Angel Isle (30 page)

“In your case, this would be not until you have reached Barda and found the object or person you seek, but before you can make use of that against the Watchers. You should therefore act on the assumption that this is going to happen, and that they will give you very little time in which to act. If that is impossible for you, then your only hope is somehow to elude their watch, or mislead them into believing that you have not yet found what you are looking for. Failing that, you must try to prepare defenses that will protect you long enough for you to put your plan into action.

“If I thought that I could help with any of this I should insist on coming with you, but if my guesses are anywhere near the truth I would be no more than a distraction and encumbrance. But can you wonder that I am extremely anxious, not only for Miss Saranja, but for all of you?”

They sat in silence. If Striclan knew so much, thought Maja, how could the Watchers not know it also? And of course they’d wait until they knew where the Ropemaker was. Why hadn’t she thought about that before? There simply wasn’t going to be time. They’d pounce at once. It was all, suddenly, hopeless.

“At least I can tell you you’re a very good spy,” said Ribek after a while. “If their other spies are that good, your Sheep-faces must know practically everything there is to be known about the Empire.”

“Alas, no,” said Striclan. “Information from agents on the ground often appears contradictory, and the tendency of the authorities is always to believe what they want to believe, even when the weight of the evidence is against it.

“Well, I will do what you ask me and leave you. I shall set out early in the morning, and get as far away from you as I can before you reach Barda. And I must thank you yet again for your companionship and wish you a successful outcome to your perilous undertaking, and so bid you farewell.”

He rose and helped Saranja to her feet. She didn’t let go of his hand. Ribek also rose and Maja scrambled up, but Benayu stayed where he was, dazed with his long dream, looking as if he hadn’t heard a word.

“Good luck to you too,” said Ribek. “I really hope we’ll see you again.”

“I’ve given him one of the finder stones,” said Saranja. “When all this is over he’s coming back to live in the Valley. And thank you for not asking any questions till now.”

Still holding hands they walked away and vanished among the shadows of the way station. There was no more nonsense that night about Striclan taking Maja with him when he left.

CHAPTER
15

C
oming to Barda was very different from coming to Mord, or Tarshu, or Larg, or anywhere else they’d been. For two whole days the road crossed an utterly flat landscape, drearier even than desert, scraggy little fields with reedbeds here and there, sighing in the steady wind from the ever-nearing ocean. Bank after bank of low clouds rolled in on it, endlessly threatening rain, but not a drop fell. No houses, only a few tumbledown sheds and sties, built where they were for no purpose Maja could imagine, and apparently abandoned years ago.

Once, on the first morning, they passed a sad old yellow horse in a small paddock that it had grazed almost bare. Pogo, prepared to flirt or gossip with anything vaguely horse-shaped, whinnied a greeting, but it didn’t even raise its head. Seabirds glided on the wind, hawks hovered, and there were waterfowl on the innumerable sluggish rivers and streams, all flowing from the west, that the road had begun to cross. Otherwise the landscape seemed almost completely lifeless.

But not the road. This was busier than they’d seen it at any time since they’d left Larg, apart from the two narrow strips down the center that had been set aside for nobles and other grandees, which had very few users. On the other hand there were two extra lanes in either direction for slow-moving ox-wagons and the only slightly faster horse-drawn carts, and by the time three major Highways had joined the one they were on—two on the first day and one on the second—these were pretty well nose to tail with traffic. The frequent bridges boomed and thundered to the steady drub of wheels.

Ribek no longer bothered to stop and listen to every bit of water they crossed.

“It won’t have anything new to say,” he explained. “It’s just an arm of a delta—all the same river. It’s brought down a tremendous load of silt, which has spread further and further out into the sea, with the river breaking up into different channels to find a way through it.”

“So the actual village where the Ropemaker was born won’t be on the coast any longer?”

“I suppose not. Even since he disappeared the coastline will have shifted further out. Come to think of it, that may have made things more awkward. Well, we can only see when we get there. What’s up?”

Maja had clutched him to stop herself from falling from Levanter’s back. For a moment she was back at the sheep-fold north of Tarshu, almost drowning in darkness as she clung with her mind to the fiery streak of the Ropemaker’s hair. It was a smell, a reek, that had carried her there, salty, fishy, weedy, stronger than any mere sea smell.

She shook herself back into the here and now and stared around. The reek was still in her nostrils, beginning to fade.

“What’s that smell?” she said.

“Came from one of the wagons on the other side. Oysters, I should think. Remember that fellow at Larg said Barda was famous for them?”

“It’s what I smelled when I used the hair.”

“Are you sure?”

“Almost.”

“Interesting.”

Now that Striclan had left them, Jex had returned to his natural form whenever he could. That evening, as they sat round the fire, he spoke in their heads. Benayu woke from his long half trance to listen.

“
I do not know, any more than you do, what will happen at Barda, other than if we find the form into which the Ropemaker has put his physical self it will involve an explosion of magic far more powerful than any you and I have so far endured. I must return to an inert form before that happens, or I shall not survive. But we cannot find what we are looking for without Maja’s help, so she must stay in her own form until that is done, and I will protect her as best I can. Benayu must then immediately endow her with an inert form in which she no longer needs protection.”

“Any ideas, Maja?” said Benayu.

Maja hesitated. It was difficult to think. To leave her own body, which had always seemed to be so much of her, who she was, all that made her Maja, always there, ready and waiting when she woke from dreams…

How could she do that and still be the same person, Maja?

If she must, she must. She mastered her reluctance.

“Will I be able to see and hear?”

“If your inert form has got eyes and ears.”

“Whatever’s easiest, then. Something Ribek can carry on a loop round his neck.”

“I’ll think about it. Go on, Jex.”

“That done both Maja and I will for the time being be helpless, but we must all instantly escape to Angel Isle and into my alternate universe, where the Watchers cannot follow.”

“I’ve been bothered about that,” said Benayu. “I could take us there, of course, but it’s a risk. It doesn’t get us there all in a moment, quite, and if the Watchers show up in time I won’t be able to stop them grabbing us back. They’ve got the power. The sea won’t make any difference. They can do it from dry land.”

“Fortunately we have other means of escape at hand. A roc is a creature from my other universe, and therefore an impossible creature in this universe, where it can survive only as a magical animal. Similarly, a horse is a creature of this universe and cannot survive except as a magical animal in the other. It follows that a horse with the wings of a roc is an impossible creature in both universes and can survive as a magical animal in both. So, immediately before we attempt to locate what we are looking for, you must screen us while Saranja restores Rocky’s wings. Using him as a basis, you will be able to create the means to give the other two horses and the dog the power of flight, so that when the time comes they will be able to carry us to Angel Isle and through the touching point.”

“Won’t the Watchers be able to interfere with that too?” said Saranja.

“I should be able to think of ways to fight them off for a bit,” said Benayu. “I can’t if I’m busy transporting us all.”

“You will need to prepare your defenses in advance, before your powers are weakened over the sea. The Watchers will face the same difficulty, but they will have come in haste, without time to prepare specific weaponry to use in such circumstances. They will certainly deploy thunderbolts, and send a dragon in pursuit. Probably no more than one, since they have lost several over Tarshu, but they may well produce simulacra.”

“You might think about trying to hide us and laying a false trail. Like we did when we left Tarshu,” said Ribek.

“And finally there is the problem of how we can survive as four-dimensional creatures in a seven-dimensional universe,”
said Jex.

“I’ve been working on that. I can do it all right, in theory. I’ll get some of it ready tonight, but I can’t finish it off till we get there. I’m bothered about this business of being weaker over the sea.”

“Angel Isle itself is different. It is a major touching point, a source of great power.”

Maja was woken in the dawn by a stir of magic and found Saranja and Ribek still asleep, but Benayu already sitting up, staring at a pattern of what looked like colored rice-grains he had laid out on the tiled floor of their sleeping booth. Every now and then he would point at it and more grains would appear under his fingertip, forming another swirl in the pattern. He had screened himself closely round, so that Maja could feel no more than a whisper of something immensely powerful and complex being brought out of nowhere and woven into the fabric of reality.

He’d continued to work throughout breakfast while Saranja fed him morsels which he chewed without noticing. When they were ready to leave he spread both hands over the pattern, which flowed upward from the center, maintaining its swirls and windings as it followed the movement of his hands while he twisted them, palms inward, until they were cupped around a shimmering egg about the size of a baby’s head. He moved them together until he could fold his fingers into each other and clasp them tight, absorbing the egg into himself.

The screen vanished.

“Done,” he muttered. “Help me up. We must go. Wake me when you see the garden.”

There was no particular moment at which the town of Barda began. Sheds and barns slightly more frequent, slightly less ramshackle; a patch where someone had been trying to grow vegetables; a row of sties with actual pigs in them; a shed, not apparently more habitable than any of the sheds they’d passed earlier, but with a line of laundry flapping in the breeze; and then, astonishingly, beside yet another slow-oozing mud-rimmed river (the tide apparently reached far enough inland here to expose a few feet of the bank) a seriously grand house with two pleasure yachts moored at a jetty and gardeners working its carefully symmetrical gardens.

Ribek booted Levanter forward until he was alongside Benayu on Pogo, leaned across and shook him by the elbow.

“Ready to wake up now?” he said. “This looks like your garden.”

Benayu snorted, sat up, squared his shoulders and looked around.

“That’s it. Thanks,” he said, speaking as cheerfully and confidently as he had done when they had first met him on that mountain pasture north of Mord. There was a blip of magic, and a screen enclosed a section of the garden. He raised his right hand toward it, palm forward, fingers spread, and closed it in a slow, grasping motion. The whole section—a small raised pond and the strip of lawn around it, with a few small trees and a curving bed of rosebushes with a close-clipped yew hedge behind it—shimmered for a moment, disappeared, and returned unchanged.

“All set now,” he said. “I think I’m ready as I’m going to be. Anything else I’ll have to improvise. Any suggestions about where to start looking? We really don’t want to use the hair again until we have to. Maja?”

“The oyster-beds? That’s what I smelled.”

“There’ll be a lot of them,” said Saranja. “I’ve lost count of the reeking wagonloads we’ve passed.”

“The first thing is to find out what Barda consisted of around when the Ropemaker disappeared,” said Ribek. “I thought we might take a leaf out of Striclan’s book. Suppose I’m doing the same sort of job he was, and I’ve come here to compile a report on the history of the oyster trade. If I find the right official and show him the scroll they gave me at Larg, there’s a good chance he’ll be helpful.”

A trivial, irrelevant thought came into Maja’s mind.

“I wonder what oysters taste like,” she said.

“Now’s your chance to find out,” said Ribek. “I’ll ask the fellow I see for a recommendation.”

The street where they waited for Ribek to reappear was utterly different from the tatterdemalion outskirts of Barda. Those had been like that because they had been long ago abandoned as the town had moved steadily eastward to stay near the sea that was its livelihood, keeping up with the unstoppable growth, inch by inch through the centuries, of the delta upon which it stood.

This was a broad, cobbled thoroughfare lined with stolid-looking brick buildings, mostly large and plain, with only here and there a flourish of ornamentation around the main doors. Ribek was inside one of these slightly fancier ones. Maja and the others waited in the shade opposite. The horses fidgeted and stamped. Saranja was almost as restless. But Benayu seemed to have retired into his trance and stood with his head bowed and his eyes half closed, swaying very slightly from side to side, as if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Only Maja could sense the steady, purposeful activity inside as he gathered and ordered the powers he was going to need.

Maja herself was almost sick with anxiety, so obviously that Saranja noticed and moved to her side and put a comforting arm round her, but even that didn’t stop the spasms of shivering and the endless, useless swallowing of saliva that wasn’t there. She wasn’t afraid of dying, or of what the Watchers might do to her if they caught her, but of the task ahead. No, she wasn’t going to bear the brunt of it, as Benayu would have to, but only she could find the Ropemaker. They’d talked about this on their way into the town. As Jex and Ribek had said, it would all have to happen in an instant, before the Watchers were on them. Ribek would be holding her. Saranja would unwind that single golden hair from the roc feathers. There would be the double blast of magic, leaving Maja blind and deaf but tracking that intense thread of golden fire through the darkness between the universes…

Would she survive even that far? Jex would do what he could, but…But if she did, then what? At the sheep-fold she’d had time to recover, to come back into the here and now, to point the way they must go. This time, somehow, in that instant before the Watchers came, she would have to act, to tell or show Ribek what to do, where to go. It could only be him—Benayu would be facing the Watchers and Saranja wrestling with the panicking horses—and still she would need to endure, endure…

She tried to distract herself by studying the scene before her. What were all the wagons doing, trundling thunderously to and fro over the cobbles? Not difficult. At the far end of the street she could see masts and cranes, and the now familiar odor of oysters told her what most of the ones going in that direction bore, and what many of those coming back, only a little less thunderously and reekingly, had unloaded at the harbor. But a far greater variety of cargoes returned from there, in different carts, because you wouldn’t want your corn or your carpets or expensive luxuries impregnated with the basic Bardan odor, would you?