Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Want me to look?” said Benayu. “…No, he isn’t at Barda—they’ve got a new Magister. Wait…Ah…He’s still alive…He’s been in prison in Talagh, but they’ve let them all out now that the Watchers are gone. He’s lost about half his weight. He’s trying to get back to Barda but he hasn’t got any money. Shall we just send him some? He’ll wake up and find it in his pocket.”

  “He was sad that he’d never seen the mountains,” said Maja.

  “And here we are eating oyster-and-bacon pie,” said Saranja. “His oyster-and-bacon pie, good as.”

  “All right,” said Benayu. “And Ribek can say sorry to him for all of us.”

  Again that momentary absence, the blip of made magic, and a ragged, unrecognizable figure stood beside them, staring bewildered at the snow-capped mountain range running away north and the immense landscape below it. He seemed not even to have noticed their presence on the turf beside him.

  Another blip, and his tatters became clean, well-fitting clothes. He must have felt the change for he looked down at himself and ran his spread hands over his body, feeling the quality of the cloth. His right hand bumped against something in a pocket. He felt and pulled out a purse and weighed it in his hand. It was clearly heavy.

  Suddenly he raised his head and sniffed. A dribble of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth.

  “Oyster-and-bacon pie, Magister?” said Ribek. “We’re delighted to see you again, after all the troubles we brought upon you.”

  The Magister started at the voice, looked at Ribek and stared at them each in turn.

  “Dreaming?” he whispered. “Dead? Heaven? Oyster-and-bacon pie?”

  “No, you’re in the real world, Magister. Please sit down and taste some pie to prove it. Oysters from Barda, and there’s nothing else like them, not even in heaven. I’m sure you remember us, if not necessarily with pleasure. Saranja, Maja, Benayu and me, Ribek Ortahlsohn. You haven’t met Striclan, though.”

  “My dear sirs! My dear ladies! Barda oysters! I thought I should never taste them again. And the mountains, which I was never destined to see!”

  Trembling, he sat. Benayu heaped his plate, filled his goblet and gave them to him. He ate slowly, in silence, savoring every mouthful, while they told him their story and why they had treated him as they did.

  “The mountains of the north,” he whispered as he put his plate down. “The heroes who saved the Empire! With my help! With my help! And the oysters of Barda!”

  Gentle magic flowed and he fell asleep. It flowed again, and he vanished from the hillside.

  “His heirs are squabbling over his estate,” said Benayu. “So his house is still empty. He’ll wake in his own bed.”

  Maja woke somewhere in the depths of the night and lay gazing at the friendly stars of the North. There was the old Fisherman, with his rod bending under the weight of the Fish, so that its tip pointed directly at the Axle-pin. At Barda they had all been out of sight. At Larg he had been half hidden, and the Axle-pin just below the horizon, with the Fish still farther down. Now, at last, here they all were, shining above the glistening snow-peaks.

  The others seemed to be asleep. Ribek was only a couple of paces away. Striclan and Saranja lay further off, snug in their shared bedding; Benayu was even further away, so that the persistent buzz of his powers didn’t disturb Maja’s dreams.

  She and Ribek could have been alone together on the hillside. He was a heavy sleeper. If she were to slip out of her own bedding and ease herself in beside him, he probably wouldn’t even notice. It was only a whimsy, a fancy, but unwilled it bred the longing. A desire. A physical ache. What’s the harm in that? whispered her body.

  She wasn’t going to do it, of course. It wouldn’t be fair to him. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was astonished, frightened, by the sudden power of the demand. Night after night they had slept almost within reach of each other. Night after night she had dozed off during another episode of her fantasy life at Northbeck. Naturally, being husband and wife in the fantasy, they slept in the same bed, but she had spent no time imagining the experience. It was just a detail, a way of making the fantasy as real as possible, like the stuffed owl on the kitchen shelf.

  Now, without warning, it was central to the fantasy. Nothing could have any reality without it. And it still wouldn’t work unless Ribek felt the same about her. She had no doubt at all that he would one day. But when? They’d talked about it a bit in his dream when she’d been a rag doll in that other universe. When she was six years older, she’d suggested. He’d said ten, but that had just been haggling. Now, lying under the stars on the mountainside, feeling what she was feeling, even six years seemed a wilderness of waiting. Surely four would be enough. Or three, if she coaxed Benayu into giving her a love charm.

  And then, what would he feel after…? There’d been a farmer who’d liked girls Maja’s age. He must have done something with one of them, because Ribek thought he would have been better dead and had told him to take his wheat elsewhere for grinding. For a vivid moment she seemed to see the shadowy cavern of the wheel-room at Northbeck mill, the great wheel slowly churning round, the white water tumbling over the scoops, and dark against that the shape of a man dangling by his neck from a rope tied round one of the beams.

  In that moment she made up her mind. She wasn’t going back to Northbeck with him. Even one night there would make it harder to leave him, and harder and harder every night that passed. Benayu had had powers enough to fetch the Magister from Talagh and send him south to Barda. He would find it a simple matter, surely, to send Maja back to Lady Kzuva.

  Tomorrow she would start her new life.

  Life without Ribek.

  The words whispered in her mind, desolate, the sigh of a wandering spirit lost in a wilderness. Silently she breathed them between her lips, and again, and yet again, over and over, like a charm to help her get used to the idea. Gradually her whole mood changed. For a while she simply lay there feeling more and more deeply at peace. Then she found herself beginning to imagine what her new life would be like, in a great house full of people, or on the road with Lady Kzuva’s entourage, speeding along the sections of the Highways set aside for grandees, or in the mighty and mysterious city of Talagh.

  She wasn’t scared, hardly even nervous. In fact she was looking forward to the adventure. What had become of the terrified, tongue-tied child cowering in her lair under the barn at Woodbourne? Gone, gone, vanished like a dream, vanished like the old nightmares of pursuit. When had she last had one? They were gone, along with the Watchers. In the moment she had made up her mind and rushed out from her hiding place crying “Take me too!” she must have left them behind. And even when the pursuing monster had at last caught up with her on Angel Isle and shown her its true, terrible reality, she hadn’t tried to hide or run away but had fought back with all her small strength beside her friends, and between them they had given Benayu time to destroy the demon.

  How much she had changed since Woodbourne! From time to time on the journey she had considered the way her extra sense was growing and strengthening. But the changes in herself had passed unnoticed. Where had her self-confidence come from, her readiness to speak and act? From her friends, of course. They had needed her for her gift—they couldn’t have found the Ropemaker without her—but they had valued her for what she was, encouraged her, trusted her, worried desperately for her when she had driven herself to the edge of darkness, so much so that both Ribek and Benayu had almost died to save her….

  All right, so they had needed her for her gift, but how much she had needed them for everything else! Always on the move, they couldn’t give her a place to belong, like Northbeck in her fantasy—and Northbeck in her real future, if all went well—but they were people to belong with, sharing trust and purpose in the same spirit as they shared their evening meals. Ribek most of all. She had loved him, she now discovered, not for his sake but because she needed somebody to love. Now, of course, it was impossible to imagine tha
t anyone else might have done, but still, there had been a sort of selfishness in her love. She had attached herself to him like a mistletoe to a tree, feeding her need. It wasn’t enough. She guessed he knew that too.

  Now they were going to spend six years apart, and that was all right. It was fine, in fact, better like this, and she could do it because she didn’t need him any more. Not in the way she had done so far. But there was another kind of need, the need that Saranja and Striclan had for each other. She had felt an inkling of it only a little while ago, waking on the hillside under the stars. In six years’ time, if she and Ribek both felt like that, perhaps…

  If. Perhaps.

  Mentally she released herself from her unspoken vows, and felt a sudden, marvelous lightness of heart. She had trapped them both somehow in a room, locking the door and dropping the key out of the window, and now, by pure luck she had found a spare key and unlocked the door and set them free. Free to choose when the time came.

  As soon as he woke, here on the neutral hillside, she would tell Ribek she was going back to Lady Kzuva and tell him why.

  As it turned out, she slept longer than he did.

  The sun was just beginning to slide above the far horizon when she heaved herself into a sitting position and looked around. His bedding was empty. Saranja and Striclan were already up. She was oiling his back for him, ready for the exercises he did, and she did too now, every morning. Benayu seemed to be fast asleep. He’d be tired after yesterday, of course. If they had to wait for him it might be a long time till breakfast, but Striclan kept the saddlebags well stocked. No Ribek. Probably in the woods somewhere, easing his bowels, which was just as regular a morning need for him as Striclan’s exercises.

  No, there he was, further up the slope by the whispering cedar, staring at something in the sky above the forest on their left. She followed his gaze. The landscape below the pasture was scarfed with early mist, but the sky was a clear pale blue. Only one thing marked it, a single bird, circling slowly on motionless wings. With nothing at all to judge its distance by it was hard to tell how large it might be. Big, she guessed. She wriggled the rest of her body out of her bedding and climbed barefoot toward him.

  “Is it an eagle?” she said.

  “That’s right. A blue-shank, by the look at it. Marvelous great birds. They nest in the cliffs above Northbeck, you know. I’ll show you.”

  “I’m not coming to Northbeck with you. I’m going to ask Benayu to send me straight back to Lady Kzuva.”

  “Ah,” he said slowly, still watching the eagle.

  “Do you want to know why?”

  “I think I know….”

  “Not all of it, you don’t.”

  “All right. Tell me.”

  She did so, all of it, feelings and thoughts, without shame or shyness. He listened gravely and nodded when she’d finished.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m afraid I have to tell you that I still think it will be an impossibility. Even supposing both of us are still unattached at that point. Perhaps you’ll meet some courtier….”

  “You might fall for one of those farmers’ daughters you told us about.”

  She didn’t mention the jewel dealer at Mord. That would have been mean.

  “True,” he said. “But supposing we both escape those fates, and I’m not already in my dotage…”

  “I don’t want to hear any of that nonsense. The Ropemaker gave you ten years more than he borrowed from you. Interest, he called it. You actually said you felt ten years younger. And you told me when I was a rag doll that that’d be enough.”

  His laughter cracked the morning stillness. Pogo stopped grazing, raised his head and whickered, evidently thinking there might be horses who made a noise like that.

  “So that’s it,” he said. “I knew something had happened, but hadn’t realized you were such a scheming, colluding minx. You’re going to be in your element in the middle of court intrigues.”

  “It was his idea. Promise. But in six years’ time…”

  “I thought we agreed eight.”

  “We didn’t finish bargaining. Anyway, that was in another universe. Time’s different there. It’s six here. Five and a half, actually.”

  “All right, clever clogs, we’ll see what we both think.”

  “Feel, you mean. That’s what matters. We don’t owe each other anything. We haven’t promised anything. If we don’t both really feel we want to more than anything in the world, then we’ll marry someone else.”

  “And we won’t even see each other till then?”

  “If Lady K’s at Kzuva, Saranja can fly two of the horses over and bring you back for my birthdays. And you can read all about hawking in the library. And if you’ve got married you’ll have to bring her too.”

  He stopped watching the eagle, turned to her and grinned. She flung her arms around him and laid her head against his chest. He rumpled her hair, a carefully adult gesture, made to maintain the tricky balance to the end.

  “Breakfast,” called Saranja from below.

  They walked down the slope together, not even holding hands.

  APPENDIX

  Fodaro’s Equations

  According to Big Bang theory, in the very early stages of the formation of our universe there were more than the four dimensions we are familiar with. String theory, for instance, involves tiny strings of energy vibrating in ten dimensions of space time. Thirteen also seems to be a popular number. Anyway, once the first few microseconds of the explosion were over, the unwanted dimensions were “folded up and tucked away,” whatever that may mean.

  These conclusions were arrived at by applying complex mathematical processes to the observed behavior of sub-atomic particles—quarks and so on—in gigantic particle colliders, and of light arriving from the most distant reaches of the universe.

  Fodaro came to his rather different conclusions by very similar means. He was able to observe such things as the formation of stars and the outermost limits of the universe through a very powerful telescope—Benayu’s pool—and the behavior of sub-atomic particles in the form of magical impulses. He was also a mathematical genius. He wasn’t, incidentally, an untaught genius. Before he abandoned his career and took up shepherding he was Imperial Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Balin-Balan—the youngest ever to hold that prestigious post.*1 He continued his work in his spare time after his retirement and made his breakthrough when his observations of certain magical anomalies led him to the discovery of a place where our four-dimensional universe comes almost, but not quite, into contact with Jex’s seven-dimensional one. He called such places “touching points.”

  It is impossible for our four-dimensional minds to imagine what such a universe might be like. We can to some extent describe it with mathematical equations, but we can’t envisage it, can’t form any kind of mind-picture of it.**2

  The dimensions of any universe must compose a perfect whole. This means a five-dimensional universe, say, cannot simply have our four plus an extra one, because our four are already a whole and the extra one has nowhere to fit in. This makes it impossible for even one atom of four-dimensional matter to be transferred to a five-dimensional universe, and vice versa. The consequent destruction of matter would involve the creation of energy, as in an atomic explosion.

  Sub-atomic particles are another matter. We are already familiar with these in our own universe, in the form, for instance, of the aurora borealis, which is caused by streams of charged particles arriving from the sun and being trapped by the earth’s magnetic field in the ionosphere. Rather more mysterious are the bursts of gamma rays that appear to emanate from the central bulge of our galaxy, and arrive in our atmosphere carrying the extraordinary charge of 511 kilo-electron volts.

  Particles of antimatter are created in the big particle colliders, but survive only an instant before they collide with particles of matter, wiping each other out and releasing a burst of energy in the process. Fodaro knew nothing of particle collide
rs, but was able to use the touching point he found in a very similar fashion, observing the steady leakage of particles from Jex’s universe into ours and measuring the bursts of energy released when they collided with their four-dimensional counterparts and were mutually destroyed. Owing to the inherent weirdness, to our minds, of a seven-dimensional universe,*3 this energy took the form of what was known to pre-Fodaran thaumatology as “wild magic.”**4 Without understanding its source and nature, over the centuries the magicians of the Empire learned by trial and error to exploit and shape it into a powerful set of tools, usually described as “made magic.”

  Pre-Fodaran theory evolved a complex system of “levels” to account for the observed phenomena. Like pre-Copernican astronomy, this worked well enough for most practical purposes, but at the cost of ignoring an increasing number of anomalies and unexplained phenomena, such as the acknowledged difficulty experienced by almost all magicians in progressing from third-level to fourth-level magic. In Fodaran thaumatology this is accounted for as a result of the different degrees of complexity between universes with numbers of dimensions other than our own. First-level magic, “hedge” magic, uses only the impulses from the stray particles inherent in our own universe; second-and third-level magic uses impulses from the simpler two-and three-dimensional universes; fourth-and fifth-level, confusingly, use impulses from universes with five and six dimensions, and sixth-level uses impulses from any universes beyond that.

  Certain people are born with innate magical power. This is something like a magnetic field, in that it can capture the magical impulses from other universes. The stronger the field, the greater the number and variety of the impulses it can capture. But a magician cannot use it until he or she has learned to control and shape the flow of impulses within the field. What in pre-Fodaran thaumaturgy was called wild magic was the result of random and transient combinations of impulses; made magic was produced by magicians using their craft; while natural magic arose from certain combinations in wild magic that turned out to have survival value and evolved of their own accord into more and more complex forms, such as dragons and unicorns.