She was right in not wanting to overload me. Even the very thought of there being worlds with their realities all overlapping each other was making my mind want to squirt right out through my ears.
Mirabella was still talking. “Sometimes, when you’ve been at peace in your heart and mind, you’ve felt the presence of Sagaria, even though you’ve not known Sagaria was what it was. Of course, it’s not the world that you’ve felt but the people and creatures who live here. They come in every shape and size. Languages are no barrier here if we speak our hearts; our voices automatically convey our thoughts to every human, or any other creature you might recognize from your sagas and fairy tales.”
“You mean there are trolls here?” I said, surprised. “And dragons, gnomes and goblins and all the other magical beings?”
Queen Mirabella smiled again. “I see you are not unfamiliar with such beings, though they often have different names here. We have trolls all right, though we call them worgs and gnomes are called opposomes. If you’re lucky, you’ll not meet any of them.”
Then she became serious once more, as if the sun had briefly peeped through the clouds but was now obscured again. “You were brought here via one of the many gateways we created a long time ago as a link between the worlds, to help them grow toward balance and harmony. At the same time as the gateways were brought into being, three crystals were made that were filled with magical powers: a clear white crystal for the world of Sagaria, a midnight-blue stone for the Shadow World and a rainbow-colored crystal that represented balance for the Earthworld.
“But the inhabitants of the Earthworld grew greedy and hungry for power. Where humans once lived in accord, violence and bloody wars now spread over the surface of the earth. The rulers of Sagaria felt it was only a matter of time before we would be caught up in this Earthworld turmoil. Some of the greatest magicians of Sagaria, drawn from every corner of our world, united their magic to destroy the gates.
“All the gates except one. They left one on the Earthworld, hidden beneath the ground. Only someone who was true in heart and mind would be able to find it. But not just find it – a person like that would be drawn by the gateway, would be made to discover it. Did you really think it was pure chance that you tripped and fell down a well? Have you ever done such a thing before? A forest ranger, who knows the ways of the land? Even though your mind was filled with grief for the loss of the woman you loved beyond all else, you’d have seen that well long before you came to it … if it had been there before you fell in.”
I wondered how she knew all this. I still can’t rightly say, Sagandran. It’s just that, well, Mirabella’s like that.
“The crystals were lost during the magical destruction of the gateways between Sagaria and the Earthworld,” she was saying. “One has been rediscovered by a man of evil named Arkanamon, who has created a new portal into the Shadow World. Another, the Star Crystal of Sagaria, was found soon after, but Arkanamon has succeeded in stealing it. The third, the Rainbow Crystal of the Earthworld, has never been rediscovered, and it is best that way. If all three crystals were to be brought together again, they could bring great happiness or great misery to the worlds. The latter’s far too great a risk to take. Better the Rainbow Crystal remain forever lost.”
I had read enough stories about lost crystals and rings and other gewgaws of great magical power that folk quested to find. In most of those stories, the rediscovery of the bauble brings nothing but trouble to the world. So I shivered at the queen’s words.
She raised her gaze from mine for a moment and stared at one of the stained glass windows. The sun had caught the image of a creature rather like a unicorn except that its tail was made of feathers. The creature glowed with life.
Then Mirabella looked back at me. There was a new intensity in the blue–green of her eyes – something that might have frightened me had she been anyone else.
“Although the children of the Earthworld are sometimes able to visit us in their dreams, only through being chosen by the gateway can your kind enter Sagaria bodily. I know that the gateway must have read your heart and decided you were a true nobleman, but I cannot tell what other reasons it had for choosing you. There must have been some, for even the Earthworld is not short of noble people. But it selected you, Melwin, out of all the others who came its way.”
“There are not many who pass through that forest,” I mumbled.
Queen Mirabella heard me. “What makes you think that the gateway is always in your forest, Melwin?”
“I just thought …”
She raised a hand and my words withered in the air. “The gateway is always in the same place,” she said, “which is where it needs to be. That doesn’t mean it’s always in the same physical place.”
I must have looked perplexed, because she laughed. The noise was like the music glasses would make if you could tap a thousand of them at once with your fingernails. It was an enchanting sound, one that seemed to appear in your mind not just as music, but as pictures.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, “but I know exactly what you’re going through, and I sympathize. It’s just a different way of thinking, Melwin. You’ll find that here in Sagaria, people often think in ways the folk of Earth have forgotten how to. A place is defined by its position in the overall balance of things, not by whether it’s next to this mountain or that stream or down below the ground here or there or somewhere else.”
I did understand what she meant. I always had. The smile froze on her face when she looked into my eyes and discovered that this was so. The reason I’d been looking nonplussed was not because I didn’t have the same comprehension as her about what a place really is, just because I’d never before come across anyone else who thought that way.
When she spoke again it was with a greater gravity in her tone. “Melwin, I think you already know the choice I’m going to give to you. Once upon a time, there were countless gateways between Earthworld and Sagaria, but then the magicians destroyed them. Each of those gateways had a gatekeeper, but the gatekeepers were scattered like seeds on the wind when the gateways disappeared. The only portal left between our worlds is the one that selected you. It read your heart and decided that you were the mortal being best suited to be its keeper. It wasn’t by chance that you found the key and opened the door. If the portal hadn’t accepted you as its master, the key would have remained invisible to you – but that doesn’t mean you have to accept the task. The decision is up to you. So I’m asking you, Melwin, are you willing to accept the responsibility of guarding the portal to ensure that people of ill will from Earthworld never accidentally discover it and find a way to batter it down and come rampaging into our world?”
I thought over her words. “Surely the gateway can be found only when it wants to be?” I said.
“I cannot pretend to know all of the laws that govern our complicated, interlocking realms,” she said. “All I know is that it is possible, however unlikely, for a gateway to let itself be discovered by misadventure and, once it has done so, to be breached. As the keeper of the gateway, you would most probably never be called upon to defend it, but the job would be no sinecure for all that. You would have to be perpetually on the alert, in case the secret of the gateway might be revealed.”
After she’d said this, there was a silence in the room so deep I felt I could hear the sound of the colored sunlight falling on the carpet. I looked at my hands for a very long time; at some point I’d knotted my fingers together, and now I couldn’t think of a way to unknot them.
Then I raised my head. Queen Mirabella looked so beautiful and so true sitting there on that throne of hers that was several sizes too large. But it wasn’t her beauty I saw, it was the infinite love and compassion that dwelled in her eyes. I knew I wanted to protect her any way I could, to protect her world. I had a sense that the two were very much the same thing.
“Your Majesty,” I said, “it will be my privilege to serve this world for the rest of my life.”
&n
bsp; She smiled a warm and beautiful smile, and I felt the way you do when you’re all wrapped up in your bed and the wind’s howling outside and the rain’s pelting against the windowpanes.
“You’ll receive no reward for your labors except happiness and satisfaction,” she observed.
“I would ask for nothing more,” I murmured.
“But,” she held up a finger, “there is one thing more you will have.”
Mirabella reached her hand into thin air, her fingers outstretched, and plucked out of nowhere a golden disk with a fine golden chain attached to it.
“Come closer,” she said.
I got up out of the plain wooden chair and took the two or three steps needed until I was standing in front of her. She was even more beautiful close up than from a distance, and there’s hardly a woman here in the Earthworld you can say that about. I could smell her too, the lovely, clean smell of icy-cold, fresh water yet with the animal warmth of a kitten’s tummy. I know, I know, Sagandran, it sounds as if I was falling in love with her – a crabby old forest ranger falling in love with the radiantly lovely queen of a magical land. I suppose I was, in a way, but it wasn’t the way a man falls in love with a woman. She was the embodiment of the great love it’s possible to feel for one’s fellow creatures.
She held out the golden disk for me to look at. It was a larger version of the head of the gateway key. The rising sun and a rainbow were engraved on one side. On the other was a tangle of lines that represented a map of the invisible tunnels in the sky that used to lead from the Earthworld to the different places in Sagaria. The only difference was that now, I could look at this previously meaningless jumble of crisscrossing lines and know exactly what they were. I could see where Spectram was on the map, even though there was no mark to show it.
“This is the Royal Seal of Spectram,” said Mirabella, speaking barely above a whisper – we were that close to each other. “Wear it around your neck, Melwin, as an emblem of the great honor the gateway has bestowed upon you.”
She put her dainty fingers between the two halves of the loop of chain, pulling it out into a circle, then slipped it over my bowed head.
“To be the gatekeeper for Sagaria is to be part of a great secret,” the queen continued gravely. “Few Sagarians know about the connection between our worlds, and you are the only being from Earth to do so. I beg you never to reveal the secret of who you are to anyone unless you find someone you know is worthy of your trust, of my trust.”
I didn’t say anything – I couldn’t. I just nodded. It was as if a heavy load of responsibility had been placed on my shoulders, and yet paradoxically I felt as if the burdens of my life had been lightened. I know you’ve had this feeling yourself, Sagandran, when you’ve been given a job to do that you know is going to be difficult but, at the same time, you know you’re exactly the right person for it. I can remember you chattering away last summer when you got the lead part in the school play. You were going to have to work very hard at it, and you were quite frightened at the thought of appearing in front of all those people and maybe muffing your lines, but you also felt relieved because, in a way, it was less of a task to do it yourself than to watch someone else do it wrong. You were exactly the right person for the part. If they’d chosen one of the other kids for it, they’d have been upsetting some balance or another.
Anyway, there I was nodding my head, with the sight and the scent of Queen Mirabella filling me up, and …
… and the next instant I was back in the forest!
I was standing just beyond the spot where I’d fallen into the well. I looked behind me quite casually, but, of course, there wasn’t a hole in the ground to be seen there any more. Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t, I’ve since realized, but there wasn’t one then.
The funny thing is that I wasn’t startled by this sudden transition. Because of all the things that had happened to me, my way of seeing things had changed. I was in the forest, like I said, but I was also still in Mirabella’s throne room. The two places were really just one, you understand? It was as Mirabella had told me when she was talking about the gateway always being in the same place, even though it moves around all the time. I was just in one place even though that place was in two different worlds.
I don’t feel that I’ve ever left Mirabella’s throne room, not since that moment. I’m still there, you see, all the time that I’m here. I’m still standing in front of her, accepting my responsibility as the gatekeeper.
And I always will be.
CHAPTER 4
SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT
he flames crackled in the fireplace. Grandpa Melwin picked up his pipe, which had long grown cold, and struck a match. The windows had darkened while he’d been telling his story.
Sagandran shifted in his seat. He realized he’d hardly moved at all in the past hour, and that his bottom was sore.
“Wow, Grandpa,” he said. “It sounds just like a fairy tale. It’s the kind of fantasy story Mom tells me I shouldn’t waste time reading because” – his voice took on an accurate imitation of his mother’s – “there’s plenty going on in this world without me scrambling my brains inventing others. Yet there are others, and they’re every bit as important as the world we live in – the Earthworld, Mirabella called it.”
Grandpa Melwin looked at him steadfastly. The old man was smiling but his eyes were serious.
“I see you don’t doubt my story.”
“Why would you lie to me?” said Sagandran with a shrug. “Besides, I think I’ve seen Sagaria in my dreams sometimes. I’ve always known a few of my dreams weren’t just nonsense and that they took me somewhere real. Not all of them, not even most of them, but a few. It’s easy enough to tell the difference when I wake up afterwards. When it’s been a ‘real’ dream, I know.”
Grandpa’s smile broadened, but the somberness didn’t leave his eyes.
“It’s the same with me,” he said. “I think that’s why I felt so at home when I first went to Sagaria. I wasn’t … surprised by what I found there. It was as though I’d been a visitor to that otherworld before, but couldn’t remember anything about my visits.”
Sagandran was thoughtful. “It makes you wonder about some of the other ‘real’ otherworlds we go to in our dreams,” he mused.
Grandpa glanced at his watch. “I think one otherworld is enough for tonight,” he said. “It’s getting late. It will soon be time for bed, my lad. Before then, though, there are a few more things I should tell you – show you, in one instance.”
He undid the top few buttons of his shirt. Sagandran instantly knew what Grandpa was going to show him. Not a stone like the one hanging on the chain against Sagandran’s own chest, but the Royal Seal of Spectram.
The old man pulled the chain he always wore up and over his head and, sure enough, dangling from its end was a golden disk about two inches across. He passed it to Sagandran. There was something respectful about the way he handled it, as if it were a sacred object, and Sagandran found himself echoing that reverence.
Just as Grandpa Melwin had described, it had a sun and a rainbow on one side and a map on the other.
A map!
“Grandpa,” said Sagandran almost nervously, “I see these lines as a map too.”
“I thought you might,” said Grandpa Melwin with a chuckle. “It was many long years ago that the gateway chose me, and now, it’s choosing you. You believed my story without a moment’s doubt. I can’t think of anyone else in the world who wouldn’t have thought it was the wild ravings of a crazy old bozo. You remind me of the way I was when that blue light set me down on the ground of Sagaria for the very first time. I was accepting, not incredulous, because it seemed so right that I was there. The gateway has read you well, Sagandran.”
Sagandran turned the medallion over and over in his hands as if each new time he looked at one of its faces he might see something new. He was excited to be sure, but it wasn’t the kind of excitement that drowns everything else out. H
e had an odd sense of … homecoming. That was it. Homecoming. It was the excitement he felt when he and Mom got home from holiday and however much he’d enjoyed the strange sights and sounds of wherever they’d been and rued leaving them behind, he was still thrilled at the prospect of seeing his room and touching his favorite books and possessions.
“You’re right, Grandpa,” he breathed. “I think it’s chosen me.”
Melwin let the boy play with the seal a little longer. He tapped the dottle out of his pipe against the edge of the chimney, so that the sticky ash fell in the fire. When the old man finally spoke, it was with a sad mildness. “Not all that I have to tell you is good, Sagandran.”
Sagandran glanced up. The firelight reflected from the seal and cast a golden glow over his neck and chin. “Yes?”
“Since then,” said Grandpa, “I’ve gone back to Sagaria a few times a year, just to catch up with the news there and to tell Mirabella that all is safe on this side of the gateway. When I was there a few weeks ago, she gave me grim tidings. Sagaria is facing a grave threat from Arkanamon, who now calls himself the Shadow Master. Remember, Queen Mirabella told me about him. He discovered the crystal that belongs to the Shadow World, and now he’s set himself up there as the realm’s tyrant. His next plan is to conquer Sagaria and install himself as that world’s tyrant too. He has discovered the power of drawing the life force out of living things. Already, trees, plants and the land are suffering from this evil magic. The Shadow Master can turn it on people too, so that they become his … possessions. They do his bidding, even though he’s stolen their souls from them. Dead and alive at the same time.”
Sagandran shuddered.
Grandpa Melwin’s words faded away. The two of them, old man and young boy, stared at the hot coals in the fireplace, each thinking through the implications of what Melwin had just said.
“What can we do about it?” said Sagandran in the end.
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