THE PARENTS HAD COME OUT into the hall, to open the front door and spill out welcoming light for their guests.
‘Good old Winterbums!’ Father said.
‘Charlie!’ Mother said.
‘What?’
‘How can I stop the children doing it if you keep doing it?’
‘All right – good old WinterBEHINDS, then.’
The Lamb was delighted to see his best friend from school (though it was a little sickening that they were supposed to address each other as ‘Hilary’ and ‘Arthur’ out of school hours), and they all liked Winterbum’s big sister Lilian. She was a large, loud, laughing girl, who had been at school with Anthea; Father jokily called her ‘Airy-Fairy Lilian’, after a famous poem, because she was anything but airy-fairy and always beat him at tennis.
‘We’re very lucky to have Lilian with us,’ Winterbum’s mother said. ‘She only has forty-eight hours’ leave. I think it’s quite dreadful to make girls drive ambulances when they’re needed at home.’
Lilian – once the local tomboy and Robert’s hoydenish partner-in-crime – had left home to work as an ambulance driver.
‘Stow it, Mother,’ Lilian said cheerfully. She was wearing her Red Cross uniform of dark blue coat and skirt and felt hat. ‘The wounded need me more than you do.’
Her mother said young people didn’t listen to their parents anymore.
‘When did they ever?’ Father said. ‘Mine wanted me to be a vicar! Here, Lilian – I’m trusting the box of bangers to your airy-fairy yet capable hands.’
The two mothers and Winterbum’s father didn’t want to see the bonfire, and shut themselves in the sitting room. Everyone else pulled on coats and hats and trooped out into the darkness, laughing and stumbling in the shifting, unreliable light of torches and lanterns.
‘Mother can’t stop moaning, but I just let it wash over me,’ Lilian was telling Jane. ‘It’s the sheerest bliss to be back at home in a soft bed – our hostel in London isn’t too bad but the mattresses are agony. Most of my life is spent shivering in railway stations, waiting for the hospital trains to bring in the wounded. And then you should see me fighting my way through the London traffic, though people are usually pretty good about making way for an ambulance.’
‘She’s allowed to mess about with the engine,’ Winterbum told the Lamb. ‘Before the war, she said she wanted to be a blacksmith, but now she wants to be a motor mechanic. It puts Mother in a terrible flap.’
They walked around the corner of the stables, and saw that the magnificent bonfire already had a heart of flame, thanks to Mr Field. The dry wood caught quickly and the fire lit them all with a dramatic, deep orange light.
Father – as excited as anyone – shouted, ‘Death to the traitor!’ and threw a handful of bangers and firecrackers at the Guy Fawkes perched on the bonfire’s summit. Robert lit the Roman candles, which shot out great fountains of red and green sparks.
Robert and Lilian had been great friends as children, and the two of them laughed and horsed about as if they’d never grown up. The air was filled with smoke that made everyone’s eyes sting. In the darkness Edie held tight to Jane’s hand; the flashes reminded her of the trench where they had seen Cyril, and the shapeless ‘Guy’ looked disturbingly human in the flickering light of the flames.
And then it suddenly turned into a figure made of flames, a figure with a squat body and long arms and legs.
‘Crikey,’ Jane said, ‘it’s the Psammead!’
Edie was too horrified to make a sound. She stared as the fiery figure grew larger and larger, until the entire bonfire looked as if it had turned into a huge, blazing Psammead. Burning branches crashed down around it, and Jane pulled Edie out of the stinging sparks; the air was full of them, like a blizzard of angry fireflies.
‘Stand back there!’ Lilian shouted. ‘Bobs – start pumping!’
Lilian and Robert had grabbed the stirrup pump from the stable yard. Robert pumped for all he was worth, while Lilian directed a jet of water at the fire.
‘NO!’ Edie screamed, horrified. ‘Not water! He’ll get wet – he’ll be ill!’
‘Shhh!’ Jane gently shook her. ‘Keep quiet – honestly, it’s all right!’
Edie dared to look, and to her great relief the flaming sand fairy had vanished and it was just an ordinary bonfire again, partly black and smoking where it had blazed out of control.
‘Well played, you two,’ Father said breathlessly. ‘Lilian, you went at that like Queen Boadicea – Bobs, old boy, well done for knowing where to find the stirrup pump – which is more than I did!’
‘You built the fire too tall and narrow, that’s all,’ Robert said, equally breathless.
‘Yes, and you stopped it falling right on top of Jane and Baby – are you all right, girlies? Not burned to crisps?’
‘We’re fine.’ Jane nudged Edie, who was still trembling.
‘And where are the boys?’
‘Here!’ The Lamb and his friend stepped out of the shadows. Their faces in the flickering light of the bonfire were striped with soot.
‘Look here, Bobs,’ Father said, ‘someone sent me a pair of excellent tickets for The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre tomorrow. I’m giving them to you, on the condition that you take Lilian, as a thank-you.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ Robert grinned at Lilian. ‘What about it, old bean?’
‘You know, I’d love to,’ Lilian said. ‘It’s the last night of my leave and Mother won’t like me going out – but Mother doesn’t like anything I do at the moment.’
‘That’s settled then.’
‘I say, it’ll be a lark to wear a frock again – it’s ages since I dressed up as a girl!’
*
The moment everyone had gone Edie dashed upstairs to the attic to make sure the Psammead was safe; she was very worried that the water had hurt him. It was a great relief to find him dry and sleepy in his sand bath.
‘What is it? Why are you digging me out in the middle of the night?’
‘You appeared again – you were made of fire, and you grew into a huge burning Psammead.’ She picked him up carefully, scrubbed her lips with her sleeve to make sure they were perfectly dry, and dropped a kiss on the top of his head. ‘Are you really all right?’
‘I was – until you woke me up!’ He was grumbling, but didn’t object when Edie carried him out of the chilly attic and downstairs to the old nursery, where Robert had revived the dying fire. ‘Couldn’t this have waited till morning?’
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘I can’t go to bed until I know you’re not going to burst into flames again.’
‘I’m sorry I missed that,’ the Lamb said. ‘All me and Winterbum saw was a normal bonfire. I bet it happened because of another of your crimes – you’d better make a list of everybody you burned, so you can repent properly.’
‘I didn’t burn anyone! As I have said before, I was a thrifty tyrant, and burning people takes a lot of fuel.’
Robert was laughing. ‘It doesn’t sound as if your repentance has got very far – you’re still as vain as a peacock.’
‘But he truly has got kinder,’ Edie said eagerly. ‘And he admits he was wrong sometimes.’
‘I can’t tell you the meaning of the fire,’ the Psammead said. ‘I am undergoing certain uncomfortable feelings – it feels quite a lot like trapped wind, but Edie says it’s remorse.’ He sighed heavily. ‘If you must know, while you were all outside, I had a troubling dream about a young scholar in my court. His name was Mapeth.’
‘And I expect you did something bad to him.’ Edie was sad but resigned.
The Psammead winced. ‘Let me go back to my sand bath now. Tomorrow I must dictate a full confession to your professor. I’m sure he’ll be able to fill in the gaps.’
Letter from the Psammead to Professor J. Knight and
Mr E. Haywood (dictated to Jane)
Dear scribes,
Greetings from the Powerful One. I seek enlightenment.
Last night Jane and Edie saw a fire change into a giant burning sand fairy. But I can’t remember anything to do with fire. I was having quite a different sort of memory – a dream about a young man named Mapeth.
Frankly, I don’t come out of this well.
Mapeth was a brilliant young scholar in my desert kingdom. He did my accounts and also wrote very good worship songs all about me. When the High Priestess brought out her book of poems I was extremely jealous and longed to produce some poems of my own. Of course, I couldn’t write them myself – so I made Mapeth write them and I passed them off as mine. They were lovely poems and they were very popular – and then it was HER turn to be jealous of me!
But I didn’t want anyone to know the real author, so I made Mapeth join the army. He was weedy and skinny and very short-sighted, and I was sure he’d be killed almost at once – I sent him to the place my soldiers called the Valley of No Return, the point being that nobody did. Mapeth was horribly wounded but he did not die. One of the warrior maidens from the temple was in love with him; she followed him into the dreadful valley, plucked him out of the jaws of death and nursed him back to health. Edie thinks this is highly romantic. Human girls are so sentimental.
The fire still puzzles me; perhaps you can find out what it means. I really can’t remember anything else. But I MUST remember or I can’t move on to the green fields all covered with white blossoms that I have glimpsed in my dreams.
These green fields are not in my past – might they be my final refuge?
You’ll be glad to hear I’m pretty well, despite the shockingly damp weather.
Yours graciously
HE WHO MUST BE WORSHIPPED AND OBEYED
The Last Psammead