A Feast Unknown

I went by Keswick city somewhere in the blackness below and over the lower edge of the great

Skiddaw Forest and probably over Burnt Horse and then the Mungrisdale Common. The Bowscale Fell

(peak height of 2306 feet) was beneath us, if I reckoned correctly and if my own radar was functioning correctly. Then I was over my own estates but could see nothing, of course. I had taken this route instead of going directly to Penrith because I wanted to throw both Noli and the military off.

I cut in again to the frequency on which my presumed agent had been operating. I said, “Start signaling.”

He sounded nervous. He said, “Surely, m’lord, you’re not going to land here! It’s impossible! You’ll get killed!”

Noli and Caliban would say the same thing. Noli would want me alive for the elixir (unless Caliban had told him that the elixir could only be gotten from the Nine, and he was not likely to do that). Caliban would not want his cousin killed (if he knew that she was with me). Nor would he want me killed, since he intended to do that with his bare hands.

I wondered what the Nine would think if one of us died an accidental death? Would the survivor then have to fight the next candidate? Or did the Nine want one of us dead for some unknown reason?

I replied to the man whom, by now, I was convinced was pretending to be the agent.

I said, “What do you advise?”

“The airport at Penrith is by far your best chance,” he replied eagerly.

“I think I’ll land on the road into Mungrisdale,” I said. “I’ll get a car there.”

“You can’t do that, m’lord!” he said. “It’d be suicide! At least Penrith has landing lights!”

“Mungrisdale it is, anyway,” I said.

However, I agreed with him. My plan had been to lure Noli or Caliban into sending men down the road from Cloamby to Mungrisdale and detouring them from Penrith until it was too late. If Noli was intelligent, however, he would send men to Penrith anyway, if he had not done so already.

I realized then that I was convinced that it was Noli down there. Caliban might be close, but he was only on his way to, not in, Grandrith. The time element made this seem likely.

I put the plane into a steep dive from five thousand feet and did not begin to level out until the radar showed that I was 500 feet above ground level. Actually, we were probably much closer. There was just enough visibility for me to see several hundred feet ahead. Since the topography varied much within a short time, our progress resembled that of a very irregular sine wave. Trish gasped once and then closed her eyes. A moment later, she said, “I’m all right now. I just put my fate in the hands of the great god Old

Crow.”

I did not have much time to indulge in conversation. Nevertheless, I said, “Old Crow?”

“Yes. When I was very little, I heard my father say, more than once, that the greatest thing in the world was Old Crow. In my child’s mind, I thought that Old Crow must be a great Indian chief, like

Sitting Bull or Hiawatha. Then I thought that it must be the Great Spirit of the Indians and that my father had a place reserved for him in the Happy Hunting Grounds. So I started to pray to Old Crow. Later, when I found out that it wasn’t an Indian god but a whiskey, I refused to admit my mistake. A god was created in my mind, and it has stayed there since. And I am especially honored above all humankind, because only I have been admitted to the worship of the great god Old Crow.”

By the time she had quit talking, we were close to Penrith. The radio was getting hysterical.

Apparently the military had picked me up, and both frequencies, the port’s and the military’s, were screaming warnings, threaths, and pleas at me.

I thought for a moment of crashing the plane on the Penrith golf course, which is a fairly large one, and parachuting in. I abandoned the idea at once, because I did not want to take a chance on killing someone. No, it would have to be the airport.

I dropped down fast, banked, and came in at the port as if I intended to strafe it. The lights suddenly became visible; I was coming in at the correct location and angle, though too swiftly. The lights along the strip were blurs, and the big lights on top of the control tower were diffused stars. I dropped the plane in from too great a height, not caring if I drove the wheels up through the wings. We struck hard but the wheels and gear held, and the tires did not blow. On the second bounce, I straightened her out and cut the engine speed and feathered the props more. The end of the runway still came up too swiftly, and I went past it, across the grass, and was able to stop it only just short of the parking lot fence.

There was no time to sit and gasp in air and take time to unjangle our nerves. We scrambled out with our bundles in our arms, opened them, put on the raincoats, stuck the automatics in our pockets, and ran towards the gate with the rest of the weapons in our arms.

The doors to the control tower and the passenger buildings were open; figures were ru

Perhaps they did not really think we would try to land there after all the foofaraw, or perhaps they had been delayed for some reason.

Trish used her pencil flashlight to light our path as we ran. We got to the cars well ahead of the people from the buildings. Moreover, these at first ran towards the plane; they did not know we were in the parking lot until a few minutes later. The six cars were a Hillman Minx, two Volkswagens, an MG, a

Facel-Vega, and an Aston-Martin DB4. All were locked and none had keys in the ignition locks.

I smashed in the window of the Aston-Martin and reached in and unlocked the door. Then I raised the hood and, while Trish held the flashlight, went to work with screwdriver and pliers. It took only a minute to jump the wires, but by then we could hear voices, muffled by the wind and the rain. I completed the co

A man yelled, “Here! I say! What do you think you’re doing there?”

Five men ran towards us. I put the car into gear and took off with a squealing of tires. Wet as the pavement was, the rubber burned. There was a pinging sound as we went through the open gates. A hole appeared in the windshield between us. I shifted to second. A second car had appeared behind the first down the street. In my rear view mirror I could see a pair of headlights come on in the parking lot.

Trish was busy taking the automatic from my pocket and laying it on the seat beside me, breaking open the .22, and assembling it.

Flames spurted from alongside the first auto heading for us. I began swerving but had little room to maneuver because the hundred-yard gap between us was narrowing swiftly. I was doing 60 mph by then, and the oncoming cars were probably doing 40 mph. It swerved away when I did. The driver had acted defensively; he must have thought I intended to crash him or was playing “chicken” and he did not want a head-on crash with an impact of 100 mph.

In any event, we both skidded. I compensated properly but the Aston-Martin continued to turn, moving forward also and spi

She said, “I think I got one! A hand flew up and dropped a gun out the window!”

Our car ended its whirl pointed in the right direction, so I just kept on going.