uncle said. “Good luck, Con, and I’ll love you and leave you. Oh, and Con,” he said as I started to climb the metal steps into the tram. He beckoned and I came back down. “Something I forgot,” he said. He led me a little way off across the pavement. “You’re to tell Mr Amos that your name is Grant,” he said, “like mine. If you tell them a posh name like Tesdinic they’ll think you’re too grand for the job. So from now on your name is Conrad Grant. Don’t forget, will you?”
“All right,” I said. “Grant.” Somehow this made me feel a whole lot better. It was like having an alias, the way people did in the Peter Jenkins books when they lived adventurous double lives. I began to think of myself as a sort of secret agent. Grant. I grinned and waved quite cheerfully at Uncle Alfred as I climbed back on the tram and bought my ticket. He waved and went bustling off.
About half the people on the tram were girls and boys my own age. Most of them had plastic bags like mine, with lunch in. I thought it was probably an end-of-term outing to Stallstead from one of the other schools in town. The Stallery tram was a single-line loop that went up into the mountains as far as Stallstead and then down into Stallchester again by the ironworks. Stallstead is a really pretty village right up among the green Alps. People go there all summer for cream teas and outings.
Then the tram gave out a clang and started off with a lurch. My heart and stomach gave a lurch too, in the opposite direction, and I stopped thinking about anything except how nervous I was. This is it, I thought. I’m really on my way now. I don’t remember seeing the shops, or the houses, or the suburbs we went past. I only began to notice things when we reached the first of the foothills, among the woods, and the cogs underneath the tram engaged with the cogs in the roadway, clunk, and we went steeply up in jerks, croink, croink, croink.
This woke me up a bit. I stared out at the sunlight splashing on rocks and green trees and thought, in a distracted way, that it was probably quite beautiful. Then it dawned on me that there was none of the chattering and laughing and fooling about on the tram that there usually is on a school outing. All the other kids sat staring quietly out at the woods, just as I was doing.
They can’t all be going to Stallery to be interviewed! I thought. They can’t! But there didn’t seem to be any teachers with them. I clutched at the slightly sticky cork in my pocket and wondered if I would ever get to use it to call a Walker, whatever that was. But I had to call one, or I would be dead. And I realised that if any of these kids got the job instead of me, it would be like a death sentence.
I was really scared. I kept thinking of the way Uncle Alfred had told me not to be too obvious about taking clothes and then to call myself Grant, as if he wasn’t too sure that his spell on me would work, and I was more frightened than I had ever been before. When the tram came out on the next level part, I stared down at the view of Stallchester nestled below, and the blue peaks where the glacier was, and at Stall Crag, and the whole lot went fuzzy with my terror.
It takes the tram well over an hour to get as high as Stallery, cogging up the steep bits, rumbling through rocky cuttings and stopping at lonely inns and solitary pairs of houses on the heights. One or two people got on or off at every stop, but they were all adults. The other children just sat there, like me. Let them all be going to Stallstead! I thought. But I noticed that none of the ones with bags of lunch tried to eat any of it, as if they might be too nervous for food, just as I was. Though they could be saving it to eat in Stallstead, I thought. I hoped they were.
At last we were running on an almost level part, where there were clumps of trees and meadowlands and even a farm on one side. It looked almost like a lowland valley here. But on the other side of the road there was a high dark wall with spikes on top. I knew this was the wall round Stallery and that we were now really high up. I could even feel the magics here, like a very faint fizzing. My heart began banging so hard it almost hurt.
That wall seemed to run for miles, with the road curving alongside it. There was no kind of break in its dark surface, until the tram swung round an even bigger curve and began slowing down. There was a high turreted gateway ahead in the wall, which seemed to be some kind of a house as well – anyway I saw windows in it – and across the road from this gateway, along the verge by the hedge, I was surprised to see some gypsies camping. I noticed a couple of tumbledown-looking caravans, an old grey horse trying to eat the hedge, and a white dog running up and down the verge. I wondered vaguely why they hadn’t been moved on. It seemed unlike Stallery to allow gypsies outside their gates. But I was too nervous to wonder much.
Clang, clang, went the tram, announcing it was stopping.
A man in a brown uniform came to the gate and stood waiting. He was carrying two weird-shaped brown paper parcels. Barometers? I wondered. Clocks? He came over as the tram stopped and handed the parcels to the driver.
“For the clock mender in Stallstead,” he said. Then, as the driver unfolded the doors, the man came right up into the tram. “This is Stallery South Gate,” he said loudly. “Any young persons applying for employment should alight here, please.”
I jumped up. So, to my dismay, did all the other kids. We all crowded towards the door and clattered down the steps into the road, every one of us, and the gatehouse seemed to soar above us. The tram clanged again and whined away along its tracks, leaving us to our fate.
“Follow me,” the man in the brown uniform said, and he turned towards the gate. It was a gateway big enough to have taken the tram, like a huge arched mouth in the towering face of the gatehouse, and it was slowly swinging open to let us through.
Everyone clustered forward then, and I was somehow at the back. My feet lagged. I couldn’t help myself. Behind me, across on the other side of the road, someone called out in a strong, cheerful voice, “Bye then. Thanks for the lift.”
I looked round to see a tall boy swing himself down from the middle caravan – I hadn’t noticed there were three before – and come striding across the road to join the rest of us.
Anyone less likely to climb out of a shabby, broken-down caravan was hard to imagine. He was beautifully dressed in a silk shirt, a blue linen jacket and impeccably creased fawn trousers, and his black hair was crisply cut in a way that I could see was expensive. He seemed older than the rest of us – I thought, fifteen at least – and the only gypsy things about him were the dark, dark eyes in his confident, good-looking face.
My heart sank at the sight of him. If anyone was going to get the job at Stallery, it would be this boy.
The gatekeeper came pushing past the boy and shook his fist at the gypsy encampment. “I warned you!” he shouted. “Clear off!”
Someone on the driving seat of the front caravan shouted back. “Sorry, guvnor! Just going now!”
“Then get going!” yelled the gatekeeper. “Go on. Hop it. Or else!”
Rather to my surprise, all five caravans moved off at once. I hadn’t realised there were so many and, for another thing, I had thought the grey horse was eating the hedge and not hitched up to any of them. I dimly remembered there was a cooking fire too, with an iron pot hanging over it. But I thought I must have been wrong about that when all six carts bumped down into the road, leaving empty grass behind, and set off clattering away in the direction of Stallstead. The white dog, which had been sniffing at the hedge some way down the road, came pelting after them and leapt up and down behind the last caravan. A thin brown arm came out of the back of this caravan and the dog was hauled inside with enormous scramblings. It looked as if the dog had been taken by surprise as much as I had.
The gatekeeper grunted and
