Angel Isle (31 page)

That man there now, bustling out of a door, dodging between the wagons, pausing anxiously to check through the file of papers he was carrying, as if searching for a document that should have been there and wasn’t, sighing with relief and hurrying in through another door—not difficult either. Or that grander gentleman stalking up from the harbor, listening haughtily to the expostulations of the seaman-like figure beside him, and followed by a porter wheeling a trolley with a brass-bound sea-chest on it…All so everyday and impossibly different, almost in another universe from the one she knew, the one that had the Watchers in it, and winged horses, and Jex, and the unimaginable terrors of the next few hours…

“At last!” said Saranja. “Look at him! He’s been spinning it out, enjoying himself! He drives me mad, sometimes!”

Maja looked, saw Ribek, sane, beautiful, everyday Ribek, coming out of the door opposite, and instantly felt better. Jex wasn’t the only one who could live in two universes, she thought.

A large man with blubbery lips was talking volubly to him as he held the door, and talked on as they wound their way between the wagons, though most of what he was saying must have been drowned by the wheel thunder. He approached them reaching forward for a hand to shake and starting to introduce himself before he was fully in earshot.

“…Adorno Dorno, Oyster Magister of Barda, at your service. And you three are also Freepeople of Larg, my friend Ribek tells me. Honored, honored indeed…”

Ribek managed to get the introductions in while the Magister was vigorously shaking their hands. If Sponge had known to hold up a paw he would no doubt have shaken that.

“And none of you has ever tasted an oyster! You have waited until you can start at the pinnacle of excellence. Wonderful! Wonderful! Perhaps as a preliminary—ahem—taster to your inspection of our oyster-beds you ought to have your first experience of this wonderful delicacy. You have come to the right man. It is part of my official duties to inspect and license the commercial outlets of Barda, and there are two on our way to the oyster-beds that I would especially recommend….”

Maja quailed. How could she get
anything
down her throat with the terror of the event so close upon them? And Ribek had said that oysters were slippery blobs that you ate not just raw, but
alive
!

“I…I’m not very hungry,” she blurted.

The Magister stared at her, pop-eyed with astonishment, as if he couldn’t imagine the circumstances in which somebody might not want to sample his oysters.

“I’m afraid we made the error of partaking of a substantial repast shortly before our arrival,” said Ribek in his Striclan voice. “We did not foresee our good fortune in encountering such a fountainhead of knowledge so immediately. Perhaps when we have had our fill of the oyster-beds we will be in a better frame to have our fill of the oysters.”

“Excellent! Excellent!” crowed the Magister, covering Ribek with saliva in his excitement. “I shall certainly enter that among the Remarks of Visitors that I publish in the Town Yearbook. Well then, shall we stable your horses and take my barge? Fortunately the tide is flowing toward the full. Or would you prefer to walk? In which case we could save time in stabling the horses and leave them at the gate. We have a strict rule against allowing animals in the oyster fields for fear of contaminating the purity of the waters. The same ruling also applies to those with magical powers, but for different reasons, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Ribek. “What does everyone feel about that? Saranja?”

“Um…er…,” said Saranja. Maja sensed a brief pulse of magic from Benayu, and words seemed to come into Saranja’s mouth, unwilled. “Let’s walk,” she gabbled. “Benayu and I can stay with the horses.”

“It would perhaps be more stimulating to the appetite,” said Ribek, as if he’d noticed nothing remotely odd about the exchange.

“True, true,” said the Magister. “Well, if you’re ready to depart…”

He had a surprising turn of speed for so portly a figure. Even Ribek had to stride out to keep up with his vigorous waddle. Maja started to fall behind and broke into a trot to catch up, almost running headlong into one of the Magister’s sweeping gestures. Instantly she started to fall behind again, trotted, caught up…No, too tiring.

She halted and waited for the others and let Saranja lift her onto Levanter’s back. Benayu had had to come back into this world to greet the Magister and now took the chance to mount Pogo. Saranja seemed to be in a bad mood, probably cross about Benayu telling her in her head what to say just now. And perhaps it was also her way of dealing with the coming crisis. She was scared, and no wonder, and she was ashamed of being scared. It didn’t fit in with her idea of herself and that made her furious.

“Look at him!” she snarled suddenly. “Oozing charm at that appalling man as if he’s having a lovely time!”

“Ribek’s doing fine,” said Benayu absently. “He’s got him eating out of his hand.”

“Yes, of course he has. But he doesn’t need to enjoy it so much! And talking in that stupid voice! I think it’s grotesque!”

She strode on, seething. It was the Striclan voice, of course, that got her goat, Maja realized. She glanced at Benayu, hoping to share the joke, but he was deep in concentration again. Without warning a wave of apprehension washed over her. She felt utterly alone. Jex…

“I am here in the saddlebag, still in my living form. I will at least partially protect you until the last instant. There will not be three separate magical impulses for you to endure. They will be almost simultaneous, and then Benayu will convert you into your inert form. It would be as well to remind him.”

“All right…Benayu? Can I bother you? It isn’t important if you’re busy. Jex says I’ve got to remind you about changing me as soon as it’s over. He says he’ll look after me till the last minute. Something with eyes and ears, you said.”

“Not a problem. You won’t be able to move your eyes, so you’ll only see what’s straight in front of you.”

“That’ll be fine.”

He nudged Pogo closer, leaned over, plucked at her sleeve and effortlessly drew out a single dark green thread, which he coiled carelessly round his thumb.

“Listen,” he said. “I’d better tell you what’s going to happen. This business about the horses actually helps, because it’s the same as at the sheep-fold. You can’t do it if you’re screened, but if Saranja and I stay with the horses I can screen what I’m doing to them separately. I’ll get everything set, so I can do it in a flash, and I’ll keep in touch with you and Ribek in your heads. One of you just tell me when you’re ready. Count ten, and Saranja will take the hair off the feathers. That’ll activate it. We won’t be as close as we were last time, but you’ll still be able to feel the link between it and what we’re looking for, won’t you, Maja?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Right. Then while you’re busy your end Saranja and I will put the wings on the horses and Sponge—I’ll speed that up—and I’ll bring us. I’ve got everything ready to change you into your inert form the moment you’ve found what we’re looking for. I’ll do it whatever else is going on. All right? I’ve told Ribek in his head.”

“I’ve got to have Jex close. Do you think he counts as an animal?”

“I am stone again until you are through the gate. Take me out of the saddlebag and put me in your pouch. Put me on the ground when you tell Benayu that you are ready to proceed.”

Before Maja had finished doing that Benayu was back in the maze of his own mind.

She gazed around. They were traveling up a broad path beside a brick-banked canal, whose waters looked very different from the opaque and sluggish streams of the inner delta, clear and clean enough for her to be able to see a school of silvery minnows scuttling along beside the dark green weed that cloaked the further embankment, all the way from the canal bed to the high-tide mark a few inches above the surface.

The buildings either side were solid but elegant houses that somehow announced their owners’ richness without any parade of wealth. From snatches in the conversation ahead of her Maja could tell that the Magister was telling Ribek about those owners, and the trades that supplied their wealth, and Ribek was making Striclanishly knowledgeable remarks about those trades and at the same time trying tactfully to get the subject back to the history of the oyster-beds.

Yes, of course he was having a good time, and she was glad for him. But underneath, she guessed he was as scared as the rest of them, and this was his way of dealing with it, just as Saranja’s way was to be furious, and Benayu’s was to work on his magic, and hers—hers was to think about Ribek.

There was a bridge across the canal, at which the two rows of handsome houses stopped abruptly. A road crossed the bridge with a ten-foot brick wall on the far side. An iron gate barred the path they were on. There was an odd little Eye on the gate.

As Ribek and the Magister approached, a man appeared, uniformed like a soldier and armed with a pike. He opened the gate and saluted the Magister, but then moved as if to bar the horses.

“The animals are remaining outside, Gidder,” said the Magister. “Two of our honored visitors will remain with them. Supply them with anything they may need as befits Freepeople of our sister city of Larg.”

“There’s an Eye on the gate,” Maja whispered to Benayu.

He considered a moment.

“There to spot magicians,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t have let me through anyway. I wonder why. You’d better go. Don’t want to keep him waiting.”

She hurried to join Ribek, but she needn’t have worried, as the Magister was still impressing the guard with the importance of his visitors. Then all three walked on together through a landscape so different that Maja was tempted to look back and check that the roofs of Barda were still there beyond the wall. This was the same level, stream-threaded delta through which they had arrived, but here as kempt and tidy as that rich man’s garden with the pleasure yachts beside it had been. No tumbledown sheds and barns, no miserable horses in paddocks, only, a few hundred yards ahead of them now, an organized line of sturdy timber buildings along the banks of one of the larger waterways. There seemed to be no one apart from themselves anywhere in all that flatness and emptiness.

“…established seven hundred and fifty-eight years ago,” the Magister was saying. “I am the sixty-third to hold the office of Magister. The oyster-beds themselves are owned by the individual members, but the Guild supervises the processing, checking and marketing. It was set up during the great oyster plague, when all the beds down the whole east coast of the Empire were ravaged by oyster worm. Only Barda escaped. Prices went sky high, our oyster-beds expanded out of all recognition and we have never looked back.”

“How exceedingly fortunate for you,” said Ribek. “Magical, almost.”

“Certainly not,” snapped the Magister. “Our competitors have many times accused us of employing rogue magicians to inflict the plague on them while sparing ourselves, but the authorities in Talagh—as you no doubt know, extremely strict in such matters—made a thorough investigation and cleared us completely. Exceedingly fortunate, yes. According to our records we have nineteen times over the centuries been spared such plagues, while others have suffered. It is thought to be something to do with the quality of the water, which is another reason for our security precautions. Lunatics believe that their ailments will be cured by immersion among the oysters. There is a flourishing illegal trade in bottled Barda water—much of it fake, of course. We attempt to discourage it. That is not the sort of publicity we want to encourage. The excellence of our oysters is advertisement enough.”

“And has that always been the case?”

“Indeed it has. Our earliest records include regular orders from the Emperor’s kitchens.”

“And those actual beds still exist, you tell me? I should very much like to see them with my own eyes.”

“So you shall, so you shall. We will do that first of all. You will want to talk to some of the old oystermen later, but it is high tide, and they are taking their rest. They won’t be returning till the tide is well into the ebb, when the work begins again. Now these beds here on your right…”

He burbled on. Ribek answered just enough to keep him going, but his mind was no longer on it, and he’d almost stopped using his Striclan voice. Maja could understand why. Most of his attention was absorbed by what the waters were saying, or rather singing. She could almost hear it herself, an endless, slow, wavering chant, repeating and repeating itself but never quite the same each time. Utterly, utterly peaceful.

Of course, she thought. The same pattern as everything else that had happened. The Ropemaker would have hidden his material self in a place which only someone from the Valley could find. Only someone from Northbeck. Only Ribek.

They came to a slightly wider stretch of water, almost a pool, where two streams joined and flowed out as one. The floor of the pool was gray with layers of oysters. The tide was almost full, barely moving, but there must have been some faint current because she could see a white down feather moving very gently along, close by the near bank, away from the sea, and realized, from her sense of the secret sound that only Ribek was hearing, that the whole body of water was quietly rotating round some central point, an unending ritual dance, the slowest of slow measures to the soundless chanting.

“Marvelous,” said Ribek in his own voice, his awe wholly genuine. “I was born by a millstream, high in the mountains. I have always had a kind of feeling for water. Never anything like this.”

“How strange,” said the Magister dreamily. “You have never tasted oysters and I have never seen mountains. Ever since I was a boy I have longed to see mountains.”

They stood together in silence, lost in their separate trances.

“Wake up, Maja!”

She shuddered herself into the here and now, tugged urgently at Ribek’s sleeve and felt him do the same.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “Ready?”

She nodded. He took her by the elbow, led her to the edge of the bank and crouched beside her, pointing, as if he were showing her something in the water. She slipped the stone pendant out of her pouch and laid it on the ground.