Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Please do what you must, Lady Kzuva,” said Chanad, shaking her head wearily, as if at the unplumbable stupidity of humankind. Maja turned back to General Olbog.

  “Very well,” she said. “Since you refuse to stop the landing, we are now forced to do so ourselves. Captain, Mr. Ruddya, please carry on. Bennay, your shoulder. Stand aside, please.”

  Leaning on Benayu she hobbled up to the long window with the others following. The spectators already there made room for them. Now she was able to see what they’d been looking at. Ahead of them, still three or four miles off, lay the shoreline and hills around Larg, their colors already muted by the approach of dusk. She could see the undying flame crowning the rock pillar that imprisoned the demon Azarod, the waves breaking gently against the harbor bar, the mild swell on the last reaches of ocean glistening into bars of light under the westering sun. Black against that brightness, two medium-sized airboats floated shoreward ahead of the much larger one she was on. There were several more lined out to either side of her. Below them ships of the Pirate fleet advanced slowly on the city, first a screen of smaller vessels, then several larger ones, and then, almost beneath where she was standing, three big, broad-beamed vessels, obviously not warships but carriers. These had stopped moving and had lowered platforms something like the drawbridge of a moated town, leaving a wide opening in the bows out of which had emerged three lines of open barges, each carrying forty or more armed men. They were advancing on Larg far faster than the rest of the fleet. The leading barges were already almost level with the forward screen.

  “Captain, Mr. Ruddya, you had better act at once. Any nearer, and we shall discommode the good citizens of Larg.”

  Saranja had Zald ready in her belt-pouch. She drew the great jewel out and held it in her left hand, with the surface toward her. The fingers of her right hand moved in a careful, dance-like pattern over the jewels surrounding the central amber. That done, she spoke five resonant syllables, with deliberate pauses between them. Each seemed to linger in the air like a bell note until she spoke the next. All were meaningless to Maja and probably to every one else in the room except Benayu, whom she’d seen telling Saranja what to do back on Angel Isle. As the last syllable faded away she lifted the amber jewel gently from its setting.

  She cupped it in her right hand as if showing it to Ribek. He closed his own hand over hers and turned, not to the window, but to his right. North. They have a different magic in the north.

  He started to sing, if you could call it singing. She remembered how oddly unable he’d been, on their journey through the desert, to carry the simplest tune, but this was different. Somehow she knew that he was singing it as it was meant to be sung, this steady, rippling drone, repetitive, endless but full of intricate little changes, like the surface of a flowing stream. In this hot country, far from the mountains of his home, he was singing, as his ancestors had done for generations before him, to the northern snows.

  The sky darkened, and darkened further. The sea changed color, from blue-green to a curious pale mottled gray. The advancing fleet seemed to have come to a sudden halt. A snowflake drifted down past the window, and another, large as a child’s hand. The sea changed color again, as the sun, still reaching in from the west beneath the sudden astonishing darkness of the cloud layer, dazzled back off the whiteness below. Then everything vanished, blotted out by the falling snow. The room was suddenly as cold as a midwinter morning in the Valley. The owl on Saranja’s shoulder fluffed out its feathers and the squirrel on Ribek’s was huddling against his neck for warmth. She felt a fidgeting on her head and knew that her moth must have been triggered into hibernation and was burrowing in under her head-scarf.

  From behind the closed doors came the sound of alarm bells, urgent shouts of command. General Olbog was shouting too. Striclan’s voice spoke in Maja’s head.

  “What the hell do you people think you are doing? You are endangering the ship!”

  Maja waited for the translator’s more tactful version before she answered.

  “Tell him that nobody will be hurt, unless they are stupid enough to harm each other. The ship is in no danger.”

  Benayu’s shoulder was trembling beneath her hand.

  “Are you all right?” she murmured. “You’ve done wonders.”

  “I’m just about done for. I can’t keep everything going much longer.”

  “It is not needed. I am not a sensitive, so the child is safe in my shelter. The sea is affecting you more strongly than you predicted?”

  “It’s just the last straw. I can manage the little stuff, talking in your heads, that sort of thing. But I’m not up to anything else big. Nor’s Chanad. Ribek’s in charge now. This had better work. Ugh—I didn’t realize how cold it was going to be.”

  He shuddered again. Maja turned from the window, looking for the three hired magicians. They were standing a little way back, their faces unreadable behind their chosen masks, but their postures tense and watchful. She beckoned them forward.

  “I think I have met you before, haven’t I?” she said to the silver woman. “Your appearance was less, ah, striking then. You came for a post in my household, but I’d already chosen someone else. Your name begins with a Q, I think. Quirril?”

  “Quiriul, my lady.”

  “I’m sorry to find you here.”

  “It was that or be conscripted by the Watchers, my lady. I chose what I thought was a lesser evil. The same with my colleagues here.”

  “You must have had a hard time, so long out at sea.”

  “Very hard, my lady. We became so feeble. It is like the weakness after a fever, and we dared not tell them.”

  “Well, the Watchers are gone and that’s over now, so you can return home. When you are recovered, you could perhaps offer your services to the President-designate. She is going to need a lot of help. Meanwhile, if you are up to it, you could provide us with some warmth in here.”

  She turned back to the window. Still nothing to see but densely falling snow. The two generals seemed to be engaged in a furious argument. Striclan came round to her other side. His snake had disappeared. Gone in under his shirt for warmth, presumably.

  “Benayu is exhausted,” he said, “and Saranja and Ribek are fully occupied. I may as well simply tell you what is going on. Pashgahr wants to abort the landing—”

  “It is already aborted, is it not?”

  “I would have said so. But Olbog is determined to go ahead, whatever it costs.”

  “He probably thinks he has been made a fool of. It is the one thing that type of man cannot endure.”

  “What I suggest would mean pretending we can do something I doubt we can in fact do, with Benayu and Chanad out of action—”

  “I would advise against it,” Maja interrupted. “The danger is that he might then try to destroy us before we can carry out our threat. Benayu is in no position to defend us. I have begun an attempt to suborn the hired magicians, but they too are greatly enfeebled. We are on a knife edge, Mr. Ruddya. We must stake everything on what Ribek is doing. It seems to be as effective as we could wish. Ah, that’s better.”

  A faint draft had sprung up while she was speaking, warm, and smelling pleasantly of lowland pastures. Benayu stopped shivering.

  “No doubt you are right,” said Striclan. “Look, I think the snowfall is less than it was.”

  She glanced at the window. The flakes were already smaller and fewer, and in two or three minutes had ceased completely. The late sun appeared over the western hills once more, shining in under the cloud canopy onto a glittering island that reached in almost to the shoreline of the bay and further yet to north and south. It was far more than simply a rumpled surface of snow-covered ice, all at roughly the same level, every detail lost beneath the snow cover. Cliffs and crags of ice rose directly from the sea, and then rose further into three jagged parallel ridges, culminating in a rough peak almost level with the window through which she was looking.

  Scattered among the ledges and
crannies of this forbidding surface lodged the snow-swathed ships of the Pirate fleet. Among them were two airboats, forced down by the mass of snow on their gas bags, which, relieved of the weight of the boats themselves, still floated buoyant above them. The remaining airboats were still aloft, but sinking steadily to join them. Maja realized that the All-Conqueror itself was far lower than it had been before the snowfall. What an end to a proud invasion. But she felt no triumph. Not yet. They were still on a knife edge.

  Beyond the closed doors an alarm bell still sounded, but the cries of command had stopped. No doubt all orders had been given and the crew were readying themselves for the landing. There was silence too in the command deck, but not for long. Murmurs broke out and increased—astonishment, alarm, anger, apprehension. Ribek raised his voice above the incipient hubbub.

  “Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. I want to show you something more important than anything you have yet seen. Will you all come to the window and stand in a single line…Thank you. Now, I want you to look through my eyes and see what I am seeing. I promise you that I will not tamper with your inner selves in any way. You will remain exactly what you are, apart from having seen something that very few humans have seen before you, and perhaps having a greater knowledge and understanding than you have now. For that purpose, will you please hold hands all along the line.”

  Maja felt him take her hand in his. She sensed a hesitation on her left and turned to see what was happening. General Pashgahr was already in the line, and two of the others had joined him, but the rest were waiting to follow General Olbog’s lead, and he was still standing where he had been, a little back from the window, looking steadfastly at Ribek as if he could destroy him by glaring.

  Even powerful men such as those we will be meeting have an instinct to respect women such as yourself. Maja moved a little back, interrupting his line of sight, held out her hand to him, and smiled her grandest, kindliest smile.

  “General Olbog…,” she murmured.

  He came, a child at a party, who has arrived determined not to participate but then been overwhelmed by the greater moral force of the adult presence. Again he hesitated, but took her hand. His own was dry and muscular, the grip of a man who prides himself on a firm handshake.

  “Be gentle with it,” she told him. “Old bones, you know.”

  He forced his lips into the flicker of a smile and grabbed the hand of the man next in line. Together they turned to the window and saw what Ribek was seeing. She heard the gasps spreading along the line.

  Nothing had changed, and everything. The impossible island was still there, not one snowflake, not one ice-splinter different. It was its nature that had changed. What had been a series of rugged infolded ridges was now the scaly loops and coils of an immense reptilian body. The dragon that had hunted them down the sunken lane above Larg would have seemed ant-sized beside it.

  She had only a glimpse, and then it was gone, and the frozen island was there once more. Then, for a flicker, it was the incredible immense creature before the island returned. The flickering increased in speed until the dizzying double visions merged and she was staring more steadily at something that hung, poised, solid and real, between two possibilities, both equally impossible, the frozen island that in the space of a few minutes had emerged out of nowhere into these sub-tropic seas and showed no sign of melting, and the gigantic animal, far colder than any temperature at which life could exist, far larger than any size at which it could sustain itself.

  Even in detail the uncertainty remained, as though every part of it refused to choose between One or Other, and insisted on its existence as both. The odd-shaped summit, with its swaths of snow lying between ice-green scaurs and outcrops, and pocked and pitted here and there as if some huge hand had thrown a fistful of boulders against it, was certainly an icy summit, but equally certainly it was the creature’s head, resting on the curving outer fold of the body. The two largest holes were just empty pits, but gleamed with the liquid luminosity of deep-sunk eyes. Two apparently random mounds marked by shallow pocks also existed as a pair of scaly hummocks bearing the quadruple nostrils on the blunt snout, lidded with flaps of skin that stirred to the slow breathing of the cavernous lungs. Hollows and crevasses were folds and moldings of the tough hide, as it followed the shape of the skull beneath. Beyond it the central ridge was the vast reptilian body, curving round in the form of the northern ridge, and back again beneath the head to become the southern ridge as it dwindled into the tail. Every detail both This and That, occupying the same space at the same time. Things that could not either separately or simultaneously be true, but were.

  Human eyes are not made for such seeing. Maja’s fought for mastery, for the right to choose between This and That. Her mind resisted, fully certain of what it was seeing through those eyes, the absolute thereness of the creature, its presence, its power. All along the line she could hear murmurs of the same struggle.

  She turned to see how General Olbog was taking it. He was also struggling, being forced to recognize the reality of the vision, and hating it. In the middle of your worst nightmare some part of you still knows it to be only a dream. What if you then wake to find that it’s true? General Olbog didn’t look like a man who paid much attention to whatever dreams he had, if he remembered them at all. As soon as he stopped gazing through the window he would try to treat what he had seen like that—a trick of the light, another stupid bit of conjuring, pay no attention—but henceforth it would return to him in his dreams, and he would remember them on waking. For the moment, though, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it, but stood staring out of the window and shaking his head, like a drunk man trying to clear his mind.

  “You are looking at the great Ice-dragon of the northern wastes,” said Ribek quietly. “It and its partner to the south built and maintain the two realms of ice and snow on which the well-being of this world depends. We do not have the power to summon it, the Captain and I. Nobody has that, no magician or group of magicians, however powerful, has that. All that we two can do is ask it. Nothing that has happened since we came to the window was done by us—it is all the Ice-dragon. It came of its own will. It brought the ice and snow of its own will. If it had chosen it could have crushed every ship of your navy in the grip of its ice as easily as a cobnut is cracked open between two stones. Instead, of its own will it has chosen that you should see it. Though the power to call to it runs in my family, only once in several generations does one of us see it, and then never as clearly as you are now doing.

  “Why you? you may ask. The task of the two Ice-dragons is to maintain the well-being of this world. More than once in the remote past, the earth has sickened and needed first cleansing, then renewal. The two Ice-dragons have extended their realms to cover the entire earth, frozen it for a long age, and then withdrawn to allow the life of the world to renew itself among the tiny, unnoticed creatures that survived below the ice.

  “Now, once again, there were signs that such a time was coming. The so-called Watchers, with their insatiable lust for power, were one such sign. Their ultimate purpose was to incorporate all life on earth into themselves. In the eyes of the Ice-dragon they were the seeds of a disease that would in the end have sickened the whole earth. Fortunately we were able to act in time and destroy them before it needed to do so itself.

  “I cannot expect you to see yourselves in a similar light, but I can assure you that the Ice-dragon does. It has not come here, as we have, to prevent you from committing a single great wrong. It has come as a warning to you of what will follow if you continue on the course that you seem to have set yourselves. The very name of the great vessel that carries us all is a signpost on that course. I do not tell you this of my own knowledge. Like the vision of the Ice-dragon that you saw through my eyes, you are hearing through my mouth what it wishes you to be told.

  “Now I think we have seen enough. It is dangerous to look too long on such a being. It can madden the strongest mind.”

 
He withdrew his hand from Maja’s and the island was only a craggy patch of ice, littered with the ships of the pirate navy. The tension broke like a wave breaking, into a hubbub of comments and questions. Maja turned to General Olbog.

  “Thank you for joining us, General,” she said. “It was interesting, was it not?”

  There was nobody handy to interpret, but he caught her tone, favored her with his mini-smile, grunted some guttural politeness, nodded by way of farewell and turned away.

  “I’ve got to get us out of here,” muttered Benayu. “Fading faster than I expected. Won’t have anything left if I don’t go soon. Need Chanad to help, as it is.”

  “I will talk to Ribek. You go and sit down.”

  A dozen people, Syndics and soldiers, were already crowded round Ribek, bombarding him with questions. Most were men, taller than she was. She rapped an officer on the shoulder with the handle of her cane. He turned his head, cut his protest short when he saw who it was, and made a gap. The movement caught Ribek’s eye. She beckoned, drew aside and waited for him to join her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw somebody sidling in earshot. The Pirates’ translator.

  “My boy Bennay’s been taken ill, and I do not have the remedy with me,” she said. “I must get him ashore.”

  “It’s time we went in any case, my lady,” he said. “If you would be so good as to tell the others…”

  He turned to his audience.

  “Please,” he said. “No more questions for the moment. We have to leave in a minute. We have done what we came to do by preventing your attack on Larg. This was an emergency action. We do not have the authority to act further on behalf of the Imperial Government. We will leave you to discuss what you have seen and heard, and we will be ready to meet you for a truce conference an hour before noon tomorrow morning on the headland you can see to the south of Larg. We will permit one airboat large enough to carry your delegation, but no larger, to be cleared of snow to bring them ashore under our safe conduct. This will be a sign that you accept our conditions. If we receive no such signal your fleet will be destroyed at sunset.