[Abhorsen 03a] - Across the Wall

by Garth Nix

  Kilman saw this reaction as suppressed joy at the good news, and was about to launch into further grandiose announcements when a woman stepped out of the crowd and onto the gangplank. She was much younger than Kilman—but the sort of woman who could be anywhere between sixteen and thirty and very striking in looks and stature. She was at least six foot two, and looked taller in her plain black dress, with a long silver scarf draped over one shoulder like an arrow, emphasizing her height.

  “Sir,” she said, in Mainland so untainted by accent that it was clearly not her native tongue. “May I ask from whom you purchased this island?”

  “Why, little lady,” Kilman answered, looking down on her from the high end of the gangplank, hoping she wouldn’t come up any farther, “I purchased this island from the Lisden Fish Export Company, for the sum of one point seven five million gold bezants.”

  “Ah,” said the woman, who knew that the Lisden Fish Export Company had been superseded by the Lisden Fish Enterprise Cooperative one hundred seventy-six years ago, and so couldn’t sell anybody anything. She turned and spoke briefly to the crowd in their native tongue, explaining that the poor short man with the badly fitting toupee was a crazy millionaire who’d been the victim of a confidence trickster. They should humor him, provided it was not too difficult. Spare him embarrassment, she asked. Be kind, and in due course we will tell him the truth about his purchase.

  The crowd nodded, waved, or spoke their agreement and dispersed, laughing and talking among themselves. Kilman watched his audience disappear, disgruntlement showing in the folds of flesh about his mouth.

  “Why are they going?” he snapped. “I didn’t say that they could go.”

  “They’re going to prepare a proper welcome for our new owner,” the woman invented, seeing that he was quite hurt, and a little angry.

  She felt sorry for him, having to wrap an ego the size of the legendary Great Kranu Hunter of Remm in flesh not much bigger than the Kranu lures the hunters put down the hot holes. She took a few steps back down the gangplank and slumped a little.

  “Who are you anyway?” the proud owner of Lisden asked as she retreated. He suddenly felt an interest in her now, even an incipient fondness. She wasn’t as arrogant-looking as he’d first thought.

  “My name is…in Mainland, you would say Malletta, or Maryen…even perhaps Margon.”

  “Okay, Margalletta,” said Kilman, who only ever remembered numbers properly. “Why don’t you get hold of a wheeler and show me over my new property?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” replied Margalletta (as she was now resigned to being named). She slumped a little more, and gripped the rail of the gangplank as if overcome by weakness.

  2. SIGHTSEEING

  wheelers—and their theoretically impossible system of motivation that relied on a refusal to rotate at the same speed as the planet—had not arrived in Lisden. There was a steam car instead, a two-hundred-year-old vehicle of doubtful provenance. It had been locally repaired several times, so the panel work, while distinctive, was no longer representative of any particular manufacturer. Similarly, any badges, ornamental exhausts, or hood ornaments it might once have had were long gone. A stuffed parrot hung from the khat-catcher at the front of the boiler, but this was clearly not a factory-issue embellishment.

  Margalletta sat, or rather slumped, behind the wheel. Kilman sat in the back. Instead of leather upholstery he had a fringed carpet. Margalletta told him this was a local tradition—the island’s ruler always had such a carpet: lining a chariot; as a saddle blanket for horse or camel; or under the howdah of an elephant. Kilman was pleased by this image, unable to discern that it was a complete fabrication. The only elephants or camels ever seen on Lisden appeared in several very old books.

  For all its odd appearance, the steam car was mechanically sound. Once it had built up sufficient pressure for the safety valve to scream alarmingly, Margalletta engaged all six drive wheels and shot off up the road, taking the corners that switch-backed up the island’s central mountain with considerable elan, choosing whichever side of the road took her fancy.

  Kilman, enquiring about road safety in a voice of blustering, ill-concealed fear, was informed that this was the only vehicle, and everyone knew she was taking him up the mountain. So there was no danger from horse-drawn vehicles or the occasional camel. Oh yes, the ceremonial camels had bred in the wild….

  Kilman kept his nose perpendicular to the window. Looking for camels, but also seeing the deep blue-gray-green of the sea suddenly meeting the blue sheen of ice; the picturesque fishing village nestled at the apex of a triangular bay; the orange and lemon orchards rising up the terraced slopes. All of it safely maintained by the Summer Field that made this oasis possible amid the vast sea of ice that had sprung up millennia ago as the result of a misguided application of a Winter Field. The ancient savants who had invented both were very successful at starting the fields, and phenomenally unsuccessful at turning them off.

  Not that anyone would want to turn off Lisden’s field. Or banish it, since no one really knew what made the Fields occur. Some said mirrors in the sky, and others fire or ice elementals mixed together.

  Kilman certainly didn’t want to change his oasis. Despite being obscure, it was only eighteen days’ sail from the Republic, and there was a growing desire among the wealthy citizens for travel and well-regulated adventure.

  Lisden would perfectly meet the demand of this new industry. In his imagination he saw hostelries spring up all along the coast, and houle gardens. There would be khat netting parties and Kranu hunts with steam harpoons. The lemon groves would give way to a dalliance maze, where masked frolics could be conducted, with refreshments and prophylactics sold at exorbitant prices.

  Margalletta, sharp eared and sharp eyed, heard him whispering to himself, and saw the thick mouth move, saliva wetting the lower lip, as if he were about to moisten his finger to count money. She no longer felt sorry for him. Instead, a slight twinge of alarm caused her to open the power venturi further and accelerate rather violently out of a turn. Kilman didn’t really own the island, but he thought he did, and to such a man, that might be enough to eventually make it so.

  “There is a lookout at the top of the mountain,” Margalletta announced, as she slowed to negotiate another corner. “You will be able to survey the whole of the island from there…the entirety of your realm.”

  “My realm…” Kilman repeated, his chin thrusting out and up, right hand once again thrusting between the third and fifth gleaming bronze jacket button. “My conquest!”

  Margalletta suppressed a shrug of distaste. “Conquest” indeed! The man was more unpleasant than she had thought, and clearly not an object of pity. He was also dangerous. Kilman’s wealth gave him a weapon—and he lacked both the morality and the sense to use it wisely.

  Still, by calling the island his conquest, he had clarified Margalletta’s role.

  To have a conquest, one must conquer an enemy. If he had truly conquered the island, she would be his enemy. Now, though he only thought he’d conquered the island, it might still become a reality. Margalletta would be his enemy then, so she might as well think and act like an enemy now. Logic was not her strong point, but she rarely needed it, having intuition and common sense instead.

  “This road will have to be widened,” Kilman pronounced a few minutes later, as they bounced around yet another bend.

  “At least four lanes. Of maybe we could get one of those cable-car things…you know.”

  Margalletta did know. Unlike most of the islanders, her parents had dragged her around many parts of the globe, believing travel to be far superior to a school education.

  One of her most unpleasant memories was of being stranded for hours in an antique clockwork cable car, swaying a hundred span above an icy crevasse, the wind screeching through a gap under the ill-fitting door. It had taken everyone on board six hours to rewind the mechanism, taking it in turns. She still had nightmares about cold, heights, and a slow
ly turning key.

  Her silence did not dissuade Kilman from further musings. A few corners on, with perhaps a third of the mountain still to come, he suddenly sat up like a spring-wound Archimedes jumping out of a model bathtub.

  “A railway! It could circle all the way around, with stops every forty-five degrees of circumference. Viewing platforms. Bars. A summit restaurant. The Kilman Express.”

  “A railway?” asked Margalletta. “There was one once. A clockwork rail, to take the tailings from the glazmium mine.”

  “Glazmium! No one told me about glazmium!” Kilman squawked. Fear and greed were evenly balanced in his voice, but the scales were teetering. Margalletta decided to give them a push.

  “Oh, there’s no glazmium now,” she said brightly. “Only the waste from the mine. We used it as infill for the break-water. And the village. Not to mention this road.”

  Kilman was silent for a while; then Margalletta saw him take out a slightly soiled dove from his right sleeve and shake it awake.

  It was one of the new paper-and-blood doves, short-lived but swift. He whispered to it with his habitual secrecy and cast it out the window. The wind shook it into life and it grew plump, winging down to the waiting ship.

  Margalletta drove with newfound glee. She had defeated him so easily, with a lie about as digestible as a logy Lisden haddock.

  On the next corner, the dove was back. Obligingly it flew into Kilman’s lap and expired, becoming paper again, with a message shining wet and red upon the sheet.

  “The breakwater and the village?” murmured Kilman, reading the message. “Well, I guess it must have been mighty low-grade glazmium. My Bonesman on the Gad says his skull hardly chatters. Was it buried a long time ago, Miss Margalletta?”

  The unexpected counterattack is the most effective. Margalletta flinched, nodded halfheartedly, and sat up straighter, taller by several inches. Kilman disgusted her now and, being cleverer than she thought, frightened her more too. For his part, Kilman felt her shadow fall across him and increase as she stretched. His previous good feeling, dissipated by the glazmium scare, ebbed further. He was tired of the road, tired of the car, and tired of its driver.

  “How long till we get to the damn top?” he asked, querulous, as if he’d missed his breakfast by several meals. “And what’s there anyway?”

  “I believe I mentioned the view,” Margalletta replied stiffly. “It is most spectacular from the lighthouse.”

  “Lighthouse! Why didn’t you say so? I love lighthouses!”

  He did, too, though Kilman had never actually bothered to set foot in one. He liked pictures of lighthouses, and the idea of lighthouses. The only thing wrong with lighthouses was that they cost money instead of making it. That was why they were the natural monopoly of governments. In Kilman’s worldview everything that cost money and produced no revenue was the business of the Republic.

  He was unaware that the Lisden lighthouse was a great revenue producer. It had begun life as the folly of a Lirugian colonial governor, grown to maturity under a Hamallish one, and been bastardized by a Treton, who used it as gull-shooting platform. But as far as anyone living could remember, its main purpose was as a giant trellis for passion-fruit vines, and its biannual crop was flavorsome, heavy, and lucrative.

  To Kilman, at first sight, it just looked as if it were painted a particularly rich green. He didn’t really see it anyway, for his imagination had added gas flares, spelling out KILMAN’S OBSERVATORIUM in letters of fire. It would be huge, a landmark for all the visitors to the island, seen from every angle, the back-drop of every organized and expensive activity….

  He didn’t even notice the vines as they parked next to the entrance, and Margalletta jumped out to unlock the lighthouse door.

  3. DEPARTURE

  “the lighthouse is sixty-four merads, or 189 spans high,” Margalletta said, as she trod purposefully up the winding stairs. “There are 277 steps, of varying height, due to the different building techniques employed and different builders over the seventy-seven hundred years it was under construction.”

  “Where’s the altivator?” asked Kilman, chuckling to show it was a joke. He knew about lighthouses. He had open-cut diagrams of them. Books with plans. A snow dome featuring a famous lighthouse on some rock in the Boratic Ocean. He forgot its name.

  Margalletta led the way at a cracking pace, rejoicing at the wheezing noises behind her, praying he would have a heart attack. Not that she believed in a single God, though most of the islanders did. Just in prayer. It was good for you, even if it didn’t work.

  Kilman wheezed, but it was only cosmetic. No heart attack was in the offing, and none eventuated. They both reached the top breathless and red-faced, but with arteries intact and pounding. Margalletta opened the door, pulled-back hair encountering the wind and defeating it aided by a large black comb and rigid preparation that morning. Kilman’s toupee, less disciplined, rose from his scalp and flapped like a hatch on a hinge, till he clapped one hand upon it and pushed past Margalletta in an urgent, embarrassed rush.

  She waited for a few minutes, then closed the door and went down. Fortunately, the steam car was on the opposite side from the balcony door, so there would be no need for further panel work. The passion fruit hadn’t fared so well, as Margalletta discovered when she walked around—the vines were all torn away near the top. There was a particularly nasty bare patch, just where the balcony railing would have been, if only the Treton governor hadn’t dismantled it for being Hamallish and getting in his field of fire.

  Curiously enough, one of Mr. Kilman’s blood-and-paper doves had fallen out of his other sleeve and seemed unharmed by the fall. Margalletta picked it up and whispered into its ear, breath bringing it slowly to life.

  “Hello. Is that Mr. Kilman’s ship? I’m afraid there’s been an accident. I gave Mr. Kilman some bad news about his purchase, and he…he…”

  Margalletta released the dove into the wind and let them imagine her sobbing. She watched it fly down to the golden ship and she laughed, laughed madly, the sound twining up around the lighthouse like the vines and off into the bright-blue sky of summer.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE HILL

  “The Hill” was written for an interesting international publishing scheme, in which a bunch of publishing houses in Europe and Allen & Unwin in Australia decided to simultaneously publish the same collection of short stories in English and four European languages, with the theme of the new millennium.

  I was one of two Australian writers invited to participate, and I wrote “The Hill” in an attempt to try to tell an overtly Australian story—something I’m not known for, since nearly all my work is set in imagined worlds. This proved to be somewhat problematical, particularly when in the first drafts of “The Hill,” I made the major characters part Aboriginal and tried to inter-weave a backstory involving Aboriginal myth and beliefs about land. I knew this would be difficult to pull off, but I didn’t expect my Australian publisher’s reaction, which was basically that, as a white Australian, I simply couldn’t use either Aboriginal characters or Aboriginal myth. My initially simplistic attitude was that, as a fantasy writer, I should be able to draw on anything from everywhere for inspiration; that I could mine any history, myth, or religion.

  After some discussions with both the publisher and an Aboriginal author, I realized that the issue was more complex, and that many Aboriginal people would feel that I was not inspired by their myth but was appropriating something valuable, one of the few things of value that hadn’t been taken over in the process of colonization. It would be particularly hurtful because, as an Australian, I should know that some Aboriginal people would consider this yet another theft.

  So the fantasy element of “The Hill,” inspired by some Aboriginal myths, was removed, and I rewrote it in a more straightforward way. However, given the constraints of the multilingual publishing schedule, and some misunderstanding along the way, the original version of the story is the one that got translated and is in
the Norwegian, French, Spanish, and German editions. Only the English-language version is different.

  I’m still not quite sure where I stand on the matter of allowable use of myth, legend, and history, save that if I do decide at some point to seek inspiration from the rich traditions and lore of the Australian Aboriginal people, I will ask permission first.

  THE HILL

  rowan sniffed as the awful hospital smell met him at the front door of the Home. A mixture of antiseptic and illness, hope and despair, churned by air-conditioning that was always slightly too cool or slightly too hot.

  He ignored the reception desk, which was easy, since no one was there, and went straight up the stairs, leaping two at a time, unconscious of the old eyes that watched him, remembering when steps were not beyond them.

  His great-grandfather’s room was the first on the left after the nurses’ station, but no one was there. Rowan stuck his head around to make absolutely sure, then continued on to the television room at the end of the hall. He slowed as he approached, reluctant as ever to see the group of old people who suffered so much from Alzheimer’s or senile dementia that they couldn’t speak or move themselves, so they just sat watching the TV. Or at least had their faces pointed toward the set. Rowan wasn’t sure they saw anything.

  They were there, but his great-grandfather wasn’t. Sister Amy was helping one of the old ladies sit back up. She saw Rowan and gave him a smile.

  “Come to see your great-grand pop, then?” she asked. “He’s out in the garden.”

  “Thanks,” said Rowan. “Is he…?”

  “He’s having one of his good days,” said Amy. “Bright as a button, bless him. I only hope I do as well at his age. If I even get that far, of course. Now, up we go, Mrs. Rossi!”