Angel Isle (5 page)

“Astonishing,” whispered Fodaro. “Can you tell us what they are?”

“Ask Ribek. I’m still trying not to believe it.”

“I’m not,” said Ribek. “After all, I believe in the Ice-dragon. They are roc feathers, according to the story we tell in the Valley, which so far has proved a pretty good guide, judging by what’s happened to us in the last few days.”

“Roc feathers. I have never seen one. But yes, of course. And the hair that binds them? That is something of another order.”

“It belonged to…to the Ropemaker—the fellow whose name Saranja said just now, but mostly he’s called the Ropemaker in the story we tell in the Valley.”

Fodaro didn’t respond, didn’t even move. It seemed as if he had stopped breathing. Benayu stared at him frowning.

“You know the Ropemaker’s true name?” he whispered at last, speaking the words even more slowly than before. “You carry a hair of his head? But you know nothing of magic? What brought you to this place? How do you come by a horse with the wings of a roc? Are you, at last, who I think you are?”

“Rocky brought us here,” said Saranja. “We were just running away from the Sheep-faces, but he seemed to know where to go. Until I found the roc feathers he was just an old nag who insisted on following me, but then everything changed and Ribek showed up and I knew what to do because of the story. Then the Sheep-faces came looking for us, but Rocky was faster than they were so we got away, and after that we just came where he took us.”

“Come to that,” said Ribek, “I think we’re entitled to ask who you are and what you are doing here.”

Fodaro relaxed enough to manage a smile.

“We are in much the same boat,” he said. “We too are running away, or rather hiding. Until you came we believed we were here to take advantage of certain magical aspects of this place to conceal ourselves from our enemy, and to develop Benayu’s powers with the help of Jex. I cannot tell you more about Jex because we have promised not to, but I’m extremely worried about him, both for his sake and ours. We need him well.”

He turned to Saranja.

“Will you try something for me?” he said. “I’ve never seen him like this before. He should have started pulling himself together by now, but if anything he’s getting worse. This may not work, but it’s the best I can think of. Kneel beside him, and when you are settled untie the quills, lay them close in front of him on the boulder, without the hair—don’t let that touch him. Leave them there only an instant. Don’t even whisper the name—just think it, and then pick them up and retie them at once. I’m sorry to have to ask you. I wouldn’t if I thought it was safe for anyone else to do this.”

Saranja actually grinned at him, if a bit sourly.

“If it works, it works,” she said. “I just don’t have to pretend to like it.”

With deft, careful movements she did as he’d told her. The feathers rested on the rock for little more than a heartbeat, but for that splinter of time the hillside again seemed to twang with tension. The lizard gave a convulsion that almost toppled it from its boulder. And then Saranja was rewinding the long gold hair round the quills, and the hillside was at peace, and the lizard was no longer shuddering but crouched in the sunlight with its eyes closed and the slow come-and-go of its breath gently stirring the ruffles of its neck.

Saranja slid the feathers into her pouch and rose. Fodaro held his spread hands above the lizard, as if warming them over a fire.

“Well, he’s here, at least,” he said. “But not yet as fully here as we need him to be.”

“Would that work on Ribek’s leg?” asked Saranja, obviously impatient with such abstractions. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it, Ribek, by the look of you?”

“Not too good, but it can wait. Depends how urgent everything else is.”

“Not that urgent, I hope,” said Fodaro. “But Jex and the roc from which your feathers came are of a different order of being from ourselves,” he said. “A human hurt requires human healing, whether physical or magical. Benayu will see to it…. No, better not for the moment. I’m sorry.”

“I’d rather let Saranja take a look at it first, in any case,” said Ribek wearily. “I’m sorry, Benayu. I don’t distrust what you do the way she does, but I’m not used to it, and I prefer to stick with what I know. And there’s always a price, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Where Saranja’s been these last six years the men did precious little besides fighting each other, so she knows about wounds. Mine wasn’t too good when she dealt with it this morning, but your mountain water is clear and clean. I’ll ask it to help. They’ve all got a bit of deep-earth healing in them, water sources, until we start poisoning them lower down.”

He turned and limped over to the stream. The other four followed him. The two magicians watched for a while in silence as Saranja unwound the ragged bandage as far as she could, cutting off a bit of the loose end and using that to sponge and soften the clotted blood until she could pick the next winding free with her knife-point. It was clear from her movements that as he’d promised she knew what she was doing.

“Yes, you are right,” said Fodaro suddenly. “Any use of magic demands a price from the user. Out there, in the Empire, a serious magician would have demanded silver for healing a wound like yours—gold, even, if the wound was badly infected. Up here, though—”

“‘Would have demanded’?” interrupted Saranja without looking up, but Fodaro waited as she eased the last winding away and began on the blood-drenched pad that covered the torn flesh. The blood was still oozing, and the scabbing for the most part soft enough for her to peel the pad gently away. Ribek’s breath hissed between teeth and lip, but he didn’t flinch. The wound was a tear rather than a slice, not deep but angry-looking, running slantwise across the upper part of the calf. Saranja sniffed at it and frowned.

“Do you know what you need?” asked Benayu.

“Should do. Ribek told you. Mothermoss would be nice, but I’ll be lucky to find it here. There should be harmsain in the wood, though. Here, Maja—clean it up best you can, while I look. When you’ve finished, put a pad over it—here—and wrap it up to keep warm.”

She dampened one of the cleaner bits of bandage, folded another into a wad, gave them to Maja.

“Don’t go too far,” said Fodaro. “It’s still possible that you may need to leave in a hurry.”

She nodded and walked off toward the trees. Benayu glanced enquiringly at his uncle, who shook his head.

Ribek had caught the look.

“Let her find what’s there, if that’s what she wants,” he said. “I’ll do. We aren’t used to this sort of thing. There was almost no magic in the Valley. Saranja’s family can hear what the cedars are saying, and mine can listen to moving water, and that was about it. There was a chop or two left in the basket, wasn’t there?”

Benayu fetched the basket and then joined Fodaro, and crouched with him beside the lizard. They talked in low and worried voices. Ribek ate slowly while Maja worked away at his wound, which had clearly been troubling him more than he had let on. Then he hunkered away from the stream, stretched out in the sunlight and closed his eyes. By the time Saranja returned with a sheaf of twigs and leaves he was fast asleep, and Benayu had a small fire going beside the little circular pool, with a metal pot suspended over it.

Saranja eyed this, frowning.

“How did you know?” she said, instantly suspicious.

“Maja told me you’d need it, and Fodaro says we’d better lay off magic—even silly little things like lighting a fire—for the moment. So I did everything else your way, fetched the pot and the flint with my own hands, I mean. There’s good clean water in the pool. What have you got?”

“Nothing I was looking for. Most of this is only a bit better than nothing, but the bitter-bark’s fine, only it’s got to be an infusion.”

She picked out a bunch of twigs bound with a rag, and used this to handle them as she peeled the bronzy bark from the white wood. Maja reached to help.

“Watch it,” she said. “The raw sap is poisonous. You can use a couple of other sticks to put the bark in the pot. Keep it stirred, and just simmering if you can. Are we actually in a hurry, do you know?”

“There’s remarkably little we do know, these days,” said Fodaro, looking up. “Less than ever now, until Jex comes to himself. He exists simultaneously in two…places. That’s all it’s safe to tell you. But normally he can communicate through his other self with creatures of his kind elsewhere in the Empire and tell us what’s going on out there. In the meanwhile perhaps you could tell us this story which you’ve mentioned from time to time. It could very well be useful.”

Saranja sighed.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” she said. “Better get it over. We’ll let this cool now. Put me right, Maja, if I get it wrong. It’s been a long time.”

She lifted the pot from the fire with a stick and wedged it behind a boulder, then moved with the other three into the shade of the cedar, and they settled down close above the lizard.

“You’ll have to check with Ribek,” she said. “Everyone in the Valley tells it a bit differently, but his family and mine are the only ones it really matters to.”

“The Valley?” asked Fodaro.

“It’s over there,” she said, pointing west. “I don’t know how far. We came a bit roundabout, because first off we were escaping from some Sheep-faces in an airboat…. Forget about that—I’ll draw you a picture and explain later.”

She picked up a twig and started to scratch an outline in a patch of bare earth.

“Rocky flies incredibly fast,” she went on, “and that second day he kept going till it was too dark to see. Then we slept on a sort of ledge in the mountains and flew on all next day, with one short break by a river. We slept again halfway up a mountain and got here, when? A bit after midday, about?

“Anyway the Valley’s completely cut off from everywhere else, and has been for—oh, I suppose it’s got to be twenty generations, however long that is. But it wasn’t always. According to the story, we used to keep getting invaded by wild horsemen from the north and—just as bad, if not worse—the Emperor’s armies coming up from the south to drive them back. In the end things got so bad that we decided to send a sort of delegation to look for a powerful magician to stop this happening. She was called Asarta—”

“Asarta.”

Maja heard the stone whisper in her mind, coming, it seemed, from unbelievable distances away. Saranja must have heard it too. She shuddered.

“I don’t know if I can take much more of this,” she said. “I don’t mind giving Rocky his wings and taking them off again, for some reason, but otherwise…And I really hate it when it happens inside my head. In the story there’s an ancestor of ours—mine and Maja’s—called Tilja, who could undo magic. That was the only part I used to like.”

“Many people in the Empire feel the same,” said Fodaro. “There’ve been waves of lynchings of magicians over the years. Go on with the story. Your people went to this magician—I know her name, of course, but not much else. What did she do?”

“She didn’t. She’d finished her work and was just getting ready to leave, to ‘undo her days,’ according to the story, so she sent our people on to a magician called…Can I say his name?”

Fodaro shrugged.

“It will not have been his true name,” he said. “But it will still have resonance for Jex, as Asarta’s did. Try mouthing it only. You can tell us later.”

Maja watched the lizard as Saranja’s lips moved. It did not stir, but again she heard the whisper in her mind, no louder than before, but nearer, somehow, more resonant.

“Faheel.”

Then silence. Saranja hesitated a moment, sighed resignedly and went on.

“She gave them a ring to take to him, and in exchange he sealed the Valley off for another twenty generations. He summoned the Ice-dragon to block the northern passes with massive snowfalls, and—I’ve always thought this bit sounded particularly stupid—some unicorns into the southern forest who brought a kind of disease with them that made any men who tried to go in among the trees fall sick and die. Women were all right, though. See what I mean, stupid? There was always one woman in my family who could hear what the cedars were saying, and she had to go into the forest each year when the first snows fell and sing to the unicorns and then feed them through the winter. And there was always one man in Ribek’s family who could hear what the streams were saying, and each year he had to climb up to the snow line and sing to the snows to bring the Ice-dragon back for another winter.

“Well, that lasted another twenty generations, and then it broke down again, so four of us—Tilja and her gran from our family and a boy called Tahl and his grandpa from Ribek’s—went off to look for this Faheel person…Bother. No, it seems to be all right to call him that…Anyway, after a lot of tiresome magical adventures…I think I’m leaving out something important, Maja….”

“The Watchers?”

“Oh yes. Everything in the Empire was very tightly controlled. You couldn’t travel anywhere without having a way-leave. You couldn’t even die without a license from the Emperor. And magic—oh, gods! I suppose I’ve got to start believing in all this stuff—that was controlled by a bunch of super-magicians in Talak…am I saying that right?”

“The city is differently pronounced in different parts of the Empire,” said Fodaro. “Up here in the North we mostly call it Talagh. You were about to tell us what you know about the Watchers.”

“Oh yes. They were supposed to be controlling the magic in the Empire, only they were all at daggers drawn with each other but that didn’t stop them cracking down hard on anyone using magic without permission. Faheel had set the Watchers up to stop people doing that, but it went on in secret, and the system got out of hand, so everyone was scared stiff of the Watchers, who were meant to be there to look after them, and meanwhile Faheel had disappeared.

“But Tilja’s gran had—wait for it—a wooden spoon, of all things, carved from the wood of a peach tree that had grown from the stone of a peach out of Faheel’s garden, and the darned thing knew where he was and if you said his name over it would swivel round and point that way. The trouble was that sent out a magical signal which put the Watchers on to them whenever they tried. But they just managed to get away each time and in the end they found Faheel on an island out in the southern ocean, but of course he was incredibly old and tired and longing to give up, but he couldn’t until he’d found someone to pass the famous ring on to.”