The Islands of Chaldea

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Meanwhile, Aunt Beck went with her lovely swinging stride and Ogo marched like a pair of scissors beside her, down the hill to the river and across the stepping stones there, while I came galumphing after.

  Dark shapes came out of the fog to us on the other side. “There they are now,” said my distant cousin Ivar. We had not seen him for the fog until then. “Ogo seems to have got it right for once. You can strike up now, fellows.”

  “What is this?” demanded Aunt Beck, standing like a ramrod on the last stepping stone with brown water swirling below her red heels. But her voice was nearly drowned out by the sudden squeal and chant from the top of the bank as at least four pipers started on the ‘March of Chaldea’.

  I was quite as astonished as my aunt. An honour of pipes was quite unheard of, at least since the days when we were the Twelve Sisters. But I could now see that there were six pipers up there – more than they had in the castle.

  “I said, what is THIS?” my aunt yelled.

  “Nothing, my dear cousin. Don’t be alarmed,” said Ivar. He came right to the bank and offered her his arm. “The King insisted on it for some reason. He said the ladies must be brought in with due honour.”

  “Hmph,” said Aunt Beck. But she took his arm and stepped on up the bank. Ivar is a favourite of hers.

  I felt better for seeing Ivar there too. He is dark and skinny, with a long neck with a big Adam’s apple in it. I consider him very handsome with his beaky, jagged profile, dark eyes and jutting cheekbones. And he makes good jokes too. Although he doesn’t know it yet, I have chosen him to be my husband when the time comes and, until then, I feel free to admire him greatly in secret. All the same, I wondered, as I scrambled up the bank, what had got into King Kenig, Ivar’s father, to escort us with pipers like this. I know the King believes in doing everything the old way, now that Logra is off our backs, but this was ridiculous!

  In fact, I was quite glad of those pipers. There is something about a night with no sleep that weakens your legs. It is quite a steep climb up to the castle and without the steady, skirling beat ahead of me I would have made heavy going of it. Or I might not have got there at all. The fog was now so thick that it could have been easy to miss the way, for all I knew it so well.

  As it was, I never saw the pipers clearly, just followed them until, under the wet black walls of the castle, they peeled smoothly away, all except one – Old Ian – who led us solemnly up the steps and through into the castle hall.

  All was set for dinner there, everyone seated and the serving-people standing by the walls. There was a lot of yellow light from more candles than I could count. This surprised me greatly. King Kenig is even more fiercely economical than Aunt Beck – and she is a byword for it in the countryside. Old Ian led us solemnly up to the top table, piping the whole way, and stopped when we got there, halfway through the tune.

  Ivar dug his elbow into Ogo and Ogo bowed to King Kenig sitting there. “I-I’ve brought the ladies to you, sire,” he said.

  “Round by Kilcannon Head, I imagine. You certainly took your time,” the King said. “Get away to your place now.”

  Ogo turned around with his face very white and the eyes and mouth in it set in straight lines. I have seen him look like that often, and often after the children have been jeering at him. Once or twice, I have seen him, wearing that same straight face, standing in a lonely part of the castle with tears rushing down his cheeks. As he disappeared to a distant table, I thought the King could have been kinder.

  Aunt Beck thought so too. “There is a fog outside,” she said.

  “Never mind. You’re here. Come up, come up,” said the King expansively. “Take a seat by me. Both of you.”

  I was awed. I have eaten at the castle many times, but never at the top table. Ivar had to push me up the step and into a chair. There I sat and stared around. The hall from here looked small and deep and the tapestries on the walls looked terrible. King Kenig had ordered the wall paintings covered up with embroidery because he said that this was the old way. The trouble was that most of the ladies knew nothing about embroidery and had had to learn as they went along. Their mistakes were very evident in the bright candlelight.

  But it was quite possible that Queen Mevenne had arranged it on purpose as a protest. There she sat, along from the empty chair beside the King, looking like a dark night of the soul. She is quite handsome and her hair is much browner than Aunt Beck’s, but she carries with her such an aura of darkness that you could swear she had raven hair and blue skin like a corpse’s. Aunt Beck says “Nonsense!” when I tell her this, but I notice she seldom talks to the Queen. The castle children whisper that Queen Mevenne is a witch and murmur of queer doings at the dark of the moon. Aunt Beck says “Nonsense!” to this too, but I am not so sure. It is one drawback to my thoughts of marrying Ivar, knowing I should have a mother-in-law like Mevenne.

  Beyond, with another empty chair in between, sat Ivar’s elder brother Donal, heir to the throne, with candlelight shooting ruddy beams from his beard and his ranks of gold bracelets, and making a white flash of his teeth as he smiled at something his mother was saying. I do not like Donal either. He looks like a barbarian, but he is a very smooth and clever man indeed.

  Beyond Donal and another empty chair was the old Dominie who taught us. His eyebrows were frowning out like crags …

  I suppose I should have been wondering about all those empty chairs, but before I had begun to think about them properly, pipes sounded again with a dreadful sudden loudness and, to my astonishment, King Kenig stood up. Everyone naturally stood up with him. We all looked to the door at the back of the table where a procession came pacing through, following the pipers.

  At first, all I noticed was a crowd of splendid robes. Then I saw that the foremost of them contained none other than the Priest of Kilcannon, very tall and thin and sour. His eyebrows rival the Dominie’s. My heart sank at the sight of him, as it always does. I always have a horrible moment when I think that this man might have been my stepfather, had my mother lived. He is the kind who bleaches everything with virtue. But I had never known the King stand to him before. For a moment, I wondered if King Kenig had taken up religion as part of his effort to bring back the old ways. Then I saw among the other robes one of red and gold and the elderly, tired man, kind but stately, who was wearing it. He was the only person there in a crown.

  “High King Farlane,” Aunt Beck murmured beside me. “Ogo might just have warned us.”

  But Ogo wouldn’t, I thought. He had expected us to know. Logra only has the one king, and no one ever could get it through Ogo’s mind that lesser kings like Kenig were any kind of king at all. When Ogo said “the King”, he had meant the High King over all Chaldea, naturally, and we had not understood him – even I hadn’t, and I had argued with Ogo about it often enough.

  When the piping and the grating of chairs and benches had stopped, King Farlane was standing behind the special tall carved chair left empty for him.

  “We are called here on a matter of justice,” he said. “This must be settled before we can go any further. We invoke the favours of all high gods and lesser spirits and thereby open this hearing. Will Kinnock, Priest of Kilcannon, please state his case?”

  “I certainly will,” the Priest said grimly. “I accuse Donal, Prince of Conroy and Kilcannon, of robbery, arson and murder.”

  “Denied,” Donal said calmly, and he turned his arm around to admire the bracelets on it, as if he were a little bored by the matter.

  “Denied?” snarled the Priest. His black eyes glared from under his great tufts of black eyebrow. “Do you stand there and have the gall to deny that, two nights ago, you and your band of ruffians rode up to Kilcannon and set fire to my house?”

  Quite a number of people gasped at this, including Ivar. He turned to Donal, glowing with surprise and delight. Ivar shows a regrettable tendency to admire his elder brother. And a childish one. After the first glow, Ivar’s face went dark and peevish. I heard him mutter
, “Why didn’t you let me come too?”

  “Answer me!” thundered the Priest. “Before I bring down the curse of the gods upon you!”

  Donal continued to turn bracelets around on his arm. “Oh, I don’t deny that,” he said casually. “It’s the charge of robbery and murder I take exception to. Who died?”

  “Do you deny you went off with all my sheep? Where are my goats and oxen, you bandit?” raved the Priest. He was shaking with anger so that his fine robe rippled.

  “The animals?” said Donal. He shrugged – which made the Priest madder than ever. “We simply drove them off. You’ll find them wandering the hills somewhere if you care to go and look.”

  “You – you – you—!” stuttered the Priest.

  “I repeat,” Donal said, “who died?”

  “A fair question,” King Farlane put in. “Was anyone killed?”

  The Priest looked as if he had bitten on a peppercorn. “Why, no,” he admitted. “I was out with my novices rehearsing for the full moon.”

  “Then there is no charge of murder to meet,” King Farlane pointed out. “And it seems that there was no robbery either. There is only the charge of burning not denied. Prince Donal, what reason had you for burning this man’s house?”

  “Reason, sire?” Donal said blandly. “Why, I thought the Priest was inside it of course. It is a great disappointment to me to see the wretch strutting in here alive and snarling.”

  I thought the Priest was going to dance with rage at this. If I had liked Donal more, I would have cheered.

  “Sire,” said the Priest, “this barefaced wickedness—”

  “I object,” said Donal, “to being accused of wickedness. What has religion got to do with right and wrong?”

  “You snivelling sinner!” thundered the Priest. “Religion has everything to do with right and wrong! Let me tell you, Prince, your heathen ways will bring this fair island of Skarr to her knees if—”

  “And what have my morals to do with politics?” snapped Donal. “What a man does is his own to do, and no concern of the gods or the kingdom.”

  “This,” shouted the Priest, “is the speech of one who has wilfully taken evil to be his good. I denounce you before the High King, your father and all these witnesses!”

  By this time, King Kenig – not to speak of most of us standing at the tables – was looking extremely uncomfortable and making little movements as if he wanted to intervene. But the High King stood there, turning his tired, kindly eyes from the Priest’s face to Donal’s, until the Priest raised both his bony arms and seemed to be going to call curses down on the castle.

  “Enough,” King Farlane said. “Prince Donal, you are baiting this man. Priest, what damage has the fire done to your house?”

  The Priest shuddered to a halt and took his arms down. “Not as much as this evil young man hoped,” he said slowly. “It is built of solid stone, roof and all. But the door and window frames, being wood, are mostly burnt.”

  “And what of the inside?” the High King asked gravely.

  “Luckily,” said the Priest, “the roof sprang a leak in the rain and most of it was wet inside. This godless animal threw a brand inside, but it simply charred the floor.”

  “So what cost would you estimate for repairs?” the High King continued.

  “Six ounces of gold,” the Priest said promptly. Everyone gasped. “Including the leaking roof,” he added.

  King Farlane turned to Donal. “Pay him that amount, Prince.”

  “I protest, sire,” said Donal. “He has gold enough off us in temple dues. A more grasping person—”

  “Pay him,” repeated the King, “and the matter will be thereby settled for good.”

  “Sire.” Donal bowed his head dulcetly and stripped off one of his many bracelets, which he handed to the person next to him at the table. As the bracelet went flashing from hand to hand towards the Priest, Donal said, pretending to be anxious, “Pray have it weighed, Priest. It may be nearer seven ounces.”

  “No need,” said the High King. “The case is concluded.”

  The Priest received the bracelet, glowering, and it seemed we could all sit down to eat then. But I doubt if the Priest enjoyed his dinner much. He looked sour enough to turn milk.

  “Hm,” said Aunt Beck. “Hm.” She took a small rye loaf off a towering basket of them and pushed the basket on to me. “That was all very nicely staged, wasn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” I whispered. “Donal and the Priest hate one another, everyone knows that.”

  “True, but there had to be a glaring reason, I guess, for the High King to come here,” my aunt observed. “There will be a private reason too. As we have been specially summoned, we may well discover what it is before long.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I have in mind,” my aunt mused, tearing her loaf apart and reaching for the butter, “two things. First, that our cousin Donal, while addicted to jewellery, seldom wears quite so many bracelets. That man can scarcely lift his arms. And second that I have never known our cousin the King trust Ogo with a message before. Planning lies behind both these things. You’ll see.”

  Blow me down, she was right! We had scarcely finished a splendid dinner, entirely without porridge, to my great joy, and the two kings had scarcely risen and withdrawn to some private place, when Donal passed casually along behind our chairs. He was indeed holding his arms rather straight down by his sides. “Ivar,” he murmured to his brother, “you and Beck and Aileen follow me, will you?”

  We followed, across the platform and out by one of the doors at the back of it. There Donal led us on a corkscrew path through private corridors I did not know, and finally up a curving flight of stairs to a heavy door.

  “I have given out that Beck and Aileen have gone home,” he remarked over his shoulder as he rapped on the door.

  “And why, pray?” murmured my aunt, not as if she expected an answer. I think she was just giving voice to her annoyance that Donal should so coolly organise her movements. Our family is used to coming and going as it pleases.

  The door was opened by one of the robed attendants of the High King, who stood back and ushered us inside without a word. The room beyond was one I had never seen before with great windows that, but for the fog, would have given a wide view southwards over the sea. As it was, the fog was thinning and giving way to a red sunset, making the light quite confusing, since the room was lit with a tall lamp and many candles.

  The High King was sitting with King Kenig on his right and Queen Mevenne on his left. Two more attendants stood in the background, but I scarcely looked at them. The other people in the room were the old Dominie and the Priest of Kilcannon. My heart began to thunder in my ears as I realised that great doings must be afoot, to cause Donal and the Priest to come together in the same small room.

  Ivar was as astonished as I was. “What’s going on?” he demanded, making a hasty bow to the two kings.

  “Please take a seat,” said the High King, “and we shall tell you.”

  King Farlane was not a well man, I saw, as we sat on the low padded stools put ready in front of him. He was huddled in a royal plaid above his scarlet robes and someone had put a brazier near him for further warmth. But it was his face that showed his illness most. It was white, with a yellowish tinge, and the skin of it was very tight to the bones. What spare flesh there was had drawn into deep wrinkles of pain. But his tired eyes were not subdued by his disease. They gazed at us with a shrewdness and sanity which were almost startling.

  “As you know,” he said to us – all of us, though I think he spoke chiefly to my aunt – “ten years ago, the magicians of Logra cast a spell on our islands of Chaldea so that no one from here, however hard they try, can get to Logra.” He nodded to the Priest, who was so grimly eager to speak that he was sidling in his seat.

  “We have tried, gracious king,” the Priest burst out. “We have searched the whole of Skarr for some inkling of the spell. We have gone o
ut – I myself have gone out in boats repeatedly – as far as the barrier in the sea, where the boats turn aside as though a current takes them, though there is nothing to be seen. And we have used every craft the gods grant us to break the spell. But we have found no way to break this spell.” He subsided, sort of shrinking into himself gloomily. “I have failed,” he said. “The gods are not pleased with me. I must fast and pray again.”

  “There’s no need to reproach yourself,” King Farlane said.

  Donal could obviously not resist muttering, “Och, man, leave your gods to punish you. If they are that angry, they can surely take away your next dinner for themselves.”

  At this, our old Dominie gave Donal a mildly quelling look and turned his head questioningly to the High King. King Farlane nodded and the Dominie said, wagging his white eyebrows sadly, “I have had my failures too. It pains me, as a scholar, to say this, but I have now searched in every library on Skarr and journeyed to Bernica to search there too, without stumbling across a single hint of how this spell was constructed.”

  Oh! I thought. This explained those lovely unexpected days when I had walked to the castle for my lessons to find all the other children rushing around the yard, shouting that old Dominie was on his travels again.

  “On the other hand,” the Dominie continued, “the clue may lie all around us in the geography of our very islands.”

  I sighed. The Dominie had a passion for geography. He was forever making us draw maps and explaining to us how the lie of the land influenced history: how this inlet made a perfect harbour and caused the town to grow, or how that lone mountain sheltered this valley and made it so fertile that wars were fought for it. Sure enough, he went on instructing everyone now.

  “As you know,” he said, “our three islands form a crescent with Skarr to the north, Bernica due west and Gallis in the south, slanted south-eastwards, while Logra forms a very large wedge to the south-east. Now I have it in mind that the three Chaldean islands could be seen to form the sign for the dark of the moon, which also happens to be the sign for banishment. It would take no stretch of the imagination for the Lograns to see Logra as the full moon bearing the shield of banishment before it. The Lograns, as you know, went to war with us purely and simply because their gods told them it was their right to conquer Chaldea—”