by Mark Hodder
I was not inclined to ponder over these mysteries. I was too concerned for Clarissa, who remained unconscious and appeared to be in extreme pain. She writhed and jerked and moaned and whimpered constantly, and all the while her bones produced sickening creaks and crunches and crackles. Something was happening to her, that much was certain, but it took me a long time to recognise what.
Realisation, when it came, was akin to a revelation. I was witnessing a miracle. My friend was being corrected.
Her bones were straightening. Her surgical scars were fading. The white streaks in her hair were darkening. And it finally became apparent that she was growing taller.
I must have slept at least fifteen times, and if the period between each sleep was the length of an Earth day, then it took more than a fortnight to travel from the Shrouded Mountains to Yatsillat.
Clarissa Stark awoke on the equivalent, I estimated, of the twelfth day.
She sat up and stretched. Her limbs were long and, dare I say it, magnificent. Her shape had altered so much that her trousers now only reached her calves and her shirt had ripped. Her black hair cascaded down to the middle of her straight back. Her skin was deeply tanned but smooth and unmarked.
“I feel funny,” she said.
I tried to speak but could only emit a croak.
“Good gracious, Aiden! Whatever is the matter with you? Have you caught a cold?”
“You—you—you look t-tremendous!” I stammered. “I mean—it’s unbelievable!”
She frowned, then uttered a small cry and put a hand to her blindfold. “What are these things on my forehead?”
“You were knocked into the pool. I dragged you out. When you emerged, there were little bumps over your eyes, like the Aristocrats possess.”
“Aristocrats?”
“The Wise Ones.”
“But why do you call them aristocrats?”
Ignoring the question, I blurted, “Clarissa! You’ve been mended! Your legs and back are straight! You are beautiful! Utterly beautiful!”
She made a noise, almost a bleat, ran her hands over her legs, then reached over her shoulder and tried to touch her spine.
“Put your hand on my back!” she cried out. “Please! Do it! Do it!”
I placed my palm against the small of her back and slid it slowly up over her shirt, following her spine to the nape of her neck.
She collapsed forward, until her head was resting on her knees, and began to sob. I put my arms around her.
“How? How? How?” she whimpered.
“I can’t explain it,” I said. “Your eyes—are they repaired, too?”
“No—even the small amount of light that penetrates the blindfold and my eyelids is uncomfortable.”
“Don’t worry about that, dear thing,” came a voice. “We’ll have you sorted out with a new pair of goggles in no time at all. Humph! What!”
I looked up and saw Colonel Spearjab standing over us.
“It’s all change at Yatsillat!” he declared. “Look at that!” He pointed ahead, in the direction the Ptall’kor was travelling.
“Who is speaking, Aiden?” Clarissa asked.
“I say! Forgive me, Miss Stark!” Spearjab said. “Most rude! Most rude! I am Colonel Momentous Spearjab, formerly known as Yazziz Yozkulu. What! I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance!”
“Yazziz? That’s you? Speaking English?”
“Colonel, my dear. Colonel. But yes, absolutely it’s me, and I’m perfectly thrilled to see that you’ve made a full recovery. You appear to be as fit as the proverbial fiddle, whatever that may be. Ha ha! Harrumph!”
I tore my eyes away from the scene ahead of us and said, “Clarissa, there’s a low mountain range on the horizon. I see excavations of some sort. What is it, Colonel?”
“We are once again approaching the jolly old Mountains That Gaze Upon Phenadoor, Mr. Fleischer,” Spearjab answered enthusiastically, “but the other end of the range, what! And those excavations are quarries. Quarries, I say! We’re mining rocks and minerals, you see, to make bricks and iron and glass and whatnot. By the time we reach our destination, our artisans will have manufactured a pair of dark lenses for Miss Stark. Humph! Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I must rally the troops, so to speak. I smell Quee-tan! Ah, yes! What! Ha ha! So we’ll stop for a hunt soon. Have you ever tasted Quee-tan meat, Mr. Fleischer? Ah, no, probably not! The confounded beasts once infested all the trees in this region but have become extremely rare. Almost extinct. It’s a crying shame, for they taste absolutely delicious! Delicious, I say! Oh well. What! What! Tally-ho!”
He scuttled away.
“You taught them our language?” Clarissa asked.
“No. I have no idea how they learned it. One minute they were all speaking Koluwaian; the next, English!”
“Puzzle after puzzle!” my friend exclaimed. “Help me up, would you?”
I stood, reached down, gripped her hands, and assisted her to her feet.
She cried out, “There’s no pain! No pain at all! I feel—I feel wonderful!”
“And you look it. You’re nearly as tall as I am!”
Her fingers clenched around mine, and in that pressure there was a wealth of inexpressible emotion.
We stood together and I resumed my descriptions of the passing landscape. The Ptall’kor was now sliding across fields of lilac-coloured heather toward a broad band of tangled jungle, beyond which I could see cultivated pastures laid out like a patchwork quilt, stretching all the way to the distant horizon.
Eventually, our conveyance came to rest at the edge of the trees. Colonel Spearjab disembarked with his fellows—including the three newly made Aristocrats, but excluding Clarissa, despite that she’d apparently joined their ranks—and they plunged into the undergrowth with spears poised.
While we awaited their return, I continued to examine the terrain, telling my companion about everything I saw. “There’s something strange about the sky to the left of the mountain range,” I noted. “It’s darker. There’s a sort of dirty smudge in the air.”
“Perhaps it marks the position of Yatsillat,” Clarissa responded. “If they’re manufacturing glass and iron and so forth, they must have foundries and factories.”
“I don’t know whether I fear our destination or look forward to it,” I replied. “This journey has been interminable but at least I’ve become somewhat accustomed to it. With travelling everything is transitory—whatever you can’t accept is soon left behind. When we reach the city or town or whatever it is, then we have to face up to the challenge of living there, perhaps for a long time.”
“Or permanently.”
I didn’t answer, not wanting to contemplate such a circumstance, though it also occurred to me that, in fact, I had nothing on Earth to go back to.
For some considerable time, Clarissa continued to ask questions about our environment, which I answered as best I could. Then she suddenly interrupted me with the exclamation, “Ah! They’re returning already! The hunt was successful!”
I could see no sign of the warriors. “You can hear them?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
Clarissa furrowed her brow. “It’s—I just—I feel them, Aiden.”
Before I could probe this statement further, Spearjab’s party reappeared, carrying between them an ovoid-shaped creature from which multiple flexible appendages extended. When they reached the side of the Ptall’kor, they squatted down and set to work ripping the thing’s skin away from the white flesh beneath. They then slit it open and scooped out the guts. As I watched this, I felt cold fingers gripping my spine, for it was impossible not to think of the corpse of Polly Nichols with intestines exposed, which, of course, led me again to a contemplation of my hallucination and the monstrousness I suspected was lurking in the shadowy regions of my soul.
The Quee-tan was sliced up, and steaks, like dense crabmeat, were distributed.
With the exception of our meal in the Valley of Reflectio
ns, we had thus far subsisted only on berries, nuts, and fruits. The prospect of flesh, in light of my previous experience, was not one I welcomed. I turned to Kata and said, “I’m hungry but I cannot eat this if it will affect me like the Yarkeen.”
“It won’t,” she answered. “This is not sacred. It will fill your belly but nothing more. Enjoy it—Quee’tan meat has become a very rare treat.”
So, cautiously, I tucked into the raw flesh. It was delicious.
After we ate, the entire party slept, and it must have been for a considerable time, for when we were awoken, the slow-moving suns were noticeably higher in the sky.
It was the yodelling of animals that brought us to consciousness. A pack of around twenty glossy green creatures with ribbed exoskeletons, bulbous heads, and eight spidery limbs apiece were passing close by. They were leaping like gazelles, clicking the mandibles that extended from their pointed faces, and emitting wolfish yips, yaps, and yowls.
“They are Tiskeen,” Mademoiselle Clattersmash told us. “They are harmless at the moment.”
We embarked upon what proved to be the final leg of our long voyage.
As the Ptall’kor hauled itself over the jungle and across the cultivated fields, the uncertainty and fear I felt concerning our destination and eventual fate were kept at bay by my delight at witnessing Clarissa’s transformation. Again and again, she stretched and danced and cavorted, sometimes coming perilously close to the edge of the living platform, and evidently causing much bemusement among the Aristocrats.
“I say! What in the name of the Saviour is she up to?” Colonel Spearjab asked me.
I regarded him, still astounded to hear the English language coming from his repulsive vertical mouth. “She’s simply enjoying the sensation of healthy limbs,” I said. “For most of her life she has been malformed and suffering pain.”
“The sensation of healthy limbs,” Spearjab echoed. He suddenly straightened his four legs, which caused him to almost double in height, and threw out his long arms, waggling his fingers. The outer lips of his mouth peeled open and the inner beak pushed outward.
“Gaaaah!” he cried out, then sank back down and said, “My goodness, that’s very nice indeed! I shall recommend it to my colleagues. Hey? What? Harrumph!”
He scuttled away, leaving me to ponder the fact that I comprehended nothing—nothing!—of this world called Ptallaya and its demented inhabitants.
Throughout the remainder of the journey, Spearjab and the Aristocrats occasionally burst into spontaneous bouts of stretching and dancing, looking so utterly ludicrous that I couldn’t help but laugh. Between that and Clarissa’s obvious happiness, I might almost say that it was an enjoyable period, though whatever pleasure I felt most definitely was not shared by the Koluwaians. For some unaccountable reason, Kata and her group had become rather morose and silent, and, if anything, their mood blackened the nearer we got to Yatsillat.
I asked her what was wrong.
“It is all changing,” she said. “The new ways are not our ways. The new language is not our language. We are afraid these things will be difficult to learn before we are released. How can we serve efficiently when we don’t understand anything?”
“I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Why are things changing, Kata?”
Her deep brown eyes slid away from me. I followed her gaze and saw she was looking at Clarissa.
“Because of her.”
“Clarissa? What has Clarissa got to do with it? She knows no more of this world than I.”
“It is not what she knows of this world. It is what this world knows of her.”
I pressed her to explain this but she would say no more, lapsing into a sullen silence.
The countryside slipped past, field after field of grains and sweet-smelling herbs, and as we progressed, strange dwellings came into sight, clustered together and reminiscent of papery wasp nests but big enough to house many Yatsill. Kata explained that these were nurseries filled with the young, who grew to maturity with astonishing rapidity.
Yatsill farmers—dressed in frocks of coarse unpatterned linen—were busy tending to the crops. They paid us no attention as we glided past.
We made three short stops, during which Mademoiselle Clattersmash disembarked to collect herbs. Spearjab informed us that she used them to manufacture poultices for the treatment of wounds, and also to brew various concoctions that, when mixed with the Dar’sayn liquid we’d seen collected from the fruits in the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings, produced specific effects during meditations.
The farms were on a slight gradient, the land rising smoothly ahead of us, so the horizon appeared to be getting closer and closer as we drew nearer to the crest of the ridge lying across our path. We could now clearly see, on the other side of it, the tops of towers and chimneys, the latter sending plumes of smoke and steam into the air.
To our right, the slope steepened into much rougher terrain, which wrinkled upward in increasingly jagged waves until it became the range of quarry-scarred mountains. Three of the four moons dotted the heavens above the peaks, faint circles in the yellow sky.
“What! What!” Colonel Spearjab declared loudly. “Home sweet home! Hurrah!”
As he made this pronouncement, a breathtaking vista opened up before us, for the slope led not to the brow of a ridge but to the edge of the continent, and to the right and left the ground dropped away, a sheer cliff at least a mile high, with a sparkling emerald sea lapping at its distant base. Into this precipice a vast semicircular bay intruded, the land inside it descending to the sea in a series of nine colossal steps, and as I looked down upon them, I saw they were swarming with Yatsill. About a third of the terraces were heavily forested and the trees were filled with houses in the Koluwaian style, but it appeared that the forest was in the process of being cleared and a city the size of London built in its place. The size of London! It was simply staggering! The creatures, with the same wondrous efficiency of termites and ants, were constructing, at an apparently preternatural pace, what had taken centuries for my species to achieve—a vast, sophisticated city. And it was expanding before my eyes!
The topmost terrace was already entirely stripped of trees and looked to be a manufacturing district, for there were many large brick buildings and foundries with tall chimneystacks belching out the sooty clouds so symptomatic of industry.
The next level, which was half-complete, contained row after row of humble abodes, similar in size and arrangement—or so I later learned from Clarissa—to the “two-ups, two-downs” seen in England’s northern cities, such as Manchester and Leeds.
Next came a terrace of spires and minarets, rising from what I took to be temples and administrative establishments, all constructed—or being constructed—from a white variety of stone much like marble.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth steps were being made into attractive residential districts, with many a square patch of greenery and long roads lined with shops.
The seventh level was partially landscaped and already resembled a dreamlike version of Regent’s Park.
The eighth terrace, Colonel Spearjab revealed, was given over to barracks for the City Guard and workshops for artisans, while the ninth, and smallest, was an almost self-contained fishing village.
The most incredible aspect of the whole city, though, was the speed at which it was supplanting the forest. Every single part of it looked brand new, and every single one of its inhabitants appeared to be involved in its construction.
“Magnificent!” the colonel bellowed. “Welcome to Yatsillat! Welcome, I say! Ha ha!” He pointed at the sea. “And behold, Phenadoor!”
A number of very wide and steeply sloping avenues cut through the terraces all the way from the top of the city to the bottom. Our Ptall’kor passed into one that was lined with trees. It was paved with colourful cobbles, which, upon closer inspection, froze the blood in my veins, for they were hard shells rather than pebbles, meaning the murder I foresaw in my Yarkeen vision would transpire
here, not in London. However, I was quickly—and thankfully—distracted from this disturbing thought by the crowds that gathered along the sides of the avenue to cheer our arrival. They were Yatsill but, unlike those we travelled with, they were clothed—and in such a bizarre manner that I repeatedly rubbed my eyes and pinched myself, half-convinced I was hallucinating again. Those creatures that stood in the front rows of onlookers wore four-legged trousers or billowing skirts. Their upper mussel-shell-shaped bodies were encased in colourful waistcoats over which long jackets were draped, some male in design, others female. Viennese masks covered their faces—all with four eye-holes, all resembling long-beaked birds or bejewelled human faces or Pierrots or Punchinello—while their heads were adorned with frilly bonnets or top hats, though in the latter case many among the crowd were throwing theirs into the air while yelling, “Hooray! Hooray! Three cheers for the new Aristocrats! Hup hup hurrah! Hup hup hurrah! Hup hup hurrah!”
The rearmost spectators were rather less extravagantly dressed, their “suits” being of a baggier cut, their heads adorned with cloth caps or drab bonnets, and their masks simplistic depictions of a human face.
The hullabaloo and dazzling sights so jumbled my senses that it was impossible for me to properly explain everything to poor Clarissa. Perhaps she understood this, for she stood at my side and gripped my hand tightly, as if to shackle me to the reality she represented—the reality of Earth and home—and prevent me from drifting off into realms of madness. Had she not done so, the sheer lunacy I was now witnessing might have pushed me over the brink.
“Hallo hallo!” Spearjab exclaimed. “There’s trouble!”
He pointed to a small group of Yatsill who, unlike the majority, were unclothed. They were chanting, “Down with the dissonance! No to change! Back to the trees! No to change!”
“Backward thinkers!” he said dismissively. “Ignore the blighters. Only a bally fool stands in the way of progress. Hey? What? Harrumph! Now then, I propose a tour of the new city. But first we must stop at a tailor’s. I feel positively naked! Naked, I say! It won’t do at all!”