The Islands of Chaldea

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Gold-coat and the other soldiers made no objection to any of this. I had the feeling that they agreed with us, but the reason they said nothing may have been that we began going upstairs then, long wooden stairs. The soldiers panted and did not seem to enjoy this. We were all so used to walking up hills that we found the climb no trouble at all. We went down a corridor and then up some long stone stairs, and Rees talked all the way, describing Synon and then Gorse End, and exactly what miserable places they both were. I told him I was relieved to find there were parts of Gallis that were not idyllically beautiful.

  “Oh yes,” he said, as we began on another stone flight, “there are parts of Gallis that no bard will visit, so they get worse all the time.”

  By this time, we had climbed so many stairs that I was expecting us to be imprisoned in a high tower. I was quite surprised when we wheeled aside and clattered through a big anteroom that smelt rather deliciously of warm wood. Logra, I was beginning to see, was hotter than any country I had yet been in. It must by then have been mid-morning and the sun blazed in through a dozen tall windows.

  Beyond the anteroom we marched into a dark corridor running left to right. There was a whole row of doors there, all locked and bolted. We were made to stop by the nearest door, which had more bolts to it than any of the others. While we were standing waiting for a soldier to draw all the bolts back, I could have sworn that someone came out through a bolted door far to the left and dodged hastily back on seeing us.

  Then the door was flung open on a big well-lit space. The soldiers pushed us forward while Gold-coat called out, “Some friends to see you, Prince.”

  We stood in a huddle, staring at a huge hall with a row of empty arches opposite to us, open to the sky, and at the small crowd of people scattered about in it. Prince Alasdair was the first one I saw. He was pale as a ghost, lying on a sofa near the middle of the hall. There were crusty, bloodstained bandages over his legs, one of them yellow with infection. It looked horrible. I knew he had been wounded, but not how badly.

  He stared at us and so did the crowd of his followers. They were all wearing the hunting gear they had been captured in, very threadbare now, but quite clean. Everyone stared at each other for the long minute it took the soldiers to bolt the door outside, and then for the longer minute when they could be heard marching away.

  Then everyone came to life.

  “Finn, you old devil!” someone shouted. “You’ve brought us the green bird!” At which Green Greet took off from Finn’s shoulder and flew from man to man, uttering whooping squawks. Finn began to laugh.

  Prince Alasdair fetched a cloth up from beside his couch and briskly rubbed his face with it. His head was for a moment hidden in a cloud of white powder. Then he threw down the cloth, carefully pulled his legs out from the horrible bandages and leapt to his feet. And there he strode towards us perfectly well, with his face a healthy colour, though I could see the carefully mended rip in his trews where he had been wounded.

  “Beck!” he cried out. “Beck, by all the gods—!”

  To my extreme astonishment, my aunt ran to meet him and they embraced like lovers, she saying, “Oh, Allie, I thought my heart was broken when they took you!” and Prince Alasdair simply saying, “My love, my love!”

  Well, well! I thought. I had no idea Aunt Beck had been carrying a broken heart all this time. I hadn’t even known that she and Prince Alasdair knew one another. But there she was, not only restored to her usual self, but looking years younger, with her face all rosy and delighted and her hair still wild from the wind. It occurred to me that this was why Aunt Beck had not refused outright to go on this rescue mission – which I knew, when I thought about it, that she was quite capable of – and why she had kept going when we were landed in Bernica with no money. Well, well.

  By this time, all the other prisoners had crowded around us, so I pulled myself together and made introductions. It was clear that Finn needed none. Ossen, the courtier who had shouted to Finn, very quickly drew him aside to a seat by the open archways, where he produced a stone bottle and a couple of big mugs. I fear that before the morning was out Finn was quite disgracefully drunk! I introduced Ivar instead. Someone said, “My cousin Mevenne’s son?” and Ivar was pulled aside to give news of the family almost at once.

  I introduced Ogo next. I felt he deserved some attention. I explained how he had been left behind in Skarr. Prince Alasdair said, with his arm around Aunt Beck, “Have you told them you are a man of Logra, lad?”

  Ogo said wryly, “I tried.”

  “I’ll sort it out for you,” Alasdair promised. “Never fear.”

  “And these,” I said, “are Rees and Riannan from the Pandy in Gallis. It was Rees’s invention that brought us here.”

  “The Pandy?” said someone. A fine big man with a most noble beard pushed his way towards them. “Bran’s children?” He was wearing faded bardic blue. It dawned on me that he must be my father. I was overcome with shyness and decided to keep my mouth shut from then on.

  Aunt Beck put a stop to the eager explanations about the balloon, and how Bran had started it by inventing the floating sledges, when she pointed at me. “She’s the one you should be asking after, Gareth. She’s your own daughter.”

  “What, Aileen?” my father said, staring at me. “But she was a tiny child!”

  “She’s had time to grow up,” said my aunt, “and become a Wise Woman.”

  I could see my father could think of nothing to say. After a while, he said cautiously, “And your mother, Aileen?”

  “Dead,” said Aunt Beck, and she shot a look at me to warn me to say nothing of the Priest of Kilcannon. As if I would have done. I was as tongue-tied as my father, but I supposed we would manage to talk to one another when everyone had finished telling of our adventures.

  But there seemed to be no time for that. Prince Alasdair said, “Rory, you had better go now and get that fruit Lucia promised us. And say we need some wine too. You can tell her why.”

  The man who nodded and went off was, I was sure, the same man I had glimpsed dodging back through the locked door earlier. This time he went to a different door, which opened quite as easily.

  “They’re all unlocked,” my father said, seeing me staring, “except the one we came in by. We’re taking part in a farce here.”

  “Which we’d better get on with,” Prince Alasdair said. “The Ministers will be here any minute now.” He went to his couch and climbed nimbly back into the dreadful bandages. One of the other prisoners brought him a large box of powder which Alasdair applied to his face with a bundle of feathers. In seconds, he was a pale, wounded invalid once more. “You new arrivals had better sit about looking gloomy, being upset at being taken prisoner, you know.”

  None of us knew what to make of this, but we spread about the great room, doing our best to look miserable. Ivar, Riannan and Rees sat together on the floor, cross-legged and mournful. Aunt Beck went and sat next to Finn, where she eyed him until he guiltily hid his mug under the seat. Green Greet settled droopingly on the back of Finn’s chair. Ogo and I, with natural curiosity, went over to the archways to see what was beyond.

  Nothing was beyond, except a terrace with a few chairs on it. There was a low fence at the edge of the terrace and, beyond that, a huge drop down to the courtyard where we had come in. From our height it looked as small as this page of paper. The place did make a perfect prison. A spacious, airy, perfect prison. Once all the doors were locked of course.

  My father had come over there with us. He still seemed embarrassed. Ogo said to him, “I suppose you’re all secretly busy making ropes?”

  My father laughed. “We could be. But what good would it do? We could get to the ground easily enough, one way or another, but we’d still be in Logra, behind the barrier.”

  While he was speaking, there seemed to be a low, growing roar coming from the city beyond the courtyard. We saw the courtyard gates slam open and two horses galloped in and stopped as if they could go no f
urther. Even from up here, I could see that the beasts were covered with foam. The men on their backs, who were both wearing some sort of flapping purple robes, flung themselves off the horses and staggered, obviously as tired as the horses. People ran from the gates and the buildings around, shouting excitedly. Meanwhile, the roar from the city grew and grew.

  “I wonder what’s going on,” my father said. “Those look like—”

  He was interrupted by a green whirr. Green Greet shot out of the archway right beside my ear and plunged out over the fence.

  “—wizards,” my father finished, leaning over to watch Green Greet plummet until he was a tiny green blur, then spread his wings and sail this way and that around the courtyard. “Does he do that often?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s rather a sober bird really.”

  The tired wizards were being helped into the palace by an eager crowd now. When they were out of sight, my father turned back into the wide prison, saying, “Best get into our act, then.” And sighed.

  And Green Greet was there again, soaring over the terrace on wide wings. “The barrier is down!” he screamed. “The barrier is down!”

  “Perhaps,” Ogo suggested, “we ought to start making ropes now.”

  Green Greet had barely landed back on Finn’s shoulder when there was a rattle of bolts at the locked door. It was a useful noise. We had time to sit on the floor in suitably doleful attitudes. But Aunt Beck simply stayed where she was, sitting very upright on the couch beside Finn, and looking every inch her usual self. In fact, I think she looked better than she ever had. She had colour in her face and a near smile.

  The door was flung open and soldiers marched in, followed by Gold-coat who announced menacingly, “The Regent’s Ministers to interview the Prince. Show respect.”

  Show respect? Why? I wondered, as a group of lavishly-dressed fellows followed Gold-coat into the room. There were pasty, pompous ones, small weaselly ones and large loutish ones, and a couple who were just plain ordinary. And I could see at a glance that every one of them was an empty-headed fool. They looked majestically around and the soldiers hurried to bring them chairs so that they could sit face to face with Prince Alasdair. While they were arranging themselves, one of the doors further along – one of those that looked locked but obviously wasn’t – came open and the man who had been sent to ask about fruit put his head around it. He saw the Ministers and dodged hurriedly out again.

  “We have passed the laws you advised us to pass,” a pasty, pompous Minister announced, “but we have yet to see any benefit from them.”

  “Well, such things do take time,” Prince Alasdair said in a weak, ill voice.

  “You mustn’t tax the Prince’s strength,” Aunt Beck said severely. “When did you pass these laws?”

  They stared at her, much as people stared at Green Greet when he talked sense. My father said, melodious and bardic, “This lady is a Wise Woman of Skarr. Please attend to her every word.”

  “Oh,” said the Minister. “Well. We passed the laws yesterday, Madam.”

  “Then it’s no wonder nothing’s happened yet,” said my aunt. “You’ll need to give it at least a month.”

  “Yes, Madam,” they said.

  One of the small wispy ones began fluting away then, something about bye-laws in the city, and I became too bored to listen. Instead, I thought about how suddenly and mysteriously the barrier had come down. Perhaps all it needed was for someone from outside Logra to cross it. Had it come down as soon as our balloon went over? Those wizards, or whoever they were, had plainly ridden from a long way off, perhaps from the coast, travelling much more slowly than our balloon. And I remembered then the sudden strange gust of wind that had hit us as we crossed into Logra. That must have been the force of the barrier going down. Then, later, when those other gusts had hit us, those must have been from other parts of the barrier, the forces rushing inland to converge on where we flew. I thought we had been very lucky to survive those.

  Thinking this way, I missed a great deal of droning talk. When I started hearing it again, Prince Alasdair was saying in his weak, invalid voice, “This is purely because the price of food is so high. Did I not tell you to make the merchants give up their stockpiles to the government? I know their barns are stuffed with corn.”

  “But the merchants would be so angry if we did that,” a Minister quavered.

  “Reassure them,” Prince Alasdair sighed. “Now that the irrigation canals we designed for you are finished and working, next year should be a bumper crop. They can make huge profits then – and you can tax them, of course, so that—”

  The locked door opened with a slam. A man in official-looking robes pushed past the soldiers guarding it and hurried up to the pompous Minister. He bent and whispered urgently into the Minister’s ear. The Minister jumped to his feet, saying, “Is that the time? Then—” He beckoned furiously to the other Ministers. “Something has come up,” he said. “We must leave you, Prince.”

  They all went rushing, helter-skelter, out through the door, and the soldiers went rushing out after them.

  “Ah,” said my father. He sat in one of the ring of empty chairs, grinning. “They’ve just heard that the barrier is down, right?”

  “And they’ll find plenty of new problems to worry about,” Prince Alasdair said, stretching his arms happily. He worked his feet out of the bandages, saying, “There have been droughts and flooding and near civil war in Logra since the barrier went up and Regent Waldo started ruling. Waldo is so bad at ruling. I honestly don’t know what they’d have done without our advice.”

  “So you secretly govern Logra, do you?” my aunt said. Prince Alasdair nodded, and grinned at her like a naughty boy. “And,” asked my aunt, “how do you come to know about irrigation canals? There has never been any such thing in Skarr.”

  “Naturally not,” the Prince said. “It rains in Skarr. I know about canals because I went to the palace library and read about them.”

  “How?” asked Aunt Beck.

  “I borrowed a wizard’s gown and nobody looked at me twice,” he said. “Someone had to do something about the poor people here. Waldo’s notion is just to execute anyone who disagrees with him – which, you must admit, doesn’t get anything useful done.”

  “True,” said my aunt. “And then you seemed so certain that the work you ordered had been done. Did you see them build your canals?”

  Prince Alasdair nodded. “We all did. Ossen got us horses and Gareth borrowed a whole bundle of wizard’s gowns and we rode out almost daily to keep the men up to their work. Paying them was difficult, though. Gareth and I had to raid Regent Waldo’s treasury more than once.”

  My father coughed. “I sang the guards to sleep, naturally. No one was hurt.”

  My aunt said, almost indignantly, “So, when I thought of you lying wounded in prison, it was no such thing.”

  “The wound did take a while to heal,” the Prince admitted. “Long enough for me to discover how useful it was.”

  By this time, we were all starting to laugh. Ogo whispered to me, “This is the most enterprising prince I ever imagined. Do you think he’d have me as a courtier?”

  “Why don’t you ask?” I said.

  As I said it, doors opened all along the room. People came in by the dozen, carrying bowls of fruit, trays of little loaves and big platters of meat. Some of them had bottles of wine, others glasses and plates, and others again brought chairs, trestles and boards, all of which they most quickly and efficiently assembled into a table with a feast on it.

  “Wow,” said Ivar.

  “Courtesy of the palace stewardess,” my father said. “Here she comes, the lovely Lucella.”

  A most striking little lady followed the busy servants in. She was very dark, both in her hair and her skin, and her face had a high-nosed sort of beauty I had never seen before. She was most demurely dressed in white satin with a blue stripe in it, which, although it was obviously a uniform, seemed to make her even more beautif
ul. My father later told me that she was Roven, from south Logra, where everyone looked like this. Whatever, it was very clear to me that my father was at least half in love with her. Why is it, I thought resentfully, that everyone I’m fond of seems to love someone else? But Lucella was so charming that I found it hard to blame my father.

  She said, “Please forgive the delay. We had to wait for the Ministers to leave you. But—” She took up her striped apron and twisted it hesitantly. “But I really came because one of the prisoners claimed to be a native of Logra.”

  “Me,” said Ogo. He was staring at her. “I was born here, but my uncle left me behind in Skarr.”

  Lucella was staring at Ogo as hard as he was staring at her. She said, “Can you be—”

  Ogo said, “Are you Luci? My nurse was Luci.”

  And she cried out, “Oh, you are, you are! You’re my little Hugo!” She rushed to Ogo and flung her arms around as much of him as she could reach. He towered over her. He had to bend down to hug her.

  Hugo, I thought. Of course his name was really Hugo. It was just his Logran accent that made us all think it was Ogo.

  Lucella kept hold of Ogo and stood back from him, beaming. Ogo was beaming even more broadly. “You used to sing to me and tell me the most wonderful stories,” he said.

  “I loved you as my own,” Lucella said. “My, you’ve grown big!” Then she turned to Prince Alasdair and said, very seriously, “You must keep this from Regent Waldo. He’ll kill him if he knows.” Everyone stopped smiling at once, but I nearly laughed at the appalled look on Ivar’s face when she went on, “You see, Hugo is the king’s son.”

  Next thing, I felt Plug-Ugly push against me so hard that I fell over just as a great wind lashed through the room. It smashed up the feast on the tables, hurling jugs and bottles into the air and swirling people, like dummies, out of the row of doors that were slamming open and shut. It swept me across the floor the opposite way with a blast that threw me out on to the terrace and nearly took me over the edge. I heard my father‘s voice sing a great pure note, and the wind seemed to quail at the sound. It saved me because it gave me time to hang on to the fence. But, when I looked back, everyone had gone. The room was empty except for furniture flying about and dashing itself against the walls.