Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look all in,” said Saranja. “You still do.”

  “I’m all right now. Just tired.”

  “You’ve got to be careful,” said Benayu earnestly. “There’s always a price. Fodaro told you that. The stronger the magic the higher the price. There’ve been beginners who’ve stumbled into something big and come out raving. I don’t think you’re actually doing the magic, but you’re channeling it somehow. And you’re doing it more and more. It’s bound to have an effect.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, you’d better not try that again,” said Ribek.

  “I think I’ve got to,” she said. “I’ve got to learn about it. I think it’s important. Perhaps it’s why I’m here at all, so that I could do this. I’ve just got to practice, and get used to it, like—like learning to kick-fight, I suppose. You must have had to practice and practice.”

  He laughed.

  “Still do,” he said. “Start of each season. I’d be stiff as a plank, else. Same with your magic, I expect, Benayu.”

  “Same stupid little exercises day after day after day,” said Benayu. “Fodaro kept me at it, no matter how much I bucked. He was right, though. I think Maja’s right now. She’s got to learn. But only a bit at a time, or you’ll wear yourself out. Jex will look after her if she gets into trouble, but he’s going to need to be a lot stronger before he can cope with anything really big.”

  “And she’d better have one of us with her, always, when she’s trying anything like this,” said Ribek. “All right, Maja?”

  “All right.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  Twelve uneventful days passed. Morning and evening Maja reached back the way they had come, but sensed no tremor of pursuit. The blaze of magic around Tarshu faded into the distance. Or perhaps the ferocity of the battle had dwindled into a kind of stalemate. It seemed barely to matter. Almost, as the miles flowed steadily away beneath the horses’ hooves or their own feet, Maja came to forget the frightening purpose of their journey. The journey became all there was. They would never have to reach its nightmare ending.

  She used the long quiet hours to think. Her fantasy life with Ribek at Northbeck mill seemed to recede into the remote, unreachable future and became unsatisfying, so she thought about things more near at hand. At first she was preoccupied with coming to terms with her sense of the magical. When its power and reach had first burst on her it had been almost overwhelming, and, except when she steeled herself to face it, she had needed much of Jex’s full protection to shield her from it. It had been like the first sudden strong spring sunlight that, carelessly faced, peels and blisters the winter-tender skin to an agonizing scarlet rawness. Now she was slowly becoming hardened to it.

  Not merely that. Just as the right level of sunlight, sunlight that greets you when you step outside before breakfast with the dew still on the grass and the night chill lingering in the air, makes your skin crawl gently and you sigh with sensual delight, so, she gradually came to find, she relished the magic and mystery of the everyday world streaming round her and through her, the continual half-noticed sense that everything in that world, every pebble, every leaf, every midge, had its own individual purpose and meaning. She did too. She was part of the inward wisdom of the universe.

  “You’re living in a dream, aren’t you?” Ribek said, teasing.

  “I suppose so. Anyway, you’re part of it.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  But how could he not be, when his own Ribek-magic, so confident, brisk, easygoing, tingled continually against her consciousness? She rode pillion with him on Levanter most of the day, and when they walked, both for the exercise and to give the horses a rest, he stayed behind with her for company.

  This, of course, suited her very well. One morning several days later she started thinking about him again, not fantasizing about her future with him but soberly considering the nature of her love for him. She knew it wasn’t a childish crush, because she’d already discovered what that was like.

  Last summer, her aunt had finally decided that Saranja wasn’t coming back. Or perhaps, Maja now realized, it had been because the unicorn magic was beginning to fail, and it had become urgent that somebody was found who could renew it.

  At any rate, a family of second cousins had been invited to stay at Woodbourne—parents, three girls and a boy. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and even Maja had understood that her aunt was hoping that one of the girls might have the gift of hearing what the cedars were saying. The boy had been a friendly, easygoing lad who Maja instantly had decided was the most wonderful person in the world, and had dumbly hung around him at every spare moment she had. Her aunt had noticed, of course, and had told her in front of everyone it was a silly, childish crush, and then shut her in her room without food to cure her of it. Later her Woodbourne cousins had taken the boy behind the barn and beaten him up. The story had got around, and no more families had come visiting. Her aunt had been right about the boy, but Maja’s love for Ribek was not like that.

  Nor was it like what she might have felt for the father she had never known. She could only guess, but she knew that it must be different. It was strange for her to be even thinking about her father. Almost before any time that she could remember she had learned not to ask about him. Her mother would only weep when she did, and her aunt would punish her if she found out, or asked anyone else. It was safer never even to wonder about him, to bury all thoughts of him beneath the stories she used to tell herself of wonderful, impossible adventures among monsters and warriors and mighty sorcerers.

  But now everything had changed. Her aunt was gone, along with the fears and miseries of her childhood, and the adventure was real and wonderful, and though there was plenty to be afraid of in it she felt she could face those fears, and wonder about her father if she chose. But it wasn’t very satisfying. She knew, or guessed, that the reason she hadn’t been allowed to ask about him was that he had done something too horrible for her to be told, so she found it hard to form a picture of him as the kind of father anyone would want to have. In the end she gave up and simply decided that, whatever he was like, any love she might have felt for him would have been different from what she felt about Ribek. The great thing about Ribek was that from the first he had treated her as an equal. Nobody had ever done that before, and her father would always have been her father, never her equal. She needed somebody to love, not as a fantasy, not as a game, but for real, and Ribek was well worth loving.

  And even if she hadn’t had those feelings, Maja would have chosen Ribek to walk or ride with anyway. She admired Saranja enormously. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. Anybody could have seen she was a heroine—such fire and challenge in her glance, such unconscious pride in stance and movement, even in sleep. Maja was simply in awe of her, and would still have been if these qualities hadn’t resonated from her in the world of magic and vibrated through Maja like continuous trumpet music. But that very fire and fineness made it difficult to be fully comfortable with her all day long, in the way she was with Ribek.

  The same was even more true of Benayu. Again, how could it not be? He was a magician. To Maja he crackled all the time, like a fresh-lit bonfire, with his own magical power. The reason they mostly traveled pair and pair, with some distance between them, was to spare Maja the continual mild abrasion of his powers. ( Jex could have absorbed these, but told Maja he preferred a more varied diet. There’d been something about the way he’d said it that made her think that was only an excuse, and actually he was squeamish about feeding off the emanations from a personal friend.) His magic set him apart from ordinary people, and always would do. Poor Benayu.

  Late on the twelfth afternoon the landscape changed. For the past two days the lane they had been following had grown in size as other lanes had joined it, all apparently aiming for some point beyond the line of hills to the north. By the time they had finished climbing that final long slope
it was a well-traveled road, and when they at last wearily crossed the ridge they discovered in front of them an utterly different world from the placid farming country they’d been traveling through.

  “Now that’s something!” said Ribek, reining Levanter to a halt. “Should be quite a bit going on down there, Maja. Nothing by way of Watchers, I hope.”

  Maja peered over his shoulder and saw a level plain stretching north, almost a desert from the look of it, burnt brown by the sun even at this lush season of the year. As a sort of boundary between the two worlds, green hills and brown plain, a big river flowed from the west with an Imperial Highway running beside its further bank. The road they were on descended the hill to meet it at a large town. Part of the river had been diverted to form a moat round the gated walls, but the main channel ran through the middle of the town, with docks on either bank, and then became the outer harbor, and beyond that flowed into the sea between a rocky headland on its southern shore and a vast stretch of marsh to the north, through which another Highway dwindled into the distance.

  This must be a major port. In the center of the city masts of seagoing craft showed above red-tiled roofs. A faint haze, the dust and smoke of human bustle, lay over it all. And yes, there should be a lot going on down there in the invisible world of magic.

  She sensed nothing.

  Even at this distance it should be like Mord, twenty times over. Except that at Mord she’d only just come into her newfound sense, hadn’t really been aware that that was what it was. She hadn’t understood what the sense revealed to her, any more than a newborn baby understands the blur of shapes and sounds and smells that reach it lying in its cradle.

  Now, though, she had learned to look at a town from a distance and read it with her extra sense in much the same way that she could read its larger buildings with her eyes, its turreted walls, its public monuments, its marketplaces and warehouses and so on. Above the buzz of petty magics—made magics, the work of hedge magicians, but still quite different from the natural magics that flowed from tree and stream, companion and stranger—she would be able to sense stronger emanations, or at least the sudden patches of emptiness that showed where some serious magician had put a ward round whatever he or she was doing.

  Not here.

  Surely, at least, there should have been an Eye on each of the main gates. All large towns had them, often dating from long before the time of Watchers, but no. From all this city, nothing came back. She took Jex out of the pocket of her blouse and put him in her pouch. Now the natural magics of everything around and behind her came crowding in on her, but she still sensed nothing from down the hill. Nothing at all.

  Saranja and Benayu hadn’t stopped when Ribek had and were already a little distance down the slope. Maja felt a brief jolt of magic as, without warning, Rocky skittered sideways and back, something so unexpected from him that Saranja lost a stirrup and was almost thrown. Of course Pogo, a couple of paces behind, shied because Rocky had. He would have had Benayu off if Saranja hadn’t managed to grab his bridle, and then dismount. She waited for Benayu to do the same, handed him Pogo’s reins, and started to lead Rocky on down the road.

  Maja felt another, more violent, jolt. Rocky shied, and in the same instant Saranja was flung back up the slope, yelling with the shock of the blow and landing flat on her back. Ribek leaped down and ran to help her. By the time Maja had slid herself to the ground and led Levanter down to join them Saranja was getting shakily to her feet and feeling herself for bruises.

  “It wasn’t me,” she muttered. “It was Zald it didn’t like. And Rocky. It didn’t like him at all.”

  “And me,” said Benayu in a low, puzzled voice.

  He was standing with his back to the rest of them, as he’d been doing since he’d dismounted, turning his head slowly from left to right and back, apparently oblivious to what had been happening to Saranja.

  “I can’t feel it. I don’t know what it is. You don’t get wards that big, far as I know, and if it’s some kind of screen it’s nothing like mine and way beyond anything I could manage. It’s telling me if I go any further I’ll die. It isn’t lying.”

  “Let’s see what it thinks about me, then,” said Ribek. “You too, old fellow.”

  He led Levanter on down the road. At exactly the point where Rocky had shied, Levanter started to do the same, until Ribek halted and turned him.

  “Easy, boy, easy,” he said. “You weren’t just copying Rocky again, were you? It’s what Chanad did to you. Come and take him, Maja, and I’ll try on my own.”

  He turned, walked twenty paces down the road and came back.

  “Didn’t feel a thing,” he said. “Your turn, Maja.”

  She had just enough warning—the light fizz of something utterly new to her waking into life, a burning sensation in her arm—to snatch herself back from the invisible barrier. It didn’t mind Saranja, she thought. It was Zald it didn’t like.

  The amulet? But it wasn’t magical at all now. Unless the black bead…

  There was a large, branched cactus by the road, with a gold ring hanging on one of its vicious thorns and an elaborately decorated head-scarf spread across a flat leaf. Both looked far too good to be left by the roadside. The black bead must do something, only she didn’t know what yet. She hung the amulet on the cactus and tried again.

  There was the same fizz, but no pain in her arm, only a feeling that a hand had been placed against her thigh and was pushing her back. Jex? But his magic (if it was magic) was utterly different. She herself couldn’t feel it at all. Nevertheless she took him out of her pouch and hung him on the cactus too. The whole hillside to left and right of her was alive with natural magic, and she could feel the made-magic impulses from Zald behind her, and the permanent light hum that surrounded Benayu, and the rather different ones from the horses, but still nothing at all of that kind from the city below. And nothing from the invisible barrier itself, until she’d passed through it.

  Then, instantly, it all was there. And yes indeed, there were Eyes on all the gates, including one set to guard the whole width of the river where it flowed between two massive bastions toward the sea. The Eyes were as old as the walls themselves, and that was very old. But apart from them, nothing man-made. All the natural magics were still there, speaking to her as clearly as those around her on the hillside, the stones of the walls, the majestic, calm flow of the river, the buzz of the citizens’ lives, and much more generally, coming from the whole city below, a sense of ease and freedom that she hadn’t felt anywhere else in the Empire. But still no made magic at all apart, perhaps, from one strange, dead patch close to the nearer bank of the river. A ward inside the immensely powerful ward, or whatever it was that closed the city round? What was the use of that?

  “Watchers, Maja?” called Ribek’s voice from behind her.

  She heaved herself back to the hillside and returned to the others. As she crossed the invisible line the small sendings from the city below vanished in the blink of an eye. She picked up Jex and the amulet as she passed the cactus.

  “No,” she said. “They aren’t here. They’ve not been, not for a long while. A very long while. They don’t do magic here. It’s like the Valley.”

  They stood and gazed out over the mysterious city. Behind them, where the road crested the hill, a hoof rattled against loose gravel. They turned. A stout, elderly man was leading two laden mules down the hill.

  “Trouble?” he said. “Something stopping you, right? Must be carrying stuff with powers in it—charms and such. Provosts won’t allow that. Best leave it here, pick it up when you come back. He’d be a bloody fool as touched it if it didn’t belong to him. Cactus would rip him to bits. I’ll show you.”

  While he’d been talking he’d rolled up his sleeve and removed an intricately plaited armband and settled it into a crook of the cactus.

  “Missus has me wear that to keep me faithful,” he explained. “Works a treat, too. Never want to look at another woman while I’ve got
it on. Not my fault, I tell her, if I’ve got to leave it behind while I take the wool down to the market, is it? Either that or starve, I say, and you wouldn’t fancy starving.”

  “Trouble is we’re not coming back,” said Ribek. “We’re going on through.”

  “That case, one of you’d better go down to the city, hire yourself a pass-box at the gate—costs a bit, mind you—bring it back and put your stuff in it. It’ll seal itself shut minute you’re through the barrier, and won’t open again till you’re out the far side. You’ll need to get a move on. Gate closes, hour after sunset.”

  “There’s no way round then?”

  “Not worth thinking about. Easy enough this side far as the river. Back up the hill, right, and right again at the third real road, then down—take you a bit over half a day to reach the river. Then you’ve got to find a boat, take you over to the West Highway.”

  “Surely there’s a ferry,” said Ribek.

  “Provosts won’t have it. They want everything going through Larg. But suppose you’re lucky, beyond the river it’s still three, four times further before you reach the North Highway beyond the marshes, and that’s all desert. Spots may look green enough from here after the rains, but that’s all gone into the ground. No surface water. No way you can carry water enough for the horses. And there’s vicious snakes, and little black scorpions—one sting and you’re dead. You’d have to get some of the desert folk for guides. They’re weird—not like us, but they can find water anywhere, only they won’t do it for chance-come strangers. Worse yet going east. You’ll never get your horses down the cliff, you’ve got to find a boat again, and then it’s all marsh and bog crocodiles, and then desert again to the north. Can’t be done.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Ribek. “We’re going to have to think. Don’t wait for us. Best of luck at the market, and tell your wife she married a good man.”

  “Long as I’m wearing my armband she did,” said the man, and led his mules on down the hill.