Maddigan's Fantasia (20 page)

Garland was one of the people bowled over by the earthquake. She sprawled on the ground for a second time, bruised and blinking, then bit by bit, a leg here, an arm there stood up, wobbling, though she wasn’t quite sure if the wobble was a wobble in the world or a wobble in her own bones.

‘Look! Look!’ screamed Boomer.

Billowing out of the ground, forcing its way out through the
crack that had run down to the ground, came a cloud of greenish smoke like a blurred monster anxious to devour anything in its path. Rosalind screamed, and she was not the only one. As the cloud rolled towards them, many of the Fantasia people fled before it.

‘Don’t breathe it in,’ Doppler was calling, but it was hard not to, as it flooded the air around them. ‘Stand back! Stand back!’

‘Kaana!’ Rosalind was sobbing.

A voice came from somewhere above them – from the balcony, thought Garland.

‘Dad! Dad!’ Lilith was calling.

‘Mum!’ called Kaana. ‘The stair’s broken. Get us down!’

His confident voice had changed. The great green serpent of smoke could not be ordered back into the ground and anyone could hear that bold, determined Kaana was frightened.

‘Lilith,’ muttered Yves, taking no notice of Kaana. ‘We’ll never get in at that main door now. We’ll need to bring them down from above.’

‘Logical. Yes, logical,’ said Scrimshaw. ‘Perhaps the helicopter …’

‘You have a helicopter?’ cried Maddie.

‘We have plans to build one,’ said Scrimshaw rather complacently.

‘We won’t be able to wait for you to fit one together …’ yelled Yves. We need to do something
now
!’

Green smoke billowed out of the door, but the balcony was still clear … easy to see up there above them.

‘Human pyramid!’ Garland yelled. ‘Human pyramid!’

‘Good idea,’ Maddie said in a quiet but commanding voice. ‘Human pyramid!’ she shouted.

Bannister, Yves, Byrna and Nye ran forward and dropped onto their hands and knees directly under the balcony. Tane, along with two shy young acrobats – Lattin and Moira – leapt
up onto them and knelt on their backs, Maddie and old Shell leapt first onto Bannister then up onto Tane then up yet again to kneel partly on Tane and Lattin, partly on Lattin and Moira, while Garland leapt from Bannister to Tane to Maddie and stood there holding out her hands to Lilith, who was already lowering herself over the balcony rail and down into Garland’s arms. It was easy with Lilith. She had had practice with human pyramids, but Kaana, who was to come down after her, was much more difficult. For one thing he was bigger and heavier. For another he was desperately afraid.

‘I’ll fall!’ he was screaming. ‘I’ll fall! I’ll fall!’

‘Quickly!’ said Garland. ‘I’ll catch you. I can. I know how to.’

‘If you stay there you’ll be poisoned!’ yelled Boomer.

‘We’re here to catch you!’ shouted Timon and he and Eden stood on either side of the pyramid, arms raised.

‘For heaven’s sake hurry!’ yelled Yves.

Kaana was hanging, terrified, from the balcony. A line of green mist lazily curved out and over his head. He hung there kicking and screaming like a little child.

‘I’ve got you,’ Garland told him – though she hadn’t quite.

‘No, you haven’t,’ Kaana cried, but his fingers were slipping. He dropped into Garland’s arms, so desperate and so heavy that they both tumbled sideways. Everyone around them yelled out. Then Garland found she was rolling on the ground, her own fall broken by old Goneril of all people, while Kaana was being hugged by Timon. He and Timon were nose to nose for a moment but curiously enough Kaana did not seem to be grateful. He let out a wailing cry as if he was being terrified by something totally new and unexpected, and Timon immediately dropped him on his feet and let him go.

‘Away! Away!’ someone was shouting as the Fantasia’s pyramid fell apart, as Bannister, Tane, Byrna, Nye and all the others
bounced onto their feet again.

And then they were all running, Kaana actually crying as he ran.

And then – only a few minutes later it seemed – the whole population of Newton seemed to be gathering around the Fantasia people exclaiming with gratitude and hugging their children.

‘The converter is yours,’ said Doppler. ‘You’ve bought it in more ways than one.’

‘We didn’t arrange the earthquake,’ Maddie said. ‘We can’t take credit for that. But we do what we
do
do … what we
can
do. We can help you tidy up a bit … and then we can offer you a performance.’

And this is what they did.

And meanwhile, out of town, off in the deepening shadows, Ozul was taking things from one of the black packs which he had faithfully carried, suspended from his shoulder or strung across his chest.

He pressed a lever. A screen sprang up … or perhaps the shape of a screen, for though it had a shape this screen seemed to have no surface. Ozul and Maska both looked deep into a spinning void. Green light suddenly flared from within the void, falling on Maska and Ozul and appearing to sink deep into their skins. A sound made itself heard, incoherent to begin with but gradually forming words … furious words.

‘… and you have achieved nothing … nothing …’ the voice said. ‘The fools of that past time have tricked you over and over again.’

‘Sir and Master,’ Ozul replied. ‘They
are
fools, these Fantasia people, but they are
tricky
fools. They are whimsical. They have minds that go off at an angle. They have not been properly subdued and you did tell us not to subdue them in
case our own time is too – too
changed
by their submission. You told us to be very, very careful.’

‘No excuses,’ said the voice, coming and going as if its reality was not quite certain. ‘This is a final warning. You must not let that converter get back to Solis. And you must find the Talisman and bring it home to me. Otherwise you face deletion. Enough!’

The curious spin within the frame stopped and disappeared. Ozul sighed, and touched the lever. The frame closed itself down again. Ozul looked at Maska, and then looked over at the bright lights marking the place where the Fantasia and the people of Newton were actually dancing and singing together. The performance had turned into a party.

And the Fantasia people partied with great pleasure, glad to be at ease with the world. Garland danced with Timon, and thought that she could not remember a time when she had even felt so light-hearted. ‘I’m happy!’ she thought. ‘Happy
now
! Tomorrow will be a
usual
tomorrow … full of questions and arguments. But right now, dancing with Timon, I’m happy.’

On the edge of the celebration Boomer moved to sit beside an extremely subdued Kaana.

‘We’ll be off tomorrow or the next day,’ he said. ‘We never stay long.’

‘Good,’ said Kaana, but he said it in a curiously listless way.

Boomer looked left and right, just in case there was anyone listening to them, and then he said in a low voice, ‘That boy Timon … the one dancing with Garland … he isn’t one of our tricksters, not like his brother. But he – he seemed to frighten you. How did he …’

Kaana interrupted him.

‘He isn’t a boy,’ his voice rose. Suddenly he was filled with a terror he dared not express. ‘He’s … not a real boy! He looks like one, but I looked into his eyes and a – a – a sort of demon looked back at me.’

‘I know,’ said Boomer. ‘It’s looked out at me, too. But no one would believe me if I tried to tell them.’ And he stared across at Timon, knowing for sure that something was wrong but quite unable to give a name to it.

Spring or not the weather
was not good. In the morning Yves called for a brief parley.

‘I think we might have to go through the tunnels this time,’ he said. ‘And that means it will be quicker to take that other road home. We’ll check out the pass, but this weather is really dicey!’

The Fantasia moved on.

‘The tunnels were once the roads to old mines,’ Garland told Timon and Eden, ‘and the roads branch out under the mountains. It’s slow going underground. Exciting though!’

But at that moment there was rumble and then cries from somewhere ahead. Garland, followed by the two boys, ran to see what was going on.

‘It’s blocked,’ Yves was saying.

‘A slip,’ said Tane. ‘The road into the pass is blocked.’

‘At least we weren’t caught in it,’ said Yves. ‘But it’ll take us weeks to move this lot. We will have to take the tunnels.’

‘Oh no!’ exclaimed Timon which was so unexpected that everyone turned to look at him and he shrank back into himself. ‘I’ve heard they’re – they’re sort of poisoned,’ he mumbled. ‘And Eden hates underground ways.’

‘They press in on me,’ said Eden. ‘Even if I shut my eyes I can feel the world pushing down on me, trying to squash me flat.’

‘It could be like an adventure,’ Garland said. ‘We’ll help you.’

‘We can’t shift those rocks,’ Yves repeated. ‘Maybe Newton could help. They’ve got those big earth-moving machines there. But we don’t have anything like that.’

Maddie stood, frowning over the map which flapped as if it were trying to escape from her.

‘Urupokainia … the underground road,’ she read, and then looked around at them all. ‘I promise it’s not too bad. Ferdy and I went through there once. On our first tour together.’

‘Regular tunnel of love as I recall,’ said Goneril. ‘Let’s just get on with it. That baby kept me up all night cutting teeth. And you two,’ she looked at Timon and Eden, ‘you don’t look twice at her. You don’t offer to mash her food or change her nappies.’

‘Look!’ said Yves. ‘I’m going to have a closer look at that
blocked road.’ Leaning sideways he grabbed Boomer’s bike and leapt onto it, and set off up the road. He was rather too big for the bike and looked extremely odd, like some sort of Fantasia clown … but the faithful motor carried him well enough.

Lilith shrieked, ‘Don’t, Daddy! Don’t, Daddy!’ terrified that she was going to see him fall over the edge.

‘There’s nothing to be worried about,’ Yves yelled back to her, then swung around still shouting as he did so. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’ But, even as he was telling her how safe it was, there was a sudden violent explosion. Yves and the bike flew into the air, torn apart from one another. Yves went in one direction and Lilith’s shrieks seem to go with him. The bike went in another followed by Boomer’s cries of alarm. Yves smashed into the ground and lay there gasping. The bike hit the ground and promptly blew up.

‘Daddy!’ screamed Lilith and would have run to him, but Maddie caught her by the collar.

‘No! No, Lilith! The track must be mined. It’ll be a Road Rat trap. They must have tracked us and set up a trap so that they could get us on the way back from Newton. And there might be other mines … stay here.’

Through the dust and grit and smoke they could see Yves slowly sitting up. Even sitting seemed as if it was rather too much for him.

All the same he dragged himself onto his feet, swaying like a tall tree in a wind that no one but he could feel.

‘What a surprise,’ he said croakily. ‘First bad weather and now explosions.’

‘Follow the trail your bike left,’ called Garland, and everyone looked at her as if she were speaking in some foreign language. ‘Well, he got that far up the hill without being blown up,’ she said rather defensively.

Maddie nodded, then turned back towards Yves.

‘Can you see the trail?’ she called.

Yves looked around in a vague way. ‘I don’t know,’ he said sounding lost. But then his voice sharpened. ‘Yes I can,’ he said. ‘Just!’

‘Follow it back to us!’ Maddie told him. ‘Go carefully!’ And they watched, all terrified as Yves gathered himself together and jumped for the track the bike had left behind it only a few minutes earlier. He walked along it rather like Garland walking a tightrope, carefully, carefully, just as if there were a thousand feet of empty space below him. When he stepped out among them, there was a curious puffing sound – the sound of held-in breaths being set free, and Lilith hurled herself on Yves with such force she almost knocked him back into the dangerous ground once more. But Yves was looking over Lilith’s head … looking at Maddie. Garland felt her face taken over by a frown. After all
she
was the one who had pointed out the bike tracks.
She
was the one Yves should be thanking.

‘Let’s press on then,’ Goneril said in the voice of someone who wanted to put a lot of unnecessary rubbish behind her. ‘Urupokainia! Tunnels of the Dead, here we come!’

‘My bike!’ Boomer was saying as if he could hardly believe himself. ‘My bike! It was the best thing I had – that bike – and now it’s all smashed up.’

And off we went
Garland wrote to Ferdy, but writing this time on some page that existed only in her head. She could see the imaginary pencil leaving imaginary silver words behind it.
You know how it is.
If one road does not work we have to try another, so we turned around, which was really hard and then went back down the mountainside. The sky is clearing now, and now we can see the roads branching out down below and winding … winding … and of course we are winding too. I am uncomfortable about it because we did not want to go this way and yet it seems as if we haven’t got any choice. Cattle must feel like this when they are
being herded. And who knows? Those enemies Ozul and Maska are probably watching us from somewhere, watching us come … watching us go …

She could not see them but in a curious way she had come to feel their presence. And indeed they were watching, battered but implacable – watching the Fantasia retrace its way down the road that would have taken them through the pass, and then swinging off along a narrow but sweeping road to the right.

‘There they go!’ said Ozul in his voice stumbling and impeded now. His lower jaw did not seem to be moving easily. ‘We must follow.’

‘… follow …’ said Maska like a grating echo, speaking with even more difficulty than Ozul.

And when the Fantasia was well launched on its new road Ozul and Maska did indeed follow, moving rapidly but carefully too, moving through the shadows which seemed to greet them and take them in as if they were old friends.

Timon, Eden, Boomer and Garland walked beside the slowly moving vans, Garland and Timon just a little ahead, Boomer and Eden following. They could hear Lilith’s voice coming from inside the nearest van.

‘Dad, why are they called the Tunnels of the Dead?’

She had asked this several times and Yves had always given the same answer.

‘It’s not important, love. Forget it.’

But Lilith could not forget it, and neither, it seemed, could Eden.

‘I don’t want to go through those tunnels,’ he said to Timon.

‘Do you want us to leave you behind?’ Timon replied, but Garland thought Eden deserved reassurance.

‘Ferdy once told me that there was something sort of calm and beautiful about the tunnels. He went through them several times. Sometimes we have to, because the pass gets blocked with snow.’

‘And this time it’s blocked with mines,’ said Boomer. ‘The tunnels will be the best way.’

Eden wasn’t convinced. ‘But we’ll be miles underground in the dark with thousands of dead people,’ he said. ‘Maybe radioactive dead people.’

Garland stared at him as if she could hardly believe what he had just said.

‘Radioactive? No way! Just simply dead,’ she said at last.

‘In our time …’ began Eden, but Timon took over.

‘In our time we mine radioactive material from the Silica Mountains … these mountains, that is.’

Up in the slow-moving van they heard Lilith’s voice again. ‘Why are those tunnels called the Tunnels of the Dead? Why won’t you tell me?’

Yves might have answered this time, but there was an interruption. Maddie’s arm came out of the window of her van signalling a halt. Yves signalled to the van behind him, then put on the brake of his own van. Gently but firmly it came to a quiet stop. He turned to Lilith.

‘They’re called the Tunnels of the Dead because rich people from the towns down below use them as crypts. They bury their dead here. Happy now?’

Garland felt sure that Lilith might not be happy with this answer, but she did not wait to check on Lilith’s response. Instead she pushed ahead, Timon and Boomer behind her and Eden coming last of all.

They reached a small group of buildings with peaked roofs standing on either side of a great cave in the flank of the mountain.

The cave looked like a great dark eye and the rocks around the eye were carved with strange symbols and messages which Garland could not read. As they walked towards it, staring doubtfully, there was a sudden gentle eruption in the ground in
front of them. Everyone jumped back as a hand came through to wave at them … a strange hand with a thumb and a single nail and the fingers fused into something like a little shovel. Something worked under the thin soil. The earth parted like a curtain and, as they stared, a Tunneller – a small stunted bald figure – suddenly seemed to leap out of the ground to stand, rather challengingly, in front of them.

‘The radioactive waste changed them … mutated them,’ muttered Garland to Timon.

‘But we have very good hearing,’ said the Tunneller, staring at her through lenses like a shadow balanced on its stubby nose. Beyond him other Tunnellers were advancing out of the cave, all wearing those dark goggles to protect themselves against the sunlight.

The whole Fantasia came to a standstill. Yves and Maddie looked at each other and sighed. Then they marched forward briskly to meet the Tunnellers, planning to bargain for a passage through the mountains and to bargain for guides as well … for they would certainly need guides.

‘My dad is going to deal with them,’ said Lilith smugly. ‘People do what he tells them.’

‘They’ll just want a performance,’ said Garland loftily. ‘Everyone does …’

She broke off suddenly, looking towards the black tunnel mouth in consternation.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Boomer.

‘Nothing,’ said Garland. ‘Well, I don’t think – I just thought …’

‘You said “thought” when you didn’t think!’ cried Lilith. ‘But anyway you’re always thinking, thinking, thinking. Too much thinking and not enough doing.’

Garland shrugged. ‘I thought I saw an enemy,’ she said carefully. ‘I thought I saw one of those men who – who have been
following us. But I can’t have. I mean they were behind us and we’ve moved on pretty sharply. I must have been wrong.’

Ozul had stepped quickly back into the darkness of the cave.

‘They think they will buy their way through with a performance no doubt,’ he said. ‘They have nothing much to exchange except the so-called wonder of their skill. Once they get into the darkness surely – surely they will be ours.’

‘We should have had them days ago,’ said Maska. ‘But we will have them this time … the two boys, the baby, and maybe the converter they gained back in Newton. Why not? It must be something of a treasure and the Nennog would probably reward us if we brought it back to him. And once we have the children we will force the boys to surrender the Talisman, whatever it might be. We will carry all that we can home to the Nennog.’ He grinned. ‘Lucky there are just the two of us. That lot there couldn’t take the short cut that we took.’

Outside the cave, in a small stone circle, the Fantasia had begun to assemble itself for a cramped performance, and the Tunnellers, each one moving it seemed in a private cloud of darkness, gathered around them.

Once again Maddie threw her knives around Garland with elegance and accuracy. Garland stepped away from the board, waving to the crowd, leaving her shape behind her, marked out with sharp, gleaming stars and moons. Yves shouted and gesticulated, punishing the air with his flicking whip. Tane clowned and tumbled with Boomer, as Garland walked haughtily over their head, balancing on her tightrope while Byrna and Nye stalked around, like strange longlegged birds on their stilts. All went well. The Tunnellers gasped and clapped. The band played and at last Eden did his remarkable magic show. The Tunnellers gasped again and
surely, behind their dark glasses, they goggled too. And they wanted more.

‘Singing! Singing!’ they shouted, and began to sing themselves, just to show what it was they were now longing for. And suddenly a well-known voice … a Fantasia voice joined in. Garland turned, scarcely able to believe it. Lilith came dancing on, singing as she came. She sounded terrible as she always did … shrill and squeaky like some machine needing oil.

Garland groaned softly, but to her amazement the Tunnellers joined in. They all knew the words of the song and sang it along with Lilith. And every Tunneller was a terrible singer – worse than Lilith, if that were possible. All the same anyone could tell they loved singing and bouncing around to their own squawking voices. Anyone could tell the Tunnellers thought this was the best act of all and that the Fantasia would be allowed to pass into the tunnels beyond.