It was also at this time that they came across roads; the great bands of concrete which cut across the face of the land. Beth explained the purpose of them to Nab and he in turn told the others although they had all seen them before. Beth told them of the dangers if they were crossing when one of the Urkku vehicles was travelling along, and she always led the way over them, standing on the verge looking out for headlights and beckoning them to go over one by one when she thought it was safe. Sometimes two of them would be safely on the far side, normally Perryfoot and Brock as they went first, and then a stream of cars would appear from nowhere and the animals would lie terrified behind a bank, or hidden in a ditch by the verge, while the cars roared past in a thundering storm of noise and light, choking them with dust and fumes and leaving them shaking with fear. Once they had been crossing on a bend and Beth, thinking it was safe, had motioned Perryfoot across. He had just hopped on to the tarmac when a car screamed around the corner trapping him in its lights. The hare had frozen, mesmerized as Nab remembered from the incident he’d seen in the field at the front of Silver Wood, but fortunately Beth had just had time to leap out and pull him back before he was crushed under the wheels. The driver had seen the girl in the glare of his headlamps and had pulled to a halt further up the road. Beth had gone up to him when he got out and told him that it was her little dog he had almost run over and that she had left him tied to a tree at the side of the road in the ditch. He offered her and her dog a lift home as it was a cold night and it was past eleven o’clock, but she had politely declined the offer explaining that she did not live far away and was just taking the dog out for its last walk. The man had then wished her goodnight, walked back to his car and driven off, feeling slightly bemused by the sight of the wild-looking pretty young girl in the brown tweed cape whose eyes had seemed to transfix him with their depth and intensity and whose blonde hair had tumbled like a mane around her shoulders. She did not live far away, she had said, and yet the nearest house he had passed was eight miles back. Once back in the familiar surroundings of his own car, it was almost as if he had dreamt the entire incident.
Some time later they came across their first town. The previous night they had noticed a red glow in the dark sky and had wondered where it came from. They had stopped at dawn by the base of a huge oak tree and rested all day. That evening they set off again and the glow had still been there ahead of them until, towards midnight, they became aware of a constant hum coming to them on the wind. It was such an indistinguishable mass of sound that it could almost be forgotten about and it reminded the animals of a strong wind rushing through trees. As they got nearer the glow became brighter and the noise louder and more jagged so that now, over and above that level hum, could be heard the occasional horn of a car or the sound of a heavy lorry churning its way through the streets or a motor cycle buzzing along an empty road.
They were approaching the summit of a sharp rise in a meadow: suddenly they were at the top and there, stretched out in front of them, lay the town. It was not particularly big but to the animals it seemed as if it went on for ever. Their ears now felt as if they were being assaulted by the noise and the sky was ablaze with light; gone now was that comparatively gentle red glow, this was a maelstrom of reds, oranges and whites which carved away the darkness of the night in a huge arc above; and all around, like the crooked spolces of a giant wheel, stretched out ribbons of red as the street lights followed the roads out into the suburbs. Sometimes they could see twin pairs of lights travelling along as a car returned home late or a lorry made its lonely way through the town. As they turned a corner, these lights would sometimes, if they were on the outskirts, beam out into the darkness of the surrounding countryside and swing round as the car turned: once or twice they shone straight out at the animals, blinding them momentarily until they continued on their way.
The air was heavy with the sickly cloying smell of fumes and chemicals from a large industrial estate on one side; here also the lights were brighter and there was more noise and activity. The smell stuck in their nostrils and put a strange metallic taste at the back of their mouths; they felt unable to draw their breath properly and they became a little desperate and frightened as every time they breathed they felt this unfamiliar air go through their lungs and make them feel like retching.
They stood at the top of the rise for a while, scared but also fascinated by what seemed like a huge beast breathing fire and smoke and which even at rest was unable to stop the ceaseless turmoil within itself. Nab asked Beth lots of questions and she answered them as best she could because she was not very familiar with town life. As she told him all she knew he became cold with fear for he realized that he would be totally unable to survive in it; to live in the middle, surrounded by that mass of concrete and lights and noise, would be for him a nightmare.
‘We cannot go through it,’ he said to Warrigal, who was standing at his side. ‘I would not be able to feel the Roosdyche and we would lose our bearings. We shall have to go round and hope to pick it up on the other side.’
‘It will take us a long time,’ replied the owl.
‘We have no choice. If we got lost in there it would take us far longer. We should never get out. And we would be certain to be spotted. Beth has said untold numbers of Urkku dwell inside it. No; we must go round.’
They set off on a detour around the town, keeping the same distance away from it all the time. It took them fifteen nights; fifteen nights during which the town was their constant companion. By the end they almost felt as if they had come to know it; to become aware of its changing moods as the week wore on from the desperate gaiety of Saturday through the busy workday clatter of the week to the docile slothful slumber of Sunday, before the pattern began again, to repeat itself over and over, inexorably.
They had to go very slowly because of the multitude of outlying dwellings around the town and the busy main roads down which the cars screeched and thundered but there were no mishaps even though sometimes they were forced to go so close to a house that they could hear voices. When Beth heard the familiar household noises drift out through the night air, the clatter of plates in a kitchen or the whistle of a kettle boiling on a cooker or the thump of a pair of feet going upstairs, she felt very strange. They took her back to her other world, the one of which she had been part for so long and which she had now abandoned, and she was reminded of her parents and her home. At these times waves of nostalgia would sweep over her to vanish quickly in the tension of the moment as they crept behind a wall or through a hedge in a garden.
So, while people watched television or lay asleep in their beds, outside in the cool clear night the little band made their slow and careful way round the town until finally they caught sight of the Scyttel in the distance. It was not long then before Nab detected the earth currents which told him that they were once again on the old way and they set out towards the distant mound with excitement and relief; they felt that they were now well and truly on their way and that it would not be too long before they arrived at the place of the Sea Elves where they would meet the Elflord of the Sea and the first part of their journey would be over.
Soon they reached the mound which they had kept in sight for so long. It was smaller than they had imagined from far off and was simply a large flat-topped hummock with a circle of large standing stones set in the grass. Some of the the first Urkku had, by means of logic, been able to recognize the magic power of these places and had attempted to concentrate and magnify their strength by placing these stones on them for, because magic had been denied to them, they were forced to use logic in order to be able to extract and make use of the power. It was only where the magic force was strongest that they were able to perceive the power of the place so there are myriads of lesser Scyttels totally unknown to them and of whose existence only the elves and the animals are aware, for it is only those who possess magic who can feel intuitively where they are. Thus it was only occasionally on their journey that the animals came across one of these larger and more powerful Scyttels. The day they spent at this one was a wild blustery day in early February when the sky was heavy with enormous dark clouds rolling after each other as the wind howled over the plain. They sat huddled behind one of the stones out of the wind, mesmerized by these armies of cloud passing overhead and letting the strength of the Scyttel flow into them. So aware were they of the energy of the place that they were unable to sleep and in fact they felt no need of it. Stretched out behind them they had a view of the entire plain over which they had travelled while ahead of them was a further small range of foothills to cross and they sensed that beyond those lay the sea.
