Castle Of Bone Read Online Free PDF Page B

bracken. The sky looked blue again and was cut by the little teeth of the bracken fronds. There was a sharp, green smell, and tickings from insects he could not see. The cricket bat flashed in corners of his vision, but though he searched the sky he could not see the kestrel any more and so he shut his eyes, let his thinking narrow to a single point; a point he had pursued, yet avoided, all day long.
    He thought of dreams; that flowed in your mind when it was freed by sleep, but always remained inside your mind, did not involve physical, breakable, bones and flesh and skin.
    But this world he had been into twice had made him cold; it had made him wet, so it could not be a dream world. It had to be altogether another world, another time, like Thomas the Rhymer’s fairyland, where a man lived for years while no time passed in his own world. Or else – and at thought of this Hugh contracted with fear – or else, he emerged from it after what seemed but a few days, and found that hundreds of years had gone by; so that he was a stranger, out of time.
    But if it had not been a dream, the reality he had experienced had been of a different kind. It was as if everything he knew had been taken apart and then put together in a different way, in a pattern just as agreeable yet apparently wayward, because it was not the pattern in which he normally lived. He might follow it in time but it would take him time to do that; as eyes take time to adjust from light to dark.
    It was a world, Hugh thought, in which animals, trees, landmarks were not just animals or trees or landmarks, but friends or enemies, or both at once. He remembered suddenly, vividly, the alder trees; which had surrounded him like friends, but then tried to hinder his going, like enemies. And the birch trees – once when Hugh looked back they had seemed peaceful, harmonious, like slender peaceful women; but the next moment they had appeared as warriors, with twigs and branches for arrows and for spears.
    It all came back to Hugh now, what had happened to him last night. What dream he’d had. It was not a dream, he knew, but he did not know what else to call it. And that evening, Monday, when he found himself back in this other place, it was as if he had never been away.
    Light came slowly. He was still walking through the same bleak landscape, towards the same castle, which looked farther away than ever, because now Hugh could see, between it and him, the deep folds in the country which he would have to traverse. There was one fold immediately below him. A group of willow trees stood at the centre of it, beside a little stream.
    The snow was patchier than it had seemed at night and the land beneath it, tired and brown and dim, was made drearier if anything by the strengthening daylight. The light was at the same time strong yet bleak; it bleached out the castle which no longer looked as if it was made of glass. It looked more like a castle made of bone.
    Hugh went downwards now, into the hollow with the willow trees. The slope cut off the castle bit by bit, until he could see only the topmost battlements, and then not even them, for the hollow, engulfing him, wiped out the landscape. There was only sky and the remains of bracken, sodden and brown and patched with coarse, greyish-looking snow. There was also the group of willow trees.
    Hugh put out a hand and touched a willow tree. The bark was pitted, coarse and lined. He stroked it, feeling still more roughness than his eyes saw, and when his hand slowed it took a moment for him to realize that he had not meant to slow it; that his brain had not ordered nerve, nerve had not ordered muscle, even subconsciously. The hand had seemed to slow, stop, entirely of its own accord. It was as if it had frozen. And when he touched the tree with his other hand he found that that at once was frozen too, that he could not move either hand, that indeed he could not move at all.
    His brain searched out each nerve to command each muscle.