Chaos Quest (4 page)

Five times now they had stepped into the pool and emerged from the cave to find day or night or twilight; a ruined chapel and a city spread before them, or bare hillside and the distant flickering fires, and each time it had been only seconds before Morgan muttered, “No. He’s here, but not now.”

For two days they had waited as the sky in the little pool changed and changed again, venturing out into the Wildwood to rest or eat, for it seemed impossible to do either in the briar glade.

Morgan prodded the sleeping Thomas with the toe of his boot and got to his feet. “It’s a while since we looked. We ought to check.” Thomas nodded, not properly awake, and followed him yawning.

The sky in the pool was the washed, clear blue that comes after rain, wisps of white cloud trailing across it like tattered banners.

Thomas looked at Morgan expectantly. He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different if we go through. I can’t tell from here.”

They clasped hands and stepped …

… through, into a morning that smelled of spring and green things growing. Thomas looked around and saw a chapel on the slope in front of them, not ruined this time, but whole, and recently built by the look of it.

“Well, it’s a different …” he began, turning to speak to Morgan, stopping as he saw his face.

“He’s here.
Now
. We’ve found the right time.”

Thomas let a slow breath out. “Can you tell where?”

“That way.” Morgan pointed immediately to the walled town that clustered along a spur of rock a mile or two away. At the far end a castle dominated the highest point. Streets sloped away from it down the rocky spine to another large building, a church or monastery, near the bottom of the hill on which they stood. Between the hill and the monastery lay a loch, silver-blue in the morning light. “Somewhere in the town maybe.”

“So now we …”

“… go and find him and bring him back through the Door and take him to the Empty Place or the Heart of the Earth.”

“And if he doesn’t want to come?”

But Morgan was already walking towards the town and didn’t answer.

Erda, Kate and David had become quite used to each other now and one or both of them managed to visit the house on most days, finding some excuse or other for their families. That part wasn’t difficult: there were so many after-school clubs and friends they could be visiting that it never occurred to their parents to wonder at these absences, which were, in any case, seldom very long.

Erda’s speech was becoming more fluent and she no
longer seemed such a strange creature as she had at first. Not just because they’d become used to her either; it was as though she absorbed facts from her surroundings, plucked knowledge straight from people’s brains.

She looked less odd now, dressed in clothes that Kate and David had managed to find that more or less fitted her. Kate had also persuaded her to comb her hair so that she looked less as though she’d blown in with the last high wind.

That was another weird thing, Kate thought, for as soon as she’d explained it, Erda was able to draw the comb smoothly down the length of her waving, dark red hair as though it had last been combed moments before.
Or as though she’d told it to unt
…

Don’t be stupid, Kate thought. As if anyone, however odd, could think their hair out of tangles.

Still …

She and David had been so taken aback when Erda had said she remembered seeing them before that they hadn’t really pursued it at the time. Now, as she sat teaching Erda to play snap, she brought the subject up again.

“Remember when you said you’d seen us when the man pushed you out of that shop?”

“Yes.” Erda put down a seven.

“How long ago was that?”

Erda waited until Kate put down the Jack of Hearts before she answered.

“I don’t remember.” Three. “Last week sometime.”

Eight.

“Soon after you came to the garden?”

Eight.

“Snap!” Erda picked up the cards and added them to her pile. “Two days after, I think. I don’t remember well.”

Kate was running out of cards. She put down the Queen of Diamonds.

“To David and me, it was much longer ago.”

Erda looked at her, head tilted to one side.

“Maybe,” she said finally, putting down a two.

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes, when I go out, it is different.”

Kate put a four on the pile.

“Different how?”

“Different words, different clothes. Different houses.”

Kate’s heart thudded heavily against her ribcage.

“Different … time?” she asked slowly.

Erda tilted her head and thought again.

“Don’t know. Time…” She thought about the word while she put down a ten. “I don’t understand time. The words are not in my head to know it yet. But maybe … maybe I come out in different times.”

Kate put down her last card. Ace of Clubs.

“I win,” said Erda happily.

After Kate had gone, Erda made a sandwich with jam and bread and raisins and went over what she and Kate had said in her mind as she enjoyed the sweet tastes.

She decided to go out in search of words that would tell her about time. She finished the sandwich, pulled on her shoes and tied the special strings.

As she did so she was aware of something new. It pulled at her, urging her to go out of the house. Since it was what she wanted to do anyway, she let it tug her towards and through the front door.

Outside lay a bright morning that smelled of spring and green things growing. In front of her, where the street usually was, lay a grassy slope and off to the left a wood, the wind whispering among the tender new leaves.

When she turned around the house was still there, shimmering as though it lay underwater.

“Stay there,” she said to it and set off towards the wood, letting the odd sensation inside her draw her forward. There was a smell from somewhere that she recognised as woodsmoke.

She listened to the soft sounds of the wood: birdsong, leaves growing, the tiny noise of mice breathing in their sleep, the clatter and whirr of a startled woodpigeon.
This way
, said a voice in her head, tugging her onwards.

Kate phoned David as soon as she got home.

“Maths again?” he said, answering.

“No, listen. I’ve just been talking to Erda. I asked her if she was sometimes in different times and she wasn’t sure she understood, but she thought she might be.” There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. “David?”

“I was just thinking it through. It doesn’t sound very definite, does it?”

“No, but …”

“Do
you
think she understood you?”

“Yes. Maybe not exactly, but yes. David, I think that maybe she did have some sort of accident and she’s come unstuck in time, or got stuck in the wrong time.”

“
David
!”

“Yeah dad?”

“
Christine’s been calling you for tea
.”

“Sorry, I didn’t hear.”

“
Come on
.”

“Okay. Kate: got to go. Talk to you later.”

The phone went silent and Kate threw it down on her bed in frustration.

“Kate?”

“Yes, Mum?”

Her mother pushed the door open and stood there, obviously fuming.

“Where have you been?” Kate opened her mouth to reply but her mother cut her off. “You forgot, didn’t you?”

Kate’s hand flew to her open mouth as she remembered to her horror that she had been meant to come straight home from school to look after Ben so that her mum could get her hair cut.

“Oh no Mum, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”

“Well, that doesn’t really help does it? I’ve had to cancel the appointment and believe it or not, Ben was looking forward to going out somewhere with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said again miserably.

“It’s about time you started taking a bit more responsibility around here. You’re not a child any more.” Ruth turned on her heel and went out, closing
the door hard behind her.

Kate threw herself on the bed and pulled the pillow down over her head.

The wood was beautiful, full of so many different things. Not like the city, where you could only hear people, drowning out everything else. Here she listened to the words of the trees and the birds, the mice and the fungi and the deer, words about sunlight and water and seeds and nests. It seemed to open in front of her, drawing her on. She was intrigued by the constant tug she felt and followed it, eager to find its source.

Morgan and Thomas had avoided entering the city and instead followed a route that took them round the south side of its walls following the line of the red sandstone crags and the little river that fed the loch. The few people they met glanced at them curiously, for their clothes were not the same as those of the inhabitants, but nor were they so different that they caused comment.

Morgan walked like a man in a dream, and though he said nothing Thomas felt a tight knot of anxiety for him in his stomach. He still couldn’t imagine what Morgan meant to do when he was finally able to confront the Stardreamer.

Just as he was thinking this, Morgan stopped,
frowning, and stood still for several seconds, as though listening.

“He’s not where he was. He’s moving. This way.” He set off between a straggle of buildings, heading south west now instead of due west. They soon left the buildings and the little fields behind and were back in uncultivated land, with springy heather underfoot and gorse and hazel around them.

Less than ten minutes later Morgan stopped again and gripped Thomas’s arm. “He’s closer. Can you feel him yet? He’s coming to find us.”

Thomas felt all his hair stand up.
I was wrong to come
, he wanted to say.
Let’s go back. Tell them we couldn’t find him. Let’s run away while we can
. He bit the words back and tried to look as though he felt calm. Morgan was depending on him to help … somehow.

They walked on, towards destiny and doom.

Erda lay on her back in a clearing, watching drops of sunlight slide through the mosaic of leaves above her. She joined them for a little, moving with the breeze, feeling the warm sun feed her. She turned over and pushed her face into the grass, inhaling the green sappy scent, with the underlying smells of earthworm and beetle.

Refreshed, she got to her feet and went on. She was close to the source of the frail tugging now. Soon she would find where it came from.

Ahead of Morgan and Thomas was the edge of a great wood of birch and pine and oak. Many small paths led into it, but there was no obvious way to decide which, if any, was the main one. There was no sign here of any of the villagers, though the smell of charcoal-burning came out from the eaves of the forest.

Thomas put a hand on Morgan’s arm. “Let’s stop here for a while, rest and eat before we go in there. We want to be ready when we meet him.”

Morgan nodded. “All right. That makes sense.”

They sat with their backs against a nearby boulder and got out the cheese and dried apples and bread they carried. Thomas went off a little way to refill their water bottles from a stream. Morgan ate absently, his eyes on the wood.

Erda walked between the warm trunks of the trees, occasionally putting her hand on red-brown or silvery bark, feeling the slow movement of the tree’s life beneath it.

Now that she was close, she could feel the consciousness behind the force that pulled her. It was a man, and he was aware of her as no one else in this world was. How could this be? No one else, not even Kate and David, with whom she had shared so many words, could see her like this. She walked a little faster.

Thomas packed away the last of the food and fastened his pack, talking of nothing to break the silence that seemed to grip Morgan. There was no alternative now but to go into the wood and face whatever lay in wait for them there.

He straightened up and shouldered the pack, looking back towards the town for anything that might reasonably distract Morgan from the wood.

“Look.”

The single word froze Thomas momentarily. He raised his eyes slowly to Morgan’s face, saw all the colour gone from it and turned to look at whatever had come for them.

At the edge of the wood stood a girl, just a girl, slightly built, with long, dark-red hair and outlandish clothes. As he looked, a sudden gust of wind ran out of the wood around her, flattening the heather between them.

Thomas found his voice.

“Is the Stardreamer with her?”

“She is the Stardreamer.”

For some seconds, Thomas had no idea what to think or say, then he decided that it was impossible he had understood Morgan properly.

“What do you mean?”

Morgan didn’t look round, his gaze locked into that of the girl who stood at the edge of the wood. “She is the Stardreamer.”

“But she’s just a girl. How can she be?”

“Can you not feel the power in her?”

Thomas shook his head. “No. It is you who can feel the Stardreamer’s power, not me. Are you sure about this?”

Morgan nodded.

At the edge of the wood the girl raised her hand and pushed the hair back from her face and as she did so, Thomas thought he saw a brief flash of light behind or perhaps around her. She stepped out of the trees and walked towards them.

“What do we do now?”

His eyes still on the Stardreamer, Morgan smiled grimly. “We go to meet her, of course.” He turned and looked at Thomas then and gave a sudden heart-felt grin. “Or we could turn and run, if you think you’re fast enough.”

“Faster than you anyway.” Thomas rose to the bait
automatically and the tension of the moment broke.

They walked to meet the unlikely figure of the Stardreamer.

As they drew closer together, Thomas began to feel, or to imagine, a tingling in his fingertips which spread all over his skin, a prickling. He shook himself like a dog.

“Now you feel it,” said Morgan beside him.

To Erda, walking slowly out from the wood, it was as though she followed a shining thread now towards the man who knew her. He was tall, with brown hair and green eyes and clothes that were different from hers. A word she didn’t recognise spun its way from his mind to hers.

Stardreamer
.

She searched among the words she knew, but could find nothing to make sense of it.

The other man with him was a little shorter and more slightly built, with black hair and a fine-boned face. He seemed to be about the same age as she was, here, while the man who knew her was a few years older. She walked towards them through the sudden wind that had sprung up to run across the heather from the wood, watching the thread that linked her to the brown-haired man grow shorter and thicker. Five paces apart, they stopped and stood in silence, absorbing each other, each waiting for what the other would do.

In the end it was Erda who spoke first. “I felt you. You were looking for me.”

Morgan swallowed and opened his mouth, but no words would come out.

“We thought you might need help. We thought you
might be lost.” Thomas didn’t know what moved him to say it.

“Like Kate and David,” said Erda. They looked at her uncomprehendingly. “They want to help me. They think I am in the wrong place.”

“Are you?” asked Morgan quietly.

Erda thought. “Maybe. I don’t know where I should be. Maybe here, maybe there.” She shrugged. “You knew I was here.” Morgan nodded. “Not you.” She looked over at Thomas, who shook his head, then turned back to Morgan. “How did you know?”

“I’m not sure. I can feel if you are close or not, like …” He cast about for something that would serve for comparison, “like a magnet.”

“Magnet.” She repeated the word, frowning at him slightly as she tried to make sense of what the word was telling her. It was very confusing. She would ask Kate and David. She turned her attention back to the men in front of her. “You found me. Now what will you do?”

Here we go
, thought Thomas.
Now it all comes apart
. He braced himself for whatever was about to happen.

“We could go for a walk,” said Morgan. “We could show you where we came from.”

The all-powerful Stardreamer, the fragile girl in front of them, nodded her head smiling, and Thomas wondered anew if she was really what Morgan thought, or what she appeared to be.

That night, Tiger died. David had known with his head
that it would happen one day soon. He was an old cat – fifteen and a bit – and for the last year or so he’d been losing weight. He’d always been a big lump of a cat, who dominated the others in the neighbourhood not because he was aggressive, but by sheer bulk, but recently he’d got scrawny; David could feel his hip bones and shoulder blades when he picked him up.

They’d taken him to the vet, who’d said he had kidney failure and given him some tablets that perked him up for a while, but lately he’d gone off his food and David had realised he wasn’t going to live much longer, although he was still pottering about happily enough.

Even that afternoon he’d been out in the garden, lying slit-eyed in an unseasonably warm pool of sunlight, purring to himself while David lay on his stomach on the grass beside him, reading.

He’d jumped – a bit stiffly – up onto David’s bed in the evening, as he always did, waiting to curl up next to him at bedtime, but sometime during the night he must have got down again and made his way to the spare bedroom.

David found him there the next morning, curled neatly up as though he was asleep; but it was instantly obvious he was dead.

“Dad! Come here – quick. It’s Tiger.”

They’d lifted him out from under the bed and laid him on his favourite cushion and stroked his fur smooth then looked, for the last time, at the wonderful shapes of the little pads on his paws and the elegant tufts of fur on his ears. Alastair had dug a grave under the apple tree and lined it with grass cuttings and they laid him in and
covered him with a pillowcase so they wouldn’t have to see the earth flatten his fur when they piled it back in and firmed the turf down again.

“He was a good old cat,” said Alastair, “I remember Mum bringing him home. He was such a scrawny little kitten; we could never believe how big he got.”

This was the beginning of a whole series of Tiger stories that they told each other regularly, like family fairy tales: “When Tiger got stuck in the chimney” and “When Tiger disappeared”.

They stood on the dewy grass and told the stories again and laughed. Christine watched from an upstairs window and when she thought the time was right, came down to join them.

“Poor old Tiger,” she said. “You know, we had lots of cats when I was small, but I think Tiger was the
friendliest
cat I ever met. He was really special.”

David gave a watery smile. “You’re right. He was really special,” he said, then went to his room to get ready for school so she wouldn’t see him crying.

It wasn’t just Tiger he’d lost, you see. It was another link to Mum gone. Tiger had been her cat; she’d chosen him and David felt that a memory of her lived on in the cat. Now that was gone too. He sat on his bed, wiping away tears with the heels of his hands. No one else would understand how he felt, not even Kate. He blew his nose and started downstairs.

Halfway down he stopped to listen to Dad and Christine talking.

“We’ll get another cat of course,” said Alastair.

“I like a cat around the place. I’ve always been used
to them.”

“I’ll suggest it to David when he comes downstairs. We’ll go and look for one at the Cat and Dog Home at the weekend.”

“I don’t think I’d say anything to David about a new cat just yet – give it a few days,” said Christine.

“Why? You saw how upset he was about Tiger.”

“That’s the point. Tiger was his mum’s cat, not just any cat. I don’t think he’ll feel that another cat can take his place just yet.”

There was silence for a few seconds.

“Stupid. I should have thought of that myself. You’re right of course. We’ll leave it for a week or so.”

David finished his journey downstairs more noisily than usual.

“Bye Dad, bye Christine. See you later.”

He closed the front door behind him and set off for school.
Funny, how people could surprise you sometimes
.

Morgan’s mind was in turmoil. He’d started this search expecting a hopeless confrontation with someone whose physical presence would embody the Stardreamer’s power. He’d assumed he would be some gigantic, terrifying figure. Instead Morgan was faced with this young and fragile girl, with the dark red hair and beautiful trusting face and eyes the colour of copper coins.

He had no idea what to do.

They walked together in a loose group, Thomas talking to the girl. Her answers were strange, sometimes like those of a child. Morgan himself felt as though he’d been struck dumb. It was clear she had no idea of her power, but Morgan could feel it in the air around them, crackling like fire.

“What is your name?”

The question roused him to speech at last.

“Morgan.”

“And I am Thomas, his brother.”

She looked from one to the other, her head tilted.

“Yes,” she said. “I understand. I am Erda.”

Erda
. It was a strange name, one Morgan had never heard before, though why he found that surprising he couldn’t say. Thomas had picked up a bit of wood somewhere and begun whittling it as they walked along. The girl watched his hands closely as he worked.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a bird.”

“Out of wood? How can you change one to the other?”

Thomas laughed.

“Not a real one. A model.” She looked at him, uncomprehending. “Like a picture.”

“Ah, a picture.” She nodded. That word meant something, though she still didn’t fully understand. He meant something different from what she knew.

His hands moved so quickly that she couldn’t follow them as he turned the wood to and fro, shaping it with the knife.

Morgan, meanwhile, was trying to imagine his way
ahead. They would walk to the door in the cave by the chapel and step through into the Wildwood, then they would lead her to the Heart of the Earth and persuade her to step in. Somehow.

For the first time he felt disquiet about what he was planning to do. If he did it, this frail and powerful girl would be trapped forever in the Heart of the Earth, dreaming the Worlds safe. He had not expected to feel guilt at the prospect of succeeding.

“What is wrong?” Erda had stopped and turned her innocent golden gaze on him. “The thing that binds us … it twists. Something troubles you.”

He felt his heart give one great beat, like a hammer stroke.

“Nothing.” He forced a smile. “There is nothing wrong. Look – the bird is nearly finished.”

Thomas, who had stopped dead when Erda spoke, pulled himself together and turned his attention to the carving. A few seconds later, he handed Erda a little hawk, so swiftly carved as to be more of a sketch than a portrait, but somehow capturing the essence of the bird.

“It’s for you.”

“For me? I can keep it?” She was looking at it closely. When he nodded she tucked it away in a pocket.

Instead of leading them back exactly the same way he and Thomas had come, Morgan had chosen a route that skirted the southern edge of the town. He could see the chapel now and beyond it the dark slit of the cave mouth. His agitation grew as they drew closer.

“Let’s stop here for a minute for a drink and a rest,” he said.

Thomas looked at him in surprise, but Erda sat down immediately among the heather.

“Yes,” she said, looking at Morgan. “Rest and you will feel better. In the film it says that.”

“Film? What’s that?”

“I watch it at the house. Kate and David showed me. Words, pictures …” Her words died away, leaving Morgan and Thomas even more puzzled than they had been. She leaned over and pulled at the bow slung across Morgan’s back. Thomas noticed how he flinched away when she touched him.

“What is this?”

“A bow.”

“What is it for?”

“Shooting.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ll show you.” He stood and unslung the bow, fitted an arrow and fired it, at nothing in particular, in the direction of the chapel.

“Let me try.”

“All right, but …”

She took the bow from his hand, and the arrow he offered, drew the bow and shot. The arrow landed a little further away than Morgan’s had, Thomas noted.

“Why do you do this?”

“To hunt. Rabbits, deer …”

“To stop life?” She seemed puzzled.

“Yes, for food. Some people do it for sport – to enjoy themselves.”

“They enjoy stopping life? Strange. Does it not hurt them?”

It was Morgan’s turn to look puzzled now. “No, how could it?”

But Erda didn’t answer.

They walked on again, stopping to pick up the arrows as they went. It was early afternoon but as they drew near the chapel, there was no one in sight. They paused for a moment and Erda looked down at the town stretched along its rocky backbone below them.

“They do not have so many words now as in the other time.”

“Can you hear them?” asked Thomas, intrigued.

“The words come into my head.” She tried to explain.

“I hear them inside and the world tries to tell me what they mean.”

That, more than anything that had happened so far, convinced Thomas that the girl was what Morgan thought she was.

They were close to the cave mouth now, standing a little way below the chapel.

“I will go back now,” Erda announced.

“What?” said Morgan, hoping he had
misunderstood
.

“I like this place, but I will go back now.”

“But you can’t,” said Thomas desperately.

“Why?”

“We want to show you our home,” said Morgan quickly. “It’s just a little further. Please come.” He put a hand on her arm to draw her towards the cave mouth, but she shook it off.

“No. I do not want to go with you.”

“But you have to. Please.” He grasped her arms and
started to pull her along with him.

“NO!”

The shout seemed to rip the air. Impossible that it should have come from the girl in his grasp. He rocked on his heels as if a great gust of wind had shaken him and began to pull her along again. Dimly he could hear Thomas shouting at him to stop, but he couldn’t. This was what he had to do. It was part of who – of what – he was.

The world shattered around him.