Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Tell Benayu,” came the faint reply.

  Waking again in broad daylight, she lay for a little while assembling her thoughts. She didn’t see how she could tell Benayu about her dreams without telling the others, which was what she wanted to do anyway. By the time she was up they were already halfway through breakfast.

  “You still look all in,” said Ribek. “We left you because we thought you needed the sleep.”

  “I’m all right,” she said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. Jex told me to wait till after we’d seen what the Ropemaker’s hair told us. He can’t help at the moment. He still isn’t strong enough.”

  She told them about her dreams, and what she thought they had meant. They waited for Benayu.

  “All right,” he said with a sigh. “I suppose it makes life easier. It’s a bit of a strain, always having to remember whenever you say anything there’s stuff you mustn’t let on about. According to Fodaro there are lots of universes, but as far as we’re concerned there are only two that matter, ours and Jex’s. They’re completely different because ours has four dimensions—length, breadth, height and time—and Jex’s has seven. They aren’t just our four with three we haven’t got, because however many you’ve got they have to add up to a whole. Our four already do that, so in Jex’s universe they have to be different, to make room for the other three. There’s something like our length, but it isn’t the same, and so on. They have two dimensions of time.

  “This is what Fodaro’s equations are all about. They are true in both universes.

  “It’s no use trying to imagine what a seven-dimensional universe is like, because you’ve got a four-dimensional mind, four-dimensional eyes and so on. You can’t make sense of it. And you can’t go there and find out. If you could somehow get into a seven-dimensional universe the stuff you are made of wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t just cease to exist. It would be destroyed, and all the seven-dimensional stuff it was in contact with would also be destroyed, and there’d be a colossal explosion in both universes. The explosion Fodaro set off was caused by a contact lighter than this….”

  He raised his two forefingers and lightly touched their tips together for a moment.

  “So the Ropemaker can’t be actually in Jex’s universe, and Maja’s dream is only a dream,” said Saranja.

  “Yes, he can. He can do it by magic. Magic is a sort of leakage between the universes. It isn’t actual material stuff. Fodaro used to say it’s a bit like light. Light isn’t stuff, but it’s there. It does things to stuff. Plants feed on it. If you try to grow plants in the dark they’ll grow for a bit but they won’t make green leaves and however well you treat them in other ways, they’ll die.

  “Magic is leakage from the other universe that doesn’t make sense in ours, but it isn’t destroyed because it isn’t material stuff. So if you know how you can use it to change the stuff of our universe in ways that don’t make sense….”

  He picked up a pebble, gazed at it for a moment and then put it back on the ground, where it turned itself into a beetle, raised its wing sheaths and buzzed angrily away, as if far from pleased at being roused from its peaceful sleep as a pebble.

  “Like that,” he said. “Where was I? Yes, well, there are places where the two universes, ours and Jex’s, almost touch. Mostly it’s only one or two in each world. Or none. But there are quite a few in our world, and they’re almost all in the Empire. Fodaro said that there were mathematical reasons for this—something to do with a thing called a nexus in Jex’s universe—but it’s why there’s a lot of magic in the Empire and almost none anywhere else. He called these places touching points. He found one in the pasture.

  “Anyway I think there are two possible ways of getting into Jex’s universe, but one of them you’d need Fodaro’s equations for, so the Ropemaker must have used the other one. You’d have to be a pretty good magician to do it, but he was.”

  “Is, if Maja’s dream’s right,” said Saranja.

  “Yes, is. Your anima, your inmost self, is a bit like light. It isn’t stuff, but it’s there. It can’t do anything, though—can’t act in the material world, like Jex told Maja—except inside a living creature. So what the Ropemaker would have to do is find a safe form and a safe place in which he could leave his material self—it’d have to be somewhere near a touching point—and put his anima into something like a bird, and then fly to the touching point and project his anima into a living creature on the other side, and then use that as his body to do what he wanted there. He wouldn’t be able to take anything material with him, mind you, the time ring for instance, though it’d be a hideous risk to leave that behind.”

  “He’s a bit of a risk taker, by all accounts,” said Ribek.

  “It’s always a risk, whenever you try anything new. But maybe. So if Maja’s dream is right, what we’re going to have to do is find where he’s left his material self—that’ll be where the hair was trying to reach to—and then take it to the Ropemaker’s anima in the other universe….”

  “You said you couldn’t take stuff—bits of this universe,” said Saranja.

  “I’ve got to take you, haven’t I? This is all going to be really big magic, at least as big as anything we’ve done so far. Bigger than getting Jex back. It’ll take all I’ve got. There’s no way I can do it and screen it at the same time, so the Watchers are going to be on to us in an instant. I’m not going to leave you three and Sponge and my material self behind for the Watchers to mess around with while I’m gone.

  “I tell you, I ought to be able to do it. It’s in the equations. But I’m scared. I’ve been scared ever since the Watcher came to the way station. Saranja had to hit me to make me deal with the dragon back at Tarshu. Sometimes I wish Fodaro had never found the touching point, never worked out his equations. Sometimes I wish I’d never been born the way I was.”

  “We don’t,” said Saranja. “We like you the way you are.”

  “Nothing wrong with being scared,” said Ribek. “When things are scary I’d much rather trust myself to someone who knew they were than someone who didn’t.”

  Maja didn’t say anything. She was scared too.

  Maja was strongly on Saranja’s side about not traveling by the Imperial Highways. For all its life and interest she had soon wearied of the great one they had used on their way south, and even after so short a time on this smaller one she was strangely glad to get away from it. Since, for Benayu, changing his shape to a bird’s was little more than hedge magic, which the Watchers weren’t likely to notice, he was able to scout out tracks and byways again, and as they wound their way peacefully north along them, she discovered why she liked them so much better.

  Tarshu had changed her. The effect was partly hidden at first as they passed through bare, sheep-cropped downland, completely emptied of people, all evacuated by the Watchers during the siege of the city. Then, as they moved further from the battle, the landscape changed, with the hills less steep and the valleys wide. There were farmhands working in the interlocking stone-walled fields, driving cattle out from milking to the lush pastures, or hoeing amid healthy half-grown crops.

  She was wearing Jex with the cord looped round her neck and the pendant tucked into the pocket of her blouse, and enjoying whatever he let pass of the gentle, almost unnoticeable, magical essences in everything around her—an effect like birdsong in woodland, she thought; after a while you don’t notice it, unless a pigeon coos right overhead, but it’s there, all the time. They were walking along a deep-cut lane, steep banks with walls atop, and approaching a bend. Beyond it, still out of sight, were three people, two men and a boy. She could sense and distinguish their separate essences, even their mood. The men were laughing and the boy wasn’t happy.

  She rounded the bend with the others and there they were, in a gateway a little distance further on. The boy, about nine years old, must have fallen in a cowpat or something, because one of the men was crouching beside him trying to clean him up with handfuls of g
rass from the roadside. Both men obviously thought it a good joke. The boy did not.

  Ribek, typically, stopped to chat, offering them his water flask to help with the clean-up. He caught up at a trot a couple of bends further on.

  “Nothing new,” he said, panting slightly. “They keep pretty well up to date. The Highway’s only a couple of valleys away over there. They hadn’t heard about the Watchers taking men away and enspelling them to fight the Sheep-faces. Perhaps it’s only a rumor that fellow we met had picked up. You probably get a lot of that sort of thing in wartime. You should have heard some of the stories that came up to the mill when the horsemen first attacked.”

  “If it’s only a rumor we’d be better off on the Highway,” said Benayu. “We’d get on twice as fast. Three times. Saranja?”

  “Maja, would you be able to tell from here if a Watcher came to the Highway?” said Saranja.

  The moment she concentrated, the Highway was there, laid out in her mind as if she’d been standing on a hillside looking down on it. Over to the left a way station, almost empty at this time of day. There was some kind of minor hedge magic being practiced there. On either side of that a ribbon of slowly drifting pulses, travelers on the Highway unconsciously beaming out their individual signals, the natural magic that they had brought into the world with them when they were born and that would leave them only when they died. That was what she had picked up a little while ago when they had been approaching the bend and, before she saw them, she’d known about the three people they’d meet as soon as they were round it. She couldn’t have done that before Tarshu.

  Yes, Tarshu had changed her.

  “I’d know,” she said confidently.

  “Let’s go on as we are, then, for the moment,” said Saranja, “and Maja can tell us if anything like that starts happening. We haven’t been doing too badly. These valleys all seem to run roughly north-south, so the lanes do too, mostly. If we get to a point where Benayu can’t find a good way ahead for us we can go back on the Highway for a bit.”

  All the rest of that day Maja walked or rode in silence, thinking. Her companions seemed to recognize her need and let her be. No, it hadn’t been only Tarshu that had changed her. Perhaps the overwhelming blast of the moment when the speaking of the Ropemaker’s name had summoned Jex back across the universes had begun the change, but the real work had been done three days further north, by the old sheep-fold, when she had laid one strand of his hair out on the rock beside her and let the whisper of his name blast her into a kind of elsewhere. The journey had finished somewhere in the Empire—she was sure of that—but it hadn’t gone through the Empire to reach it. It had gone through some other kind of space. Unimaginable. For a moment she stood on the hillside of her dream staring through the magical doorway at—at but not into—the unimaginable universe beyond.

  Whatever else had happened, that was the moment that had finally changed her. She had come into her own, an inheritance that had been waiting, perhaps through many generations, for her to discover and use.

  A troublesome gift. In a way she had known that all along, ever since, hiding under the barn at Woodbourne, she had first been overwhelmed by the shock-wave of magic when Saranja had given Rocky his wings. Even before they had reached Tarshu, without her amulet to protect her she would have been lost. The same now, if they ran into any more serious magic, without Jex.

  Without Jex? She looked around.

  For some time they had been climbing in single file up a narrow path, little more than a sheep track, that slanted up the side of a hill with the valley beneath them on their right, seeming to stretch further and further into the distance as they climbed. Maja was riding Levanter, with Ribek striding just ahead of her. If they continued on this line they would reach the crest and look down on the Imperial Highway. There was a small town there, not unlike Mord. If she concentrated her whole attention on it she could feel the buzz of its comings and goings, with bits and pieces of hedge magic, and a sort of numb spot, perhaps where something more serious was being warded. She could even feel the endless small fidgetings of the magical trinkets in its market. Deliberately she unlooped the stone pendant from her neck and put it in her pouch.

  She reeled. Automatically she flung up her right arm to shield her face. All the world’s magic seemed to be battering against her. She was crammed into a tiny cell with Ribek and Saranja, Benayu and Sponge and the horses, all bellowing their separate magics into her ears. She was stripped naked on the hillside with the hailstorm of minor magics of grass and shrub, gravel and boulder and soil, ant and grasshopper and fly, lizard and snail, streaming against her too-tender skin, while her whole body vibrated to the deep, slow pulse of the centuries-enduring hills.

  Her hand was already reaching into her pouch. Not yet, she thought. I must learn about this. It is part of my gift. I can use it.

  Slowly she mastered herself, forced herself to ignore the immediate intense assault. To reach out into it, through it and see what she could find. It was like a winter morning once at Woodbourne when she had woken early to look for a hen. It had been missing the night before though she had searched and searched until it was time for her to come in and set the table for supper. It would have meant a word as bitter as a blow from her aunt if she’d been late for that. The hen would have been no excuse—less than no excuse, as it would have been her carelessness to lose it—so she hadn’t dared tell anyone.

  But it had come to her in the night where the bird might be. So, in the faintest of faint hopes, she had risen and dressed and slipped down the stair in the dark and lit a lantern and opened the door, into a blizzard.

  She had heard the wind in the dark and expected storm weather. But not this. These sudden buffeting gusts from every which-where, almost solid in their strength and from the thick, swirling white flakes they bore, hurling into the tiny globe of light from the fluttering lantern flame and on into the dark. Again and again she had to force her eyelids up as they tried to close themselves against the slashing icy particles that whipped into her face, so that she could peer one pace ahead. Almost she had turned back, but she had battled on, mastering her fear, mastering her weakness, mastering the storm, finding the stupid hen cowering in its nook, carrying it back, and releasing it clucking into the coop. She had told no one. So now.

  Except that there was no hen to look for, no purpose in her struggle against that blizzard of magic except to learn how to survive it. First simply that, and then to have something to spare from the struggle, so that she could actually use this dangerous, terrifying aspect of her gift. She hunched into herself, trying to choose what and what not to feel, to ignore the bellowing voices in the cramped cell, the myriad hurtling fragments in the naked hillside, the deep engrossing vibrations of the underlying hills, to feel through them, and beyond them…

  “Maja? What’s up? Are you all right?”

  Somewhere outside the struggle her hand made an impatient gesture. But her concentration held. There! Far, far away, and faint at this distance, but still vibrant with the immense energies of its beginning. She had felt that particular queasy resonance three times before—waiting to ford a mountain river, then on the road south of Mord, then at a way station. A Watcher—no, more than one this time—Watchers going about their sinister business. She unfocused slightly and sensed what lay around that center, the unmistakable tremor of human life, but chilled almost into stillness, a press of people, several hundred of them perhaps, all locked into the terror of the moment.

  Enough.

  She reached into her pouch and closed her hand round the pendant. Instantly the shield renewed itself. Ribek had to hold her from falling from the saddle.

  “Are you all right, Maja?” he said again.

  “In a minute,” she muttered.

  She hunched down, breathing slowly and heavily and clutching the pommel of the saddle to steady herself while her spirit found its way back into her body and limbs where it belonged. After a while she shuddered, straightened a
nd opened her eyes.

  They had halted on the hillside, Saranja and Benayu, also on horseback, looking back at her over their shoulders, Ribek standing beside her with his hand on her thigh.

  “Are you all right?” he said again.

  “Yes…yes…I…”

  She was too tired to explain. The world began to go dark. She felt herself swaying.

  For several hours Maja slept, only half-waking once or twice to wonder where she was and why she was sitting sideways in the saddle being comfortably held in place by someone’s arm—Ribek’s—round her waist, with her head on his chest. She snuggled herself against him and drifted back into darkness.

  They must have stopped for the night, but she was only vaguely aware of it, of having a cup held to her lips so that she could drink a little water before sliding down again into the abyss of sleep. Her bladder roused her sometime in the moonlit night, and she rose and relieved it and slept again and woke at last, ravenously hungry, to a dew-scented morning and the crackle of a small fire, and mutton chops grilling on its embers. Just as she could smell and hear these things before she opened her eyes, so she could feel the presence of her companions, Benayu’s inner turmoil veiled behind the vague buzz of his sleeping power, Saranja’s banked furies, Ribek’s lovely ordinariness…

  While they ate she tried to explain to the others more of what had happened to her.

  “I asked Jex to stop shielding me. I wanted to see how far I could reach. I could feel everything. It was like…like…”

  She struggled to find the words, to help them feel something of the worldwide blizzard of magic that had swept round and through her.

  “Anyway,” she finished, “I think there’s one of the big Imperial Highways way over there, a long way off, and some Watchers, two or three, I think, were doing something to a lot of frightened people at a way station.”

  “Enspelling them to fight?” said Ribek.