looked as if he were sucking them in, and his eyes had gone right back into his head somehow, so that his eyebrows turned corners on top of them. His hair was as bad as his beard, like a rook’s nest. The rest of him looked more normal, because he was covered up to the chin in a huge navy-blue coat with patches of mould on it. But it probably only looked normal. The hand he stretched out – with a bottle in it to choke me with hellfire again – was like a skeleton’s.
I jumped back from that bottle. “No thanks. I’m fine now.”
He bared his teeth at me. He was smiling. “Ah, ve can onderstand von anodder!” That is a rough idea of the way he spoke. Now, I’ve been all over the place, and changed my accent a good twenty times, but I always speak English like a native. He didn’t. But at least I seemed to be in a world where someone spoke it.
“Who are you?” I said.
He looked reproachful at that. I shouldn’t have asked straight out. “Ve ollways,” he said – I can’t do the way he spoke – “we always keep one sharp look out coming through the Boundaries, in case any other Homeward Bounder in the water lies. Lucky for you, eh!”
I stared at his huge hollow face. “Are you one? Do you call us Homeward Bounders too?”
“That is the name to all of us is given,” he said to me sadly.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought I’d made it up. How long have you been one?” A long time, by the look of him, I thought.
He sighed. “You have not heard of me in your world maybe? In many places I am known, always by my ship, always sailing on. The name most often given is that of Flying Dutchman.”
As it happens, I had heard of him. At school – good old boring chapel-shaped Churt House – one rainy afternoon, when all the other Dominies were down with flu. The one Dominie left had told us about the Flying Dutchman, among other stories. But all I could remember about him was that long, long ago he had been doomed to sail on for ever, until, unless—It didn’t matter. It was probably the same as me.
“What happened? What did you do to annoy Them?” I asked.
He shivered, and sort of put me aside with that skeleton hand of his. “It is not permitted to speak of these things,” he said. Then he seemed sorry. “But you are only young. You will learn.”
“What world do you come from, then?” I asked. “Is it permitted to speak of that? Is it the same world as me?” I sat up then, in great excitement, thinking that if we were both from the same place, then we were Bound to the same Home, and I could do worse than sail with him until we got there.
Sitting up gave me a view of the cabin. I was not so sure after that. Cobwebs hung in swags from all the corners and beams. On the walls, black mould and green slime were fighting it out to see which could climb highest, and every piece of metal I could see was rusty, including the candlestick on the wormy table. The cabin floor had dirty water washing about on it, this way and that as the boat swung, and swilling round the Dutchman’s great seaboots. “Is yours the same world?” I said doubtfully.
“I do not know,” he said sadly. “But I shall know if I am back there. There will be some rest then.”
“Well, I’ll tell you about my Home,” I said. “You may recognise something. First, my name’s Jamie H—”
But he raised his skeleton hand again. “Please. We do not give names. We think it is not permitted.”
Here, one of his crew came to the door and did a jabber-jabber. He was a man too, but I saw why I had taken him for a monkey. He was so stick-thin. He was more or less naked too, and the parts of him that weren’t burnt dark brown were covered with hair. Men are very like monkeys really.
The Dutchman listened for a little. Then he said, “Ja, ja,” and got up and went out.
It was not very interesting in the cabin and it smelt of mould, so after a bit I got up and went on deck too. The sea was there, all round. It gave me the pip at first, just like the wide-open cattle country. But you get used to it quite soon. The sailors were all scrambling about the rakish masts above me. They were struggling with the great black torn sails, and they seemed to be trying to hoist a few more. Every so often, a rotten rope would snap. There would be some resigned jabber, and they would mend it and carry on. This made it quite a long business, getting any extra sails up.
The Dutchman was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the reason for all this pother. It was another ship, a beauty, about midway between us and the horizon. It was like an arrow or a bird, that ship – like everything quick and beautiful. I had to gasp when I saw it. It had a bank of white sails, white as a swan. But, as I watched, I could see frenzied activity among those white sails. Shortly, a whole lot more white sails came up, some above, some overlapping the others, until there were so many sails up that you thought the thing was going to topple over and sink from sheer top-heaviness. Like that, the white ship turned and, with a bit of a waggle, like a hasty lady, made her way over the horizon. Our sails were still not set.
The Dutchman sighed heavily. “Always they go. They think we are unlucky.”
“Are you?” I asked, rather worried on my own account.
“Only to ourselves,” he sighed. He gave out some jabbering. The monkeys up aloft gave up struggling with the sails and came down to the deck again.
After that, I was sure they would be thinking of breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and I was starving. Well, I suppose a Homeward Bounder can never exactly starve, but put it this way: it never feels that way, and my stomach was rolling. But time went on, and nobody said a word about food. The monkeys lay about, or carved blocks of wood, or mended ropes. The Dutchman strode up and down. In the end, I got so desperate that I asked him right out.
He stopped striding and looked at me sadly. “Eating? That we gave up long ago. There is no need to eat. A Homeward Bounder does not die.”
“I know,” I said. “But it makes you feel a whole lot more comfortable. Look at you. You all look like walking skeletons.”
“That is true,” he admitted. “But it is hard to take on board provisions when you sail on, and ever on.”
I saw the force of that. “Don’t you ever fetch up on land then?” And I was suddenly terrified. Suppose I was stuck on this ship, too, for ever, without any food.
“Sometimes we go to land, ja,” the Dutchman admitted. “When we come through a Boundary and we can tell we have time, we find an island where is privacy, and we land. We eat then sometimes. We may eat maybe when we come to land to put you ashore.”
That relieved my mind considerably. “You should eat,” I said earnestly. “Do, to please me. Can’t you catch fish, or something?”
He changed the subject. Perhaps he thought catching fish was not permitted. He thought no end of things were not permitted. I had opportunity to know how many things, because I was on that ship for days. And a more uncomfortable time I hope never to spend. Everything about that ship was rotten. It was half waterlogged. Water squeezed out of the boards when you trod on them and mould grew on everything. And nobody cared. That was what got me so annoyed. True, I could see they’d been at this game for ages, a hundred times longer than I had, and they had a right to be miserable. But they took it to such lengths!
“Can’t you wear a few more clothes?” I said to a monkey every so often. “Where’s your self-respect?”
He would just look at me and jabber. None of them spoke much English. After a bit, I began to ask it in another sort of way, because it got colder. Fog hung in the air and made the damp ship even wetter. I shivered. But the monkeys just shrugged. They were past caring.
I thought it was another piece of the same when I looked over the side of the ship on about the fourth foggy day. By then, anything would have been interesting. I noticed there were two big iron holes there, in the front, each with a length of rusty chain dangling out of them. I had seen pictures of ships. I knew what should have been there.
“Don’t you even carry anchors?” I asked the Dutchman. “How do you stop?”
“No,” he said. “We threw them away long ago.”
I was so hungry that it made me snappish. “What a stupid thing to do!” I said. “That’s you lot all over, with your stupid negative attitude! Can’t you think positive for once? You wouldn’t be in half this mess if you did. Fancy throwing anchors away!”
He just stood there, looking at me sadly and, I thought, sort of meaningly. And suddenly I remembered the crowned anchor on the front of the Old Fort. I knew better than to mention Them to him by then. He never would come straight out like I did and call them Them. He always put it impersonally: it is not permitted. But of course he knew that anchors had something to do with Them – probably better than I did. “Oh, I see,” I said. “Sorry.”
“We took them off,” he said, “to show that we are without hope. Hope is an anchor, you know.”
A bit of good came of this, though. He got worried about me, I think. He thought I was young and ignorant and hot-headed. He asked me what kind of Boundary I had come in by. “I am afraid,” he said, “that you may have got on a circuit that is sea only, and next time I will not be by. I shall put you on land, because I think it is not permitted for us to stay in company, but you may still end up in the water all the same.”
Oh he was a cheery fellow. But kind. I told him about the stone Boundary and the strange sign.
“That is all right,” he said. “That is RANDOM. Look for the same again and you will unlikely be drowned.”
It turned out that he knew no end more signs than I did. I suspect that he’d been Homeward Bound so long that he may even have invented some of them. He wrote them all out for me with a rusty nail on his cabin door. They were mostly general ones like UNFRIENDLY and GOOD CLIMATE. I gave him a few particular ones I knew in return, including one I thought would be really useful: YOU CAN NICK FOOD HERE.
“I thank you,” he said solemnly.
A day later, thank goodness, we came to some land. It was not my idea of heaven. I could hardly see it in the fog, for a start, and what I could see was wet rocks and spouts of wave breaking over them. It made me feel the ship was not so bad after all.
“Maybe we should go on a bit,” I said nervously to the Dutchman. “This looks rough. It could break your ship up.”
He stood sombrely beside me, with his navy coat and his beard and his hair all dewed with fog, watching the spouting waves come nearer through the whiteness. “The ship does not break,” he said. “It does not matter. There are seven holes in the underside and still we float. We cannot stop. We go on floating and sailing for ever.” Then he did something I never thought to see him do. He took his fist out of his pocket and he shook it, shook it savagely in the air. “And we know why!” he shouted out. “All for a game. A game!”
“I bet that’s not permitted,” I said.
He put his hand in his pocket again. “Maybe,” he said. “I do not care. You must make ready to jump when we are near enough. Do not be afraid. You cannot be hurt.”
Well, we came near, and I sort of flounderingly jumped. Perhaps I couldn’t be hurt, but I could be pounded and grazed and drenched and winded, and I was. I was so weak with hunger too that it took me ages to drag myself out of the surf and scramble up on to a wet lump of granite. Then I turned to wave to the Flying Dutchman. They all crowded to the side and waved back, him and the monkeys. I could hardly see them through the fog. It looked like a ghost ship out there, ragged and sketchy, like a grey pencil drawing, and it seemed to be tipping to one side rather. I suspect there were now eight holes underneath it. There had been a lot of grinding and rending while I was struggling up the rock.
It simply melted into the fog as I looked. I stood there all alone, shivering. I remembered then what my teacher had said, that rainy afternoon at Home, about the Flying Dutchman. It was supposed to be a ghost ship.
But it wasn’t, I told myself. Nor was I a ghost. We were all Homeward Bound, and I for one was going to get there. I just wished I wasn’t on my own. The Flying Dutchman was much better off. There was a crowd of them, to my one. They would be in clover, compared with me, if only they could have brought themselves to care about things a bit more.
After this, I set off inland, climbing, slipping and sliding, to where the strangest thing yet happened to me. It was so strange that, even if They’d done nothing, there would still have been times when I would have sworn it was a vision or something, brought on by lack of food. But I know it happened. It was realler than I am.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_dec342ea-84d1-5468-aa2d-d7a59310c482)
I was very thirsty. It was worse than the hunger. You’d have thought with a wet ship like that, I’d have been all right, but it was all salt, apart from the fog. And the salt I’d swallowed getting on land made me thirstier than before. I don’t know how the Flying Dutchman managed. The only drink they had was the fire-water he had choked me with, and I think they saved that for using on people they’d fished out of the sea.
But as soon as I got high enough up the rocks and far enough inland not to hear nothing but sea, I could hear water trickling. You know that hollow pouring sound a little stream makes coming down through rocks. I heard that, and it made my mouth dry up and go thick. I was so thirsty I could have cried. I set out scrambling and slithering through the fog towards the noise.
That white wet fog confused everything. I think, if I hadn’t been so thirsty, I’d never have found it. The rocks were terrible – a total jumble. They were all hard, hard pinkish granite, so hard that nothing grew on it, and so wet that I was always slithering on to my face. That hurt at least as much as scraping up the side of the Flying Dutchman’s ship. You know how granite seems to be made of millions of grains, pink and black and grey and white – well, every one of those grains scratched me separately, I swear.
After a while, I had got quite high up somewhere, and the lovely hollow pouring sound was coming from quite near, over to the right. I slithered over that way and had to stop short. There was a huge split in the granite there, and a great deep hole, and I could hear the pouring coming from the other side of the split.
“Unprintable things!” I said – only I didn’t say that. I really said them. But I hate to be beat. You know that by now. I went down into the hole and then climbed up the other side. I don’t know how I did it. When I dragged myself out the other side, my arms felt like bits of string and wouldn’t answer when I tried to bunch my fists up, and my legs were not much better. I was covered with scratches too. I must have been a sight.
The pouring was really near now, from the other side of a lump of crag. I crawled my way round it. It was a great rock sticking up at the top of the hill, and there was a ledge on the other side about eight feet wide, if that. And there I had to stop short again, because there was a man chained to the crag, between me and the water.
He looked to be dead or dying. He was sort of collapsed back on the rock with his eyes shut. His face was tipped back from me – I was still crouching down, weak as a kitten – but I could see his face was near on as hollow as the Flying Dutchman’s, and it looked worse, because this man hadn’t a beard, only reddish stubble. His hair was reddish too, but it was soaking wet with him being out in the fog and the rain like this, and you could hardly tell it from the granite. His clothes, such as there was left of them, were soaking too, of course, greyish and fluttering in strips in the sneaking chilly wind there was up there. I could see a lot of his skin. It was white, corpse white, and it shone out against the rock and fog almost as if it were luminous.
The chains he was locked up in – they were luminous. They were really queer. They shone. They were almost transparent, like glass, but whiter and stonier-seeming. A big link of the chain between his right arm and leg was lying on the rock just in front of me. I could see the grains of rock magnified through it, pink and black and grey and white, bigger through the middle of the link than at the edges, and with a milky look. It was like looking through a teardrop.
He didn’t move. My strength came back a little, and I couldn’t see him harming me in that state, so I got up and started to edge my way along the ledge in front of him to get at the water. When I was standing up, I was surprised to find how big he was. He was about half as big again as an ordinary man. And he wasn’t quite dead. The white skin was up in goose pimples all over him, with little shivers chasing across it. That was why I said what I did about Art, earlier on. He must have been frozen. But I could tell he was pretty far gone. He had a serious wound round on his left side, a bit below his heart. I hadn’t seen it till then, and I didn’t want to look at it when I did see it. It was a real mess, gaping and bleeding, with bits of his torn shirt fluttering across it and getting mixed up in it. No wonder he seemed to be dying.
I was almost right in front of him, trying not to look, when he moved his head and looked at me. “Be careful not to touch the chains,” he said.
I jumped, and stared up at him. He didn’t speak at all like someone who was dying. There was a bit of a shiver caught at him as he said it, but that was not surprising, considering how cold he must have been. But his voice was quite strong and he was looking at me like someone with sense. “Why mustn’t I touch them?” I said.
“Because they’re made to act like the Bounds,” he said. “You won’t get your drink if you do touch them.”
I shuffled backwards an inch or so. I didn’t dare go further, for fear of falling off the ledge. “What are they made of?” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
“Adamant,” he said.
That is a sort of diamond – adamant – the hardest thing there is. Granite must be almost the next hardest. I could see the big transparent staples driven into the granite on either side of him, holding him spread out. “You must be awfully strong, if it takes that to hold you,” I said.
He sort of smiled. “Yes. But there was meant to be no mistake.”
It looked that way to me too. I couldn’t think why he was so much alive. “You’re not a Homeward Bounder, are you?” I asked doubtfully.
“No,” he said.
I went on staring at him, trying to keep from looking at that wound of his, and watching him shiver. I was cold myself, but then I could move about to keep warm. He was chained so that he could hardly move a foot in any direction. And all the while I stared, that water ran and poured, away to one side, with a long hollow poppling which had me licking my lips. And he was chained so he could hear it and not get to it.
“Are you thirsty?” I said. “Like me to get you a drink?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d welcome a drink.”
“I’ll have to get it in my hands,” I said. “I wish I’d got something to hold it in.”
I went edging and shuffling round him, keeping well away from the chains. I could see the stream by then, pouring down a groove in the rock, just beyond the reddish spiked thing that all the chains were hooked into. The ledge got narrower there. I was thinking that it was going to be difficult to climb over that spike on the slippery rock without touching a chain, when I realised what the spike was. I went close and leant over it to make sure. Yes it was. An anchor. One spoke was buried deep in the granite and all of it was orange wet rust, but there was no mistaking it. And all the chains led through the ring on the end of the shank.
I spun round so fast then that I never knew how I missed the chains. “They did this to you!” I said to him. “How did They do it? Why?”
He was turned to look at me. I could see he was thinking about water more than anything. I went climbing over the anchor to show him I hadn’t forgotten. “Yes, it was They,” he said.
I put my hands under the little pouring waterfall and filled them as full as I could with water. But I was so furious for him that my hands shook, and most of the water had trickled away by the time I’d climbed back over the anchor. Even more had gone by the time I managed to stretch my hands up to him among the chains, without touching one. He was so tall and chained so close that it was quite a struggle for him to get his mouth down. I don’t think he got more than a taste the first time. But I went back and forwards, back and forwards, to the stream. I got quite nimble after a while. I even took a drink myself, after his sixth handful. He was so thirsty it was awful, and I kept thinking how he would feel if I happened to touch a chain and got twitched away just as he’d got his mouth down to the water.
“You should have asked me straight off,” I said. “Why didn’t you? Have They forbidden you to, or something?”
“No,” he said. “They don’t have that kind of power over me. But I could see how thirsty you were, and I’m more used to it than you.”
“How long have you been here like this?” I said. We were talking this way as I went to and fro. “As long as the Flying Dutchman? Do you know him?”
He smiled. He was getting more cheerful as he drank, in spite of his situation. I just wished I’d had some food I could have given him too. “From long before the Dutchman,” he said. “Long before Ahasuerus too. Almost from the beginning of the worlds.”
I nearly said “I don’t know how you stand it!” but there was no point in saying that. He had to. “How did They get you?” I said. “Why?”
“It was my own fault,” he said. “In a way. I thought They were friends of mine. I discovered about the Bounds, and all the ways of the worlds, and I made the bad mistake of telling Them. I’d no idea what use They would make of the discovery. When it was too late, I saw the only safeguard was to tell mankind too, but They caught up with me before I’d gone very far.”
“Isn’t that just like Them!” I said. “Why aren’t you hating Them? I do.”
He even laughed then. “Oh I did,” he said. “I hated Them for aeons, make no mistake. But it wore out. You’ll find that. Things wear out, specially feelings.” He didn’t seem sad about it at all. He acted as if it was a relief, not hating Them any more.
Somehow that made me hate Them all the worse. “See here,” I said, reaching up with the tenth handful or so of water, “isn’t there any way I can get you out of this? Can’t I find an adamant saw somewhere? Or do the chains unlock anywhere?”
He stopped before he drank and looked at me, really laughing, but trying not to, to spare my feelings. “You’re very generous,” he said. “But They don’t do things like that. If there’s any key at all to these chains, it’s over there.” And he nodded over at the anchor before he bent to drink.
“That anchor?” I said. “When it’s rusted away, you mean?”
“That will be at the ends of the worlds,” he said.
I saw that he was trying to tell me kindly not to be a fool. I felt very dejected as I shuffled off for the next handful of water. What could I do? I wanted to do something, on my own account as well as his. I wanted to break up his chains and tear the worlds apart. Then I wanted to get my hands on a few of Their throats. But I was simply a helpless discard, and only a boy at that.
“One thing I can do,” I said when I came climbing back, “is to stay and keep you company and bring you water and things.”
“I don’t advise that,” he said. “They can control you still, to some extent, and there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
He had had enough to drink by then. He said I should go. But I sat down defiantly on the wet rock, shivering. Both of us shivered. The fog was blowing round us like the cold breath of giants. I looked up at him. He had his head leant back again and that look on his face that was like peace but nearer death.
“Tell me the rules,” I said. “You must know every rule there is, if you found out about them.”
At that, his head came up and he looked almost angry.
“There are no rules,” he said. “Only principles and natural laws. The rules were made by Them. They are caught inside Their own rules now, but there’s no need for you to be caught too. Stay outside. If you’re lucky, you might catch Them up in Their own rules.”
“But there is that rule that nobody can interfere with a Homeward Bounder,” I said. I was thinking about the boy and the waggon. It still made me feel bad.
“Yes,” he said. “There is, isn’t there?”
Then neither of us said anything much for quite a long while. That’s the trouble with misery, or cold. It absorbs you. I still wonder how he could manage to be so human under it. Except, I think, he wasn’t human. Eventually, I put my shivering face up and asked if he’d like another drink.
He was looking off into the fog, rather intently, and shook his head slightly. “Not now, thank you. I think it’s time for the vulture to come.”
I don’t know why, but I got the point at once. I suppose I had been wondering, deep down, what made that new-looking wound of his. I found I was standing up, looking from the wound to his face and feeling ill. “Can’t I beat it off for you?”
“No,” he said, quite severely. “You can’t do things like that against Them, and you mustn’t try. Why don’t you go?”
I wanted to say that I’d stay – stay and hold his hand as it were – but I felt weak with horror. I couldn’t say a thing.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you. But do go. It’s nearly here.”
I looked up where he was looking. And sure enough, moving among the moving mist, were the shadowy wings of a huge bird. It was quite near, flapping overhead, and I could see its beak and its naked pink head. I still meant to stay. I know I did. But I was so horrified to see the bird so near that I went crouching away sideways with one hand over my head, and fell over the anchor, with the other hand on the chains.
It was nothing like the twitch that takes you through a Boundary in the normal way. It was ten times more violent. Those chains were so cold they burnt. But instead of sticking to me, the way freezing things usually seem to do, these flung me off themselves. I felt a sort of sizzling. Then I was crashing away backwards and finishing the fall I’d started, only much harder, on to a hard floor strewn with dead grass.
I lay there, winded, for a bit. I may have cried, I felt so sad. I could see I was in a big barn, a nice warm place smelling comfortably of hay. There was a great grey pile of hay to one side of me, almost up to the wooden rafters. I was a bit annoyed that I’d missed it and landed on the floor. I went on lying there, staring up at the sun flooding in through chinks in the roof and listening to mice or rats scuttling, but I was beginning to feel uneasy. Something was wrong. I knew it was. This barn ought to have been a peaceful place, but somehow it wasn’t.
I got to my knees and turned to the door. And stuck there. The door was a big square of sunlight. Outlined in it, but standing in the shadows, much nearer to me than was pleasant, was someone in a long grey cloak. This one had the hood up, but it made no difference. I knew one of Them when I saw Them. My heart knocked.
“Get up,” said the outline. “Come here.”
Now, this was a funny thing – I needn’t have done what he said. I knew I needn’t. But I was too scared not to. I got up and went over. At first the cloaked outline seemed to shimmer against the sun, but, as I got closer, it was more wavery still, as if I’d had my knuckles pressed to my eyes before I looked at it.
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