Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  If it hadn’t been for Ribek, would she even have wanted to go back to the Valley, once Benayu had sealed it off as Faheel and the Ropemaker had done? Supposing he did. After what the Ropemaker had been saying she wasn’t even sure about that now. Anyway, there’d still have to be a way of stopping the horsemen coming through the passes. So Ribek would have to go back to his mill. He’d want to, anyway. It was where he belonged. Where she would belong, if all went well. One day.

  She thought of all the wonders she’d seen on her journey. Even more she thought of the wonders she’d felt with her strange extra sense. Not the terrible, battering, almost obliterating explosions of pure power, but the little everyday magics inherent in people and creatures and plants and everything in the whole material world. To lose that now, having only just found it—it would be like losing…no, not her eyesight or her hearing, but at least her sense of smell. Think, the smell of an early morning after longed-for rain has fallen on parched fields—never to have that again in your nostrils!

  Of course, even if Benayu renewed the magical sickness that had for generations kept the armies of the Empire out of the Valley, that wouldn’t affect her, being female, and she’d be able to come and go through the forest and revisit the world of magic when she wanted, but it wouldn’t be the same as living among its day-to-day wonders. And she would never finish learning how to cope with major magic, not just to endure it, but to explore it and understand it, perhaps even to relish its strange and dangerous energies.

  Her rough cousins had loved climbing the largest trees on the edge of the forest, whose branches hung low enough to reach, and where they were not affected by the magic sickness. They would dare each other higher and higher, further and further out along the swaying boughs, and descend gleeful and triumphant. Maja could never have done that, but with Jex’s help she’d been beginning to do something of the same kind with serious magic until Benayu and the Ropemaker had needed to shield her completely from the huge forces unleashed in all that had happened from the oyster-beds of Barda to the destruction of the Watchers.

  Suppose she went back to live in the Valley. Sealed again into its seclusion, she would never make that wonderful journey. Was that what her dream had been telling her? All she would have was her memory, a flaking picture on a crumbling wall. Suppose, suppose…

  She must have sighed at the thought.

  “What was that about?” said Ribek. “You can’t be that bored with adventures.”

  She told him.

  “Well, it’s worth thinking about,” he said, to her surprise. “I’ve been wondering myself, after what the Ropemaker told us. Watchers are gone. Who knows what’s happened to the Emperor? Chanad’s got the ring the Ropemaker used to summon the Twenty-four, but there isn’t a Twenty-four to summon. Not even a One. All we know is things are going to change. It could be wonderful. It could be hideous. And we won’t know. Frustrating, very, as our friend would have said.”

  “Benayu says he doesn’t want to do big stuff, anyway for a while. Suppose he didn’t seal us off in the Valley, then we’d still have the horse people to deal with.”

  “Well, maybe. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

  “What’s that got to do with the horse people?”

  “You haven’t been listening?”

  “I told you. I was asleep. I had that dream.”

  He grinned at her, but didn’t say anything.

  Frustrating, very.

  Chanad was coming across toward them. She was obviously still very tired and shaken, but apart from that everything about her, the look on her face, the way she moved and held herself, was quietly solemn. She wasn’t making a parade of it. It was how she felt. They all rose and waited for her to speak.

  “They’re ready to begin,” she said. “They would like us all to watch, but not to come too near. It will be clear to you how close we may safely get. They will need help to stand at first. I will steady Zara….”

  “I’ll do the Ropemaker,” said Saranja firmly.

  “Good. I will give you bread soaked in wine. Put it to his lips before you try to lift him. He will nibble a morsel off and that will give him the strength to stand and move. Then follow me and Zara and we will position them either side of the tablet. When I give you the signal—it’ll be when the sun’s rim is about to touch the horizon—put the bread to his lips again. As soon as both are ready, we can move away. We will stand and witness their going.”

  They walked quietly over to where the two dying magicians lay in the shadow of the rocks. Zara was on her back with her hands clasped across her. The Ropemaker was on his side, facing her, slightly curled up, with his cheek resting on the back of his hand, like a sleeping child. Standing, Maja could just see over the top of the rocks to where the round, smoky-orange sun was settling out of a pale gold sky toward the dark hills. Visibly the gap closed.

  Chanad took a roll and a small flask out of the folds of her robe. She broke the roll in two, releasing an odor of fresh-baked bread, and poured a little yellow wine into the soft interiors. She handed one half to Saranja, then bent and breathed gently on each of the still faces. The eyes opened. She placed the softened pulp of her half roll against Zara’s mouth and the shriveled lips sucked and chumbled at it. Saranja did the same for the Ropemaker until he turned his head away. The helpers stood back, and they all waited.

  “I am ready,” whispered Zara.

  “Me too,” said the Ropemaker, and pushed himself up onto his elbow.

  Chanad had to lift Zara bodily to her feet and half-carry her across the turf, but the Ropemaker needed only to be helped up and then steadied as he tottered behind them. The others followed. A hollow had appeared in the center of the arena, grassed like the rest of the space, as though it had been there for centuries. At the bottom lay a low stone slab, carved with what looked like a letter in an unknown alphabet. Chanad and Saranja helped the two magicians down the slope and positioned them either side of the slab. Without any discussion Ribek, Benayu, Striclan and Maja spaced themselves out round the rim of the bowl. Sponge was already at Benayu’s heels and the horses came ambling over and joined them.

  Again they waited. Maja was facing west. The sun was almost red now, seeming unnaturally huge and near, but dim enough for her to be able to watch it unblinking. Chanad, in deep shadow at the bottom of the bowl, could not have seen it, but when only a sliver of golden sky separated the rim of the disc from the rim of the hills she nodded to Saranja.

  The bread had barely touched the lips of the two magicians when they raised their hands and took it themselves. Chanad and Saranja backed away, turned and climbed up out of the bowl. The sun reached the hilltops.

  The magicians didn’t stir, but they seemed now to glow faintly as they slowly nibbled the bread, or perhaps that was only an effect of dusk settling into the bowl. They stopped eating, and a rustling whisper rose from the hollow, steady, faintly rhythmic, shaping itself as Maja listened into the sound of two old voices muttering as if in dreams. Gradually the mutter was strengthened into song. They raised their arms in a gesture of invocation. Somehow the space in and above the bowl seemed to begin to revolve, without causing any movement in the windless air, but because it was filled with minute flecks of light, like dust-motes, turning and turning, floating downward and inward, drawn to the two figures standing either side of the slab, sucked in by their quiet song.

  Maja knew what she was looking at. It was all in the old story, right at the start of it. This was what had happened to the magician Asarta forty generations ago. She was watching the whirlpool of the years. The motes were all the uncountable instants of those two long lives spiraling back down into the bodies from which they had come. The glow from the two magicians intensified and spread around them, filling the bowl but casting no shadows beyond it. The light contained itself, like a drop of liquid held into a sphere by its own surface tension.

  The two voices became distinct. They were almost at the same pitch, but very different, the Rope
maker’s a light, slightly nasal tenor, quavery at first, but true, and soon becoming firmer. By the time he was standing to his full stature it rang with his natural energies and zest for life. Zara’s was deep for a woman’s voice, much darker and sadder in tone, with effortlessly sustained long haunting notes. Their songs were not the same songs, but intertwined gracefully with each other as if they had been made and shaped to do so.

  Though there was no wind the whirl of time plucked at their clothing like a fresh breeze, unsettling small bright birds from the folds of Zara’s robes, to flutter and dart around her. The backward-racing minutes twitched and fingered at the Ropemaker’s turban, loosed it and sent it snaking away in a brilliant ribbon of color, and the birds danced in and out of its windings. Laughing through his song he shook loose his fiery shock of hair and it blazed out like sunlight around him.

  Their song became laughter, delight in their own youth and strength and the joy of the living world. Still singing, they held out their arms to each other across the slab, gripped hands with hands, and stepped easily up onto the slab. He knelt, bringing their faces to a level. She moved to him, and they took each other in their arms and kissed. Even to Maja it was obvious, from the sudden slight awkwardness after all their assured and purposeful movement through the ritual, and from the long, intense silence breaking the song, that the kiss was no part of the ritual, and that never before in all their immense lives had either of them done such a thing, done it in the love that magicians can never afford.

  They separated. She stepped back and he remained kneeling. They raised their arms in front of their faces and moved them closer to each other, all four hands spread and tilted backward at the wrist, forming a shape like the petals of a tulip. The light in and over the hollow, without losing any of its intensity, shrank inward to its center, smaller and smaller, until it became the thing that the hands were holding, all the instants of all their years gathered into a sphere of pure light, that still cast no shadows because it spread no ray beyond itself, an offering up of those lives, the purpose and ending of the ritual.

  Quietly they allowed themselves to be absorbed into its brightness, and it floated upward. The witnesses round the bowl watched it go, widening now and fading as it spread across the sky, until it became the light of the newly risen moon. The stone slab vanished and the hollow in which it had lain rose quietly back to level ground.

  They stood for some while in silence. Maja’s eye was caught by a movement among the rocks on the further side of the arena. A Jex, several Jexes, a whole rank of them, all round the arena, had returned to their living form to watch the magicians’ going, much as humans might have risen from their sickbeds to witness some astounding event. Rows of lizard eyes glistened opal in the moonlight. Maja had scarcely noticed them before they began to melt back into patches of lichen.

  Nobody seemed to want to move or break the silence. Even Chanad, steeped perhaps for centuries in serious magic, seemed awed by what she had seen. At length she walked slowly forward and picked up the remains of the two pieces of roll that the magicians had dropped. She took the little flask from inside her robe and placed it upright on the turf, where the slab had been. As it touched the ground a second flask appeared beside it. She plucked a few stems of grass, rubbed them between finger and thumb, and placed them beside the flasks, where they became a woven grass platter. When she crumbled the two pieces of roll onto it the morsels reassembled themselves into a loaf.

  She beckoned and they moved to join her. She gave them each a goblet, and there, still in complete silence, they sat and ate and drank. The bread was the best Maja had ever eaten, and the water in one flask as delectable as the wine in the other. It was a simple meal, but richer and more satisfying than the grandest feast, because it was the final element in the ritual they had witnessed, an act of letting go, their share in the blessedness of the event.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Maja woke with an ache in her hip and a strange stiffness in all her muscles and joints. A few loose hairs were brushing against her mouth. Sleepily she raised her hand to push them away and found a whole mass more of them covering the side of her face. Where had they come from? Her own hair wasn’t long and silky soft like…

  Yes it was, now. Her last memory of the previous evening was sitting with the others in the moonlight, thinking about Zara and the Ropemaker, with never a thought in her head about what was coming in the morning. Now it all flooded back in.

  Trying not to wake the others by groaning, she pushed herself creakily up. It was a quiet clear morning, with the chill of the night still in the air. She never woke this early, even when sleeping on bare ground. She pushed a tress of her hair forward to where she could see it and combed her fingers out along it. It was a bit blurred—she must be long-sighted—but she could see that it was silvery white, and feel its fineness. There was lots of it and it was long enough to reach well below her shoulders. There were several pretty rings on her fingers. She couldn’t see them clearly enough to know what they looked like, but feeling them with her other hand she found that they’d be impossible to remove over the swollen knuckles. The fingers themselves must once have been long and elegant, but now wouldn’t quite straighten properly.

  She ran their tips over her face, feeling the creases and wrinkles. She seemed to have high cheekbones above slightly hollow cheeks, but her nose was firm and straight. Her mouth felt a bit too small for such a face. There were smile lines at the corners. No sign of sag beneath her chin.

  And something else, stranger still…

  It took her a moment to grasp what had changed. Her extra sense was gone. Even when most strongly shielded by Jex or Benayu, with no glimmer reaching her of the magic beyond the shield, she had always been aware of it, just as when one closes one’s eyes one is aware of the possibility of seeing. Not now. It didn’t belong in this strange old body. It would come back as soon as she was Maja again, but she felt an odd sense of loss at its going.

  She realized her bladder was urgently full. She was going to need to crawl to the rocks to help herself stand. No. What looked like some rather grand clothes had been neatly piled beside her bedding, with a silver-handled ebony cane propped across them. Using it she carefully eased herself up. Her bad hip shrieked at her as she rose from kneeling, but she forced herself through the pain and hobbled away.

  Yesterday they had each found their own places for this sort of thing. Mercifully Maja had chosen one that didn’t involve any scrambling among the rocks, a small grassy platform at the edge of the cliff, facing eastward across the ocean. The sun had started to rise by the time she reached it. When she had done what she had to she stood for a while staring out to sea and letting the faint warmth of those first rays seep into her chill-stiffened limbs.

  Did Benayu really need to do this to me? she wondered. Well, I suppose it means I’m not going to be a twelve-year-old girl trying to pretend to be an old woman. This creaking body will keep telling that’s what I am. I suppose it’s a good idea. And there was more to it than that. She wasn’t a twelve-year-old girl. She was a strong confident woman, used to being listened to and obeyed. She could be kindly enough to those who merited kindness, but very few people would be fools enough to offend her twice.

  When she got back to the arena she found Benayu sitting cross-legged on his bedding, studying something in his lap. He wasn’t wearing his normal clothes, but some kind of uniform, green with gold trimmings. She half remembered seeing uniforms like that somewhere before. In a dream, was it…?

  She peered at him, puzzled, and hobbled toward him, but her long-sightedness blurred him as she came nearer. He must have looked up and seen her.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I hope you got a bit of sleep. I was a bit worried.”

  “As you well might have been,” she answered, snappishly, and was startled by the sound of her new voice. Even the words were different from the sort she was used to saying.

  “Though I can see the reasons for
it,” she went on. “You have not yourself changed?”

  “Easier for me if I don’t,” he said. “It’d be like doing everything through a screen. And we don’t want them to get it that most of the magical stuff is coming from me and Chanad. So I’m your servant-boy, carry your stuff around, give you a shoulder to lean on, that sort of thing. This is your household livery I’m wearing. Would you like me to help you dress?”

  “I would prefer Saranja to assist me. But you may as well try to make me comfortable until she is ready to do so.”

  She was pleased by how easy it seemed to play her new part, almost as if she’d done it all her life.

  “Very well, ma’am,” he answered, and rose. Close up, his face was a blur, but she could tell from his tone that he was grinning.

  “And you can take that smile off your face, young man,” she snapped. “I would not be seen in public to allow myself to be so spoken to by a servant.”

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” he said, actually sounding a bit chastened.

  Maja leaned on his shoulder as she returned to where she had slept, and waited while he opened a folding canvas stool which she hadn’t noticed before, padded it with some of her bedding and helped her to sit.

  “I hope you don’t think I overdid the aches and pains,” he said. “I copied them from Lady Kzuva. She’s actually the Landholder of Kzuva in her own right.”

  “There’s a Lord Kzuva in the story we tell in the Valley. Zara used to be his household magician.”

  “That’s right. Lady Kzuva’s his umpteen-greats-granddaughter. She’s a big northern landowner. Striclan told me about her. I’m sorry about your hip, but I was pretty tired and I’d got a lot to do. It’s much easier for me to copy someone whole than start fiddling about with bits and pieces.”