Angel Isle

CHAPTER

27

Again the Empire reeled itself away beneath them as they flew on, still passing none of the country they had traversed so slowly on their journey to Tarshu. The detour to Kzuva had taken them well west of that, and now they were heading back toward the sheep pastures north of Mord. There seemed to be an unspoken joint desire that they should stay together as long as possible, and this was the simplest way. They would say good-bye to Benayu and Sponge at the pastures, cross the mountains by the way they had come when they’d been escaping from the Pirates, and after a couple of days at Northbeck leave Ribek and Maja there. Saranja and Striclan would fly on with all three horses to see what was happening at Woodbourne. When the time came for them to leave the Valley, they would return by way of Northbeck, pick Maja up, take her to Lady Kzuva and travel south together when the snows were gone.

Now, far ahead, they could see the glitter of the snow-peaks. Farms and woodlands flowed beneath them, and there was the river, skirting the plain of Mord, and Mord itself, smug and snug behind its walls. The Watchers’ Eye was gone from its southern gate. More and steeper woodland, and then…

Then, where the pasture should have been, utter desolation. A dismal black slope of scree and tumbled rock. A crater at the center. Not a blade growing on the slope itself apart from one or two strips of turf running down from where the whispering cedar had stood. Not a tree standing within several hundred paces of it. Benayu shouted, pointed and wheeled to the left, up the slope. The great wings pounded the thinning air, spiraling up beside a cliff-face to a wide ledge, clothed in scanty grass. They landed there and slid or swung themselves down from the horses.

“What on earth happened?” said Saranja.

“I told you,” said Benayu. “Fodaro got it wrong. I was pretty sure we’d find something like this, and I’ve been getting ready for it. Ever since we left Larg, pretty well. Tell you later.

“You stay here and hang on to the horses. You’d better take their wings away, Saranja. We don’t want them bolting. This is going to be fairly big, Maja, and I won’t have much to spare, so I can’t afford to shield you. I could put you to sleep for a bit, if you like.”

“No. I want to see. I’m a lot tougher than I was when we started.”

“All right. It shouldn’t be too bad—you’ll be in the lee of the cliff. Only don’t get too close to the edge. Well, here goes. No, boy. You stay here.”

He vanished.

Maja moved toward the drop, and found she couldn’t see much of the slope below without going right up to the edge. She looked around. Either side of the ledge they were on the rock face ran sheer up and down, and the ledge itself was the bottom of a wide cleft in the upper half of the cliff. The others had led the horses to the back of it and turned them to face the cliff. Ribek and Saranja were blindfolding Levanter and Pogo. Pogo didn’t like it. Saranja had already done that for Rocky and was starting to remove his wings. These days Maja barely had to brace herself for stuff like that.

She scrambled up over the boulders that had fallen against the side of the indent in the explosion of magic, found a viewpoint and stared at the bleak, black wound that had once been sheep pasture, and the tumbled woods around it.

She had seen nothing quite like it before, and yet a faint familiar throb pulsed steadily from it, the background magic of that other universe, beyond the touching point on Angel Isle. This was where Fodaro had discovered Jex, where he had studied the stars in the pool Benayu had made for him—still there now, gleaming untroubled amid the ruin around it—and where he had worked out his equations, and with Benayu’s help had begun to experiment on how to use them to destroy the Watchers.

This had once been a touching point too.

Benayu was there now, a tiny figure standing close by the central crater. He raised an arm and waved toward her.

“Ready?” she called. “He’s starting.”

The blast of magic came not from him, but inward, to him, invisible at first, but then a vortex formed, a thickening of the air that could be seen only because it rumpled itself as it gathered, like something seen through an uneven pane of glass, or heat waves rising from a furnace. When it reached its center over the crater it spiraled upward, denser and denser. And at the same time, far overhead, invisible dust particles gathered out of the clear, pale sky and hurtled inward—pale racing specks at first that joined and became flakes, puffballs, clumps, cloud streamers, darkening all the time as they crammed themselves tighter and tighter over the vortex below until they formed a single, roughly circular, mile-wide mass, darker than the darkest thundercloud.

Maja’s whole being shuddered, reverberated like a bell, to the steady drumroll of the forces pent there. She cried aloud at the sudden clapper stroke of their release, not into any outward explosion, but into a single aimed downward stroke from the center to the center of the vortex below. The two joined, and for a while she was looking at a thing like one of the flat-topped desert trees she had seen at the start of the journey north from Larg, a sky-high tree of darkness, a tree that was growing backward in time, its whole top shrinking inward and down through the trunk until there was only the pillar of the trunk itself plummeting down….

And then the light.

She had an instant of warning in which to close her eyes as the flash of the original explosion gathered in from its furthest reaches. The world turned white and eyelids were not enough. Hands across her face were not enough. For a moment she could see her finger bones black against the impossible whiteness. All vanished in thunder. Then nothing at all. She could neither hear nor see. Not even the dark of not seeing.

She opened her eyes and still she could not see. Nor hear. There should have been the screams of the panicking horses, the shouts and grunts of the others trying to calm them, Saranja’s voice, perhaps, grimly calm, “I think I’ve gone blind….”

Nothing. Not a whisper. Not the rustle of movement. No movement at all, even when Maja tried to move. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart seemed to have stopped between beat and beat. No sense of any of the marvelous magic of the world.

It’s all over, she thought. I’m dead. How disappointing. Ribek…

She would have wept with frustration, but even a tear must move.

Benayu’s voice in her head.

“I’m sorry about that. I should have realized….”

Sorry! she thought. When I’m dead!

“Hang on. I’ll sort it all out in a moment. I’d better deal with the horses first.”

Yes, being dead must be like this. One everlasting wait in utter silence, total non-seeing.

Benayu again.

“Ready, Maja?”

The pulse of his presence. A gentle puff into her nostrils. The touch of fingers on eyes and ears.

She was alive, herself, breathing and feeling and hearing, not on that mountain ledge but the long slope of green cropped turf below. The others were beside her, the horses still in their blindfolds, the people, even Striclan, looking as dazed as she felt. Now the peaceful woods stood round, their leaves already coloring as the world turned toward winter. Only the central crater remained, unhealed.

“Look,” said Saranja in a voice of wonder. “There’s an ant! It’s just as if all that had never happened.”

“Yes,” said Benayu. “That’s why it was easier than I thought it would be, except for the last part. Sorry about that. But it was all still there, waiting to come back into balance, all but the touching point itself. That’s gone.

“It’s all over now. Fodaro beat the Watchers in the end. We’d never have done it without him. I’ve left the crater like that for him. No one but us will ever know what it means, but that’s enough.”

They stood in silence for a while, gazing at the strange memorial to a brave and lonely genius.

“I’m hungry,” said Benayu. “Let’s have something to eat. Oyster-and-bacon pie, anyone?”

“Really?” said Maja. “I didn’t get any first time because I was a rag doll, and second time Ribek wouldn’t let me have more than a mouthful.”

“In that case I’ll have some too. Shall I make it oyster-and-bacon pie all round? Fine. That’s for the Empire. And rhubarb-and-ginger crumble for the Valley. And mountain cider for me and Fodaro. He adored the stuff. It’ll take a few minutes.”

“You’re not too tired?” said Saranja.

“I’ve got a bit left. Lucky I did at the end, mind you. But like I said, the rest of it went a lot better than I’d budgeted for. Get your saliva working.”

He was off somewhere else in his head for less than a minute, then settled down and sat staring gazing out eastward. The sun was halfway down the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the pasture was in the shadow of the mountain behind him. The same thought must have struck him.

“It’ll be cold up here in the hills, this far north,” he said. “Sleep out here all the same, I think. The cottage is still there, and there’d be room for all of us, but it’ll reek of Watcher-work, and I don’t want to waste our last evening together sorting it out. I’ll get it done tomorrow, and then you’ll be welcome to stay as long as you want.”

“Nice of you, but I must get back,” said Ribek. “Harvest’s later up north, of course, but they’ll already be behind with the milling.”

“Us too,” said Saranja. “We don’t feel right, taking all that money off Lady K and then swanning off to deal with our own affairs. We want to get it all settled.”

(Lady Kzuva had characteristically insisted on paying Saranja her salary from the date of her commission, and Striclan for a year in advance. Ribek got a lump sum to compensate for his loss of earnings in the service of the Empire—as much, he said, as he’d have earned in ten years’ milling. Imperial coin wasn’t any use in the Valley, so he got gold. There was a leaving bonus for her boy Bennay, as large as if he’d held that post for sixty years, and for Maja what seemed to her a monstrous amount of plain spending money.)

“Ah, food,” exclaimed Ribek. “Nothing like mountain air for a healthy appetite.”

The dishes assembled themselves neatly on the turf. The five sat in a circle and passed them round.

“I got second helpings for all of us,” said Benayu.

The silence of contentment fell, until Ribek broke it with a sigh.

“You know,” he said, “I think there’s only one thing I regret in all our journeyings. I feel we didn’t do right by the Magister at Barda. All right, he was—is, I hope—a pompous ass, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he was a good man who did his best for us. And the Watchers came, and we ran away and left him in deep trouble. I hope he came out all right.”

“Want me to look?” said Benayu. “…No, he isn’t at Barda—they’ve got a new Magister. Wait…Ah…He’s still alive…He’s been in prison in Talagh, but they’ve let them all out now that the Watchers are gone. He’s lost about half his weight. He’s trying to get back to Barda but he hasn’t got any money. Shall we just send him some? He’ll wake up and find it in his pocket.”

“He was sad that he’d never seen the mountains,” said Maja.

“And here we are eating oyster-and-bacon pie,” said Saranja. “His oyster-and-bacon pie, good as.”

“All right,” said Benayu. “And Ribek can say sorry to him for all of us.”

Again that momentary absence, the blip of made magic, and a ragged, unrecognizable figure stood beside them, staring bewildered at the snow-capped mountain range running away north and the immense landscape below it. He seemed not even to have noticed their presence on the turf beside him.

Another blip, and his tatters became clean, well-fitting clothes. He must have felt the change for he looked down at himself and ran his spread hands over his body, feeling the quality of the cloth. His right hand bumped against something in a pocket. He felt and pulled out a purse and weighed it in his hand. It was clearly heavy.

Suddenly he raised his head and sniffed. A dribble of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth.

“Oyster-and-bacon pie, Magister?” said Ribek. “We’re delighted to see you again, after all the troubles we brought upon you.”

The Magister started at the voice, looked at Ribek and stared at them each in turn.

“Dreaming?” he whispered. “Dead? Heaven? Oyster-and-bacon pie?”

“No, you’re in the real world, Magister. Please sit down and taste some pie to prove it. Oysters from Barda, and there’s nothing else like them, not even in heaven. I’m sure you remember us, if not necessarily with pleasure. Saranja, Maja, Benayu and me, Ribek Ortahlsohn. You haven’t met Striclan, though.”

“My dear sirs! My dear ladies! Barda oysters! I thought I should never taste them again. And the mountains, which I was never destined to see!”

Trembling, he sat. Benayu heaped his plate, filled his goblet and gave them to him. He ate slowly, in silence, savoring every mouthful, while they told him their story and why they had treated him as they did.

“The mountains of the north,” he whispered as he put his plate down. “The heroes who saved the Empire! With my help! With my help! And the oysters of Barda!”

Gentle magic flowed and he fell asleep. It flowed again, and he vanished from the hillside.

“His heirs are squabbling over his estate,” said Benayu. “So his house is still empty. He’ll wake in his own bed.”

Maja woke somewhere in the depths of the night and lay gazing at the friendly stars of the North. There was the old Fisherman, with his rod bending under the weight of the Fish, so that its tip pointed directly at the Axle-pin. At Barda they had all been out of sight. At Larg he had been half hidden, and the Axle-pin just below the horizon, with the Fish still farther down. Now, at last, here they all were, shining above the glistening snow-peaks.

The others seemed to be asleep. Ribek was only a couple of paces away. Striclan and Saranja lay further off, snug in their shared bedding; Benayu was even further away, so that the persistent buzz of his powers didn’t disturb Maja’s dreams.

She and Ribek could have been alone together on the hillside. He was a heavy sleeper. If she were to slip out of her own bedding and ease herself in beside him, he probably wouldn’t even notice. It was only a whimsy, a fancy, but unwilled it bred the longing. A desire. A physical ache. What’s the harm in that? whispered her body.

She wasn’t going to do it, of course. It wouldn’t be fair to him. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was astonished, frightened, by the sudden power of the demand. Night after night they had slept almost within reach of each other. Night after night she had dozed off during another episode of her fantasy life at Northbeck. Naturally, being husband and wife in the fantasy, they slept in the same bed, but she had spent no time imagining the experience. It was just a detail, a way of making the fantasy as real as possible, like the stuffed owl on the kitchen shelf.

Now, without warning, it was central to the fantasy. Nothing could have any reality without it. And it still wouldn’t work unless Ribek felt the same about her. She had no doubt at all that he would one day. But when? They’d talked about it a bit in his dream when she’d been a rag doll in that other universe. When she was six years older, she’d suggested. He’d said ten, but that had just been haggling. Now, lying under the stars on the mountainside, feeling what she was feeling, even six years seemed a wilderness of waiting. Surely four would be enough. Or three, if she coaxed Benayu into giving her a love charm.

And then, what would he feel after…? There’d been a farmer who’d liked girls Maja’s age. He must have done something with one of them, because Ribek thought he would have been better dead and had told him to take his wheat elsewhere for grinding. For a vivid moment she seemed to see the shadowy cavern of the wheel-room at Northbeck mill, the great wheel slowly churning round, the white water tumbling over the scoops, and dark against that the shape of a man dangling by his neck from a rope tied round one of the beams.

In that moment she made up her mind. She wasn’t going back to Northbeck with him. Even one night there would make it harder to leave him, and harder and harder every night that passed. Benayu had had powers enough to fetch the Magister from Talagh and send him south to Barda. He would find it a simple matter, surely, to send Maja back to Lady Kzuva.

Tomorrow she would start her new life.

Life without Ribek.

The words whispered in her mind, desolate, the sigh of a wandering spirit lost in a wilderness. Silently she breathed them between her lips, and again, and yet again, over and over, like a charm to help her get used to the idea. Gradually her whole mood changed. For a while she simply lay there feeling more and more deeply at peace. Then she found herself beginning to imagine what her new life would be like, in a great house full of people, or on the road with Lady Kzuva’s entourage, speeding along the sections of the Highways set aside for grandees, or in the mighty and mysterious city of Talagh.

She wasn’t scared, hardly even nervous. In fact she was looking forward to the adventure. What had become of the terrified, tongue-tied child cowering in her lair under the barn at Woodbourne? Gone, gone, vanished like a dream, vanished like the old nightmares of pursuit. When had she last had one? They were gone, along with the Watchers. In the moment she had made up her mind and rushed out from her hiding place crying “Take me too!” she must have left them behind. And even when the pursuing monster had at last caught up with her on Angel Isle and shown her its true, terrible reality, she hadn’t tried to hide or run away but had fought back with all her small strength beside her friends, and between them they had given Benayu time to destroy the demon.

How much she had changed since Woodbourne! From time to time on the journey she had considered the way her extra sense was growing and strengthening. But the changes in herself had passed unnoticed. Where had her self-confidence come from, her readiness to speak and act? From her friends, of course. They had needed her for her gift—they couldn’t have found the Ropemaker without her—but they had valued her for what she was, encouraged her, trusted her, worried desperately for her when she had driven herself to the edge of darkness, so much so that both Ribek and Benayu had almost died to save her….

All right, so they had needed her for her gift, but how much she had needed them for everything else! Always on the move, they couldn’t give her a place to belong, like Northbeck in her fantasy—and Northbeck in her real future, if all went well—but they were people to belong with, sharing trust and purpose in the same spirit as they shared their evening meals. Ribek most of all. She had loved him, she now discovered, not for his sake but because she needed somebody to love. Now, of course, it was impossible to imagine that anyone else might have done, but still, there had been a sort of selfishness in her love. She had attached herself to him like a mistletoe to a tree, feeding her need. It wasn’t enough. She guessed he knew that too.

Now they were going to spend six years apart, and that was all right. It was fine, in fact, better like this, and she could do it because she didn’t need him any more. Not in the way she had done so far. But there was another kind of need, the need that Saranja and Striclan had for each other. She had felt an inkling of it only a little while ago, waking on the hillside under the stars. In six years’ time, if she and Ribek both felt like that, perhaps…

If. Perhaps.

Mentally she released herself from her unspoken vows, and felt a sudden, marvelous lightness of heart. She had trapped them both somehow in a room, locking the door and dropping the key out of the window, and now, by pure luck she had found a spare key and unlocked the door and set them free. Free to choose when the time came.

As soon as he woke, here on the neutral hillside, she would tell Ribek she was going back to Lady Kzuva and tell him why.

As it turned out, she slept longer than he did.

The sun was just beginning to slide above the far horizon when she heaved herself into a sitting position and looked around. His bedding was empty. Saranja and Striclan were already up. She was oiling his back for him, ready for the exercises he did, and she did too now, every morning. Benayu seemed to be fast asleep. He’d be tired after yesterday, of course. If they had to wait for him it might be a long time till breakfast, but Striclan kept the saddlebags well stocked. No Ribek. Probably in the woods somewhere, easing his bowels, which was just as regular a morning need for him as Striclan’s exercises.

No, there he was, further up the slope by the whispering cedar, staring at something in the sky above the forest on their left. She followed his gaze. The landscape below the pasture was scarfed with early mist, but the sky was a clear pale blue. Only one thing marked it, a single bird, circling slowly on motionless wings. With nothing at all to judge its distance by it was hard to tell how large it might be. Big, she guessed. She wriggled the rest of her body out of her bedding and climbed barefoot toward him.

“Is it an eagle?” she said.

“That’s right. A blue-shank, by the look at it. Marvelous great birds. They nest in the cliffs above Northbeck, you know. I’ll show you.”

“I’m not coming to Northbeck with you. I’m going to ask Benayu to send me straight back to Lady Kzuva.”

“Ah,” he said slowly, still watching the eagle.

“Do you want to know why?”

“I think I know….”

“Not all of it, you don’t.”

“All right. Tell me.”

She did so, all of it, feelings and thoughts, without shame or shyness. He listened gravely and nodded when she’d finished.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m afraid I have to tell you that I still think it will be an impossibility. Even supposing both of us are still unattached at that point. Perhaps you’ll meet some courtier….”

“You might fall for one of those farmers’ daughters you told us about.”

She didn’t mention the jewel dealer at Mord. That would have been mean.

“True,” he said. “But supposing we both escape those fates, and I’m not already in my dotage…”

“I don’t want to hear any of that nonsense. The Ropemaker gave you ten years more than he borrowed from you. Interest, he called it. You actually said you felt ten years younger. And you told me when I was a rag doll that that’d be enough.”

His laughter cracked the morning stillness. Pogo stopped grazing, raised his head and whickered, evidently thinking there might be horses who made a noise like that.

“So that’s it,” he said. “I knew something had happened, but hadn’t realized you were such a scheming, colluding minx. You’re going to be in your element in the middle of court intrigues.”

“It was his idea. Promise. But in six years’ time…”

“I thought we agreed eight.”

“We didn’t finish bargaining. Anyway, that was in another universe. Time’s different there. It’s six here. Five and a half, actually.”

“All right, clever clogs, we’ll see what we both think.”

“Feel, you mean. That’s what matters. We don’t owe each other anything. We haven’t promised anything. If we don’t both really feel we want to more than anything in the world, then we’ll marry someone else.”

“And we won’t even see each other till then?”

“If Lady K’s at Kzuva, Saranja can fly two of the horses over and bring you back for my birthdays. And you can read all about hawking in the library. And if you’ve got married you’ll have to bring her too.”

He stopped watching the eagle, turned to her and grinned. She flung her arms around him and laid her head against his chest. He rumpled her hair, a carefully adult gesture, made to maintain the tricky balance to the end.

“Breakfast,” called Saranja from below.

They walked down the slope together, not even holding hands.