Complete darkness and complete silence fell.
Chapter Twenty
The dwarf beckoned again, but Ria hesitated. She wasn’t sure she liked the look of this little fellow. He wore colourful knee-length leggings, one side red, the other yellow, his jerkin was green, and he was no taller than a child, yet his face was ancient, sallow and grim. In his right hand he held a long thin wand made of some pliant, gently glowing material.
Another gesture, this time betraying a definite hint of impatience, and the dwarf’s thought-voice rang inside Ria’s head: ‘Come quickly. I’m here to send you on.’ As he spoke he reached towards her with the rod and touched her lightly on the shoulder. At once she felt reassured and became conscious of a steady, insistent tugging, as though some invisible force were drawing her towards the gap that had opened in the cave wall. But that couldn’t be what was happening because even as these sensations were at their most intense Ria could see that her body, seated on ibex skins on the floor, wasn’t going anywhere.
Then she realised that she had never actually seen all of herself in quite this way before – even the bits she couldn’t normally see, like her own eyes! It wasn’t like looking at her reflection in a river pool. This was a completely new perspective – somehow outside herself, separated from and able to look down on her body.
Ria had heard of such things before when tales of the Painters were told around the campfires. Like everyone else in the Clan she had been taught that these mysterious ancestors of theirs had discovered a way to send their souls out from their bodies – and thus to travel to the spirit world and return alive. She had also been taught that this way had been closed, and forgotten by mankind, since the long-ago. But now, through happenstance and adventure, Ria possessed a devastating secret unknown to even the most senior elders of the Clan. The way to the spirit world was not closed at all. Its long-lost entrance could be found, at will, by eating the forbidden mushrooms that Brindle called the ‘Little Teachers’.
The dwarf beckoned one final time, then turned his back on Ria and disappeared through the cave wall. His thought-voice in her head urged ‘Hurry!’ and she felt herself drawn further away from her body and into the jagged crevice – no more able to resist than smoke carried on a strong breeze.
Inside there was darkness ahead. She moved forward – where was that dwarf? – and the cave wall behind her closed up with a crash, shutting her off with horrible finality from her own body.
Now there was only darkness everywhere and Ria found herself adrift with no reference points.
Was she in motion or was she still?
At first she had no way to tell, but little by little the level of light began to grow, like a slow dawn, and soon there were hints of form and substance – a brief flash here, an illuminated grid there, sparkling zigzags, a swirl of dots. From such clues, in the rising light, she came to understand her predicament better.
She was being swept through an immense tunnel. Its walls – within which the patterns appeared and disappeared – were not rock but some other substance, a bit like water, a bit like sky, slow and majestic, wheeling round her. Sometimes, as though through mist or cloud, she thought she caught glimpses of that other country that had beckoned to her from beyond the cave wall.
The darkness had been banished and it was full daylight, dazzling and unearthly. The walls of the tunnel became thinner, more transparent and finally invisible. Then there was a sudden deceleration and a clap like thunder and Ria found herself standing in a meadow of green flowers beneath two suns.
Two suns! What the fuck?
Her first thought was to ask the dwarf, but he had vanished.
Another mystery was her body. She was quite certain that she had left it behind in the cave but she was equally confident that she was now in a body again. It felt like her own familiar body – but her injured leg was healed, and she was dressed in a fine fabric smock she’d never seen before
How all this could have come about was a great puzzle but she decided she could leave its solution to another time. She was here, now, and she wanted to explore.
* * *
The mantle of green flowers sloped upwards and away from Ria in all directions, and was ringed by the horizon, suggesting she must be standing at the lowest point of a huge shallow basin. There were no other features to break the view – not a tree, not a river, not a hillock – and the flowers exuded a sticky richly scented sap that bathed her feet as she walked.
She had never in her life seen such flowers. They were the iridescent green of a kingfisher’s feathers – quite breathtaking in such a mass – and the entire expanse swayed and bowed as though agitated by a gentle continuous breeze, yet no breeze was blowing. It was like looking into the shimmering surface of a brilliantly coloured ocean.
Then there was the little matter of two suns in the sky. How great was that? Before, when Ria had thought of the spirit world – which was not often – she had pictured it as a murky place filled with ghosts and monsters. She had hated the idea that her parents had passed on to an eternity of gloom and shadow. But now the little mushrooms had brought her here it was obvious it wasn’t like that at all and she even began to hope, as Brindle had hinted, that in this place of marvels she might find her mother and father alive once again.
It was difficult to judge distances because of the absolute lack of landmarks and the ceaseless swirling patterns of the flowers at her feet. But Ria didn’t care. This was all much too exciting to allow caution to slow her down.
Ria was uncertain how long she’d been walking and couldn’t track the passage of time. At home the sun moved through the heavens along a predictable path at a predictable speed, measuring out morning, noon and night. But here in the spirit world there were two suns and both seemed fixed in their places. If they were moving at all it was at a rate too slow to be perceptible.
The rays given off by the twin suns, bearable or even pleasant at first, were now almost scorching, the air was hot, dry and utterly still, and for the first time Ria began to wonder … Where do you go to get a drink in the spirit world? She was very thirsty and longed to bury her face in a mountain stream, but there was no water to be had anywhere. She reached down and trailed her hand through the green flowers, brought a finger to her lips. Despite their pleasant fragrance their sap tasted so alien, bitter and salty she was repelled.
A new thought occurred to her: if she didn’t climb out of this basin soon and find shelter or water, or preferably both, then things could go very badly for her. Ria was just beginning to wonder if she could actually die of thirst in the spirit world when she felt something small and fierce bite her ankle and discovered that there was pain here as well – at least as bad as the pain of a polecat bite she’d suffered the previous summer. Only this wasn’t a polecat. A hideous little beast, something like a cross between a rat and a cockroach, had clambered onto her foot and sunk its fangs into her. She hopped about on one leg trying to brush it off, lost her balance, and crashed down on her bottom amongst the flowers, unleashing a further splatter of the bitter sticky sap.
The beast still had its teeth in her and wasn’t letting go. The little fucker was drinking her blood! Ria gripped it behind the head with her finger and thumb and pinched hard. It squealed in protest, scrabbled at her with its rat claws, and made threatening buzzing sounds with its cockroach wings. Ria pinched harder. She could see the mechanism of its jaw now. She shifted her grip, increased the pressure to the maximum strength of her hand, forced the jaws apart and prised the jagged razor-sharp teeth out of her flesh. Then she got hold of the creature’s neck and with a sharp twist and a wet plopping sound she tore the head away from the scaly body. She threw both parts down amongst the flowers where they continued to jerk and writhe as though trying to reunite.
Ria examined her ankle. She had suffered a savage and bloody bite. She was lucky the rat-roach had been alone or she would have been in trouble. She picked herself up, looked around feeling spooked, and began to hu
rry. She had always imagined that spirits were insubstantial and ghostly so it worried her that she could suffer physical harm in the spirit world. If she could be bitten, if she could be thirsty, what else might happen to her here?
The bite felt hot, and Ria was growing sure some poison had been injected into her system when she came at last to the rim of the basin of green flowers. The flowers continued beyond the rim – for all she knew this whole world was covered in flowers. But at a distance that looked like a morning’s hard march the peaks of lofty mountains revealed themselves. Much nearer, just a few hundred paces away, an inviting river meandered through a broad valley. Nearer still – almost close enough to touch – two utterly outlandish creatures examined Ria through segmented black eyes. The creatures were about the size of aurochs, but they had six legs each, and they had stubby beetle-wings folded up on their backs. Judging from the clumps of flowers dangling from their mouths they had been grazing, but now, startled, they turned away and began to canter towards a copse of a dozen trees by a bend in the river.
Ria followed, limping.
There was, she decided, something odd about the trees. For a moment she considered avoiding them, but checked herself. This was ridiculous. They were just trees. And their shade was most inviting. Because she was now in so much pain, and because she wanted to drink and then lie down and rest out of the glare of the two suns, she overruled the instincts honed in years of hunting and gathering – instincts which signalled danger – and continued to approach.
Fingers of shade reached out to caress her.
Ah. Bliss.
Ria passed the first tree, noticing the curious feathery texture of its long green leaves, and stepped into the midst of the copse, luxuriating in the deep shadows as she made for the river just a hundred paces ahead. Above her, branches creaked and leaves rustled.
Then she heard a voice, shouting in a language she didn’t understand. This was not a thought-voice. It was out-loud speech. Ria turned, and was shocked to see that a young woman of about her own age had somehow materialised right behind her – a beautiful young woman, dressed as she was, with golden hair. She was pointing and gesticulating and it was she who was the source of the incoherent yelling.
‘What manner of spirit are you?’ Ria asked, also using out-loud speech.
The other girl rolled her eyes, yelled some more, then raised her arm and one outstretched finger.
What was she pointing at?
Could it be the trees?
Ria looked back over her shoulder.
Fuck! They weren’t trees.
Chapter Twenty-One
They weren’t trees. They were monsters, three times Ria’s height, and she’d walked right into the midst of them. She looked left and right trying to figure out an escape route, but they were all around her – in front of her, behind her, towering over her – blocking her way to the nearby river. She could see their beady red eyes now, like poisonous fruits amongst the weird foliage, and their long pointed beaks, big enough to cut her in half or swallow her whole. These features made them look like birds – perhaps some gigantic species of stork. But their legs really resembled tree trunks, their feet were clumps of tangled roots, their feathers were a mass of dirty green leaves, and a network of large and small bones resembling branches and twigs supported the stubby rudiments of wings.
Could they fly, jump, run, like birds? Or were they – please let it be so – fixed in place like trees?
Ria spun on her heel hoping for answers from the spirit girl, but she had vanished. One moment she was there, signalling and shouting, seemingly flesh and blood. But a blink of an eye later she was … just gone.
Ria had no time to be mystified. Moving with exaggerated care, she took a couple of experimental steps towards the river a hundred paces away.
The monsters responded with muted clucks.
A third step brought an ear-splitting squawk from just over her head, accompanied by a disconcerting rustling of leaf-feathers.
As she took her fourth step the rustling increased to a crescendo and she was already breaking into a run when a huge beak scissored down.
Ria dodged rapidly to her left and ducked. The beak snapped closed where her head had been an instant before. She stumbled, almost fell, threw herself forward to evade another murderous lunge and then was up and running again.
Glancing back she confirmed that the weird tree-birds were not, as she had hoped, rooted to the ground. The good news was that most of the flock seemed to have no interest in her, but the bad news was that two were in hot pursuit, only paces behind, and closing the distance fast. They were so big and heavy that the ground was shaking under their feet.
Whoosh!
One of the great beaks was swinging towards her. She tracked it out of the corner of her eye, ducked – Clack! – and carried on running
Faced by danger Ria’s natural instinct was to snatch up stones and throw them at whatever threatened her, but she could see no stones amongst the endless green flowers of the spirit world. So her only plan was to get to the river and find something to defend herself with, or dive in and swim for it.
The bank was close but the two huge birds were agile and fast-moving and forced her to run the indirect zigzag course of a startled rabbit. They were right on her heels, crowding her, stabbing at her back and legs with their scything, snapping beaks. But it seemed that neither wanted its rival to get to her first so they lunged and stabbed at each other as well, uttering furious clucking squawks.
While they were squabbling, Ria stopped zigzagging and made a break for the river, now only fifty paces away, but in an instant one of the tree-birds caught up with her again, squawking and shrieking. Clack! Its wickedly sharp beak stabbed down at her head. Clack! Clack! She sprinted forward the last few paces and reached the bank. There was a drop of about twice her height to a shingle beach below – a beach covered with rounded cobbles.
Whoosh! Clack! Another near miss. Ria was already in the air. She went into a forward roll as she landed, grabbed a couple of stones and ended on her feet facing the tree-bird as it flapped down onto the beach twenty paces from her and began to pick its way across the shingle.
The stones were larger and heavier than she would have liked, but there was no time to find substitutes. They would just have to do. Scanning the top of the riverbank for the second bird, she drew back her right arm, took aim and let fly at the first, which had closed the distance between them to just ten paces. There was a distinct and absolutely satisfying thwack! as the missile found its target. The creature’s head split open, spilling its brains, and it crumpled on the spot in a heap.
One down, one to go.
She scanned the riverbank again and the second bird hopped into view, its disproportionately small wings thrashing before it crashed down to the shingle a dozen paces in front of her. It stood still for a moment, clacking its beak and sizing her up with its greedy red eyes. Hoping she could throw as well with both hands in this world as she did in her own, Ria hefted her second stone.
If she took just three steps backwards she knew she would be in the river. It looked as deep and fast-flowing as the Snake, in which her mother and father had drowned, and she wasn’t getting into it unless there was no other way to avoid being eaten. She aimed and threw again, but lost her footing. The stone flew wide of its mark, bouncing off a wing, and at once the tree-bird was on the move, screeching its rage, lurching towards her.
Ria waited a little too long to dodge its charge and was sent sprawling by a kick from one of its massive rootlike feet. As she struggled to pick herself up, the tremendous momentum of the creature’s onslaught carried it past her, skidding on the wet sand. It was unable to stop itself and plunged into the river with a stupendous splash and flapping of wings. At once the water around it seethed and boiled and the monster began to call out with a repeated piteous ear-splitting screech.
What was happening?
Ria peered closer and saw that a host of small reptilian-l
ooking fish with mouths full of long serrated teeth were swarming over the tree-bird, bearing it down under the surface of the swirling river, eating it with astounding efficiency and attention to detail. The teeth flashed and glittered in the sunlight, the water boiled and splashed in a mad frenzy, and within moments there was nothing left of the huge predator at all except trails of blood in the water and its strangely beautiful skeleton, now stripped clean like a dead tree, sinking into the depths.
‘Well done, Ria’ said a thought-voice in her head. It was a voice so thrilling and ethereal that it made her hair stand on end. ‘You have passed the first test.’
She looked up from the bloodied water and saw three figures standing watching her less than a bowshot away on the far bank. One was a tall woman with long black hair and deep blue skin. The others were her mother and father, waving, looking just as they had on the last day of their lives.
Forgetting everything in her love and excitement, Ria ran out into the river.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As the waking sleep of deep ketamine sedation wore off, Leoni began to be troubled by memories of a strange dream.
If it had been a dream.
It came back to her in fragments, not in a connected whole, and with the sense that she had forgotten large parts of it.
It began with a vivid and convincing rerun of her near-death experience, and she found herself out of her body, drawn into a vortex of light and returned to that strange world that the Blue Angel had called ‘the land where everything is known’. She was in a body again and – exactly as before – she was dressed in a simple sleeveless tunic that didn’t belong to her. She was sure that she’d had another encounter with the Blue Angel, one laden with significance, but she couldn’t remember anything that had passed between them.
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