Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  He burbled on. Ribek answered just enough to keep him going, but his mind was no longer on it, and he’d almost stopped using his Striclan voice. Maja could understand why. Most of his attention was absorbed by what the waters were saying, or rather singing. She could almost hear it herself, an endless, slow, wavering chant, repeating and repeating itself but never quite the same each time. Utterly, utterly peaceful.

  Of course, she thought. The same pattern as everything else that had happened. The Ropemaker would have hidden his material self in a place which only someone from the Valley could find. Only someone from Northbeck. Only Ribek.

  They came to a slightly wider stretch of water, almost a pool, where two streams joined and flowed out as one. The floor of the pool was gray with layers of oysters. The tide was almost full, barely moving, but there must have been some faint current because she could see a white down feather moving very gently along, close by the near bank, away from the sea, and realized, from her sense of the secret sound that only Ribek was hearing, that the whole body of water was quietly rotating round some central point, an unending ritual dance, the slowest of slow measures to the soundless chanting.

  “Marvelous,” said Ribek in his own voice, his awe wholly genuine. “I was born by a millstream, high in the mountains. I have always had a kind of feeling for water. Never anything like this.”

  “How strange,” said the Magister dreamily. “You have never tasted oysters and I have never seen mountains. Ever since I was a boy I have longed to see mountains.”

  They stood together in silence, lost in their separate trances.

  “Wake up, Maja!”

  She shuddered herself into the here and now, tugged urgently at Ribek’s sleeve and felt him do the same.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “Ready?”

  She nodded. He took her by the elbow, led her to the edge of the bank and crouched beside her, pointing, as if he were showing her something in the water. She slipped the stone pendant out of her pouch and laid it on the ground.

  “Just show me the way,” he muttered. “I’ll find it. Hold your breath when I say…I’m going to push you in. Don’t try to swim. Now!”

  She filled her lungs and stopped breathing. Two thundering heartbeats and the world went black. The hair blazed through that dark. She was jerked forward, was falling, distantly heard Ribek’s shout of alarm, heard the Magister’s yell, met the shock of cold, automatically clung on to her breath, but barely noticed any of these things as the blazing strand streaked onward, filling her consciousness, all there was. Her hand must have been already pointing when Ribek gripped her wrist and dragged her on down, but she didn’t feel him doing so. All she knew, all that held her together, was that single intense line of fire seeking its home.

  And then, in another colossal explosion of power, it was gone, and she was bursting apart, rags and splinters of what had once been Maja, whirling away into the never-ending blackness.

  And then…But there was no then. Not any more. Never.

  Then there was now. Now was extremely strange. She had no sense of herself, Maja, existing in that nowness. There was sight, there was hearing, but nothing to tell her who or what was doing that seeing, that hearing. And even they were strange. The hearing was the sound of a heavy, windy thud or boom, repeated and repeated, strangely familiar, though only a few times heard by the Maja that once existed. The sight was of a dim, grayish something—more than just a gray light because there was texture in it, mottlings and grains, moving erratically around, uninterpretable.

  For a moment the grayness moved away and she saw a dark, reddy-brown surface, slightly curved, moving upward, only to vanish as the grayness returned. It had something to do with the thud…Yes!—Rocky, flying toward the mountains—wing-thunder. But wrong color—not Rocky, Levanter.

  The grayness vanished and for a moment she saw his vast neck stretching away from her, and then that swung aside and she saw sky, and then, for another moment, Saranja, hair streaming behind her, riding Rocky, golden-winged, glorious, and behind and beyond them white-winged Pogo with Benayu in the saddle craning backward and upward, and Sponge at their heels streaking along in the winged equivalent of his normal easy lope.

  They too swung out of sight and everything was blanked out by something too huge and close to recognize which pressed itself briefly over her eyes as she heard a faint familiar noise such as two moist surfaces make when being gently pulled apart. (What was it? What was it? It was important.)

  Everything wheeled around and briefly she could see the sky, hazy blue but with one strange black cloud, streaming toward them far faster than any wind could have carried it. She seemed to be seeing sky and cloud, everything in her restricted field of vision, through some kind of transparent mesh, but all that was blanked out as the cloud became blinding to her unclosable eyes and the thunder drowned her hearing.

  Lightning! she thought. The Watchers came! This is the end.

  It wasn’t the end. Sight returned, hearing more slowly, only to be lost again in thunder-bellows. Lightning poured around them, but eyesight remained since she wasn’t looking directly at it. She couldn’t see Benayu, but she guessed he was somehow warding it off. And Levanter flew steadily on, apparently not even noticing it. Amazing, considering how Rocky, prince among horses, had shied and bolted at the appearance of the airboat. Benayu must have thought of that too, and done something to the horses.

  Lightning and thunder weakened and ceased. She had time to think, time to look properly at what she could see—frustratingly little since she couldn’t turn her head or even move her eyes in their sockets. At the lower edge of her field of vision she could discern a greenish gray expanse stretching away into the distance. They must be out over the sea.

  Rocky and Saranja were moving out of her line of sight as Ribek edged Levanter closer to Benayu. His shout came faintly through the thunder-deafness.

  “…only a lull. Like at Tarshu. Then more lightning, to distract you while they get the next thing ready. A dragon, Jex said. Simulacra, but if you can sort out which is which it’ll be one-to-one. Maybe it’ll sail straight in. But they must get it by now what they’re up against. My bet is it’ll feint and wait for you to respond so it can catch you off balance with a sucker kick.”

  She couldn’t see or hear Benayu’s answer, but he must have gestured understanding or something because Ribek raised his hand and took Levanter back to Rocky’s other flank. They waited. It was strange not having a heart to pound, breath to come quicker, palms to break into sweat, at a moment like this.

  Her mind wandered. She was still seeing everything as if through a transparent mesh. And why was her hearing so strangely woolly? It had been like that before the thunder, when all she’d been able to see was a moving grayness.

  Oh, of course! That had been Ribek trying to clean and dry her with a bit of cloth after her immersion in the oyster pool. And then he’d lifted her up and round to loop her over his head and now she was dangling on his chest, but on the way…on the way…

  That funny sucking noise had been his lips kissing her.

  And she hadn’t even felt it.

  It wasn’t fair!

  More lightning streaming harmless round them as Benayu swept it away. In the middle of it a yell from Ribek, words lost in the rolling thunder but voice full of urgency and danger.

  “Ribek! Can you hear me? Ribek!”

  If he answered she couldn’t hear. No. He’d never have kissed her if he’d remembered she could see and hear. She’d never reminded him! She hadn’t had a chance. Desperately she tried again.

  “What’s happening? I can’t see. I can’t move my eyes. Turn me round.”

  The world wheeled and steadied, and she was looking back and to their flank. Saranja and Rocky were at the right-hand edge of her vision; Benayu had fallen back a little and had twisted round in his saddle to face the danger; Sponge was darting to and fro behind Pogo’s heels, snarling defiance.

  Beyond and above them, dw
arfing them, loomed the dragon, twice the size, at least, of the monster that had patrolled the valley above Tarshu, gnarled and scaly, dark-hued, mottled brown and green like lichened rock. Maja could see it clearly only in glimpses as the rhythm of Levanter’s flight brought her center of vision to bear on it. A huge round eye with a black vertical slit for a pupil, the rest of the eye glowing smoky-pale like a harvest moon, as if lit from within; the vicious spike that ended a rib of one of the vast leathery wings; a taloned foreleg tucked cozily for flight against a chest like the hull of a warship; a double puff of black smoke from the hummocked nostrils at the end of the long snout. The dragon hovered a long moment, half folded its wings and plunged.

  Benayu was ready. He flung out both hands and a bolt of darkness, sudden and swift as the lightning, streamed from his fingertips. It wrapped itself round the dragon in a swirling cloud of absolute black that carried the beast backward and at the same time seemed to shrink and solidify as if it were about to squeeze it out of existence.

  Another intense shaft of lightning, dazzling even in daylight, but aimed this time not at Benayu and his companions but at that sphere of midnight. With a bellow and a blast of flame it burst apart, and out of the dazzle emerged five separate but identical dragons, wings half folded, plunging down. No knowing which was the real one.

  Benayu shouted and flung out an arm, and Sponge was climbing to meet the attack, double, four, eight times his real size, great black wings pumping him upward. All five dragons bellowed flame, but only one, fourth in the line, directly at him. The other four, constrained to do exactly what the master dragon did, blasted the unreal flame in lines parallel to the reality. By its own fire it had betrayed itself.

  Immediately Sponge turned toward the single blast that engulfed him and now flew directly into it, relentless and untroubled as it streamed round him. The dragon had no other weapon. Sponge was almost muzzle to muzzle with the monster when he dived, rose, gripped the immense scaly gullet in his fangs and started to wrench and worry at it like one of the Woodbourne terriers worrying a rat. Black wings and gold buffeted the air as he wrestled for purchase and the dragon writhed and scrabbled at him with its puny forelegs. On either side of it four dragon simulacra towered, writhing and scrabbling at invisible Sponges. Above the individual struggles, seen and unseen, the agonized heads bellowed unavailing flame, and below it dangled the pale, vulnerable underbellies and the endless writhing tails.

  Now something invisible, something Benayu must have prepared in those long days of meditation, struck home. Black blood spurted from all five underbellies. He shouted a command and Sponge released his hold and drew clear as the four simulacra blanked out of being and the master dragon plummeted out of Maja’s vision toward the ocean.

  Ribek whooped in triumph. Benayu held up a hand in acknowledgment and pointed ahead. The horses, who had flown steadily on through the turmoil as if nothing were happening, began to descend.

  “What is it? Are we there? Say something. I can hear now.”

  No answer.

  “Turn me round. Please.”

  Again, though she was now nearly certain that Ribek couldn’t hear her, the world swung, and she was looking past Levanter’s neck at the immense expanse of ocean. Out of it, not far off now, rose a single broad pillar of rock with the ocean swell breaking into foam all around it. Angel Isle. The touching point.

  The horses glided toward it like gulls, wings barely moving, and circled it single file. Without being asked, Ribek turned her so that she could see the wave-ravaged cliffs, fissured into immense, irregular columns, slide past. Why Angel Isle? she wondered. She had a vague idea that angels were a kind of good demon. There were plenty of demons in the old stories, but no angels as far as she could remember.

  Halfway round the island a crevasse between two pillars widened into a dark slit. The horses swung past without hesitation and circled on. But second time round Rocky led them out and away, swung back, and headed directly for the slit. At the last moment he half folded his wings and disappeared into the cliff. Pogo followed, and Levanter, and they were in darkness. The opening must have widened considerably the moment they were inside, for now she could see Rocky and Pogo gliding on, silhouetted against a pale light gleaming ahead.

  Darkness again. No, Ribek had twisted right round in the saddle to look behind him, so she perforce had done the same. The slit must have closed. Or something.

  He turned back, and she watched the light increasing and increasing until they glided out into the daylight of what she instantly knew to be another universe.

  PART THREE

  ANGEL ISLE

  CHAPTER

  16

  There must have been some kind of night in this different universe, because now it was dark, and the others were all asleep. Maja knew that because the darkness seemed to come from the outside, so it wasn’t anything Benayu had done. Everything else was, here inside the eggshell he’d made to keep their own four dimensions safe from touching the seven dimensions of this other universe.

  Maja wasn’t asleep, because rag dolls can’t shut their eyes. All they can do is lie and stare into the dark and wait for it to be day again.

  She knew what she was now because as soon as they were off the horses Ribek had unlooped her from round his neck and propped her against something, and for a moment her head had flopped forward and she’d seen her muddy legs sticking out in front of her with a bit of the hem of her skirt, dark green like the thread Benayu had pulled from her blouse. Her stockings were green and yellow stripes and her round puppy-paw feet were purple. The stockings were knitted, but the shoes and skirt were fabric, so she supposed her face must be fabric too, with her features painted onto it. She was pretty certain her eyes must be blue because of the way everything she could see looked a bit too blue, and the transparent mesh she saw through came from the weave of the fabric, and of course her hearing was woolly because wool was what her head was stuffed with.

  Then Ribek had straightened her up and she’d been able to see everything in front of her. Benayu was explaining how he’d got all the four-dimensional stuff ready in those last hours when he seemed to be three-quarters asleep, and hidden it inside himself so that he could bring it out as they passed through the touching point. There, as soon as it came into contact with the seven-dimensional stuff of this other universe, it started to explode, but then stopped and became the place where they were now.

  It was very pretty. She’d watched him copy it from the rich man’s garden they’d passed just outside Barda, with the raised pool rimmed by a low stone wall and a stone mermaid in the middle, and the turf and the trees and the rose bed with the neat clipped yew hedge behind it, though there was now a tidy pile of horse dung on the perfect turf beside it (tsk, tsk, as Striclan might have said). The horses were drinking from the pool, and Benayu had “fetched” fodder for them from somewhere.

  Immediately beyond the yew hedge was the shell of the egg that enclosed it all. Or was it so close? For all Maja could tell, it could have been half a mile away. It shimmered, but it shouldn’t have because it didn’t seem to have a surface and it was all one color, a kind of extra-gray gray. (White can be dazzling white and black can be pitch black, but gray…?) Benayu said that this was because it was made of the two kinds of light, one from each universe, tangled into each other and forming a shell of solid energy to keep the actual stuff of which the universes were made from touching and being destroyed in the explosion.

  Ribek, of course, had moved into sight from beside her, gone through a gap in the yew hedge and tried to touch it. She’d seen him jerk himself back and stand wringing his hand as if he’d jarred a nerve in his wrist. Benayu had laughed. Maja hadn’t been able to see him from where she’d been sitting but he sounded utterly exhausted and at the same time triumphant. It had been a frustratingly long time before anyone thought to ask what Ribek and Maja had found in the oyster pool.

  Ribek was out of sight again, but Saranja had been sitting on the
wall of the pool, almost at the center of her line of vision, with Jex on the coping next to her.

  “Well, what happens now?” she said. “I’m afraid we haven’t got the hair any more. I’d laid it out on Rocky’s saddle and was holding it in place with a fingertip in case it blew off when Benayu told me to say the name. The moment I did so it got hot enough to burn and I snatched my hand away before I could stop myself, and when I looked it wasn’t there. Not that it would do us much good without Maja to tell us which way it wants us to go. Aren’t you going to show us what you found in the oyster-bed? Perhaps we can use that somehow.”

  “Trouble is, I don’t know if it’s the right thing,” said Ribek. “I’d got hold of Maja’s wrist and I was letting her show me the way down and at the same time helping her get there. She seemed to know exactly where she wanted to go. She pushed her hand down through the oysters into stuff beneath—loose sandy gravel—and then just went limp and the breath started bubbling out of her mouth and any moment she’d’ve started breathing water. I had to get her out. I only had time for a quick grope where her hand had been. Anyway, this is what I found. I don’t think there was anything else.”

  A long pause. Saranja stared, frowning.

  “Show me too! Ribek, please! Jex…!”

  Why couldn’t even Jex hear her?

  “Let’s have a look,” said Benayu. “I should be able to tell…Yes, this is it! By all the levels, this is it! There’s the hair. Woven itself right in…No, there’s two of them…Jex! Are you all right, Jex?…Must’ve been too much for him. He should be fine—he said he’d be ready for it this time. But he was right, it would’ve destroyed Maja.”

  “Almost did, I think,” said Ribek. “In the oyster pool, the moment she touched it. You’re sure she’s really all right in there?”