Angel Isle (41 page)

“Be that as it may, I think we will certainly decide that all future contact with humans, indeed anything that might make them aware of our existence, is to be avoided. I must ask you and your friends, including the magician Chanad, never to speak of our existence, even among yourselves, and as far as possible to forget about us altogether.”

“Oh, Jex, that’s impossible! I won’t talk about you to anyone or say anything about other universes and all that. I think Chanad will understand. But you saved my life several times over….”

“As you did mine, Maja.”

“I can’t forget you! I’ll remember you as long as I live.”

“And I you, Maja. Farewell.”

“Good-bye, Jex. Good-bye.”

She wept in her dream, but woke to find her cheeks dry. The shadows of the circling boulders were long across the grass. There was a patch of yellow and blue lichen on the boulder beside her. She stroked it gently but it didn’t respond.

The others were awake, still discussing how to deal with the Pirates once they were aboard the airboat. Benayu was back from wherever he’d been. They seemed to have pretty well worked out most of their plans. Maja sat up and nudged Ribek’s side.

“Is Benayu going to make me older?” she whispered. “I won’t have to say a lot, will I?”

“You’ll be a grown woman, representing agricultural interests in the Empire. I don’t think the military will be very interested in that. The Syndics might be, as the Empire’s economy is mainly agricultural. Benayu says…it’s too complicated to explain, but you’ll be all right. He’s going to do a much trickier version of what we did with the jewel seller at Mord. They’ll have translators aboard, so Striclan’s not going to let on he speaks their language. If he wants you to say anything important, Benayu can tell you in your mind. He says the magicians they’ve hired are fairly good but nothing special. Normally one of them would spot what we’re up to, but he’ll put them out of action. What do you want to look like?”

“I don’t mind. Only not too young and pretty. And not like I’m going to look when I’m forty.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I just don’t want to know,” she said. (
Him
knowing was what mattered, of course. No. She’d got to stop thinking like that.) “But can I have white hair?” she added hurriedly.

“Tell Benayu.”

He turned back to the others. Striclan was explaining something about how two of the Syndics were enemies in public but were actually both in the pay of the same big mining company, which wanted to start mining in the Empire. Maja’s attention drifted. She was sitting companionably with Ribek, but being careful not to touch him. Perhaps too careful, she thought. She oughtn’t to need to be careful about it.

In that other existence she’d been planning to go back and live at the mill with him. Now she wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be better to go back to Woodbourne. It depended on what Saranja, and Striclan of course, decided to do, whether they simply rebuilt the farm and lived together there. They weren’t making much attempt to conceal their delight in being back in each other’s company, but it was difficult to imagine them both settling down to the steady, repetitive annual round of life on a farm in the Valley. They were born to be adventurers, both of them. There weren’t any adventures in the Valley.

That made her wonder about her dream again. It had been such a strong vision. Pogo without his wonderful wings, just an ordinary sad white horse. Not magical at all, never any more. And then stepping into the picture, and becoming a unicorn. Unicorns are as magical as they come, but this was only a unicorn in a crumbling picture. Half his horn was already gone. The rest of it, the rest of him, the rest of the whole magical world, would soon be a drift of colored flakes on the cobblestones, until a breeze blew up and wafted it away.

If it hadn’t been for Ribek, would she even have wanted to go back to the Valley, once Benayu had sealed it off as Faheel and the Ropemaker had done? Supposing he did. After what the Ropemaker had been saying she wasn’t even sure about that now. Anyway, there’d still have to be a way of stopping the horsemen coming through the passes. So Ribek would have to go back to his mill. He’d want to, anyway. It was where he belonged. Where she would belong, if all went well. One day.

She thought of all the wonders she’d seen on her journey. Even more she thought of the wonders she’d felt with her strange extra sense. Not the terrible, battering, almost obliterating explosions of pure power, but the little everyday magics inherent in people and creatures and plants and everything in the whole material world. To lose that now, having only just found it—it would be like losing…no, not her eyesight or her hearing, but at least her sense of smell. Think, the smell of an early morning after longed-for rain has fallen on parched fields—never to have that again in your nostrils!

Of course, even if Benayu renewed the magical sickness that had for generations kept the armies of the Empire out of the Valley, that wouldn’t affect her, being female, and she’d be able to come and go through the forest and revisit the world of magic when she wanted, but it wouldn’t be the same as living among its day-to-day wonders. And she would never finish learning how to cope with major magic, not just to endure it, but to explore it and understand it, perhaps even to relish its strange and dangerous energies.

Her rough cousins had loved climbing the largest trees on the edge of the forest, whose branches hung low enough to reach, and where they were not affected by the magic sickness. They would dare each other higher and higher, further and further out along the swaying boughs, and descend gleeful and triumphant. Maja could never have done that, but with Jex’s help she’d been beginning to do something of the same kind with serious magic until Benayu and the Ropemaker had needed to shield her completely from the huge forces unleashed in all that had happened from the oyster-beds of Barda to the destruction of the Watchers.

Suppose she went back to live in the Valley. Sealed again into its seclusion, she would never make that wonderful journey. Was that what her dream had been telling her? All she would have was her memory, a flaking picture on a crumbling wall. Suppose, suppose…

She must have sighed at the thought.

“What was that about?” said Ribek. “You can’t be that bored with adventures.”

She told him.

“Well, it’s worth thinking about,” he said, to her surprise. “I’ve been wondering myself, after what the Ropemaker told us. Watchers are gone. Who knows what’s happened to the Emperor? Chanad’s got the ring the Ropemaker used to summon the Twenty-four, but there isn’t a Twenty-four to summon. Not even a One. All we know is things are going to change. It could be wonderful. It could be hideous. And we won’t know. Frustrating, very, as our friend would have said.”

“Benayu says he doesn’t want to do big stuff, anyway for a while. Suppose he didn’t seal us off in the Valley, then we’d still have the horse people to deal with.”

“Well, maybe. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

“What’s that got to do with the horse people?”

“You haven’t been listening?”

“I told you. I was asleep. I had that dream.”

He grinned at her, but didn’t say anything.

Frustrating, very.

Chanad was coming across toward them. She was obviously still very tired and shaken, but apart from that everything about her, the look on her face, the way she moved and held herself, was quietly solemn. She wasn’t making a parade of it. It was how she felt. They all rose and waited for her to speak.

“They’re ready to begin,” she said. “They would like us all to watch, but not to come too near. It will be clear to you how close we may safely get. They will need help to stand at first. I will steady Zara….”

“I’ll do the Ropemaker,” said Saranja firmly.

“Good. I will give you bread soaked in wine. Put it to his lips before you try to lift him. He will nibble a morsel off and that will give him the strength to stand and move. Then follow me and Zara and we will position them either side of the tablet. When I give you the signal—it’ll be when the sun’s rim is about to touch the horizon—put the bread to his lips again. As soon as both are ready, we can move away. We will stand and witness their going.”

They walked quietly over to where the two dying magicians lay in the shadow of the rocks. Zara was on her back with her hands clasped across her. The Ropemaker was on his side, facing her, slightly curled up, with his cheek resting on the back of his hand, like a sleeping child. Standing, Maja could just see over the top of the rocks to where the round, smoky-orange sun was settling out of a pale gold sky toward the dark hills. Visibly the gap closed.

Chanad took a roll and a small flask out of the folds of her robe. She broke the roll in two, releasing an odor of fresh-baked bread, and poured a little yellow wine into the soft interiors. She handed one half to Saranja, then bent and breathed gently on each of the still faces. The eyes opened. She placed the softened pulp of her half roll against Zara’s mouth and the shriveled lips sucked and chumbled at it. Saranja did the same for the Ropemaker until he turned his head away. The helpers stood back, and they all waited.

“I am ready,” whispered Zara.

“Me too,” said the Ropemaker, and pushed himself up onto his elbow.

Chanad had to lift Zara bodily to her feet and half-carry her across the turf, but the Ropemaker needed only to be helped up and then steadied as he tottered behind them. The others followed. A hollow had appeared in the center of the arena, grassed like the rest of the space, as though it had been there for centuries. At the bottom lay a low stone slab, carved with what looked like a letter in an unknown alphabet. Chanad and Saranja helped the two magicians down the slope and positioned them either side of the slab. Without any discussion Ribek, Benayu, Striclan and Maja spaced themselves out round the rim of the bowl. Sponge was already at Benayu’s heels and the horses came ambling over and joined them.

Again they waited. Maja was facing west. The sun was almost red now, seeming unnaturally huge and near, but dim enough for her to be able to watch it unblinking. Chanad, in deep shadow at the bottom of the bowl, could not have seen it, but when only a sliver of golden sky separated the rim of the disc from the rim of the hills she nodded to Saranja.

The bread had barely touched the lips of the two magicians when they raised their hands and took it themselves. Chanad and Saranja backed away, turned and climbed up out of the bowl. The sun reached the hilltops.

The magicians didn’t stir, but they seemed now to glow faintly as they slowly nibbled the bread, or perhaps that was only an effect of dusk settling into the bowl. They stopped eating, and a rustling whisper rose from the hollow, steady, faintly rhythmic, shaping itself as Maja listened into the sound of two old voices muttering as if in dreams. Gradually the mutter was strengthened into song. They raised their arms in a gesture of invocation. Somehow the space in and above the bowl seemed to begin to revolve, without causing any movement in the windless air, but because it was filled with minute flecks of light, like dust-motes, turning and turning, floating downward and inward, drawn to the two figures standing either side of the slab, sucked in by their quiet song.

Maja knew what she was looking at. It was all in the old story, right at the start of it. This was what had happened to the magician Asarta forty generations ago. She was watching the whirlpool of the years. The motes were all the uncountable instants of those two long lives spiraling back down into the bodies from which they had come. The glow from the two magicians intensified and spread around them, filling the bowl but casting no shadows beyond it. The light contained itself, like a drop of liquid held into a sphere by its own surface tension.

The two voices became distinct. They were almost at the same pitch, but very different, the Ropemaker’s a light, slightly nasal tenor, quavery at first, but true, and soon becoming firmer. By the time he was standing to his full stature it rang with his natural energies and zest for life. Zara’s was deep for a woman’s voice, much darker and sadder in tone, with effortlessly sustained long haunting notes. Their songs were not the same songs, but intertwined gracefully with each other as if they had been made and shaped to do so.

Though there was no wind the whirl of time plucked at their clothing like a fresh breeze, unsettling small bright birds from the folds of Zara’s robes, to flutter and dart around her. The backward-racing minutes twitched and fingered at the Ropemaker’s turban, loosed it and sent it snaking away in a brilliant ribbon of color, and the birds danced in and out of its windings. Laughing through his song he shook loose his fiery shock of hair and it blazed out like sunlight around him.

Their song became laughter, delight in their own youth and strength and the joy of the living world. Still singing, they held out their arms to each other across the slab, gripped hands with hands, and stepped easily up onto the slab. He knelt, bringing their faces to a level. She moved to him, and they took each other in their arms and kissed. Even to Maja it was obvious, from the sudden slight awkwardness after all their assured and purposeful movement through the ritual, and from the long, intense silence breaking the song, that the kiss was no part of the ritual, and that never before in all their immense lives had either of them done such a thing, done it in the love that magicians can never afford.

They separated. She stepped back and he remained kneeling. They raised their arms in front of their faces and moved them closer to each other, all four hands spread and tilted backward at the wrist, forming a shape like the petals of a tulip. The light in and over the hollow, without losing any of its intensity, shrank inward to its center, smaller and smaller, until it became the thing that the hands were holding, all the instants of all their years gathered into a sphere of pure light, that still cast no shadows because it spread no ray beyond itself, an offering up of those lives, the purpose and ending of the ritual.