Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Fodaro worked out how to do it and I set it up. It was an extremely delicate balance. Two…”

  He stopped and stared at his hands. In an unconscious gesture he’d raised them in front of his chest and was holding them, stretched flat and almost touching, palm to palm. Deliberately he folded them together and laid them in his lap.

  “No, that’s telling you too much,” he said in the same listless, weary voice. “Anyway, if whoever did it got it dead right, there’d be an explosion, and in the instant before it happened he’d get out. A scrap too little, and it wouldn’t happen at all. A scrap too much, and…well, you felt what happened. But if he got it right, the Watchers, or whoever had come for us, wouldn’t be ready for it. It wouldn’t be any sort of magic they’d ever run up against, and that would be two fewer Watchers in the world, and our traces completely covered.

  “I think I could have done it. I was pretty sure he couldn’t. That’s what we were arguing about. Oh, blood, I wish I hadn’t had to leave him like that. He didn’t try to pretend what he was going to do was a certainty, but he said if I stayed to help him they’d get us both, and that would be his whole life wasted, but if I got away in time it wouldn’t. He said that now you’d come it didn’t really matter what happened to him, but I had to get away because this was what I’d been born for. This was the moment they should all have waited for.”

  “Who’s they?” said Ribek.

  “The Andarit. The Free Great Magicians. When the Watchers decided to take complete control they began by picking off the other fifth-level magicians one by one, sucking them in or just destroying them, until the ones who were left realized what was happening and decided to band together and try to fight them. They called themselves the Andarit.

  “My parents were two of them. I never knew them. They didn’t love each other or anything—magicians don’t do that—but they wanted a child to carry on the fight if the Watchers got them. If I was any good, of course. They couldn’t even use magic to make sure. It had to be a clean break, so the Watchers couldn’t trace me. They just had to take the chance.”

  “That makes two of us,” muttered Saranja.

  Benayu frowned at her, not understanding.

  “Not born to be loved,” explained Ribek. “Her mother wanted a daughter who could hear what the cedars were saying.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame them for not loving me. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to. They couldn’t have. We all have our own…anima, the books call it. It means soul, spiritual essence, inner self, something like that. It’s the place where we keep our really important feelings, all the stuff that really matters to us. Even hedge magic is bad for it, if you do it all the time, and a lot of serious, powerful magic eats it away until you stop being human.

  “There are just a very few, like the ones in your story—Asarta and Faheel and the Ropemaker—whose anima is strong enough to stand it. But almost all serious magicians have to find a safe place to keep their anima, utterly separate from themselves and out of their reach, until the time comes for them to put their magic aside and become human again.

  “That’s why my father and my mother couldn’t love me. Magicians can have feelings—spite, anger, envy, pity even—but they’re different, cold, so that the magician can control the feeling and use its power. But there’s no such thing as cold love. It doesn’t make sense.

  “My parents weren’t bad people. They knew what was right, and tried to do it, and died for it in the end. But all in a cold way. They died because they knew what the Watchers would do to them if they were caught alive. They booby-trapped every step of the way as they went, in case anyone tried to follow them and bring them back. Yes, they were very powerful magicians, but all the magic in the world couldn’t make them love me.

  “Fodaro didn’t want me to be like that. At first he told them he wouldn’t help them unless they could think of a way round it. They said it couldn’t be done, it was a sort-of all-or-nothing thing. How can your anima be a living part of you, right at your center, and at the same time utterly separate? But there are things in mathematics a bit like that—impossible numbers that actually work—so Fodaro decided he’d look after me until I was old enough to choose for myself. And then he found a place in the sheep pasture, and there the answer was, waiting for him in the equations.

  “There’s a lot more to the equations than that, and the one great thing we’ve got going for us is that the Watchers don’t know any of it, and it’s going to be too late for them when they find out. Yes, by all the Powers and Levels, they’ll find out!”

  “What a load to carry at your age!” said Saranja. “It makes my kicking and screaming about having to take on Woodbourne and the stupid unicorns look pretty petty. Was Fodaro really your uncle? Why wasn’t he in with the others?”

  “He wasn’t good enough. He was my father’s brother, but he was just an ordinary third-level magician because he couldn’t make the shift. Partly couldn’t, partly didn’t want to.”

  “These levels,” said Ribek, “they’re real? I mean, we do a thing called kick-fighting in the Valley and we have grades for that, but that depends on how many bouts you’ve won and who you’ve beaten and so on.”

  “They’re only sort-of real. That’s one of the big things Fodaro found out. It’s in his equations. But even he couldn’t actually imagine what the real thing is like, the way you can imagine, well, levels, for instance—something like stories in a building you can go up and down stairs between. He said his mind wasn’t the right shape. Nobody’s is.

  “So magicians have always talked about levels, because that’s what it feels like. You know at once when you make a shift, because you have to change yourself to do it. It’s like learning to breathe a different kind of air. Third to fourth is the hardest. That’s like learning to breathe water, Fodaro said. He never could do it, though he knew what made it so difficult. I haven’t tried—too much of a risk, I don’t know enough—but I don’t think it will be a problem for me.

  “That whole old theory of magic is one of those almost-fit things. It’s worked well enough for centuries and everyone thought it was right. But then Fodaro found the place in the pasture, and looked at some very distant stars in the pool I built him, and found things that didn’t fit. So he went back to the beginning and started again.

  “That’s all I’m going to tell you about that. I want to talk about Fodaro himself.

  “Mostly I don’t even think about my parents. Fodaro was the only person I’ve ever had to love. Him and Sponge”—he nodded toward the dog, half drowsing as he guarded the sheep—“and Jex, I suppose, but you can’t really love him—he’s too different.

  “No, Fodaro was the only one, really. He was my father and my mother and everyone else. My parents gave me to him almost as soon as I was born—as soon as they were sure I had the gifts in me. They chose him because the Watchers were only interested in fourth-and fifth-level magicians those days, and he took me away and they never saw me again. They wanted as clean a break as they could make.

  “He wanted that too, but not for the same reason. Or at least not mainly. He was as keen as they were to stop the Watchers controlling everything, and as far as he could he wanted to help me do it. But until then he wanted me to grow up with someone who really loved me, someone I could love back. And that’s what he gave me.

  “He hired a wet-nurse to feed me when I was tiny, but he did everything else, fed me and dressed me, played with me and carried me around in a pouch on his chest and sang me to sleep and nursed me when I was ill. He never used magic to make me better, only sometimes to find out what medicines to give me, but he never let magic touch me until I began to do it for myself.

  “Before I could walk or talk I started making things come to me if they looked interesting. One day, when I’d just learned to crawl, he left me with a neighbor while he went to market. Her bitch had a new litter. He came back to find that my cot was empty, and the neighbor was having hysterics, and there was an extra
puppy sucking at the bitch’s teats.

  “All that low-level stuff—stuff on the surface of things—it’s never been any problem for me. Some ways it’s been too easy. If you find everything easy—if you never have to puzzle anything out—then you never have to think how anything connects, because it doesn’t, up in the easy levels. That happens way down, at deeper and deeper levels, as the connections on the level above connect with each other. If you wanted to change the whole world you’d have to go right down to the single root of everything, below the fifth and below the sixth to where the Tree of the World grows all alone, that carries the stars on the tips of its branches, and the clouds, and the singing birds, and the tears of humankind.

  “It isn’t really like that, of course, it’s just how it feels, like the layers of rock in the cliff or breathing a different kind of air. The last bit, about the World Tree, comes from a poem Fodaro gave me to learn….”

  He paused and looked up, tense and watchful.

  “There’s someone at the cottage,” he said. “He’s trying to open the locks. So he’s not a Watcher—they’d have no problem. There—he’s done it, he thinks. So he’s a magician—third-level at a guess. There’s no one that good round here…. Wait. Ah, now get out of that, you bastard….”

  “You don’t think he just happened along?” said Ribek.

  “Didn’t feel like it. He’d come in a hurry. I think the Watchers didn’t want to lose two more of themselves, so they sent somebody they could spare. We should be all right for tonight—I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll take the sheep down to the farmer first thing, and then we’d better be on our way.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?” said Maja.

  “Away from here, for a start,” said Benayu. “As far and as fast as possible without using magic. That means south. After that we’re going to start looking for this Ropemaker of yours, though I’ve no idea how or where. Jex might know, but he can’t tell us.”

  “He’ll be somewhere in the Empire, won’t he?” said Saranja. “That must mean south too.”

  “Are we going to have enough money?” said Ribek. “We haven’t got any. We don’t use Empire money in the Valley, and in the story there were endless bribes to pay wherever you went. Or have things changed?”

  “No, of course not. It’s always been like that. Fodaro says…used to say…the Watchers are all for it, because it means people’s lives are one long struggle against corrupt officials and they don’t have time to worry about what the Watchers are up to. I’ve brought what we had in the cottage—I hope that’ll get us to one of the safe places Fodaro told me about, and there’ll be people there who’ll give us money. If not I’ll have to use magic. It’s too dangerous to make or fetch money, because any good magician can smell that at once, and it’s a nasty death if you’re found with any you got that way, but I should be able to fetch one or two things we can sell.”

  “I may have something,” said Saranja, beginning to fish in under the coarse, high-necked blouse a farmer’s wife had given her on her way to Woodbourne. “My warlord was in council when his brother attacked. He liked to have me there, sitting on a stool by his knee, wearing a lot of his jewelery and precious little else, because I was the mother of his sons. It was a way of showing how rich and powerful he was. This was one of his prize possessions. It’s a sort of all-purpose amulet. It’s famous. It’s even got a name, Zald-im-Zald. It didn’t really belong to him, or anyone else. He’d looted it from another warlord who’d looted it from somewhere else, and so on.

  “Anyway, there I was sitting on that stupid stool and smiling away till my face ached, when all of a sudden the castle was full of his brother’s soldiers. There hadn’t been any warning. Somebody must have betrayed him and opened the gates. Everyone was rushing around screaming. Five years I’d been longing for something like this to happen and worked out exactly what I was going to do if it did. I ran down to one of the laundry rooms and put some clothes on over what I was wearing and ran on to the kitchens. Nobody bothered me—they were all eating and drinking themselves stupid—but I grabbed a sack of scraps and I was out through an unused sewer-pipe I’d found and well into the desert before I remembered I was still wearing Zald-im-Zald. We’ll have to take it apart and sell it stone by stone, of course. We’d never find anyone who could pay for the whole thing. It isn’t as if I’d stolen it, at least no more than my warlord had, and I reckoned he owed me. Three times over he owed me, three times over. Once for myself and once for each of my sons. I was never even allowed to nurse them, you know. They were brought up by eunuchs in another part of the palace. They weren’t even told I was their mother. Oh, it’s mine all right.”

  While she was speaking she’d carefully eased out from under her blouse and laid across it a prodigious ornament, far more than a necklace or pendant, a kind of chestpiece the size of a child’s face. At its center was an oval of brown-gold amber, clear as a drop of liquid but filled with inward fire from the refracted and reflected sunset. This was circled by faceted red gems, each the size of a man’s thumbnail, and out from these fanned sprays of smaller jewels, dark gold and then paler and then almost colorless, all set into a lacework of gold, stiff enough to hold its shape but flexing to follow the contours of the flesh beneath.

  “Perhaps you’d better have a look at it, Benayu,” she said. “It’s supposed to be full of powers, but everyone’s forgotten what they are.”

  He leaned forward, held his hand for a moment above the ornament, and carefully withdrew it and sat staring at it, breathing deeply. To Maja he seemed suddenly more involved, more alive, than at any time since he’d sworn his oath in the woods above the sheep pastures.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s pretty near dormant at the moment, apart from one little stone. Just as well—if it was all activated it would send out a signal strong as a beacon. And there’s a curse on anyone who tries to question it or take it apart. I think I can deal with that, but you’d better not be wearing it while I’m at it.”

  Saranja slipped the gold chain over her head and handed the ornament to him, but as she let go of the chain the strange vague magical feeling that Maja had all along sensed coming from her suddenly ceased. In the same instant she collapsed forward, almost into the embers of the fire. Maja jumped to her feet and helped Benayu haul her clear and turn her over. She seemed to be fast asleep, her face calm, her breathing slow and heavy. Benayu felt her pulse and nodded.

  “Nothing we can do,” he said, and returned to the jewel. “It’ll be that active stone. This one. It makes the wearer tireless. Only you pay for it after. It must have been made to switch itself on when the wearer starts to get exhausted. How long ago was that?”

  “Five days in the desert, she told us,” said Ribek, reaching for her wrist from where he lay. “And at least four since. She may have taken it off at night. I didn’t see.”

  “And she’s still breathing? It ought to have killed her. How’s her pulse?”

  “Not bad. Very slow, but fairly strong.”

  “All right. Just leave her there for the moment while I close it down,” said Benayu.

  He knelt beside Saranja’s body and laid the jewel across her chest. Maja sensed a blip of power suddenly woken, and Saranja began to stir. Supporting her left hand with his right, with his other hand Benayu moved the tip of its middle finger in gentle circles over one of the jewels, three times one way and then three times the other. Maja could feel a second blip as the power subsided and Saranja returned to sleep.

  “That’s the best we can do,” he said, rising. “Nothing’s going to wake her till she’s ready, and that won’t be for a day or two yet, at a guess.”

  He took Saranja’s shoulders and Maja her feet and between them they dragged her into the nearest hut, laid her on sheepskins on one of the rough bunks and covered her with a blanket. When they came out Benayu picked up the jewel, walked a couple of paces down the slope and laid it at his feet. Maja watched him stretch out and turn slowly, taut with c
oncentration, pointing in succession at three boulders spread across the slope, then at the forest edge around and behind the huts, and back to the first hut. A barely visible flicker of light followed his movement and she could feel the rich, humming vibrations of magic as it leaped from mark to mark. Satisfied, he settled down and crouched over Zald-im-Zald, but then glanced up at her.

  “That’s enough of a screen, I hope,” he said. “Anyway, it’s as much as I can manage. They’re bound to be looking this way. There’s too much hedge magic going on for them to have noticed what I was doing to Zald just now, but dealing with the whole thing’s going to be bigger stuff. Why don’t you go out beyond the screen, Maja, and give me a shout if any of it gets through? Sponge can go with you in case of trouble. Just call him. That’s all right, boy. Go and keep an eye on her.”

  Maja couldn’t feel the screen at all until she reached it. Then there was a slight extra tingle as she passed through it. She could feel it stretching from point to point like dew-beaded spiderwebs slung between bushes on an autumn morning. Beyond it nothing.

  Without Sponge beside her it would have been scary out there on the edge of the strange, deep-shadowed woods. She tangled her fingers into his fur and waved to Benayu that she was ready. He crouched over the jewel again. Ribek had raised himself onto his elbow to watch him.

  For some while he didn’t seem to be doing anything except staring at the jewel. At one point his body tensed, but then he relaxed and continued his inspection. After about five minutes he raised his right hand, extended his forefinger, and with the fingertip held slightly above them started to trace the pattern of jewels, working from the outer edges inward. In the gathering dusk each stone glimmered or twinkled with its natural light as the finger passed above it, and even at this distance she could see the glow of it flicker off Ribek’s face, as though a fiery spark were running from jewel to jewel. Faintly she could feel the web of Benayu’s screen flex and quiver as it responded to the passing shocks of magic. At last he rose and waved to her to return. When she reached him, he was trembling slightly, and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip.