‘Not take them on the Hallowmount?’ said Tom cautiously, to be sure he had not mistaken her.
‘No – but naturally you wouldn’t. Silly of me!’
‘Why not, though? Or is that a stupid question? And why naturally not?’ He had been feeling so close to her, so comfortable with her, and suddenly he felt alien and out of his depth. There she sat, in her amber-and-bracken autumn suit that wouldn’t have looked abashed in Bond Street, with her smooth brown beehive of hair and her long, elegant legs and incredibly fragile and impractical shoes, as modern as tomorrow, as secure and confident as money and education and travel and native temperament could make her; and without mystery or constraint, as though she were reminding her husband to lock the garage door, she warned him off from taking his week-end camp on the Hallowmount.
‘Oh, we just wouldn’t,’ she said, vaguely smiling, eyes wondering at him a little, but making allowances for him, too, as the incomer, the novice in these parts. ‘We just don’t. I wouldn’t worry too much myself, but some of their mothers might. You weren’t thinking of going there, were you?’
‘Well, no, I wasn’t. Too exposed, anyhow, for October. I was thinking of taking them up between the Westlyns.’
‘Good! Fine!’ said Eve Mallindine, satisfied, and slammed the door shut. She looked up and smiled at him through the open window. ‘No need to go yelling for trouble, is there?’ she said serenely, and shot away up Castle Wylde before the lights at the Cross could change colour again.
And he had not taken them on the Hallowmount. Once, he suspected – and the glance back at himself when younger was revealing – he would have gone there on principle, having been warned to keep away. Not now. Besides, she hadn’t pressed him, hadn’t exactly warned him off. She’d merely indicated to him that the plate was hot, so that he shouldn’t burn his fingers. She’d taken it for granted that no more was necessary where a sane and sensible adult was concerned. And whether it could be considered a sign of good sense and maturity or not, he hadn’t taken them on the Hallowmount.
But in the gathering dark over the remnants of the fire, up there in the shelter between the ridges of the Westlyns, with one ear cocked for sounds of forbidden horseplay from the Three B tents, he had turned his head to stare thoughtfully at the distant ridge of the Hallowmount, with its top-knot of trees and rocks black against the milky spaces between the stars. And he had asked the son what he had never had time to ask the mother.
‘How did it get its name – the Hallowmount? And why is it taken for granted one doesn’t take boys camping there?’
‘Is it?’ said Miles vaguely, flat on his back on a spread ground-sheet, with the faint glow of the fire falling aslant across his smooth, high-boned cheek and broad forehead. Mild wonder stirred in his tone and recalled Eve’s look and voice, but he wasn’t paying very much attention. ‘I suppose it would be, come to think of it. They wouldn’t mind by daylight, but at night they’d probably think it wasn’t the thing to do. On the principle that you never know, you know.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘You tell me. What about the name, for instance?’
‘I don’t think anybody knows much about the name, to be honest, but a lot of them will tell you they do. It goes back into pre-history—’
‘Or thereabouts,’ said Dominic Felse dubiously, demurring at such imprecision in his friend.
‘Let’s not argue about a few hundred years. Anyhow, whenever it was, we don’t know how it arose. Something not quite canny. But all this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ He opened his eyes wide at the sky and sat up, feeling it, perhaps, hardly dignified to conduct a discussion from the supine position. ‘Take the old lead mines,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There couldn’t be anything more practical, but there couldn’t be anything more haunted, either. We have knockers – like in the Cornish tin mines. And Wild Edric’s down there, too, with his fairy wife Godda. And half a dozen others, for all we know. It’s the same with the Hallowmount. Some say it’s “hallow” because it was holy, a place of sacrificial mysteries in the pre-Christian cults. And some say it’s really “hollow,” and not for nothing. They say people have stumbled on the way inside sometimes, and vanished.’
‘Or come back years later,’ said Dominic helpfully, ‘like Kilmeny, with no memory of the time between, and as young as when they disappeared.’
‘Oh, that’s common to every country in Europe,’ said Tom, disappointed. ‘Nearly every hill that has a striking shape or has been the site of occupation from very early times gets that tale attached to it. Are you sure King Arthur isn’t down there, waiting for somebody to blow a horn and wake him up?’
‘No, sir, we use Wild Edric instead round these parts, we don’t need any other saviours.’ That was Milvers, the third of his only-slightly-dragooned sixth-form volunteers for this week-end chore. A clever one, Milvers, stuffed with the history and legends of the borders, all the more because he was not himself a borderer. He might be able to tell more than Miles Mallindine about the documentation of the Hallowmount; but nothing he could say would be as revealing, as perfectly direct and simple as Miles’s mild: ‘All this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ Without pretensions and without reluctance he had included himself in that verdict, in just the same way as his mother dealt herself in. They found nothing incongruous in having one foot in the twentieth century and one in the roots of time.
‘And some say a witch-coven used to meet there,’ said Milvers, warming to the assignment. ‘Did you know that outcrop of rock is known locally as the Altar?’
He hadn’t known, but it didn’t surprise him. Just a place of acquired ill-omen, after all, an accumulation of ordinary superstitions.
‘So that’s it,’ he said. ‘Just bad medicine.’
‘Oh, no, not really. Not
Tom told him, in a strictly edited version, about that lift into town. ‘Your mother evidently thought it was a place to fight shy of. I suppose that’s the legacy of the witches.’
‘I don’t believe there ever were any witches. Just that chain of lives going back so unbelievably far, and a kind of impress left from them all—’ He couldn’t find the words he wanted, and wouldn’t descend to substitutes; he shut his arms helplessly round his knees, and rocked and scowled, still mining within his mind for the means of fluency. When not stirred, he could be a little lazy; it was an effort getting into gear.
‘Then why should everyone be afraid of it?’
Dominic looked at Miles, and Miles looked at Dominic. Tom had seen just such exchanges pass before, and the
