Maddigan's Fantasia (38 page)

‘Wherever you go, Garland, I will follow you,’ he said.

Garland had been about to step off onto that balcony. Once there she could open a door perhaps, run into the building beyond, lose herself in some way, and find safety for herself and Jewel. Perhaps! Perhaps! But then Timon suddenly moved with such rapidity she could not escape from him. He caught her arm. ‘I will follow you!’ he repeated in the Nennog’s voice and yet with a strange echo of Timon’s voice lurking beneath.

There was no hope now, but she would not surrender. ‘Then follow this!’ she said. Still clasping Jewel with one arm, she jumped from the wire into the abyss below.

In that mad moment she meant to fall even if it meant that Jewel fell with her … meant to be free of Timon, both prince and monster and free, too, of the huge wearing puzzle of being alive. But she did not fall far. Timon caught her free hand and held her swinging over that abyss. One of them clung, the other swung like a supreme circus act, Timon now somehow lying
along the wire, Garland dangling below it.

And as Garland looked up and Timon looked down, staring incredulously at each other, something struck Garland’s face … a gleam of light … new light. Up on the summits of the tallest buildings, solar panels had suddenly begun to unfold like a hundred silver petals.

‘They must have done it!’ cried Garland with wild hope. ‘The technologists must have connected the converter.’

She felt her fingers slip, just a little in Timon’s hand, and suddenly she did not want to die. But she was desperately clasping Jewel with her other arm and could not help herself unless she let the baby fall. And she wouldn’t do that – she couldn’t! Looking up at Timon she saw the new intense light was falling directly on him, and as it did so, his face began a strange sparkling.

‘What’s happening?’ she screamed, and then saw that the green hand holding hers was sparkling too. The Nennog may have longed for the converter, but he could not stand the light it generated. The scales were falling away from Timon, his golden hair was strengthening. Before her eyes he was changing – becoming once again the boy she had known in the beginning.

But as his true self strengthened and drove the possessing Nennog out of him, his grasp was weakening. It was becoming nothing more than an ordinary human grasp. Timon could not balance on the wire as the Nennog had balanced … as Garland had balanced … and Garland could not help him without dropping Jewel.

‘Garland! Garland! I can’t hold you!’ Timon screamed, and his voice was now Timon’s voice, full of grief and despair. As he cried this she felt herself slip out of his fingers.

They were falling.
This is the end
, Garland thought madly.
Really truly the end!
and as she tumbled and spun down past
lines of windows, balconies green with potted plants, down and down again, she hugged Jewel to her chest, her hand covering the baby’s head in a last desperate effort to protect her.

And then something seized them. Hands grabbed her collar and the loose shirt in the small of her back. Her fall changed. She was no longer plunging down in that mad, deadly way. Suddenly she was sinking slowly. Then the sound of a small motor revving up came to her ears, and she even began to rise a little, being pulled up in a struggling way, but rising all the same, and being carried towards one of those green balconies she had tumbled past only a moment ago.

Boomer. Boomer flying! Boomer trying hard to fly and manage her weight, sinking a bit … rising a bit … but managing to stay aloft.

‘Want a lift, you great lump!’ he shouted in triumph. Then he laughed. Garland laughed too. At least she thought she was laughing but, after all, she might have been crying, as she hugged the drugged and sleeping Jewel to her heart.

They were saved. The converter had been installed. The solar panels of Solis were opening like mysterious flowers, and the towers around them were blooming with light. Solis was saved. And thanks to Boomer and the Birdboy wings, Garland was saved too.

At the far end of the wire Eden helped his brother onto the balcony and then hugged him. Below them, among the pot plants on another balcony, while Boomer hovered above her, Garland unfolded the blanket back from Jewel, still sleeping.

But Jewel wasn’t there.

Garland crouched staring down in horror at the empty blanket. Had Jewel slipped out of her grasp after all? Had the baby tumbled away to death in the city below while Garland struggled with the Nennog who had turned back into Timon when
the intensified lights of Solis fell on him? Then in the middle of her sudden despair, she heard pounding footsteps, voices crying out, and footsteps again and then the balcony doors behind her opened.

At the same time she was feeling something new – something coming in at her from outside – something entirely familiar as if a note of well-known music was ringing not just in her ear, but through and through her. There it was again, that utter certainty that something magical was about to be revealed. She lifted her head and saw the silver girl, but not as she was used to seeing her. This girl was real. There was not a ripple … not a moment of drift about her. She stood in front of Timon and Eden, a girl of about sixteen – still slightly silvery perhaps – but real in a way she had never been real before. And this time she did not point or gesture. She actually spoke.

‘When you travel in time,’ she said, ‘you can sometimes be in two places at once. But you have to ride on the right time pulse.’

‘You!’ cried Garland, understanding something at last. ‘The silver girl.’ She looked down at the empty blanket in her arms then up again. ‘You’re Jewel!’

‘Jewel grown-up,’ said the girl. ‘I’m sorry if I was hard to understand but I was melting this way and that between futures. But now, thanks to you, thanks to your help, things have become certain for me …’

High over head the last of the solar panels was unfolding.

‘… and we love you – me and my brothers, and all those future people on ahead of us, and we’re grateful to you. You have saved us. But that future is now forming and settling down, and in that future we were never here …’ said Jewel, her voice fading.

As she said this Garland understood something else. She
looked almost desperately at Timon and Eden, saw them smiling at her, not simply with friendship but with love as well. A love that would become part of them all, crossing time, strengthening her day by day in her own time, strengthening them in theirs.

‘Oh! Don’t go!’ she called. ‘Wait! I want to
talk
to you. I want to ask
questions
. I want to really truly
understand
.’

But they were already fading, melting into that new light. There was Eden, that foresty boy, a child made of sticks and leaves. But he was going. Timon held out his hand once more, his long fingers free of scales. She saw the light shift on his golden hair … saw his blue eyes flash at her. But he was going too. ‘Garland,’ she heard him say.

Then he shimmered just as Eden was shimmering, just as Jewel, the silver girl, was shimmering. Both boys dissolved into light, and light was all she could see there in Solis, the great city of her own particular time.

Garland sat on her bunk in the van, her diary open in front of her, her pencil in her hand. Somehow she found she could not write to Ferdy any more, for she had said goodbye to Ferdy back on that rise, reliving an earlier time which she should never have entered, which she should never have tried to change.

But she wanted to write it all down. Writing it down would give her some power over things that were really beyond her. Of course there was no way she could ever understand them, but all the same she had to
try
understanding them. She had to remember them as well as she possibly could, and somehow build a story out of them, for if she built a story she would be able to learn it by heart and take charge of it and the story would, in time, dissolve into her blood and build itself into her bones.

‘Garland!’ Maddie was calling her. ‘Garland! Garland! Darling girl!’

Garland walked out of the van and the Fantasia, her dear Fantasia, embraced her … closed tightly around her and yet at the same time seemed to open out like a great glowing flower. A show was about to begin. In a moment she would be called upon to walk the tightrope … to jump on it, somersault on it. Nobody could do that better than she could. There they all were, the people she knew so well … all the people who, she felt, were part of her forever. There was Goneril arguing with Tane. There was Boomer, dear old Boomer, her saviour, putting his wings on yet again. And there was Maddie watching Yves who was out in the ring, grand in that scarlet ringmaster’s coat, which he certainly deserved to wear by now.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ Yves was shouting. ‘We present Maddigan’s Fantasia … the show of amazement … the show of wonders … the show that explodes with a thousand delights …

‘What a journey,’ Maddie was saying. ‘There’s never been anything like it. I mean we always have problems, always, but I don’t think there’s ever been anything as troubled as this last time.’

‘But we won through,’ Garland said.

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Maddie. ‘We won through. I hope for a rest
now, but then we’ll hit the road again, and have – I don’t know – a more orderly trip next time.’

‘There’s always the Road Rats,’ said Garland. She found she did want to travel quietly, but she did not want to travel without adventures.

‘You’re on next,’ said Maddie.

And only a few minutes later Garland was standing in the ring herself … not walking the tightrope yet … not juggling … but staring down at the magic cabinet and thinking to herself, thoughts she sent on ahead through the years to Timon.

So I open it, and it is empty …

Garland opened the cabinet and it was indeed empty as she turned down the sides, showing that there was no way there could be anyone hiding in it. The audience nodded and nudged one another, preparing to be astonished.

Life’s a bit like the cabinet really … a box of wonders. People climb into it and disappear. Sometimes they go forever. Sometimes they flit in and out of your life like wild birds …

She looked up as Boomer swooped down overhead dropping flower petals and little balloons, almost but not quite as Eden might once have done. Garland put the sides of the box up again, smiling at the audience, but still sending her thoughts on ahead to Timon.

Some people disappear no matter how much you want them to stay. And some people don’t disappear, no matter how much you might wish them to.

Boomer beat out a challenging rattle on his drum, and Garland waved her wand, and touched the cabinet.

Its sides fell away. It opened once more but it was no longer empty. There was her lovely assistant Lilith rising up out of nowhere in her spangly dress, smiling and blowing kisses to the people out there, who gasped yet again as Boomer beat a triumphant roll on the drums.

… and I guess it would be mean to wish that Lilith might disappear, unless of course you knew, deep down, that she was going to appear again, even if it did mean that you had to listen to her singing.

Lilith jumped down from the magical box, and took Garland’s left hand. Boomer took her right and they ran forward to meet the applause, as they might run forward to meet some wave of the sea. They bowed and bowed again while the applause, the whistles, the clapping, rang around them.

So the Fantasia is still Fantastic, and Solis still glows with light, and everyone is happy, except perhaps the Duke of Solis, who is sitting there in the audience, but who is never going to be what he just might have been.

(Up in his box the Duke applauded politely.)

But that, as they say, is another story
.

Margaret Mahy is the author of over a hundred children’s stories and groundbreaking novels for young adults. She has won numerous awards and prizes for her writing, including the Carnegie Medal for
The Changeover
and
The Haunting
, and the Hans Christian Anderson Award. Margaret lives in New Zealand.