Slowly and reluctantly Tacroy stood up. Miss Rosalie said sharply, “Mordecai, you look ill. Do you want me to come with you?”
“No!” Tacroy and Christopher said together.
Tacroy sat on the edge of a desk in the empty office and put his face in his hands. Christopher was sorry for him. He had to remind himself that he and Tacroy were the ones who had brought Uncle Ralph the weapon which had blown Gabriel’s lives apart, before he could say, “I’ve got to ask you.”
“I know that,” Tacroy said.
“So what is it about Series Eleven?” said Christopher.
Tacroy raised his head. “Put the strongest spell of silence and privacy round us that you can,” he said. Christopher did so, even more fiercely than he had done for Miss Bell and Mama. It was so extreme that he went numb and could hardly feel to scrape out the centre of the spell so that he and Tacroy could hear one another. When he had done it, he was fairly sure that even someone standing just beside them could not have overheard a word. But Tacroy shrugged. “They can probably hear anyway,” he said. “Their magic’s nothing like ours. And they have my soul, you see. They know most of what I do from that, and what they don’t know I have to go and report to them in spirit. You saw me going there once – they summon me to a place near Covent Garden.”
“Your soul?” said Christopher.
“Yes,” Tacroy said bitterly. “The part that makes you the person you are. With you, it’s the part that carries on from life to life. Mine was detached from me when I was born, as it is with all Eleven people. They kept it there when they sent me here to Twelve as a baby.”
Christopher stared at Tacroy. He had always known that Tacroy did not look quite like other people, with his coffee-coloured skin and curly hair, but he had not thought about it before because he had met so many stranger people in the Anywheres. “Why did they send you?”
“To be their guinea pig,” said Tacroy. “The Dright puts someone in another world from time to time when he wants to study it. This time he decided he wanted to study good and evil, so he ordered me to work for Gabriel first and then for the worst villain he could find – who happened to be your uncle. They don’t go by right and wrong in Eleven. They don’t consider themselves human – or no, I suppose they think they’re the only real people, and they study the rest of you like something in a zoo when the Dright happens to feel interested.”
Christopher could tell from Tacroy’s voice that he hated the Eleven people very deeply. He well understood that. Tacroy was even worse off than the Goddess. “Who’s the Dright?”
“King, priest, chief magician—” Tacroy shrugged. “No he’s not quite any of those, quite. He’s called High Father of the Sept and he’s thousands of years old. He’s lived that long because he eats someone’s soul whenever his power fails – but he’s quite within his rights, doing that. All the Eleven people and their souls belong to him by Eleven law. I belong to him.”
“What’s the law about him fetching himself all Gabriel’s lives?” Christopher asked. “That’s what he’s done, hasn’t he?”
“I knew he had – as soon as Flavian said ‘Series Eleven’,” Tacroy said. “I know he’s always wanted to study someone with nine lives. They can’t get them in Eleven, because there’s only one world there, not a Series. The Dright keeps it down to one world so he won’t have any rivals. And you know how your nine lives came about – don’t you? – because all the doubles you might have had in the other worlds in Twelve never got born for some reason.”
“Yes, but what’s Eleven law about pinching most of an enchanter?” Christopher insisted.
“I’m not sure,” Tacroy confessed. “I’m not sure they have laws like we do. It’s probably legal if the Dright can get away with it. They go by pride and appearance and what people do mostly.”
Christopher at once resolved that the Dright should not get away with this if he could help it. “I suppose he just waited to see how many lives there were loose and then collected them,” he said. “Tell me everything about Eleven that you can think of.”
“Well,” said Tacroy, “I’ve never been there, but I know they control everything with magic. They have the weather controlled, so that they can live out in the open forest and control what trees grow and where. Food comes when they call and they don’t use fire to cook it. They don’t use fire at all. They think you’re all savages for using it, and they’re just as scornful about the kind of magic all the other worlds use. The only time they think any of you are any good is when one of you is absolutely loyal to a king or chief or someone. They admire people like that, particularly if they cheat and lie out of loyalty…”
Tacroy talked for the next half hour. He talked as if it was a relief for him to tell it at last, but Christopher could see it was a strain too. Halfway through, when the lines on Tacroy’s face made him look haggard, Christopher told him to wait and slipped out of the secrecy spell to the door. As he had expected, Miss Rosalie was standing outside looking more than usually fierce.
“Mordecai’s worked himself to the bone for you, one way and another!” she hissed at him. “What are you doing to him in there?”
“Nothing, but he needs something to keep him going,” Christopher said. “Could you—?”
“What do you take me for?” snapped Miss Rosalie. Erica rushed up with a tray almost at once. As well as tea, and two plates piled high with cakes, there was a tiny bottle of brandy nestling in the corner of the tray. When Christopher carried the tray back inside the spell, Tacroy looked at the brandy, grinned and poured a good dollop of it into his cup of tea. It seemed to revive him as much as the cakes revived Christopher. While they polished off the trayful together, Tacroy thought of a whole new set of things to say.
One of the things he said was, “If you saw some Eleven people without being warned, you might take them for noble savages, but you’d be making a big mistake if you did. They’re very, very civilised. As for being noble—” Tacroy paused with a cake halfway to his mouth.
“Eat your elevenses,” said Christopher.
Tacroy gave a brief grin at the joke. “Your worlds know about them a bit,” he said. “They’re the people who gave rise to all the stories about Elves. If you think about them like that – cold, unearthly people who go by quite different rules – that will give you some idea. I don’t understand them really, even though I was born one of them.”
By this time Christopher knew that getting Gabriel back was going to be the toughest thing he had ever done in his lives. If it was not impossible. “Can you bear to come to Eleven with me?” he asked Tacroy. “To stop me making mistakes.”
“As soon as they realise I’ve told you, they’ll haul me back there anyway,” Tacroy said. He was very pale again. “And you’re in danger for knowing.”
“In that case,” said Christopher, “we’ll tell everyone in the Castle, and get Yolande and Beryl to type a report to the Government about it. The Dright can’t kill everyone.”
Tacroy did not look any too sure about this, but he went back with Christopher to the operations room to explain. Naturally, it caused another outcry. “Eleven!” everyone exclaimed. “You can’t!” People crowded in from the rest of the Castle to tell Christopher he was being a fool and that getting Gabriel back was quite impossible. Dr Simonson left off making final adjustments to the Lobster Pot to march upstairs and forbid Christopher to go.
Christopher had expected this. “Fudge!” he said. “You can catch the Wraith without me now.”
What he had not expected was that the Goddess would wait for the clamour to die down and then announce, “And I’m coming with you.”
“Why?” said Christopher.
“Out of loyalty,” the Goddess explained. “In the Millie books, Millie never let her chums down.”
There was no accounting for the Goddess’s obsession, Christopher thought. He suspected she was really afraid to stay where the Arm of Asheth could find her on her own, but he did not say so. And if she came
along, she would almost double the amount of magic they had between them.
Then, on Tacroy’s advice, he dressed for the journey. “Fur,” Tacroy said. “The more you wear, the higher your rank.” Christopher conjured the tigerskin rug from the Middle Saloon and the Goddess cut a hole in it for his head. Miss Rosalie found him a lordly belt with great brass studs in it to go round the middle, while the housekeeper produced a fox fur to wrap round his neck and a mink stole for the Goddess. “And it would help to have it hung all over with ornaments,” said Tacroy.
“Not silver ones, remember,” Christopher called as everyone rushed away to find things.
He ended up with three gold necklaces and a rope of pearls. Yolande’s entire stock of earrings was pinned artfully here and there on the tigerskin, with Beryl’s brooches in between. Round his head he had Miss Rosalie’s gold evening belt with Erica’s mother’s mourning brooch pinned to the front of it over his forehead. He tinked in a stately way when he moved, rather like the Goddess in the Temple. The Goddess herself merely had a cluster of ostrich feathers at the front of her head and somebody’s gold bracelets round the bottom of her Norfolk breeches. They wanted to make it clear that Christopher was the most important one. Tacroy stayed just as he was.
“They know me,” he said. “I have no rank in the Sept at all.”
They shook hands with everyone in the operations room and turned to the Gate. It was now tuned to Eleven as far as Flavian and Tacroy knew, but Miss Rosalie warned Christopher that the spells round Eleven would probably take all their strength to break, and even that might not be enough. So Christopher paced tinking in the lead, pushing with all his might, and the Goddess walked after with her ghostly pair of arms spread under the real pair. Behind them, Tacroy muttered an incantation.
And it was easy. Suspiciously easy, they all felt at once. There was an instant of formlessness, like one short breath of The Place Between. Then they were in a forest and a man who looked like Tacroy was staring at them.
The forest was smoothly beautiful, with a green grassy floor and no bushes of any kind. There were simply tall slender trees that all seemed to be the same kind. Among the smooth and slightly shiny trunks, the man was poised on one foot, something like a startled deer, looking over his naked brown shoulder at them. He was like Tacroy in that he had the same sort of coffee-coloured skin and paler curly hair, but there the likeness ended. He was naked except for a short fur skirt, which made him look like a particularly stylish Greek statue, apart from his face. The expression on the man’s face reminded Christopher of a camel. It was all haughty dislike and scorn.
“Call him. Remember what I told you,” Tacroy whispered.
You had to be rude to Eleven people or they did not respect you. “Hey, you!” Christopher called out in the most lordly way he could. “You there! Take me to the Dright at once!”
The man behaved as if he had not heard. After staring a second longer, he took the step he had been in the middle of and walked away among the trees.
“Didn’t he hear?” asked the Goddess.
“Probably,” said Tacroy. “But he wanted to make it clear he was more important than you. He was obviously low in the Sept. Even the lowest ones like to think they’re better than anyone else in the Related Worlds. Walk on, and we’ll see if anything comes of it.”
“Which way?” asked Christopher.
“Any way,” said Tacroy, with a slight smile. “They control distance and direction here.”
They walked forward the way they were facing. The trees were all so much the same and so evenly spaced that, after about twenty steps, Christopher wondered if they were moving at all. He looked round and was relieved to see the square frame of the Gate among the tree-trunks about the right distance behind. He wondered if the whole of Eleven was covered with trees. If it was, it was hardly surprising that its people did not use fire. They would risk burning the whole forest down. He looked to the front again and found that, without any change in the landscape, they were somehow walking towards a fence.
The fence stretched for as far as they could see into the trees on either side. It was made of stakes of wood, nicely varnished and wickedly pointed on top, driven into the turf about a foot apart. The points at the top only came to Tacroy’s waist. It did not look much of a barrier. But when they turned sideways to get between the stakes, the stakes seemed much too close together to let them through. When Tacroy took his jacket off to cover the points on top so that they could climb over, his jacket would not go anywhere that was not their side of the fence. As Tacroy picked his jacket up for the sixth time, the Goddess looked to the left and Christopher looked to the right, and they discovered that the fence was now all round them. Behind them, there was no sign of the Gate among the trees – nothing but a row of stakes blocking the way back.
“He did hear,” said the Goddess.
“I think they were expecting us,” said Christopher.
Tacroy spread his jacket on the grass and sat on it. “We’ll just have to wait and see,” he said glumly. “No, not you,” he said to Christopher as Christopher started to sit down too. “The important people always stand here. I was told that the Dright hasn’t sat down for years.”
The Goddess sank down beside Tacroy and rubbed her bare toes on the grass. “Then I’m not going to be important,” she said. “I’m sick of being important anyway. I say! Was he here before?”
A nervous-looking boy with a scruffy piece of sheepskin wound round his hips like a towel was standing on the other side of Tacroy. “I was here,” he said shyly. “You just didn’t seem to see me. I’ve been inside this fence all morning.”
The fence surrounded a small grassy space no bigger than the tower room where Christopher had hidden the Goddess. Christopher could not understand how they could have missed seeing the boy, but given the queerness of everything, perhaps they could. Judging by the boy’s lank white body and straight fair hair, he was not one of the Eleven people.
“Did the Dright take you prisoner?” the Goddess asked.
The boy rubbed his funny little hooked nose in a puzzled way. “I’m not sure. I don’t seem to remember coming here. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for someone,” said Tacroy. “You don’t happen to have seen a man – or several men, maybe – called Gabriel de Witt, do you?”
“Gabriel de Witt!” said the boy. “But that’s my name!”
They stared at him. He was a timid, gangling boy with mild blue eyes. He was the kind of boy Christopher – and probably the Goddess too – would naturally have started to boss about in the next minute or so. They would have bossed him quite kindly though, because it was easy to see that it would not take much to upset him and make him sick with nerves, rather like Fenning at school. In fact, Christopher thought, this boy reminded him of a tall, thin Fenning more than anything else. But now he knew, he saw that the boy’s face had the same pointed outline as Gabriel’s.
“How many lives have you?” he asked disbelievingly.
The boy seemed to look within himself. “That’s odd,” he said. “Usually I have nine. But I can only seem to find seven.”
“Then we’ve got all of him,” said the Goddess.
“With complications,” said Tacroy. “Does the title Chrestomanci mean anything to you?” he asked the boy.
“Isn’t he some boring old enchanter?” asked the boy. “I think his real name’s Benjamin Allworthy, isn’t it?”
Gabriel had gone right back to being a boy. Benjamin Allworthy had been the last Chrestomanci but one. “Don’t you remember Mordecai Roberts or me?” Christopher asked. “I’m Christopher Chant.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Gabriel de Witt said, with a polite, shy smile. Christopher stared at him, wondering how Gabriel had come to grow up so forbidding.
“It’s no use,” Tacroy said. “Neither of us was born when he was that age.”
“More people,” said the Goddess.
There were four of them, three men and a
woman, a little way off among the trees. The men all wore fur tunics that only covered one shoulder and the woman had a longer one that was more like a dress. The four of them stood half turned away from the fence, chatting together. Occasionally one of them looked scornfully over a bare shoulder at the fence.
Tacroy sank down into himself. His face was full of misery. “Take no notice, Christopher, definitely,” he whispered. “Those are the ones I usually had to report to. I think they’re important.”
Christopher stood and stared haughtily over everyone’s heads. His feet began to ache.
“They keep turning up like that,” Gabriel said. “Rude beasts! I asked them for something to eat and they pretended not to hear.”
Five minutes passed. Christopher’s feet felt wider and hotter and more over-used every second. He began to hate Eleven. There seemed to be no birds here, no animals, no wind. Just ranks of beautiful trees that all looked alike. The temperature never changed from just right. And the people were horrible.
“I hate this forest,” Gabriel said. “It’s so samey.”
“That woman-one,” said the Goddess, “reminds me of Mother Anstey. She’s going to giggle about us behind her hand any moment, I know she is.”
The woman put her hand up to her mouth and gave a scornful, tinkling laugh.
“What did I tell you?” the Goddess said. “And good riddance!”
The group of people was suddenly gone.
Christopher stood on one foot, then on the other. It made no difference to the ache. “You were lucky, Tacroy,” he said. “If they hadn’t dumped you in our world, you’d have had to live here.” Tacroy looked up with a crinkled, unhappy smile and shrugged.
A minute or so after that, the man they had seen first was back, strolling among the trees a little way off. Tacroy nodded at Christopher. Christopher called out loudly and angrily, “Hey, you! I told you to take us to the Dright! What do you mean by disobeying me like this?”
The Chrestomanci Series Page 80