Angel Isle (47 page)

CHAPTER
26

D
reamily, lulled by the hiss of the passing air and the rhythmic boom of the tireless wings, Maja watched the landscape stream away beneath them as the horses bore them north. She thought they’d seen a lot of the Empire on their long, slow journey south, but realized now that it had been almost nothing beside the things she would never now see.

That craggy range of hills with a great gorge running through, for instance, every cliff festooned with battlements and walls protecting what should have been a series of mighty citadels, but in fact holding no more than a few stone cottages with steep red roofs, piled almost on top of each other where they clung to the rock above the foaming water.

Benayu, after a week’s rest at Larg, was stronger physically, but still seemed dazed and faraway, coming to terms with himself, perhaps, in the same way he had done on their first journey north from Larg. Maja, relishing her recovery of her extra sense, hadn’t asked him to renew her shielding. So now she could tell that the costly-seeming fortifications had been built centuries ago by magic. But why here, and to what end? And how did the people who dwelt there now earn their living in such a seemingly barren place?

A yellow plain, featureless apart from one large dark patch like cloud-shadow. But the sky was cloudless, and above the patch, and nowhere else, forty or fifty huge birds circled. As the horses drew nearer Maja saw that the patch was an enormous herd of animals, several thousand of them. Antelopes? Wild cattle? And the birds vultures, hovering for prey? None of these, for as Maja watched three of the creatures below detached themselves from the main body and she could see that they were also birds, each the size of a pony, but flightless, with puny little wings. A moment later one of those circling overhead plummeted down and drove the strays back to join the main mass; then the rest of the flying ones seemed to notice the intruders’ approach and flew shrieking toward them. Saranja, riding on that flank with Striclan pillion, shouted a warning and swung Rocky away. Benayu and Ribek followed. Sponge dropped back as rear-guard, snarling over his shoulder. The birds, soon outpaced, turned back to their guardianship.

Then for a while they followed a river winding through a forest, fold after fold of tree-covered hills as far as the eye could see. Stretches of glassy-still water alternated with foaming rapids. Close above one of these, two massive chains had been stretched from bank to bank to hold two lines of rafts steady against the current. There were people on the rafts, wearing the normal bright-colored dress of the Empire. Each of the women on the upstream line carried a large gourd, from which she was steadily sprinkling small handfuls of what looked like some kind of seed onto the water where it flowed between the rafts. The rafts immediately above the rapids were spaced further apart so that the men on them could thrash the surface into foam with implements like flails. The foam was brilliant orange, which persisted all the way down the rapids until it was lost in the stillness of the pool below.

In the middle of a clearing beside the pool a boy about six years old, naked apart from a small gold crown, was sitting on an ornate throne watching the tumbling water. Either side of him a dozen yellow-robed men—priests, perhaps—stood with their spread hands raised in front of them as if they were causing the color change. None of the laborers above the rapids had even glanced up as the winged horses passed above them, so intent were they on their task. For a moment it looked as if the priests would also ignore the intrusion into their ritual, but then one of them shouted and pointed and they broke rank and rushed into the trees, stumbling over their robes as they ran. The boy remained, staring steadfastly at the sunset-colored rapids.

“What on earth was happening there?” said Maja. “It wasn’t magic. At least I couldn’t feel any.”

“We’ll never know now,” said Ribek cheerfully.

“No, we’ll never know now. Never.”

“We could go back and ask, I suppose. Only I doubt they’d be friendly, judging by the way those fellows bolted into the trees.”

“We’d be doing it all the time. Going back and asking, I mean. There’s so much. It was better on the road. There was time.”

“You want to get down and walk? You aren’t in a hurry to get back to the Valley?”

“Not specially, not for me. I know you’ve got to, because the horsemen will be going back to their wives and families before the passes close, and then you can sing to the snows and stop them coming back next year.”

“Assuming it works again. Won’t know till I’ve tried.”

“You’ve seen the Ice-dragon. And Saranja’s got Zald. It’ll be all right. This time, anyway. And Benayu wants to get back to his sheep, and Saranja’s got to sort out about what happens to Woodbourne and see what everybody wants done about the forest…”

“And we won’t know
that
for several years. Valley’s never been quick to make up its mind…”

They had talked it over and over in the last few days since the Ropemaker’s unsettling last words about the new times coming. It was both hardest and easiest for Ribek. Hardest because he would have been perfectly happy to go back to the old times, with the Valley closed off completely, and easiest because he still knew what he wanted and what he had to do—to live as a miller at Northbeck and to keep the passes closed if he could.

Saranja and Maja were different. They’d both hated their life in the Valley. Why should they care what happened to it? Saranja had already tried to leave it once, and Maja might have done so too when she was older, supposing she’d had the nerve. But both of them, almost as soon as they were in the adventure, had assumed without thinking that the whole purpose of their lives, the one thing for which they’d been born, was to find the Ropemaker so that he could restore the Valley to what it had been for the past forty generations.

And now perhaps that wasn’t true any more. The Ropemaker had said those times were over, and they themselves must sow the seed of change. This was what they had tried to do when they met the Pirates on the hill above Larg, but it would take years—most of Maja’s lifetime, perhaps—before she got to see what kind of a tree had grown from their sowing.

And if these were new times, did it even matter from now on if there wasn’t anyone to sing to the unicorns, if no one ever again could hear what the cedars were sighing?

Anyway, how could the three of them decide something like that for themselves? The one thing that was clear to them was that somehow the whole Valley, everyone who lived there, had to choose. They had a few years more to make up their minds.

Benayu had been firm about that. There was one important thing he had to do when he got home, he said, as soon as he’d recovered from his efforts at Barda and Larg, and then he was going back to simple shepherding until he’d grown to manhood and come fully into his powers. At that point he would help Saranja seal the forest if that was what the Valley wanted—she couldn’t do it without him—and then make up his mind about his own future.

So, a few more years. Call it six. Six years for the Valley to make up its mind. And Ribek his.

They fell silent, thinking their own thoughts.

“I know what I want for myself, of course,” said Ribek after a while. “All the same, there’s a funny sense of letdown. I mean, we’ve done so much against all the odds, gone so far, fought brigands and demons, ridden flying horses, visited another universe, found the Ropemaker, destroyed the Watchers, saved Larg twice over. But…I don’t know…that last meeting…all right, we agreed a temporary truce—best we could hope for, best we could offer—but everything else is still up in the air. It was all too easy, though I suspect it might have been a great deal harder but for your friend with the unpronounceable name…”

“Blrundahlrgh,” said Maja. “Anyway, none of them could manage Kzuva.”

“Not the only thing you had in common. Sisters under the skin, if ever I saw a pair. Anyway I found the whole thing very strange and unsettling. Not how I’d want it to end, if it was an ending. I’m like you I suppose, except that it isn’t the magic I’ll miss. It’ll be not knowing anything that’s happening out here as a result of our efforts, not being part of it.”

“We haven’t quite finished,” said Maja. “We’ve still got to tell Lady Kzuva. I’m looking forward to seeing her house.”

They did that two mornings later, standing in the roadway, just as Tilja and her long-ago companions had done, and staring at the astonishing building. Maja had thought that she would know it already from that story, and yes, still the same river flowed calmly out of the wooded valley and under the massive bridges on which stood the same wonderful house, elegantly ornamented and pinnacled, more beautiful than any of the grand houses they had seen in all their journeyings. It was just what she’d expected, but yet she was not prepared for it. It was old, so full of its own placid magic, breathed into it through the accumulated centuries.

Grand steps led up to a big double door. At Ribek’s knock a wicket door opened and a footman in the green and gold livery of Kzuva came out. He looked them over briefly. Huh! Fifteenth graders, at best. Riffraff.

“Your kind go round to the courtyard entrance,” he said. “You can state your business there.”

“You mistake our kind,” said Ribek, speaking with all the authority of an Imperial delegate. “The brooch, Maja. Thank you. Now, sir, will you please take this directly to the Lady Kzuva. Put it into her own hands. She will know what it means. She will be exceedingly displeased if she learns that you have done otherwise than I ask.”

The footman stared at him, glanced at the others again, stared rather longer at the three horses, wingless but still magnificent, and retired, closing the wicket behind him. They waited. Footsteps—more than one set—on the paving within. Both the big doors creaked open. Four footmen this time. They lined up, two either side of the entrance, and bowed as Lady Kzuva hobbled out between them. She raised her spectacles but merely glanced at her visitors, then gestured to the footmen, who retired, closing the big doors behind them but leaving the wicket open.

Now Lady Kzuva studied the visitors one by one, starting with Maja. Maja gazed back. This was the meeting she had been both dreading and longing for. There had been no mirror on Angel Isle, no rock pool so far above the waves; all she knew of Lady Kzuva’s appearance was what she had been able to see directly, arms and hands, the front of her body, her feet. Now she looked into deep brown eyes, enlarged by the spectacles, remarkably clear in one so old. She knew, from having seen through them, how they had given her a sense of needing to peer at the world, but there was no sign of that in Lady Kzuva’s expression. No sign either of fret or temper in the set of the small mouth or the many-wrinkled, soft, leathery-brown complexion.

The nose was straight and well formed, the stance erect, the whole effect proud without arrogance, dominant without contempt. No wonder the Pirates had been impressed.

“Maja,” she said.

Maja managed a curtsey of a sort.

Lady Kzuva smiled, amused.

“No need for that between us,” she said. “We know each other too…intimately. Is it not strange that we have never seen each other? And the Captain.”

“Not really, I’m afraid,” said Saranja. “I was a fake too, though at least I looked like me. But I’m really just a farmer’s daughter. And I can’t do much magic, either. My real name’s Saranja Urlasdaughter.”

“You are welcome in any guise under my roof, Captain. And Mr….? You have lost few years, I think.”

“Ribek Ortahlson, at your service, my lady. I was something less of a pretender. I am indeed a mill owner, though I own only one small mill. And the ability to call to the Ice-dragon does run in my family. I must explain, my lady, that we aren’t here in the hope of exploiting your hospitality. We would have understood if you never wanted to see us again after our intrusion into your life. But events took place after you left us which you will need to know about.”

“There is a great deal that I shall want to know. It was certainly very frustrating to be whisked away so much in the middle of things.”

“It may take some time, my lady.”

“No matter. I hope you can spare me a few days, at least. And Mr. Ruddya. You too have changed, but in some other fashion than the rest of you.”

“I was, but no longer am, a professional spy, my lady. I was reared from childhood by the people you call the Pirates to travel throughout the Empire and send my reports back to them. Part of my training taught me how to change my appearance.”

“Who ever would have thought that I should welcome an enemy spy through my door? But I do, and most gladly.

“And last but not least, my boy Bennay. I have been so worried for you. I am relieved and delighted to see you looking so well. And all those amusing wonders we appeared to accomplish flowed from you and Mistress Chanad. There has always been a magician in my household, so I am well acquainted with your kind. Not one of them, and they were grown men and women, could have accomplished one-twentieth of what you have done. How old are you?…Bennay is not your real name, I think.”