Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “A good spy can always find employment,” said Lady Kzuva. “Now Bennay—Benayu.”

  “There’s one more thing I’ve got to do,” said Benayu. “I’ve been saving up for it. Resting. Getting ready. After that I’m going back to shepherding—a bit of hedge magic, perhaps, charms for sheep scab, that sort of thing. One day, perhaps, but nothing much bigger, not for a long while.”

  “I think that is very wise,” said Lady Kzuva. “This is not good sheep country, and I know you would prefer to be among the mountains, but you will always be welcome under my roof. Perhaps you can use your lesser powers from time to time to bring yourself here for a short visit, and read in the library and talk to Stindul.

  “Now, I have kept Ribek and Maja for the last. I am not going to pretend that I do not know—that all of us do not know—that Maja has strong feelings for Ribek, which perhaps when she is older Ribek will be able to return. And you in your turn may have detected that there is a special bond between Maja and myself. When you came to my door I used the word ‘intimate’ to describe it. I chose the word casually, but I was right. For a little over two days we were one person, distinct still in our oneness, but one despite that. The experience has left us with a tie that is stronger than that between twin sisters, closer than that between passionate lovers. It will last until I die….”

  “Not even then,” said Maja. “Not till I die too. Even then…”

  “That is my hope,” said Lady Kzuva. “Now I am telling you this because when you hear my proposal you might very reasonably guess that it arises from a desire to keep Maja to myself. Not so. I rejoice at your affection for Ribek, and his for you. I should rejoice if it were to ripen into adult love. I hope to rejoice at your wedding, though I have to be carried there on a stretcher. If I were to die on that very day I should die happy.

  “But meanwhile, what is to become of Maja? Where is she to live? I would very strongly suggest that it should not be at Ribek’s mill. The balance you presently maintain on the border between strong affection on Ribek’s part and what I know to be genuine love on Maja’s will become increasingly precarious as Maja grows toward womanhood—”

  Normally none of them interrupted Lady Kzuva. Ribek did now.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that too,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy. And anyway, it’s far too soon for her to make up her mind the way she has. Striclan and I are almost the only men she’s ever got to know. She needs to meet boys her own age—Benayu doesn’t count. She needs girl friends to talk to about them. Experience of the world too. Again, what we’ve been doing doesn’t count—ordinary life isn’t like that. You’re suggesting she comes back here? It’s up to her, but I’m all for it.”

  “Wait,” said Lady Kzuva. “There is more to my proposal than Maja simply coming back here. You tell me there is going to be a peace conference. I have every intention of participating. I shall renew Maja’s acquaintance with Syndic Blrundahlrgh—I of course did not experience it directly—and accompany her on part of her travels. With the disappearance of the Watchers there will be intense power struggles in Talagh. I shall throw my support behind Chanad and persuade my fellow Landholders to do the same, and so on.

  “Where do you three, Saranja, Striclan and Maja, fit in? The case of Striclan is obvious. I doubt if there is anyone living who has his experience and knowledge both of the Empire and the Pirates’ culture and politics. Simply to have him there as my adviser would be invaluable. Saranja, as a member of our truce delegation—”

  “But I was a complete fake!” said Saranja. “Everybody will know that I wasn’t ever a Captain in the Imperial Army, and then they’ll realize that the whole delegation was fake.”

  “You are mistaken. Maja, if you would be kind enough to look in the top right-hand drawer of the bureau there…There is a sheet of parchment, with wax and seal beside it….”

  The parchment was thick and creamy. Elaborately penned writing filled one side.

  “Now that little silver dish. Thank you. Take one of the candles from the table and tip it a little sideways over the parchment and hold the dish in your other hand to catch any drips from the candle…A bit lower…that’s right.”

  Wide awake this time, Maja watched the scarlet pool of wax forming, and then Lady Kzuva’s many-ringed fingers pressing the seal firmly into the wax. Much better than I managed, she thought. I wonder what the penalty is for forging a Landholder’s seal. Death, at least, I should think.

  “Among the less absurd privileges Landholders possess,” said Lady Kzuva, “is that of appointing an officer to a regiment in the Imperial Army. All Landholders travel with an armed escort, which will be much more effective if one of them can act with the full authority of an Imperial commission. Congratulations on your appointment, Captain Saranja, of the Women’s Regiment of the Imperial Guard. You will see that the commission predates our conference at Larg.”

  Ribek laughed aloud, and Striclan too. Saranja stared at the parchment. Maja had never seen her so put out. She turned white, then red. Her mouth opened and shut several times before she could speak.

  “Oh,” she said at last. “Oh…Thank you. Thank you very much. I don’t know what to say.”

  “You have already said it, my dear. I should add that I do not expect you to be a mere ornament in my train, though you will certainly be that. But you are manifestly a woman of action, full of fire and purpose, a born soldier, one whom others will follow. We may well have need for that. And your horses—they are now wingless?”

  “I can give Rocky his wings again if I want to.”

  “And the other two,” said Benayu. “I can fix that for you.”

  “Again, an obvious asset. Finally Maja. You shall come as my ward, my dear, so it is natural that you should accompany me. But in many circumstances in which we may find ourselves, with unchecked magic now loose in the Empire, your special talent may prove invaluable, as you have already shown me in my little courtroom.

  “And more important to me than any of your separate gifts is that I can be confident, both from the story you have told me and from what I have seen of you, that I can trust you completely.

  “Now, unless you have any questions, I suggest that I should leave you to talk my proposal over among yourselves, and you can tell me in the morning what you have decided.”

  She unhooked her cane from the arm of her chair and waited for one of them to help her to her feet. Nobody moved. Maja looked at Ribek, who had already turned to her. He raised his eyebrows. She nodded. He pointed at her. Surprised, she turned to Lady Kzuva.

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

  “I was about to say the same thing, rather more elaborately,” said Striclan from the other side.

  “Me too,” said Benayu.

  “Excellent,” said Lady Kzuva. “Nothing moves quickly in the Empire. I shall need to send to Talagh at once, to prepare the ground, but I should like to be on the road as soon as the snows are gone. If you can be here by then, well and good. Otherwise you will need to find me on the road somehow. With wings on your horses you will travel far faster than I.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  Again the Empire reeled itself away beneath them as they flew on, still passing none of the country they had traversed so slowly on their journey to Tarshu. The detour to Kzuva had taken them well west of that, and now they were heading back toward the sheep pastures north of Mord. There seemed to be an unspoken joint desire that they should stay together as long as possible, and this was the simplest way. They would say good-bye to Benayu and Sponge at the pastures, cross the mountains by the way they had come when they’d been escaping from the Pirates, and after a couple of days at Northbeck leave Ribek and Maja there. Saranja and Striclan would fly on with all three horses to see what was happening at Woodbourne. When the time came for them to leave the Valley, they would return by way of Northbeck, pick Maja up, take her to Lady Kzuva and travel south together when the snows were gone.<
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  Now, far ahead, they could see the glitter of the snow-peaks. Farms and woodlands flowed beneath them, and there was the river, skirting the plain of Mord, and Mord itself, smug and snug behind its walls. The Watchers’ Eye was gone from its southern gate. More and steeper woodland, and then…

  Then, where the pasture should have been, utter desolation. A dismal black slope of scree and tumbled rock. A crater at the center. Not a blade growing on the slope itself apart from one or two strips of turf running down from where the whispering cedar had stood. Not a tree standing within several hundred paces of it. Benayu shouted, pointed and wheeled to the left, up the slope. The great wings pounded the thinning air, spiraling up beside a cliff-face to a wide ledge, clothed in scanty grass. They landed there and slid or swung themselves down from the horses.

  “What on earth happened?” said Saranja.

  “I told you,” said Benayu. “Fodaro got it wrong. I was pretty sure we’d find something like this, and I’ve been getting ready for it. Ever since we left Larg, pretty well. Tell you later.

  “You stay here and hang on to the horses. You’d better take their wings away, Saranja. We don’t want them bolting. This is going to be fairly big, Maja, and I won’t have much to spare, so I can’t afford to shield you. I could put you to sleep for a bit, if you like.”

  “No. I want to see. I’m a lot tougher than I was when we started.”

  “All right. It shouldn’t be too bad—you’ll be in the lee of the cliff. Only don’t get too close to the edge. Well, here goes. No, boy. You stay here.”

  He vanished.

  Maja moved toward the drop, and found she couldn’t see much of the slope below without going right up to the edge. She looked around. Either side of the ledge they were on the rock face ran sheer up and down, and the ledge itself was the bottom of a wide cleft in the upper half of the cliff. The others had led the horses to the back of it and turned them to face the cliff. Ribek and Saranja were blindfolding Levanter and Pogo. Pogo didn’t like it. Saranja had already done that for Rocky and was starting to remove his wings. These days Maja barely had to brace herself for stuff like that.

  She scrambled up over the boulders that had fallen against the side of the indent in the explosion of magic, found a viewpoint and stared at the bleak, black wound that had once been sheep pasture, and the tumbled woods around it.

  She had seen nothing quite like it before, and yet a faint familiar throb pulsed steadily from it, the background magic of that other universe, beyond the touching point on Angel Isle. This was where Fodaro had discovered Jex, where he had studied the stars in the pool Benayu had made for him—still there now, gleaming untroubled amid the ruin around it—and where he had worked out his equations, and with Benayu’s help had begun to experiment on how to use them to destroy the Watchers.

  This had once been a touching point too.

  Benayu was there now, a tiny figure standing close by the central crater. He raised an arm and waved toward her.

  “Ready?” she called. “He’s starting.”

  The blast of magic came not from him, but inward, to him, invisible at first, but then a vortex formed, a thickening of the air that could be seen only because it rumpled itself as it gathered, like something seen through an uneven pane of glass, or heat waves rising from a furnace. When it reached its center over the crater it spiraled upward, denser and denser. And at the same time, far overhead, invisible dust particles gathered out of the clear, pale sky and hurtled inward—pale racing specks at first that joined and became flakes, puffballs, clumps, cloud streamers, darkening all the time as they crammed themselves tighter and tighter over the vortex below until they formed a single, roughly circular, mile-wide mass, darker than the darkest thundercloud.

  Maja’s whole being shuddered, reverberated like a bell, to the steady drumroll of the forces pent there. She cried aloud at the sudden clapper stroke of their release, not into any outward explosion, but into a single aimed downward stroke from the center to the center of the vortex below. The two joined, and for a while she was looking at a thing like one of the flat-topped desert trees she had seen at the start of the journey north from Larg, a sky-high tree of darkness, a tree that was growing backward in time, its whole top shrinking inward and down through the trunk until there was only the pillar of the trunk itself plummeting down….

  And then the light.

  She had an instant of warning in which to close her eyes as the flash of the original explosion gathered in from its furthest reaches. The world turned white and eyelids were not enough. Hands across her face were not enough. For a moment she could see her finger bones black against the impossible whiteness. All vanished in thunder. Then nothing at all. She could neither hear nor see. Not even the dark of not seeing.

  She opened her eyes and still she could not see. Nor hear. There should have been the screams of the panicking horses, the shouts and grunts of the others trying to calm them, Saranja’s voice, perhaps, grimly calm, “I think I’ve gone blind….”

  Nothing. Not a whisper. Not the rustle of movement. No movement at all, even when Maja tried to move. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart seemed to have stopped between beat and beat. No sense of any of the marvelous magic of the world.

  It’s all over, she thought. I’m dead. How disappointing. Ribek…

  She would have wept with frustration, but even a tear must move.

  Benayu’s voice in her head.

  “I’m sorry about that. I should have realized….”

  Sorry! she thought. When I’m dead!

  “Hang on. I’ll sort it all out in a moment. I’d better deal with the horses first.”

  Yes, being dead must be like this. One everlasting wait in utter silence, total non-seeing.

  Benayu again.

  “Ready, Maja?”

  The pulse of his presence. A gentle puff into her nostrils. The touch of fingers on eyes and ears.

  She was alive, herself, breathing and feeling and hearing, not on that mountain ledge but the long slope of green cropped turf below. The others were beside her, the horses still in their blindfolds, the people, even Striclan, looking as dazed as she felt. Now the peaceful woods stood round, their leaves already coloring as the world turned toward winter. Only the central crater remained, unhealed.

  “Look,” said Saranja in a voice of wonder. “There’s an ant! It’s just as if all that had never happened.”

  “Yes,” said Benayu. “That’s why it was easier than I thought it would be, except for the last part. Sorry about that. But it was all still there, waiting to come back into balance, all but the touching point itself. That’s gone.

  “It’s all over now. Fodaro beat the Watchers in the end. We’d never have done it without him. I’ve left the crater like that for him. No one but us will ever know what it means, but that’s enough.”

  They stood in silence for a while, gazing at the strange memorial to a brave and lonely genius.

  “I’m hungry,” said Benayu. “Let’s have something to eat. Oyster-and-bacon pie, anyone?”

  “Really?” said Maja. “I didn’t get any first time because I was a rag doll, and second time Ribek wouldn’t let me have more than a mouthful.”

  “In that case I’ll have some too. Shall I make it oyster-and-bacon pie all round? Fine. That’s for the Empire. And rhubarb-and-ginger crumble for the Valley. And mountain cider for me and Fodaro. He adored the stuff. It’ll take a few minutes.”

  “You’re not too tired?” said Saranja.

  “I’ve got a bit left. Lucky I did at the end, mind you. But like I said, the rest of it went a lot better than I’d budgeted for. Get your saliva working.”

  He was off somewhere else in his head for less than a minute, then settled down and sat staring gazing out eastward. The sun was halfway down the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the pasture was in the shadow of the mountain behind him. The same thought must have struck him.

  “It’ll be cold up here in the hills, this far nor
th,” he said. “Sleep out here all the same, I think. The cottage is still there, and there’d be room for all of us, but it’ll reek of Watcher-work, and I don’t want to waste our last evening together sorting it out. I’ll get it done tomorrow, and then you’ll be welcome to stay as long as you want.”

  “Nice of you, but I must get back,” said Ribek. “Harvest’s later up north, of course, but they’ll already be behind with the milling.”

  “Us too,” said Saranja. “We don’t feel right, taking all that money off Lady K and then swanning off to deal with our own affairs. We want to get it all settled.”

  (Lady Kzuva had characteristically insisted on paying Saranja her salary from the date of her commission, and Striclan for a year in advance. Ribek got a lump sum to compensate for his loss of earnings in the service of the Empire—as much, he said, as he’d have earned in ten years’ milling. Imperial coin wasn’t any use in the Valley, so he got gold. There was a leaving bonus for her boy Bennay, as large as if he’d held that post for sixty years, and for Maja what seemed to her a monstrous amount of plain spending money.)

  “Ah, food,” exclaimed Ribek. “Nothing like mountain air for a healthy appetite.”

  The dishes assembled themselves neatly on the turf. The five sat in a circle and passed them round.

  “I got second helpings for all of us,” said Benayu.

  The silence of contentment fell, until Ribek broke it with a sigh.

  “You know,” he said, “I think there’s only one thing I regret in all our journeyings. I feel we didn’t do right by the Magister at Barda. All right, he was—is, I hope—a pompous ass, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he was a good man who did his best for us. And the Watchers came, and we ran away and left him in deep trouble. I hope he came out all right.”