Angel Isle (33 page)

“Perhaps you just somehow felt what I wanted. Anyway I saw almost everything. Benayu was wonderful. And Sponge. Tell me what I look like. I’ve seen my legs, so I know I’m a rag doll.”

“Cute. No substitute for the real thing, mind you, but nice and light and easy to carry around. You look reasonably like yourself too, apart from the blue eyes.”

Now or never. No way I’d be able to do it when I’m back in my own shape, speaking the words out aloud. Don’t rush it. Start gently, somewhere else.

“What happened back at the oyster pond? I was in the water. I think you got hold of my wrist and were helping me down, but I couldn’t see anything or feel anything except the fire-line I was following. Then everything went black.”

“Like I said. We’d reached the bottom but your hand was like a dog pulling on a leash. You weren’t doing it yourself. Your arm would’ve been completely limp, except that it was being dragged on down by your hand. It pushed on down between the oysters into the gravelly stuff and then—you saw me trying to touch Benayu’s eggshell earlier?”

“Yes.”

“It was like what happened to me, only a hundred times more so. My own arm went numb. I saw the breath bursting out of your mouth so I had a quick grope with my other hand and found the bit of rope and hauled you up to the surface. I was desperate to get you ashore and tip the water out of you, but the moment I broke the surface I was snatched into the air and deposited on Levanter’s back. I seemed to have lost you somehow. So I started yelling to Benayu to turn back and find you, but then I realized I was holding something and got the water out of my eyes and saw what it was.

“You looked absolutely pitiful and my heart sank but I just hoped that Benayu and Jex had got it right between them. I stuffed you into my shirt for the moment—I was sopping wet too, remember—and looked to see what we’d found. I hadn’t given it a thought till that moment. I could perfectly easily have dropped it in the excitement. My heart sank all over again, but all I could do was shove it into a saddlebag and sort myself out, get hold of the reins, sit properly and so on.

“As soon as I got the chance I looked behind us, but there wasn’t anything to see at first because Benayu had made a dense fog over the whole area. It wasn’t anything to bother the Watchers, really, he says, though it gave us a few more seconds to get us further out over the sea before they swept it away, but that wasn’t the point.

“I saw that happen. One moment the fog was there, the next it was thin mist, except for a dense patch over the harbor. Benayu had made that to be still there when the fog was gone. There was a screen round us, he says, but of course I couldn’t see that. And down at the harbor he’d built a good strong ward round a flock of sheep waiting to be shipped, and then ‘sent’ them—that’s the opposite of fetching—somewhere up the coast. And he’d put it into the poor old Magister’s head that he’d seen us heading off in that direction. That was part of the false trail, like the extra bit of fog.

“Anyway, what I saw looked like a ripple of sunlight sweeping up from the south and rolling the mist away in front of it. A bit of the mist seemed to stay round us, enough to hide us from the shore, I guess, but I could just make out the Magister standing by the oyster pond staring back toward Barda. Six or seven Watchers appeared out of nowhere—they all looked exactly like that one who came to the way station. The oyster pool exploded. The Magister fell flat on his face. Everything in the pool fountained up into the air and rained down through a glittering net, which I guessed was there to sieve out anything magical in the pool.

“Then the Magister was stood up like a doll—sorry about that—no offense meant—and just dropped after a couple of moments, and the Watchers disappeared. They must have gone down to the harbor because there was a colossal explosion and a swirling dark cloud which was sucked up into the sky and just vanished.

“By this time I was absolutely shuddering with cold. I was still wearing my wet clothes, and the wind was whistling past at the speed Levanter was going. The only thing that stopped me freezing solid was a bit of warmth coming up from him through my legs. Having you dangling against my chest, sodden as a sponge, wasn’t helping, so I fished you out and squeezed the water out of you best I could and cleaned you up with a dry shirt out of my saddlebag and hung you round my neck….”

Now!

“Before you did that you kissed me, didn’t you? Not on my forehead, like last night. In the middle of my face. On my mouth.”

“Well…I just felt like it. I’m fond of you. I didn’t realize you’d notice. Your face is a small target and there was a lot going on. I didn’t take careful aim. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not, except that I couldn’t feel it. I want to marry you when I’m old enough. What do you think?”

Long pause. She’d got it all wrong, and plunged right in. If she’d been in her own body she’d have been plum-red with embarrassment. Poor Ribek.

“You don’t have to answer. It probably isn’t a fair question.”

“I was thinking how to put it. The answer is no, but isn’t as simple as that.”

“No’s all right. You don’t have to explain.”

“I want to. I’ve been thinking about it, because I was aware you might have feelings like this. Nothing to be ashamed about. It happens. But if I had the same feelings about someone your age…I knew a chap once, farmer, used to bring his wheat to the mill…”

Another pause.

“Go on.”

“All I’ll tell you is that when I found out what had happened I told him he was sick in his head and he could take his wheat somewhere else to be ground. He would have been better dead.”

“I wasn’t talking about me now. I said ‘when I’m old enough.’ Suppose I was six years older…”

“Make it eight. I’d be fifty-two.”

“I don’t mind how old you are.”

“I do. I’ve seen what can happen. When I was sixteen my sister married a farmer from down the valley. She was three years older than me, and he was a bit past fifty. That’s about two years more than the gap between you and me. He was a big, strong, friendly man—we all liked him. Five years later he had a stroke. The worst of it was that he lived for another twenty-two years, an almost helpless wreck of what he’d been. My sister had the farm to manage, three children to raise, and him to look after night and day. You’ll meet her one day and you’ll see she looks a good twenty years older than I do. Two of the three girls don’t want anything to do with her. They feel that between them their parents managed to blight their own childhoods…. Oh, my dear. All that good young life my sister should have had, wasted and blasted! I’m not going to do that to you. Or to me. Do you see that? I think it was even worse for my brother-in-law than it was for my sister.”

There wasn’t any point in arguing, though Maja could think of plenty of arguments, but not now. Perhaps if she talked to his sister. For the moment it was enough that he’d really been thinking about it. Even that was more than she’d hoped for. Best thing now was to make it easy for him.

“It’s a good thing for you I can’t cry, or you’d be having to wring me out again.”

“There’s that.”

“How much younger would you have to be, d’you think? Five years? Ten? Fifteen?”

“Ten at least. But—”

“And if you tell me about this nephew you’ve got who’s only sixteen and the spit image of you at that age…”

“How did you know?”

He was teasing, of course. He’d already told her he had just five nieces, two living at the mill plus the three he’d been talking about. But so was she. Why couldn’t he see it? They were so right for each other. Not now. Change the subject.

“This is only a dream, isn’t it? We won’t talk about it when I’ve changed back.”

“Right. Thank you, Maja.”

“Wait. There’s something I do want you to talk about. To the others, I mean. It’s about one of us getting outside the eggshell. Ask Jex and Benayu if I’m a sort of magical animal, like Sponge and the horses.”

“No!”

“Or if I’m not, can they make me into one?”

“Absolutely not! It would kill you.”

“You can ask them about that too, and then we can decide. There are five of us, so Jex can have the deciding vote. You’ve got to ask them, Ribek. It isn’t fair if you don’t, because I can’t talk to them myself. You can tell them what you think, of course, but you’ve got to tell them what I think too. I’ll be listening, remember, and if you don’t play fair I’ll get into your dreams and give you horrible, horrible nightmares.”

“If they let you go I’ll be in one already.”

“It’s what I’m here for, to find the Ropemaker. It’s why I’m like this now. I’m still the only one who can do it, the way I did in the sheep-fold and the oyster-beds. It’s all meant.”

“All right. We’ll see what the others say.”

CHAPTER
17

B
y morning Jex had recovered enough to talk and listen, so he was there when Ribek told the others about that part of the conversation over breakfast (oyster kedgeree). He put Maja’s case fairly enough but then argued so passionately against it that she wondered whether the others might guess something about the part of the conversation he hadn’t told them.

“I don’t like it either,” said Saranja. “She’s been wasting away as it is, despite what Jex has been doing for her. It all depends whether there’s anything else we can try first. If there isn’t, then it’s a question of whether Jex and Benayu think they can actually do what Maja suggests. But if it’s our only chance then I think we’ve got to let her try. Benayu?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of doing it like that. Off the top of my head I think it might be possible, not quite the way she says because a rag doll is four-dimensional and she wouldn’t survive like that. So she’d have to do something like the Ropemaker must have done and put herself into a different form for the other universe….”

“Could you protect her at all while that’s happening, Jex?” said Ribek.

“No more than partly. And remember that she would also need to endure the stress of following the line left by the Ropemaker’s hair when his name is spoken by one of you. Both the previous times that that has happened she has been very near the limit of what she can stand.”

“Then that’s out,” said Saranja and Ribek together but in different tones.

“Anything else?” Saranja added. “I mean, could you move the eggshell about, for instance?”

“Not a hope…But…Wait…I think there’s just a possibility…If we combine that with Maja’s idea…It’s going to take a lot of thinking. Pure brain-stuff, like I said. No shortcuts. And I’ll still need to talk to Jex. I wish Fodaro were here….”

“Do not forget that I also exist on the other side of your eggshell. I do not understand the equations, but I may still be useful.”

“We wouldn’t have a hope without you. Let’s talk about it when I’ve finished eating.”

The morning passed slowly. When breakfast was over Ribek propped Maja into the crook of a small tree, where she could see almost everything that happened inside the eggshell. Then he brought the saddlebags across, unpacked their contents onto the turf, spread the bedding out to air and sorted and repacked everything else.

Saranja groomed the horses, combed their manes and tails, cleaned a small cut in Pogo’s hock—and goodness, did he make a fuss about it!—and checked the harness. The horses preened their wings with their front teeth as far as they could reach, and then took turns to spread them so that the other two could finish the job. They did this as naturally as if they’d had wings all their lives. So did Sponge, though with his more flexible neck he didn’t need help.

When he’d finished he settled to sleep against the rim of the pool, close to where Benayu sat gazing into the depths of the still water as if he could read the answers to his equations in them. Jex squatted next to him on the stonework. Maja could sense the murmur of his stone voice in her mind, in much the same way that she could faintly hear the rhythm of what Benayu said without being able to distinguish the individual words.

After a long while Benayu rose, stirred Sponge with his foot, lifted Jex down onto the turf and all three came across to Maja’s tree. In the normal course of events Jex didn’t move about much, but when he chose to he did it with an easy, fluid motion, unexpected in so clumsy-looking an animal. Ribek looked up, saw what was happening, and called to Saranja, who came across too.

“You talk to Maja, Jex, and I’ll explain to the others,” said Benayu, and turned to meet them. Jex spoke in Maja’s head.

“Maja?”

“Yes. How are you getting on?”

“There is something we would like to try, but all this is unknown territory.

“The difficulty is that what we are thinking of will become inoperative if I shield you, and you will also need to be to some degree sensitive to external magic if you are to follow the trail to the Ropemaker. So you will have to tell me the moment you feel that it is becoming too much for you.”

“All right. What do you want me to do?”

“Benayu believes that he can construct a much smaller version of what you have been calling the eggshell, just large enough to contain you and therefore light enough to be transported. The form in which I exist in the universe outside the eggshell is largely sedentary, like a sea anemone in your universe. In that form I can, after some preparation, relocate myself over considerable distances. Indeed, I have only a short while ago arrived immediately outside the eggshell, which will make the transfer of large magical impulses between the universes very much easier for me.

“But I cannot follow a trail, as you will need to, to an unknown destination, nor relocate other objects with me except by swallowing them. We doubt whether Benayu’s eggshell would survive the strength of my digestive juices. Our solution is that the dog should carry you, since, being a magical animal, he can exist in both universes.

“The problem then—”

He stopped abruptly and became stone. Something like an immense but soundless explosion battered against the eggshell. Maja couldn’t feel it, but she saw the ground judder, and the whole enclosure seem to heave around as the tree in which she was seated swayed violently to and fro. The stone mermaid toppled into the pool. The horses squealed and reared, wrenching at their tethers and spreading their wings for panic flight. Weird rainbow lights swirled across the surface of the eggshell. Benayu was on his feet, pouring out magical energies, but Maja was impervious to them in her doll form. Saranja was shouting to Ribek to come and help with the horses.

Slowly the turmoil stilled.

“Trouble?” said Ribek mildly.

“The Watchers have found the touching point,” said Benayu. “That was their first shot at breaking through my barrier. I reckon they’ll have suffered, but it was much sooner than I’d expected. Much stronger too. They’re not going to give up. I was wrong. I think they might make it after all. I’ll do something about the horses, like I did yesterday, in case it happens again.”

“How long have we got?” said Saranja.

“I don’t know. But we can’t afford to hang about. Where’ve you got to, Jex? Jex!”

The stone Jex flipped back into its living form.

“Let me try,”
Maja told him.
“You want to do something to me so that I can tell Sponge where to go? All right. See if it works. I’ll tell you if I can’t stand it.”

“Maja agrees,”
said Jex, speaking now to the others.

“Wait,” said Ribek. “I accept that nothing that can happen to her here will be as bad as what would happen to her if she fell into the hands of the Watchers. You’re sure there’s nothing else we can try?”

“I can’t think of anything, and nor can Jex,” said Benayu. “This is far the best chance we’ve come up with.”

“All right,” said Ribek. “You’re going to hang her round Sponge’s neck, I suppose. I’ll do that when you’re ready.”

“This is only a trial,” said Benayu. “I’ll set Sponge up first, and then I’ll do her as gently as I can. Jex will keep in touch, so she can stop the process whenever she wants. If that goes all right she can try guiding Sponge around in here. No point in building the little egg if that doesn’t work, and it’s going to take a bit of time, in any case.”

Ribek grunted and lifted Maja down from the tree. He settled himself down with his back against the trunk. She could just see the back of his right hand across her legs, holding her steady in the crook of his left arm.

“Might as well be comfortable while we’re waiting,” he said. “See all right? Start telling you the rest of ‘The Demon Baker’ while we’re waiting, shall I? I need to take my mind off things just as much as you do. More, probably.”

It didn’t really work. For the first time since she’d known him he let her see how worried he really was. The natural little pauses which storytellers use to sort out in their minds what comes next kept stretching into longer gaps, and then he’d shake himself, say “Sorry,” and go on with the story. Maja didn’t mind. She was aware of being strangely unscared, for someone who had always thought of herself as timid, by what she was soon going to have to try to do. The fact that Ribek really cared about her took up most of her attention.

So she half listened to the story while she watched what Benayu was doing by the pool. He spent some time kneeling with Sponge sitting opposite him. At first he simply cradled Sponge’s head in his hands, looking into his eyes and muttering. Then he asked Saranja to fetch one of Maja’s human socks and gave it to Sponge to sniff. He told Sponge to stay where he was, fetched a handful of soil from the rose bed and dribbled it in a thin stream all the way round Sponge, muttering as he did so.

He was halfway round when another silent explosion battered against the eggshell, but his hand didn’t falter. As soon as the circle was completed it began to glow with a steady pale light, not bright but still visible in the sunless daylight. He straightened, squared his shoulders like someone momentarily easing powerful inward tension, looked briefly round at the eggshell, where the swirls of strange light that had followed the explosion were still dying away, and came across to the pool.

“We’re going to have to speed things up,” he said. “I think that was only a try-out. I took them by surprise first time, and they didn’t get a chance to study what I’d done and start working out how I’d done it. They’ll try something different next time and I’d better be ready for it. I don’t want to be still messing around with this.

“You’re going to have to be able to see what’s happening outside your little eggshell, Maja, and there’s no way I can let you see through it without weakening it fatally, so you’re going to have to see everything through Sponge’s eyes. It’ll be pretty confusing, because of course he’ll actually see them in seven dimensions, but his brain will do its best to switch them into four, as far as it can. It won’t bother him, but you’ll find it pretty confusing.

“I’m telling you that now because you’ll be testing the connection here, inside the big eggshell, in our ordinary four dimensions. You won’t find out what it’s like till you’re on the outside. Ready? Just hang her round Sponge’s neck, Ribek.”

Again the scene swung and tilted as Ribek carried her across the lawn and knelt just outside the circle of pale light. She was facing him now. He was doing his best to smile through his anxiety as he eased her loop over Sponge’s neck. He stood and moved back. Benayu took his place and reached toward her with both hands. She couldn’t feel his touch or see what he was doing, but she guessed it was the same sort of thing he’d been doing to Sponge, because almost at once something started to happen inside her.

It had the familiar tingle of magic, which she hadn’t felt at all in her rag-doll shape despite everything that had been going on around her. It started slowly, becoming steadily stronger, but with nothing like the dizzying impact of powerful magic happening outside herself that she’d learned to bear in her true Maja form.

“All right so far?” asked Benayu. “Tell Jex if you’re not…. Now I’m going to make the connection. I’ve only done it for myself before, and with you as you are…well, it’s a bit tricky. Here goes.”

He rose and stood. She could just see his feet, with an arc of the glowing circle running close in front of them. The glow became stronger, rose, moved inward and passed out of her vision. But now she could feel it, not as though it were touching her on the outside, but moving up inside her body, so that as it passed through her she began to feel for the first time since Ribek had carried her out of the oyster pool where the bits of this new body were—something she’d felt all of her life without noticing, knowing the position of each of her hands and feet, even with her eyes shut.

So now she could tell where Sponge’s four paws—
her
paws—were, and actually feel the pressure of the ground on her hindquarters where she sat with her tail curled round to her right….

The glow passed over her eyes, too bright for her to see anything but the weave of the fabric on which they were painted, but after a few moments it changed to a darker color and then faded and she was seeing again, only very differently from either of the ways she had seen before, Maja or doll. The colors had changed, become much duller. The whole rose bed was now various tones of browny-green, with a few pale blobs and patches to show which were the white flowers, while the darker and browner bits might be the red ones. She couldn’t tell from their shapes which of the rest were leaves or flowers; they seemed to fade into each other.

On the other hand she could smell all their intense individual scents, and could at the same time tell that the enjoyable reek of the dollop of horse dung behind her on the other side of the pool had been dropped there by Levanter.

“Still all right?” said Benayu (wonderful, godlike Benayu) in a curiously deep voice.