by Jon Berkeley
Miles felt an echo of the leaden sleep that Bluehart brought, and with it came a flush of anger. “Who does he think he is?” he said sharply.
Little looked at him with a shocked expression. “Bluehart is a Sleep Angel. That’s his purpose in the order of things.”
“You sound like Silverpoint!” said Miles. He had felt the comment rising up through his anger and was unable to stop it leaving his mouth, and he felt bad about it straightaway. Little looked down at her feet.
“I just meant . . .,” said Miles, searching for the words. “What I mean is, how can they pass judgment on me for owning the Tiger’s Egg when it was passed on to me as a baby? I didn’t even know it existed until a few months ago.”
“The Council has known about it for a long time,” said Little, “and they’ve decided that whoever carries the Tiger’s Egg should lose his life.”
“You don’t have it,” said Miles, “but they’ve condemned you too.”
“Some of the angels feel I’m just as guilty because I’ve been with you while you used it. That’s why Silverpoint wants to convince them that I’m just trying to get it back.”
“Nobody’s asked our opinion!” said Miles. “Any proper court gives the accused the right to speak. Remember when Lady Partridge was charged with being a menace to public health because of all her cats?”
Little’s musical laugh chimed through the cabin. “I remember,” she said. “After her speech the judge apologized, and that pointy-nosed man, the . . .”
“The prosecutor,” said Miles.
“That’s right, he was fined a hundred tins of cat food for wasting the court’s time.” A cloud crossed her face. “The Council of Light doesn’t quite work the same way.”
“I still think I should have the chance to defend myself,” said Miles. He looked out of the porthole at the strange landscape of the air. High above the Sunfish the sky was striped with thin lines of salmon pink, while below them a smooth cloud was passing slowly aft. It looked almost within reach, as though he could leap from the porthole and bounce on its soft white surface, and he had to remind himself that he would fall straight through and plummet to his death. He sighed. “It’s not like it’s possible, is it?”
Little said nothing in reply. She frowned and crossed her arms, and for a long time she seemed to be staring through the closed door of the cabin. Miles was about to suggest going in search of Baltinglass when Little spoke. “There might be a way,” she said. “But it would be dangerous.”
“More dangerous than being condemned to death?” said Miles.
Little smiled. “I suppose we have nothing to lose. I’m not exactly in their good books either.”
“How can we get them to meet us?” asked Miles. He pictured the stateroom of the ship filled with bewigged angels, glowing faintly in the dead of night, while he swayed their cold minds with the clarity of his argument.
“We can’t summon the Council!” said Little, looking incredulous. “We’ll have to go to them, and we’ll have to find a way to make them believe you’re someone else. If they realize who you are, it’s all over.”
“But how can we get there?” asked Miles. “You gave up your wings, and I never had any in the first place. The only way we can fly is inside an airship.”
Little pushed her hair behind her ears and took a deep breath. It was the kind of deep breath she always took when she was about to try to explain something that didn’t want to be explained, and Miles knew he would need all his concentration for what was coming next.
“The Realm is out there,” she began, nodding at the portholes, “but it’s not exactly out there. It exists between the light.”
“And what?” asked Miles.
“And what what?” said Little.
“You said it exists between the light. Between the light and what?”
“Just between the light,” said Little. She bit her lip for a moment. “Think of the tiger,” she said.
“Is that where he exists?” asked Miles. “Is that how he comes and goes like he does?”
“I suppose so, but that’s not what I meant. Think of the tiger’s pelt. He’s orange with black stripes. But what happens to the orange behind the black stripes?”
“There is no orange behind the black. There’s orange in some places, and black in others,” said Miles a little uncertainly. At one time he would have said this with patient conviction, but he was beginning to learn that Little’s ideas often made as much sense or more than the ones he had learned from Lady Partridge’s encyclopedias.
“That’s what people think,” said Little. “And it’s the same with the Realm. No one ever considers that there might be anything between the light, and that’s why few people ever see it. Except when they’re asleep, of course.”
“You mean dreaming? Is the Realm like a dream?”
“A dream is like the Realm,” said Little.
“But my dreams are usually just weird,” said Miles.
Little laughed again. The sun came out from behind a cloud and shone straight through the portholes, beaming twin circles onto the cabin wall. “So is the Realm,” she said. “Did you think it would be all shiny and twinkly?” She leaned forward and fixed Miles with her clear blue eyes. “If I do take you there, you had better be ready for anything,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
TRAINING WINGS
Miles Wednesday, sky-sailing and sleep-sentenced, sat on the bench in his cabin and tried to fit the broad sweep of Little’s world into his head. He had always taken the simple view that the Song Angel had come from the sky somewhere, a place that was just not easy for earthbound people like himself to reach. Little’s description, however, was a bit more complicated, and he suspected that she was putting it simply for him at that.
“How . . .,” he began, chasing his question around his own mind to try to get a grip on it. “How can you visit the Realm? Aren’t you banished for using your real name?”
“I was never banished exactly,” said Little. “I became tied to the body I had adopted on Earth.”
“But without the wings,” said Miles.
“The wings are part of what people expect angels to have,” said Little. “Once I chose to bind myself to Earth, I became an ordinary girl, and the wings no longer . . . fit.”
“Then how can you bring me to the Realm?” asked Miles. He was beginning to feel a little nervous at the prospect of arguing for his life in front of the mysterious Council. What would they look like? What exactly would he say? Perhaps running and hiding was the better option, though he knew he could not do that forever. He reached into his pocket and gently squeezed Tangerine, but the squeeze was not returned as he had half expected, and he was left with a hollow feeling.
“I can still visit when I’m sleeping,” said Little.
“Do you go back often?” asked Miles. It had never occurred to him that she might have any way of returning to the life she had left behind, and he was surprised to feel a twinge of jealousy.
Little shook her head. “Hardly ever,” she said, “but I can if I need to. I can meet you there, but first you’ll have to find your own way into the Realm.”
“How do I do that?”
Little scratched her head. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “Once you’re asleep you’ve got to look for the light, and . . . get between it.”
Miles looked at her blankly.
“Look,” said Little, “all you need to do . . .” She sighed and stopped speaking for a moment, tracing spirals on the palm of her hand. Suddenly she smiled and looked up. “Actually, it’s not that complicated,” she said. “There’s a lever that will open your way into the Realm.”
“A lever?” said Miles doubtfully.
Little nodded. “A big brass lever,” she said. “You just need to look for the lever and pull it, and in you go.”
“Why didn’t you say that already?” asked Miles.
Little shrugged. “I forgot,” she said.
“Where is the
lever? Where do I find it?” asked Miles. It seemed a highly unlikely idea to him, and not at all like the solutions Little usually came up with.
“I can’t do everything for you, Miles,” she said with a grin. “You’ll just have to look for it yourself.”
There was a tapping at the door, and Baltinglass came in. “Are you the traveling companions of Baltinglass of Araby, by any chance?” he said.
“It’s us,” said Miles.
“That’s a relief,” said Baltinglass. “I forgot to count the doors on the way out, and this is the third cabin I’ve tried. The first one had three ladies in it. They must have been in their nighties, because they were mighty relieved to discover I was blind. The one next door is an odd one. Nobody answered me, but I’d swear there was someone in there. I could smell a cigar burning. And pickled socks of some kind.”
He felt his way to the bottom bunk and sat down with a creak. “I’ll sleep here belowdecks,” he said. “These old bones are not as tough as they used to be, and if I fell out of the top bunk I’d shatter like a chandelier. Good night, Master Miles. Night, Little.” He threw his head down on the pillow, and within minutes his quiet snoring was added to the sigh of the wind in the rigging.
Miles climbed into the middle bunk and lay down on the hard mattress. He was eager for sleep to come, but he had never felt so completely awake. The more excited he became about the prospect of visiting another world in his dreams, the more his eyes felt like they were glued open. He forced them to close, and listened to the wup, wup, wup of the great propellers, driving onward through the darkening night. He pictured the Albatross, sailing far below them with Doctor Tau-Tau on board, the Tiger’s Egg in his pocket, and the Great Cortado scheming and sniggering in a lamplit cabin.
Miles opened his eyes and saw to his surprise that the bunk above him was receding into the far distance, and the space in which he slept was rapidly growing to the size of a cathedral. There seemed to be small animals with beady eyes huddling at the end of the bed, just beyond the reach of his toes. They were whispering together, all sharp ears and pointed noses, and casting furtive glances in his direction. He opened his mouth to say, “Shoo,” but his voice would not work. He looked around for a bat or a broom handle with which to chase them away. There was something sticking up at the side of the bed. It was a brass lever of some kind, like Morrigan’s long handbrake. He was sure it hadn’t been there when he went to bed. He grasped the lever tightly and pulled, and without warning the mattress opened beneath him like a trapdoor and dumped him out into the night sky.
He fell through the cold air toward a domed cumulus cloud, his fluttering bedsheets wrapped around him and the beat of the airship’s engines fading rapidly into the night. He landed in the cloud before he had time to think. It was like falling into an invisible web of very stretchy elastic, if you can imagine such a thing. His fall had been broken, but he sank rapidly until only his head was free of the clammy whiteness. With a great effort he paddled and pulled himself upward until he was more or less sitting on top of the cloud, and looked around him. The Sunfish had receded to the size of a baked bean. Above him the sky was strewn with stars, and all around him a fleet of towering clouds sailed purposefully, much larger now than they had looked from the porthole of the airship. He looked down and found he had sunk back into the cloud up to his chest. He was still entangled in his bedsheets, and struggling back to the surface was difficult and surprisingly tiring. He was not sure he could keep this up for long. He reached in his pocket for Tangerine before realizing that he had left his overcoat in the cabin of the Sunfish. The cloud began to suck him in again. He had never felt so alone.
Something hit him on the shoulder, and disappeared before he could see what it was. He turned around quickly, but there was nobody there. Another small object bounced off his chest, and this time he caught it in his hand. It was a pinecone. It did not seem strange to him that pinecones should be flying about in the night sky. He was sure someone had thrown them at him once before. Who had it been? Not Lady Partridge. Not Baltinglass, or Tau-Tau, or the Bolsillo brothers. “Little!” he said aloud.
And there she was, sitting beside him, a look of exasperation on her face. “Finally!” she said. “You were supposed to look for me as soon as you got here.”
“I forgot,” said Miles. He had sunk almost up to his neck again.
“What are you doing down there?” said Little, who was sitting on top of the cloud without difficulty.
“I keep sinking,” said Miles. “I’m surprised a cloud can hold me up at all. They’re just made of . . .”
“They’re made of cloud,” said Little sharply.
“ . . . water vapor,” finished Miles.
Little opened her mouth to speak, but then she seemed to shoot upward and disappear all at once, and Miles was falling through clammy grayness. He felt dampness rushing up at him, then he was in clear air again and the cloud was above him and shrinking fast. Below him the inky ocean stretched to the horizon, tiny wrinkles marching across it. The wrinkles were getting bigger. He was falling fast, and now that he had left the cloud an icy wind shrieked in his ears. He listened for the whump of Silverpoint’s wings coming to save him, but he knew that the Storm Angel was otherwise occupied.
“Silverpoint’s not here,” said Little’s voice beside him. She was falling too, her silver-blond hair streaming upward. “And I can’t lift you. You need wings, Miles.”
“I can’t just grow wings!” shouted Miles.
“You can’t just sit on clouds either, but you managed that at first. Think yourself some wings, Miles, or you will die.”
A shot of fear ran through Miles. He had never heard Little speak like this before. He closed his eyes, fighting to control his panic, and tried to imagine wings sprouting from his shoulders. If you have ever found yourself plummeting through icy skies and trying to grow a pair of wings at the same time you will understand how impossible a task that was, even in a dream. He opened his eyes again. The water rushed up toward him, and when he thought of the shock of the cold and the prospect of drowning he stretched his two arms out in desperation. The bedsheets flapped crisply behind him, and his headlong dive turned into a sort of deep swoop. He was falling still, but not as quickly, and instinctively he angled his outstretched hands upward. He pulled into a horizontal glide in the nick of time, close enough to feel the spray that blew off the crests of the waves. A panicky laughter rattled around his chest.
“That’s better!” said Little, flying beside him. “Now you need to rise again.”
Miles flapped his arms, but it only made him lose height. “They’re not really wings,” he said nervously. “I’m just gliding.”
“Just make yourself lighter for now,” said Little. “We’ll work on the wings later.”
An updraft lifted Miles as she spoke, making him feel suddenly buoyant. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? He allowed the weight to drain from his body, just as it had done when he had inadvertently healed Dulac Zipplethorpe after the boy was kicked by a horse, or when he had cured the pain in Baltinglass of Araby’s leg. At the time he had been afraid he would be carried off by the breeze, but now that was exactly what he wanted. A gust of wind caught beneath his makeshift wings and he soared upward. Little kept pace, and suddenly Miles noticed her wings. They looked exactly the same as they used to, pearly white and fine-feathered, and breathtakingly beautiful. She was laughing now, and her voice seemed to twist the shrieking of the wind into a wild, headlong music. He could feel the thrill of flight race through his body like an electrical charge, and he laughed too. “Up!” called Little. “Higher, Miles!”
“Where are we going?” called Miles. His billowing bedsheets seemed clumsy by comparison with Little’s exquisite wings, and his arms had begun to ache all of a sudden. He felt the weight pour back into his body, and he began to lose altitude fast. A look of alarm came over Little’s face, and he thought he glimpsed more figures beyond her, indistinct shadows that were growing
closer as they flew alongside. She was no longer laughing.
“Close your eyes!” she said urgently.
“Why?” asked Miles, closing them anyway.
“You’re not falling anymore, are you?” came Little’s voice.
She was right. The wind seemed to solidify into something soft beneath him, and the plummeting sensation faded away. “Does this mean I’m flying?” said Miles excitedly.
“No,” said Little. “It means you’re in bed.”
Miles opened his eyes. The rhythm of his bedsheet wings had turned into the wup, wup, wup of great propellers, and he found himself lying in his bunk aboard the Sunfish, entangled in his bedclothes.
Little’s head hung over the edge of the bunk above, her skin glowing as faintly as a distant star, her wings no longer anywhere to be seen. “You okay?” she whispered.
“Why did we leave?” asked Miles, struggling to disentangle himself from the sheets. “I thought we were going to see the Council.”
Little smiled. “You’re not ready for that.”
“I learned to fly, sort of,” said Miles, who was feeling secretly proud of himself. “Is that not good?”
“You learned to stop falling,” said Little. “You’ll need a lot more than that to survive in the Realm. We haven’t even taken the training wings off yet, Miles.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CAPTAIN TRIPOLI
Baltinglass of Araby, hot-coffeed, fried-egged and streaky-baconed, sat among the ruins of his breakfast in the stateroom of the Sunfish, regaling the other passengers with tales of daring between the puffs of smoke that belched from his pipe. “There I was,” he said, “face to face with a black mamba, hiding in a hollow log while the privateers sharpened their cutlasses and argued over whether it would be more fun to flay me or roast me.”
The blind explorer had a rapt audience, but Miles was sure he had heard this story before. He seemed to know what Baltinglass was about to say a moment before he said it, which was strange, as the old man’s stories contained a liberal dose of fiction and were seldom told the same way twice. Miles had an uneasy feeling that there was something he had forgotten to do, and it made him restless. He suddenly remembered his mother’s diary, and the fact that he hadn’t had a chance to read any more of it since leaving Partridge Manor.