Angel Isle

CHAPTER

19

“Wake up, Maja,” said Ribek’s voice. “Benayu wants to know what you’d like for breakfast.”

“Oyster-and-bacon pie,” she mumbled.

“Bit rich for an invalid?”

“I’m not an invalid. I’m just tired. I just want a little to taste.”

“Provided you have some chicken broth first. Your stomach’s shrunk too, remember.”

“All right.”

“Good as my grandad made, I’ll have what you leave, well as my own,” said the Ropemaker.

“Two oyster-and-bacon pies,” said Benayu’s voice. “One chicken broth, three lots of lamb chops, one raw and two medium-rare, one spiced kidneys. Lime water, ale, and coffee. Fodder for the horses. Anything else?”

“Rhubarb-and-ginger crumble,” said Ribek. “Milaja Finsdaughter at Frog Bottom does a good one.”

“Coming up. There’ll be a ten-minute wait on Saranja’s kidneys.”

“They taste best if you can make them disappear from under a warlord’s nose,” said Saranja.

“Look, I’ve got an Empire to sort out,” said Benayu, obviously delighting in the challenge.

“First things first,” said Ribek.

An extraordinary sense of well-being pervaded the little encampment. They were in a smooth patch of thymy turf ringed by a wall of the jutting rocks of which Angel Isle was made. Maja had seen the place only briefly last night, by the light of the pale glow the Ropemaker, back in his human form and wearing his turban, had shed around him as he had knelt by her side and stared down at her. Now, even with her eyes shut against the morning glare, Maja could hear the exhilaration in everyone’s voices. Not wanting to miss a moment of it, she opened her eyes, rolled on her side and tried to push herself up. Instantly Ribek’s arm slid under her shoulders to help.

“I can do it,” she said crossly.

But she couldn’t, and in the end was forced to let him lift her and resettle her in a nest he’d made out of the bedding rolls with her back propped against one of the rocks, arranging her limbs much as he’d done when she’d been a rag doll inside a magical egg in that other universe. Not enough stuffing, she thought, gazing at the stick-thin legs stretched out in front of her.

“How are you doing?” he said quietly.

“Better. I think it was that extra-dimension stuff wore me out. I could feel it eating me away. It wasn’t Benayu’s fault, or Jex’s. They had to let it happen so I could follow the trail. I’ll be all right now we’re back in our own world. Look, I’m a rag doll still. Floppy legs.”

“We need Striclan back to feed you up. Can’t go on asking Benayu to keep doing this.”

“What about the Watchers? Won’t they notice?”

“The ones who came after us are still trapped on the other side of the barrier, and he’s put a screen all round the island. He seems to think it’s all right. Ah, this smells like your broth.”

“First things first, you said,” said Benayu, not bothering to hide the boyish pleasure he felt in showing off, just as he might have done on the mountain pasture where they had first met him all those months ago. The soup tasted as good as it smelled. She sipped it with dreamy relish as the warmth flowed into her bloodstream. She let Ribek have a taste of it and drank the rest herself. The next course arrived as she put the mug down.

“I could show you the warlord’s face if you like,” said Benayu as he handed Saranja her pungent-odored bowl.

“All right…Oh! That’s Tarab Arkan. He was a real beast. He treated his women like trash, punched them and kicked them when they had daughters and then gave them away to his bodyguard to do what they liked with. Nobody dared suggest it might be something to do with him that he didn’t have any sons. He’d have had them flayed alive! I’ll savor every mouthful.”

They ate in contented silence, apart from Sponge’s joyous snarls as he wrenched at his raw chops. Ribek had been right, though. Maja could tell she would have enjoyed the pie if she’d been well and strong, but now it was far too rich. For a while she dipped corners of bread in the sauce and chewed them slowly, but in the end passed almost a whole bowlful over to the Ropemaker to finish. Then she closed her eyes and drowsed against Ribek’s shoulder, half listening to the Ropemaker telling the others in short, jerky sentences about his childhood in Barda. His father was a fisherman who had drowned at sea when he was a baby, his mother had married a man who didn’t want him in the house, so he’d lived with the grandfather who’d made the oyster-and-bacon pie. But he’d died when the boy was six and he’d been sent to live with the village ropemaker, more as a child slave than anything, though he’d been called an apprentice. He’d picked up the trade simply by watching what his master did, and this included using a few simple spells to supple a rope or strengthen a splice and so on.

He grasped them instantly, and worked them almost without thought, and when his master realized this he told him other charms that he knew of but couldn’t do himself, and they too came to the boy easy as breathing. Soon he could rig a fishing smack in a morning, or tie two ends of cord into a pattern of knots that would of its own accord repeat and repeat itself until it was a full-sized fishnet.

He got no thanks. The reverse, if anything. He was still his master’s apprentice, and so still a slave, but now a valuable one. For fear that he might be kidnapped by a rival, or run away and look for a kinder home, his master kept the boy locked up when he wasn’t under his eye, leaving food for him when he went to carouse with his cronies. A rat arrived, searching for scraps, and the boy made friends with it, studied it, searched out its inner nature, and as if by instinct turned himself into a rat. He crept out by the hole through which his friend had entered and scuttled down to the foreshore, where there was a skiff waiting ready for him to rig it next morning.

He did the work by moonlight. At one point he was aware of a wind-charm blowing in the breeze off the ocean, so he wove it into the halyard. When he’d done, he winched the skiff down the slipway, let the incoming tide set it afloat, for no reason that he knew of loaded several coils of spare rope aboard, hoisted sail and told the wind-charm to take him wherever it had come from. Unhesitating, it took him to Angel Isle.

On the way over he unraveled a spare length of rope, knotted a few strands into a pattern of squares and set it to grow into a bag-net, which he trailed over the stern and scooped up a couple of plump sunfish. But at Angel Isle his luck seemed to run out. All round it the cliffs ran sheer down to the water with the ocean swell foaming against them. There was no possible anchorage or landing place.

He sailed as close as he dared to the cliffs and asked the wind-charm to hold the skiff steady in one place against the current flowing past the island. Then he took four of the coils of rope he had brought and flung their ends up against the cliff, telling them to lodge themselves in crannies, wriggle on up and find somewhere to secure themselves. That done he dropped their lower ends into the water, two on each side of the boat, telling them to float themselves below the hull, knot themselves to the rope opposite, and then tighten their weave along their whole length so that as they shrank they lifted the skiff clear of the water while he used an oar to stop it scraping against the cliff face.

He was nine years old, and none of this was anything he’d thought of, let alone tried, before. It was just there, on Angel Isle, waiting for someone who knew about ropes to use it.

“Swarmed up and found this place,” he said. “Changed me. Didn’t realize it; then kids don’t. Cooking my fish, all I thought about. Told the ropes to fetch me driftwood, caught in the rocks. Piled it up. Lit it by snapping my fingers—hedge magic, of course, but I’d never seen it. Good fish, mind.

“Dropped off when I’d finished—dog tired—working all night, remember. Strange dreams, shapes, distances, all wrong. Nothing fitting with anything. Know why now. Maja will tell you. Eh, Maja?”

She opened her eyes to see him sponging the last morsels out of his bowl—her bowl—with a hunk of bread. Jex had changed back into his proper shape and crept out of the saddlebag and was now squatting on a sunlit boulder, staring at him with unblinking eyes.

“Woke up feeling nothing I can’t do,” he said as he chewed. “Only got to find out about it. Twenty years I spent, just finding out. Best time of my life.”

He had changed, she thought, since she had first seen him yesterday, in Benayu’s egg. There was something slightly different about him, but she couldn’t think what. He swallowed the last spoonful and gave a long, satisfied belch. As if at that signal the rhubarb-and-ginger crumble appeared on the turf. Maja smiled at the familiar smell. Even the dread and misery of life at Woodbourne hadn’t been able to spoil the excellence of her aunt’s cooking.

“I could eat a little of that,” she whispered.

“A little,” said Ribek.

It was as good as her aunt’s had been, but no better. Strange to think of her aunt never making it again. When they were back in the Valley, she decided, she’d go to Frog Bottom and ask Mrs. Finsdaughter to show her how. Then she could make it for Ribek as often as he liked.

“Want you to understand,” said the Ropemaker. “That’s why I’ve been telling you all this. Next thing, Tilja and the others show up in my life. Won’t bother you with all that—you know the story.”

“I’m not from the Valley,” said Benayu. “I only know what they’ve told me.”

“Ring Faheel passed on to me? Know about that?”

“You can use it to change time, so you can undo something that’s happened and do something else. You’d need to get outside time to do that, so it’s got to have something to do with other universes, where time’s different.”

“Mphm. Fourteen, and you’ve figured that out. Took me getting on a couple of centuries. Didn’t start thinking about it straight off, of course. Too busy getting things sorted in the Empire. Good people helping me, mind you. Tilja, Lananeth, Zara…You met Zara at Larg, Maja says. Waiting for me to come back. Good, brave woman. Let her down. Any of the others, they’ll be gone. Or turned into Watchers. Worse, that. Ah, the things you do for the best. You think.”

He took a small black box from the fold of his cloak and sat staring at the ground, juggling it up and down in his hand. The mood and posture made him look somehow older. She could almost feel how long he had borne his burden. Yes, that was it. He did look older. Yesterday, in Benayu’s egg, he’d seemed about Ribek’s age. Now she’d have guessed at a good ten years more.

He sighed and straightened.

“Never used the ring unless I had to,” he said. “Scared the hell out of me first time I tried. Still does. Maybe if I’d practiced a bit more, wouldn’t’ve got into the mess I did. Ah, well.

“Getting worse, if anything. Time’s like that. Every day goes by, another lot of complications weave themselves in. Things old Faheel did, I doubt he could do now. Ring only makes it worse. Every time you use it, you mess with time itself. Does a bit of that, even when you’re not using it. Like a rock in a river—sets up an eddy, just by being there. Round and round, round and round, can’t stop. And after all that, who d’you hand it on to? Really want it, you’re not fit to have it. Wrong people get hold of it—Watchers, way they’re set up now—these Pirates of yours—either of them…doesn’t bear thinking about.

“Decided, better get rid of it. Once and for all. Hide it, someone’d have found it. Melt it down, smash it to bits, no chance. Only hope was unmake it, same way it’d been made.

“How? Saw I’d got to get outside time somehow. Tried using the ring—takes you someplace else—sort of nowhere—can’t explain it—all there is is this rope thing, everything ever happened, happening now, going to happen, this and that causing this and that, all woven together, stretching on and on each way, for ever. Been there before. So that’s time, I used to think. Started nosing around, up and down time, see how it all worked, how it was made, how to unmake it.

“Took me a while to see I’d got it wrong. Rope isn’t time. Time’s always out there—things happening, kid swinging on a branch, star falling, chick hatching, arrow on its way, blink of an eyelid. Rope I was looking at—that’s only a model of real time, time out there. Ring’s inside time, and you’re in there with it, and the rope you’re looking at, all inside the ring, still inside time. You can mess with it inside real time, and somehow it reaches out, outside real time, and messes around with stuff that’s happened, changes what’s going to happen.

“No use trying to unmake the ring from inside real time. Wasn’t made that way. Made from outside it. Got to be unmade same way.

“How do I do that, eh? Thought about it all day. Got nowhere. Woke up next morning thinking, wrong question. Not how, where. Where’s outside time? Thought about that all day. Still got nowhere. Had a dream that night. Strange. Nothing happened in it. Just kept seeing shapes, distances. All wrong. Nothing fitting with anything. Remember? Same dream here, on Angel Isle.

“Never been back till then. Didn’t want to spoil it for myself. But came here and nosed around. Found the whatchamacallit…”

“Touching point,” said Jex in their heads.

“Right. Made of the wrong stuff somehow. Didn’t get it about different universes, different dimensions, all that. Trial and error. Blasted myself clean out of the tunnel a couple of times. Must’ve been mad to try it.”

He laughed, shaking his head at his own folly.

“Did it in the end,” he went on. “Made a sort of pocket in the barrier. Put a lining into it—wove it out of same stuff barrier was made of, way I do with a net. Made it small, easier to move around once I was through. Came out egg-shaped, like Benayu’s. Seemed to be the only way. Don’t know why.”

“Nor do I, really,” said Benayu. “But it’s in Fodaro’s equations, so I knew it had to be like that.”

“Right. Had to leave something behind to come back to—know about that too?”

“Jex had told Maja there had to be something,” said Saranja.

“Worked it out for myself. Made a couple of little dollies, put one in my egg, sent other off to the oyster-beds. All ready now. Lot of weird creatures had shown up other side of the barrier while I was at it. Knew something was up, I reckoned. Got inquisitive.”

“They were feeding on the energy seeping through the touching point from what you were doing,” said Jex.

“Right again. Wish I’d had you there to tell me what’s what. Saved a lot of trouble. Anyway, took over one of these creatures, way Maja did with Sponge here. Great lump of a thing. Lots of eyes.”

“A fufu. More intelligent than it appears.”

“Take your word for it. Got it to pick the egg up and ferry me around. Used the ring to work back through time, find out where it came from, first place. Tricky work, different rope from the one I knew.”

“There are two dimensions of time there, which have to fit with the other five dimensions, which are also different.”

“No idea about that. Still, found where the ring was made—when in time, where on the rope. Must’ve been blind luck, but I thought that meant I’d got it all sorted. Bad mistake. Nothing special about the place I could see, but the whatchamacallit, fufu, didn’t want to go near it.”

“You had reached a dimensional node, a point at which the seven dimensions lock themselves together to hold the structure of the universe firm. Considerable secondary forces are generated, which could have been used in the construction of the ring. Proximity to such points arouses sensations of extreme anxiety in the creatures of my universe.”

“Second mistake. Tried putting it to sleep. Shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but soon as I got one lot of eyes shut another lot opened.”

“That is how a fufu sleeps. Serially.”

“Know next time. Didn’t have anything to spare to hold the creature hanging around when it was crazy to be off. Had to let it go.

“Problem was, couldn’t have the ring unmake itself there—place it was made, time it was made. Do that, there’d be no ring, so no Tilja story. You wouldn’t be here. Had to set it up there to destroy itself—only place I could have done that—then forward into the future, beyond the time when I came in, time now. Leave it there, all set to send me back to time now, and then unmake itself when I give the word. Pick up another creature, give the word, out through the touching point into my own world, before anything happened.”

“Let me understand you. The ring cannot be destroyed in your universe, because it was made from outside the time of your universe. So you were planning to use it to travel to some time in the future of both universes…”

“Didn’t get it they were that different.”

“Yes, very different. And then you were going to arrange for the ring to destroy itself at the dimensional node where it was made in that universe, but not to do so until you had used it to return to the time you had come from in both universes, which you assumed would remain identical with each other, and escaped into your own universe?”

“That’s about it.”

“It is just as well you failed. The convulsion at a dimensional node would have caused a major change in the structure of that universe, with unpredictable results in other universes, including at the least a major irruption of demons into this one.”

“Bad as that?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

They sat in silence and thought about it. To Maja the dismaying thing wasn’t the chance-averted disaster—that seemed so remote as to be unimaginable—but that the Ropemaker, who she had been vaguely assuming knew almost everything and could do almost anything, could have come so close to such a blunder. Even going backward and forward in time hadn’t warned him.

“Wonder I’m scared of the thing?” said the Ropemaker. “Too dangerous to have around. Got to get rid of it. Beyond me. No time, anyway. Think you could do it with these equations of yours, Benayu?”

Benayu shook his head.

“We’ve done the first part of what we came to do,” he said. “Now I’m going to destroy the Watchers and then I’m going back to shepherding. I’ll show you how Fodaro’s equations work, if that’d help.”

“And you’ve got to get Maja and Ribek back to the Valley,” said Saranja. “She can’t do it the way we came. It’d kill her.”

The Ropemaker stared at Maja, his face unreadable.

“Not enough time,” he muttered, as if he too had been in the same state as she was, just a tired old man.

Yes, thought Maja. I’m very close to the edge. She could sense the coming fall, her almost weightless body floating down into darkness. Won’t be long now. No time.

“Well, you’re going to have to make time,” snapped Saranja. “You can use that ring of yours, can’t you? Look, Ribek. You can take Rocky. He’ll be quicker than Levanter. I’ll leave the wings on him. It’ll only take…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She knew too. Not enough time.

“Ribek,” Maja whispered. He looked enquiringly down at her. “He’s got time to tell us how the story ended. How did he get himself stuck?”

The Ropemaker’s whole mood changed when Ribek passed the message on. He laughed.

“Time for that,” he said. “First bit was the tricky bit, setting the ring up to unmake itself. Managed it in the end. Rest should have been easy. Relaxed a bit, maybe. Bad mistake. Came forward, reached time now, where I came in. Uh-uh, there I was, coming in again, going back again, setting the ring up to unmake itself. Then forward, time now, and same again. Still got ring, no memory of where I’d just been. Went forward again. And again. And again…

“Didn’t know it was happening. All fresh every time. Then somebody spoke my name. Farmyard long way off, horse, roc feathers, hair from my head. Forgot about it next time round. Same stupid business, over and over and over.

“Happened again. Still long way off. Mountain pasture, sheep, same hair, roc feathers. Big convulsion close by me, connected with other place. Couldn’t make it out.”

“My selves in both universes were adversely affected by the magical overload emanating from the utterance of your name.”

“Uh-huh. Remembered first time for a moment, then forgot ’em both starting next time round, remembered ’em halfway through. Got an idea what was up. Forgot and remembered that too.

“Happened again. Had to be a while later because it was someplace else again. Hilltop above the sea. Big magic, dragons, burning city, flying battle-wagons, monster storm, convulsion close by, same rum connection. Jex here, of course. Roc feathers, hair—got it this time. The Valley. Urlasdaughters and Ortahlsons, coming to look for me…

“Then the same stupid cycle again, remembering and forgetting. Tried to think about it in the remembering bits, pick up where I’d left off, get through to you somehow. Frustrating, forgetting and forgetting. Just one glimpse, once. Doorway, kid standing far side, watching me—you, Maja?”

“Yes, but there was a Watcher there on the hillside, looking for you. I shouted at him to stop him seeing the doorway.”

“Felt that. Got us both clear somehow. Didn’t want to risk it again. Big help, all the same. Remembered longer each time round. Same again when you found my dolly at the oyster-beds, again when Saranja called my name from inside the egg. Still that last little bit of forgetting each time I started again. Still couldn’t break right out, not till Maja barked my name right there, close outside my egg. That did it.

“Story over. Stop now, Maja?”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Satisfied, she closed her eyes and felt herself floating away, down and away. She was dreaming, strange, shadowy moments: a kiss beside the millrace; a wedding feast, herself at the heart of it; a caress on her naked flesh in the warm dark, with the race roaring beneath the window; the stir of a child inside her own ghostly body; two children fishing on a green bank, their reflections steady in the stillness of the millpool; a shaft of sunlight slanting through gloom, a slowly turning millwheel clear in its brightness, the shapes of a man and a half-grown lad dark against it as they watched the steady trickle of flour down the chute. Hauntings from the promised life she would never now be given. Vaguely through this she was aware of her exhausted body being laid gently on the turf, of hearing the murmur of voices, receding, almost gone…