CHAPTER 15
Following a restorative stop in Barion, Eliot and Janet forded the Great Salt River, half a mile wide and six inches deep, a vast gray-brown ribbon spilling through the green countryside like somebody left a hose on somewhere. They passed a low, grassy hill on which an enormous white figure was etched; the grass and soil had been cleared away in lines so that the white chalky substrate underneath showed through. It was a simple cartoon of a man holding a staff horizontally above his head. He was usually there, or thereabouts—sometimes he wandered, but he was there today. It was good to see him still at his post.
They trotted through open country, following paths in the grass like an old carpet that had worn thin. They crossed sun-blessed fields with stone walls crisscrossing them, real classics, almost pristine. Every way you looked the landscape of Fillory composed itself into even lines, ridgelines and tree lines, near, middle and far distance, each one a shade paler than the last, gently sloping to the left and the right and the left. A long, heavy tranche of cloud lay above the horizon, utterly still, its outline etched finely against the sky, like the silhouette of a breaking wave cut out of paper.
“Look at it all,” Janet said. “Just look at it. It’s almost like the world isn’t ending.”
“Almost.”
Even now it still felt unreal. With so much beauty everywhere it was easy to forget that Fillory was a dying land. Maybe this was Fillory’s hectic glow.
Then they plunged out of the sunlight into the gloom of the Darkling Woods, where they’d appeared the very first time they came to Fillory. This was a more chaotic scene than the Queenswood; not all the trees were sentient, and the ones that were tended to be loners, and not very civic-minded. They spent a morning looking for the exact spot on which they’d arrived—there was a clock-tree there, they remembered, and a sort of a gully—and there would have been a nice circularity to it, paying their respects to where it had all started. But they argued about where it was, and in the end it turned out that neither of them was right, by which time they were both in bad moods. They couldn’t even find the Two Moons Inn, where they’d kind of hoped to stop for some lunch and a beer.
The next morning they broke out of the woods again and into the Clock Barrens, which turned out to be a vast flat plain sparsely covered with tiny twisted scrub trees, the tallest of them only waist high. It was a bonsai forest. The Barrens began more or less abruptly, as things tended to in Fillory: it was one of the peculiarities of Fillory that it bore an uncanny resemblance to a map of itself.
Eliot had never seen the Clock Barrens before. There had never been any particular reason to go here, and he guessed he’d just never gotten around to it. Good to check that box before it was too late.
“So that’s it,” he said.
Words failed him. They sometimes did. Eliot wondered if he was seeing it for the last time as well as the first, and what else he hadn’t seen, and wouldn’t ever see.
“I thought it would be . . .” Janet said. “I don’t know. Clockier.”
She poked at one of the stunted trees with a headless axe.
“Me too.”
“Maybe it is and we’re just looking at it wrong. Maybe from overhead it looks like a giant clock or something.”
“It so does not look like a giant clock from overhead.”
There were no paths, but they didn’t especially need any. The little scrub trees were far enough apart that the horses could walk between them. Eliot had to fight a feeling of panic, an urgent need for decisive action. This was day six of Janet’s timeline, and even though she’d made it up on the spur of the moment it had taken on an authoritative feel. They had a lead, a slim one, but it was a stretch to call it an adventure. It wasn’t much to hang a quest on. They were trotting along in search of they didn’t even really know what, and there was no way to speed up the process, if there even was a process. It was quixotic, was what it was. Not even that, it was sub-quixotic. My kingdom for a windmill to tilt at.
“I had an idea last night,” Janet said. “For saving the world. I woke up with it in the middle of the night but then forgot all about it till now. Are you ready?”
“Ready.”
“We hunt the White Stag, like Quentin did. We catch it or shoot it or whatever you do with it. We get three wishes. We wish Fillory would last forever and not die. Done. Mischief managed.”
Eliot was silent.
“You have to admit—”
“No, it’s good,” he said. “It’s definitely good. You think the stag could do that?”
“No idea. But it’s worth a try, right?”
“Definitely worth a try. Agreed. If this quest is a bust we’ll do that.”
“Plus we’d still have two wishes left over after we saved the world,” Janet said. “One each. What else would you wish for?”
“I feel like I should wish for Quentin back.”
Janet laughed.
“Then I could use my wish to wish him away again. Psych!”
They slept that night in the barrens; they had to burn flat a circle of ground to make room for their tent. The trees were surprisingly fireproof—the wood was fantastically hard and dense—but when they caught they burned like rocket fuel, hot on their faces, sending sparks and spears of light up into the night sky and leaving fountainous afterimages on their vision. It made for a July Fourth atmosphere, a summer carnival in a wasteland, and they broke out the last of the wine. After a couple of bottles Janet suggested they start a huge forest fire, because it would look cool; Eliot thought it would be more prudent not to, but he agreed that if they couldn’t save the world they might as well come back here and burn the Clock Barrens before the end.
By mid-morning the next day, day seven, they could see where they were going: a single clump of trees sticking up on the horizon, regular-size non-bonsai ones. As they got closer they saw that the trees stood in a circle, a thin ring one tree deep, and that there was a house in the middle.
“Barren, or barrens?” Janet said. “Can you have just one barren? Or multiple barrens? Barrenses?”
“Hush. This is it.”
They drew up a hundred yards from the ring. They were all clock-trees, every one. It was a strange and beautiful tableau. Eliot had never seen more than one full-grown clock-tree at a time; Quentin used to joke that there was probably only one clock-tree in Fillory, it just moved very fast when they weren’t looking. But here were twelve of them, and all different kinds: there was a gnarled oak; a slender birch with a rectangular dial; a needle-straight pine; a melted-looking, morbidly obese baobab.
The house in the middle was perfectly square, with a steeply pitched shingled roof. It was made of a pale stone that looked like it had been brought from a long way off.
“Very Hansel and Gretel,” Janet said.
“It’s not like it’s a candy house.”
“You know what I mean.”
He did actually, there was a fairy-tale feel to it all. Nobody answered when they knocked so they walked around to the back, where they found an old woman on her knees working in a vegetable garden. The resident witch, obviously. Her hair was gray but pulled back in a girlish ponytail. A small woman, she wore a long brown dress, coarse and practical. When she stood up to greet them her face was pleasant and peaceful, though there was something mischievous in it too.
“Greetings,” she said, “to the High King of Fillory. And to Queen Janet, of course.”
“Hi,” Eliot said. “Sorry to drop in like this.”
“Not at all. I knew you were coming.” She crouched down again and went back to what she was doing, which was fixing a little wicker cloche that stood over some sweet peas. “I figured you weren’t trying to be stealthy when you lit those trees on fire. Are you wondering how I know your names?”
“Because we’re famous?” Janet said. “Because we’re the king and queen of you?”
“I know your names,” the woman said, “because I’m a witch. I’m a bit famous too. Jane Chatwin. Or as I used to be known, the Watcherwoman.”
“Jane Chatwin,” Eliot said. He felt something very close to awe. “Well. We meet at last.”
She was right, she was famous: she was one of the first children to come to Fillory, decades ago, and she had haunted it for decades as the mysterious Watcherwoman. It was she who, with the help of a magic watch that controlled time, helped orchestrate their journey to Fillory in the first place, and their disastrous confrontation with the Beast, who had once been her brother, Martin Chatwin.
“Or are you still the Watcherwoman? What shall we call you?”
“Oh, Jane is fine. I haven’t been the Watcherwoman for years now.”
“Somehow I thought you’d be hotter,” Janet said.
“You’ve been talking to Quentin. Why don’t you come inside, we’ll have some tea.”
The cottage was well kept, neat as a pin and swept to within an inch of its life. The décor was a crude Fillorian approximation of the interwar English drawing rooms that Jane must have remembered from her childhood. Funny that for all the effort she’d put into escaping the real world, she’d wound up re-creating it here. She summoned a blue bloom of fire out of her stove and placed a teakettle on it. Hard to say where she got a natural gas hookup out here.
“One could boil the water with magic,” she said, “but it never tastes quite the same.”
While they waited they sat around a sunny-yellow wooden table with a water glass full of wildflowers on it. Now that they were here Eliot thought he’d wait a bit before he popped the big question.
“How long have you been living here?” he asked. “We didn’t even know you were still in Fillory.”
“Oh, I never left. I’ve been here for years, ever since that business with you and Quentin and Martin. Since I broke my watch.”
“I’ve always wondered about that,” Janet said. “Is it really gone?”
“It’s gone. There’s nothing left. I broke it and jumped on the pieces.”
“Darn.”
Eliot hadn’t even thought of that. It might’ve been handy, if they could’ve put it back together. Though he wasn’t sure what they would go back and do differently. Maybe they could just relive the same couple of years forever. Was that how it worked? It was confusing. And irrelevant now.
“Not that I don’t miss it,” Jane said. “As it turned out, it was all that was keeping me young. When I broke it I went from twenty-five to seventy-five overnight, or thereabouts—with all that back-and-forthing I’d lost track of how old I really was. Now I know.” She looked down at the backs of her hands, which were ropy and mottled. “I wish the dwarfs had warned me. They must have known.”
“I’m sorry,” Eliot said. He tasted his tea; it was bitter, and it tingled on his lips. “Fillory owes you a debt.”
“We all owe each other debts. I always thought you must hate me, for the way I used you.”
Janet shrugged.
“You did what you had to. It’s not like you got off easy—your brother’s dead. And without you we never would have found our way to Fillory at all. Call it a wash. Though I did wonder what happened to you. What the hell are you doing all the way out here?”
“I study with the dwarfs now. They’re teaching me clockwork.”
“I didn’t know there were any dwarfs out here,” Eliot said. “I thought they only lived in the mountains.”
“There are dwarfs everywhere. They’re like ants—for every one you see, there’s fifty more you don’t. These ones are underground.” She tapped her foot on the floor. “There’s tunnels all the way under the barrens. You’re sitting over one of the entrances.”
Huh. Janet had the wrong fairy tale, she should have said Snow White. He suppressed an urge to look under his chair. It made him a bit uncomfortable to think that Fillory might be riddled with dwarf-tunnels. They’d never done anybody any harm, yet, but Jesus. They were like termites.
Though it did explain who’d run a gas line into her cottage.
“There’s an entire city down there. I would show you but the dwarfs are touchy about their secrets. They’re terribly polite, but they’d find some reason not to let you in.”
“How come they let you in?” Janet said.
“I’ve paid my dues. Plus I did them a few favors.”
“Like what?”
“Like saving Fillory.”
There was a funny kind of competitiveness in the room, a rivalry: the first generation of Fillorian royalty versus the second. Jane Chatwin didn’t seem especially fazed by Janet’s bluntness. On the evidence it was hard to imagine Jane Chatwin being fazed by anything.
“We saved Fillory,” Janet said.
“Twice,” Eliot said.
“But who’s counting.”
“It’s a start,” Jane said.
When they’d finished their tea she showed them into the next room, which had a pleasant smell of very pure mineral oil and raw-cut metal. The walls were studded with hooks, and on each hook hung a pocket watch. There were brass watches, steel watches, silver and gold and platinum watches. They had white faces with black numbers and black faces with white numbers and clear crystal faces that showed the movements behind them. Some just told the time, some were crowded with tiny subdials that displayed the temperature and the season and the positions of celestial bodies. Some of them were as fat as softballs; some of them were the size of cuff links.
“Did you really make all these?” Janet said. “They’re awesome.”
You could tell she really thought they were. Eliot also got the impression Janet wanted one but wasn’t quite up to asking.
“Most of them,” Jane Chatwin said. “It keeps me out of trouble.”
“Oh my God,” Janet said. “You’re trying to rebuild the watch, aren’t you? The time-travel one! Aren’t you? You’re going to reverse-engineer it or whatever!”
Jane shook her head solemnly.
“Oh. Well, I wish you would.”
“If they don’t control time, what do they do?” Eliot asked.
“They tell time,” Jane said. “That’s enough.”
When the tour was over they went back outside and admired the garden again. Behind it, rusted and half drowned in grass, were the broken remains of what Eliot took to be the Watcherwoman’s famous ormolu clock-carriage, run down at last. He wanted to ask about it, but he sensed that from Jane’s point of view the visit was coming to an end, and he wasn’t leaving without what they came for.
“What are the dwarfs doing all the way out here anyway?” Janet asked. “Why build a bunch of tunnels in the middle of nowhere? Or under the middle of nowhere?”
“I’ll show you.” Jane took a spade that was leaning against the house and stuck it into the ground with a coarse chuff. When she turned over the shovelful there were glints of something in it. “Didn’t you ever wonder why it was called the Clock Barrens?”
“I guess I did.”
Jane bent down with a groan and picked a couple of the shiny things out of the soil, three or four of them, and held them out. In the palm of her hand lay two tiny, perfect gears, a brass wheel as thin as paper, and a delicate coiled mainspring.
“Clockwork,” she said. “It’s naturally occurring here. You should see the big stuff they mine, deep down. You could make Big Ben out of it. I’m not entirely sure that they didn’t.”
She flung them away into the grass. Eliot had to suppress an urge to go after them. This kind of thing, totally inexplicable random strangeness like this, made him want to save Fillory more than ever.
“Plus they like the dwarfiness of the trees,” she added.
“Jane,” Eliot said, “we came here for a reason. Ember says that Fillory is dying. The end of the world is coming.”