Entangled (6 page)

Leoni could still see the operating theatre behind, and sense the rush and chaos surrounding the body on the gurney in there; but all that was fading … fading. Ahead, getting closer, the other end of the tunnel was filled with an illuminated swirling fog through which tantalising vistas of green sunlit meadows dotted with trees appeared and vanished again.

Looks good
, Leoni couldn’t help thinking.
Is it Heaven?

Then the figure of a woman materialised out of the fog filling the mouth of the tunnel, a tall, very beautiful woman, beckoning to her, surrounded by a cascade of white robes – a smiling woman with jet-black hair and indigo skin whose face was hauntingly familiar like an old friend not seen for many years.

The walls of the tunnel dissolved, full remembrance dawned, and Leoni found herself in the presence of the mysterious being she called
the Blue Angel. They were standing barefoot on grass wet with dew, in the midst of a vast meadow. A herd of strange animals unlike any she had ever seen before grazed in the shadows of a nearby clump of trees and there were two suns in the sky, one almost at the zenith, one low down towards the horizon.

‘Where are we?’ asked Leoni.

‘This is the land where everything is known,’ replied the woman. ‘Shall we walk a bit?’

Ria skidded to a halt on a patch of scree at the summit and in the blink of an eye had hefted two good throwing rocks. She hurled the first at Grigo, now just twenty paces below her, and saw it strike the middle of his forehead, felling him like a speared bison. The second rock glanced off Duma’s right ear. It reamed out a chunk of cartilage but he was still coming at her. Then Vik was upon her in a full charge, catching her with his hefty shoulder and sending her sprawling into a thorn bush.

An urgent whisper from Duma: ‘Hey, Vik! Behind you! Uglies!’

Morons
, Ria thought.
Shit for brains.
Hadn’t they even considered the possibility that the Uglies might still be close? Struggling to free herself from the thorns, she enjoyed a comic moment as Vik’s jaw dropped and Duma turned around and fled down the hill in the direction he had come from, pursued by two enormous braves from the Ugly column. They caught him in less than fifty paces. One reached out and pinched his torn right ear, then dragged him back by it, squealing and protesting, to the top of the hill. Vik had been knocked to his knees by a third big male. A fourth menaced Grigo as he regained consciousness.

Arseholes.

‘Definitely arseholes,’ agreed Brindle’s thought-voice. Together with the rest of the Uglies he had scrambled up to the summit. Now he limped over to stand beside Ria and sent her a vivid image of herself running away from the column: ‘Protect you. Told you I would.’

Ria was getting used to not having to speak aloud. Because she and Brindle had a ‘rope’ between them – whatever that meant – she could simply think and he would know. She tried it out: ‘OK, so I guess that makes us even …’

‘Can never be even. What you did before, fought the hunter boys, saved my life – that was … magnificent. You are hero. Brindle useless cripple. Can’t fight. Just tell braves to help you.’

‘You mean if you hadn’t told them they wouldn’t have helped?’

‘No. Why help? No rope between them and you. And you ran away from us. Your decision – so Uglies think: better stay out of it. Better not get mixed up with Clan.’ Pictures exploded in Ria’s mind of the massacres, tortures, thefts, burnings, beatings and insults that Murgh’s followers had recently been inflicting on the Uglies – the whole range of ruthless techniques used to annex their traditional hunting grounds. With the pictures came a huge wave of sadness and loss and Ria understood in a flash that Clan braves had killed Brindle’s mother, brother and sister just two moons before, catching them in the open while they trekked from a distant camp. With more images he showed her that almost every one of the sixty or so Uglies now gathered round the hilltop had suffered similar losses.

It made sense to stay out of the Clan’s way. It made sense to avoid getting mixed up in Clan business. But now, with Grigo, Duma and Vik on their hands, the Uglies were mixed up with the Clan whether they liked it or not. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’ she asked Brindle.

‘Feels like problem.’

‘Will they be killed?’

‘Clan are people like us. Are spirits … like us. Better let them go …’

‘If it was the other way round and the Clan had captured three Uglies who’d been hunting one of our boys, we wouldn’t hesitate. We’d kill you guys on the spot. Without mercy …’

Brindle looked pained and, for a few heartbeats, Ria received nothing from him at all: no words, no feelings, no emotions. Then, very still, serious and emphatic, his thought-voice was back inside her head: ‘Uglies would
not
hunt one of you. Uglies are not Clan. Don’t kill if don’t have to. Never kill for fun.’

Ria wasn’t impressed. ‘If you let them go,’ she said, ‘they’ll just follow us and grab me again as soon as I’m on my own.’

‘We are going to Secret Place. Half-day march from here. Many of us hiding there now since Clan started to attack us. Not only for your sake but for our sake also we must not be followed there.’

The four braves guarding Grigo, Duma, and Vik stayed on duty. The rest, including Brindle, gathered into a tightly packed circle nearby and began to hoot. Coming from these massive, stinking brutes in their ragged skins it was a weird and eerie sound, halfway between an owl call and the cough of a mountain lion, that sent chills up Ria’s spine.
She wondered what purpose it could serve for them when they already had the power to see into each others’ minds.

She was also curious about Brindle. He described himself as a useless cripple yet he was respected by the other Uglies, including the toughest braves. It seemed that when he told them to do something – like rescue her – they obeyed. In Clan society gimps got no respect at all and certainly didn’t give orders. In fact, most of them didn’t even live past the age of five.

As suddenly as it had started, the chanting stopped, the scrum broke up, and Duma, Grigo and Vik were prodded to their feet. A brave wearing a reindeer-skin backpack walked over to them, took off the pack and pulled out a big coil of fine flexible rope woven from grass fibres. Lengths of the rope were cut and used to tie the three scowling youths’ wrists tight together behind their backs, and then to bind their legs equally tight at the ankles – Vik’s right to Grigo’s left and Grigo’s right to Duma’s left. Only Vik’s left leg and Duma’s right leg remained untied and free to move. Grigo was in the middle, hobbled on both sides.

Ria stood close to them on the hilltop, picking thorns out of her leggings and jerkin and feeling spiteful. After what they’d tried to do to her she had no pity for them. As Brindle walked over to join her again she asked: ‘So is this the plan? Just tie them up?’

‘Yes. Not perfect, but better idea than killing them. This way they cannot follow us and we’ll make it to Secret Place before they can get back to Clan …’

The three-bodied man that Duma, Grigo and Vik had become began an awkward shuffle away from the Uglies. When no one stopped them they seemed to take heart and tried to move faster, cursing and complaining with every tottering hop and skip, but they lost their balance and fell over in a tangle of limbs and profanities. Vix’s fat arse ended up in Grigo’s lap, pinning him to the ground.

Ria giggled and yelled: ‘Hey, Grigo, I know you guys like each other a lot, but please, go behind a tree or something …’

With a grunt Grigo shoved Vik aside and forced Duma into a painful contortion so that all three of them could stand. Grigo’s face was flushed with anger and exertion, his lips split and bruised, his teeth broken, his forehead bloody. ‘I’m going to kill you, Ria,’ he hissed through the wreckage of his mouth. ‘The next time I see you you’re dead.’

‘Big words, Grigo. Only maybe it won’t be me who gets killed the next time you see me.’ She whipped back her arm as though about to throw another rock at him and he cowered.

‘See that, Vik?’ Ria couldn’t resist gloating. ‘See that, Duma? Your lord and master is afraid of my empty hand.’ She held up her hand to them, palm outward, fingers extended, and Grigo glared at her with such an intensification of hatred that she knew she’d made an enemy for life.

‘Who’s Sulpa?’ she asked suddenly, hoping to catch him off balance.

A sly look crept over Grigo’s face, but he said nothing and when Duma started to speak he silenced him with a snarl.

Leoni walked in silence for some minutes, just looking around at the peculiar wildlife, trees and scenery, trying to understand what had happened to her, and sneaking glimpses out of the corner of her eye at the Blue Angel walking by her side.

Before, when she had come to her in dreams – and that had not happened for many years – the Angel had been a motherly, gentle, and reassuring presence, with just a hint of some great power held in reserve. On her first visits she had been winged, like the angels painted on the ceilings of Italian churches, and sometimes golden stars had spangled her body. But as Leoni encountered her more often she came to look more and more as she did today – a splendid, imposing but wingless woman.

In dreams, though, it had been as if Leoni were seeing her through a soft filter, or twenty feet of water, whereas now she was revealed in a brilliant radiance and glory, terrible as an army with banners.

Her indigo skin was the colour of earth’s oceans seen from space. Nobody had skin like that.

Then there was her incredible charismatic presence. She was six feet tall, maybe a little more, and she was dressed in figure-hugging robes that seemed to have been sewn from incandescent threads of white metal. Her jet-black hair had a wild satiny sheen and hung thick and straight to below her waist.

She was beautiful in a spectacular and ethereal way, with the high cheekbones, large heavy-lidded almond eyes, arching eyebrows, fine straight nose, full sensual lips, delicate chin, and long elegant neck of an Ancient Egyptian goddess.

Leoni was doing her best to act nonchalant but inside she was freaking – and it wasn’t just because of the Blue Angel.

Everything she could see around her – absolutely everything – was utterly strange and weird.

First problem: wherever this was …

(the land where everything is known?)

… it certainly wasn’t Planet Earth.

There were two suns, for fuck’s sake.

Second problem: what was the deal with those animals – there seemed to be about twenty of them – grazing close to the trees? They looked very much like a herd of cows. They were cow-sized. They had udders like cows – one was even suckling a calf. And they had leathery hides. But they also had six legs, stubby wings folded up over their backs, and heads like beetles.

Third problem: were those really trees? From some angles they looked more like a dozen tall spindly birds that had disguised themselves as trees with elaborate contortions of wings and leafy feathers. Every now and then Leoni got the sense they were inching closer to the grazing cow-beetles.

Fourth problem: what the cow-beetles were grazing on – and she was walking on – was not dew-sprinkled grass, as she had supposed, but a carpet of little green flowers into which she sank up to her ankles with each step. The flowers were wet because they exuded fragrant sap when pressed down underfoot and, although there was no breeze, the surface of the whole mass of them, as far as the eye could see, rippled and undulated in a beautiful yet somehow disconcerting manner.