Peter Dickinson - Changes 02 by Heartsease

Author:Heartsease
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

VI

It was glorious to be out of the fingering wind.

The cabin, an odd-shaped chamber with a tilting floor and walls which both curved and sloped, was beautifully warm and stuffy — warm from the round stove which crackled against the inner wall, stuffy from being lived in by three people. The witch lay in a corner, his feet down the slope of the floor, and watched them scramble down the ladder; the reflection of daylight from the open hatch made his eyes gleam bright as a robin’s. He looked thin, tired, ill — but not dying, not any longer.

“Welcome to the resistance movement,” he said in his strange voice, slow and spoken half through his nose. “What you got there, Tim? Another patient?”

Tim cooed happily and put his bundle on the floor, a wet, yellow, floppy pup, just big enough to have followed its mother with the pack but not big enough to fend for itself, nor to tilt off its patch of ice and drown. It snarled at them all and slashed at Tim’s hand; he

didn’t snatch it away but let the puppy chew at it with sharp little teeth until Lucy handed him a mutton bone. The puppy took it ungraciously into the darkest corner and settled down to a private growling match.

Otto laughed.

“What shall we call him?” he said. “If it is a him.”

“Davey,” said Margaret without thinking. The other two children looked at her, surprised.

“Means something to you?” said Otto. “Okay, fine. What happened outside? We heard the noises but we couldn’t figure them out. Leastways you won your battle.”

Jonathan told him what they had done in dry sentences, as though it had happened to someone else and was not very interesting anyway. Otto listened without a word and then lay silent, twitching his eyes from face to face.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I reckoned I’d just been mighty lucky till now. I didn’t know we had a thinker pulling for us.”

“We can’t do it if we’re not lucky,” said Jonathan without emphasis.

“Yes,” burst in Margaret, “but we couldn’t have got anywhere without Jo. He’s made all the luck work

“The question is can we make the engines work,” said Jonathan.

“What’s she got?” said Otto.

“I think it must be diesel,” said Jonathan. “It’s very old; there’s a brass plate on the engine saying 1928. I can’t see anywhere for a furnace, or for storing coal; and there are feed-pipes which look right for oil and wrong for water, and a big oil tank behind here.”

He slapped the partition behind the stove. Otto whistled.

“Nineteen twenty-eight!” he said. “A genuine vintage tub, then. Isn’t there anything newer?”

“Yes,” said Jonathan, “the other tug, the one that’s not sunk I mean, looks much newer and much more complicated. But it’s in a mess, as though they were using it all the time just before the Changes came. But this one’s very tidy, with everything stowed away and covered up and tied down. I thought perhaps it was so old that they didn’t use it at all, but just kept it here, laid up.

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