Maddigan's Fantasia (6 page)

Almost at once the land
began to swivel and buck. Hills hunched up higher on either side of them.

‘This way – I think,’ called Bannister, riding his bay horse and guiding Maddie’s van, which bumped along at the head of the caravan, winding along the vague road. Light shone over his shoulder onto the map he held stretched out in front of him, then reflected back onto his frowning face. Garland thought she could almost see roads and place names marked in shadow on his skin. At last he looked up, and signalled back along the line towards Goneril’s wagon at the rear, waving them all onwards with the map as it were a flag of battle.
Garland
, riding Samala, trotted forward anxious to be in the front of the procession. After all Maddigan’s Fantasia should be led by a true Maddigan.

‘I remember this part of the road,’ Yves was saying. ‘Well, I think I do. We’re on track. We wind between the hills and come to the Thelwell Gorge in a mile or two. And there’s that settlement at the other end of the gorge. We’ll be able to put on a performance and earn ourselves fresh milk and eggs. Bacon too. They run a few pigs.’

‘Eggs and bacon!’ said Nye, rubbing his stomach, and pulling a face so that those around him laughed.

A kilometre and a half later, the hills stretched themselves
even higher. Sharp rocks broke through the skin of the land as if something from deep in the dark heart of the world were gnawing its way into the light of day. The highest peaks had a little snow on them. The gorge grinned wolfishly out at them as they drove bravely towards it. The track tilted down. The rocks tilted up, and in its struggling but determined way the Fantasia tilted itself downwards too, first one van and then another. The gorge had its difficulties, but the Fantasia was glad to be in a familiar place, glad to feel sure of itself once more.

‘Careful! Careful!’ shouted Yves for, though downhill was much easier than uphill in some ways, downhill had dangers of its own kind particularly when there was ice on some corners. Garland dismounted and let Lattin lead Samala to the line of horses that straggled after the first three vans. Then she
scrambled
into her own van and sat beside Maddie, who was driving, inching along at the head of the line.

Garland remembered the gorge well, and felt all the familiar Fantasia relief at being in a place she could be sure of. But as they went down between the rocks she looked up and briefly glimpsed the two men on their black horses riding ahead of them along the top of the gorge. And, though she was still
distrustful
of the boys, she distrusted those men even more. One of them, glimpsing her upturned face perhaps, lifted his hand waving down at them. Garland did not wave back. She knew he was not being friendly.

She turned her head and found she could make out Eden and Timon, side by side, standing on the running board of Goneril’s great van, and talking up to Tane who walked beside them … but, as she watched them, Tane left the boys, striding away between the stony flanks of the gorge and the moving line of the Fantasia as well as he could, making his way towards Maddie’s van at the head of the procession. ‘Hey! Kiora!’ he shouted through the open window as they moved forward, inch
by cautious inch, Garland leaning out through the passenger’s window and Yves –
Yves
– sitting between them. Suddenly Garland could not bear to ride in that van with him.

‘Mum, I’m going to walk a bit,’ she said. Secretly, almost without knowing it herself, she wanted to talk to Timon and Eden.

‘Be careful then. Don’t get under the wheels,’ was all Maddie had to say. ‘Remember it gets narrower later on.’

It wasn’t as easy to find walking room as Garland had hoped it would be. Maddie was right. The gully had been narrowing for some time. But then the track thrust out an elbow, and Garland edged into the elbow space, waiting in its ferny shadows until Timon and Eden, now walking and edging too, came alongside her. They looked at Garland cautiously.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to fight.’

‘Neither do we!’ said Timon.

‘Does it go on for long like this?’ asked Eden, staring apprehensively at the wild sides of the gully.

‘Not for long,’ Garland said. ‘You can see we’re almost at the bottom. From now on it’s more or less straight ahead. Once, years ago, there was a road that ran right along the bottom of the gully, and sometimes we can still find bits of it. And because we’re driving vans it’s much easier going this way than going over the hills.’

Both Timon and Eden looked down at the moss and leaf mould, then up at the hilltops which, from here, looked dark against the skyline.

‘We have to pay a toll at the other end of the gully,’ Garland went on. ‘There’s a tribe there. We usually pay with a little performance … but the last couple of times we’ve been through here they’ve asked for something they can sell in Gramth, which is the town we’re mainly making for, or for pieces of silver which they can spend. We do sometimes get
paid in silver or gold – or horses. So we sometimes have money or an extra horse or two we can barter, and they let us through. And now it’s my turn to ask you something. Are you being followed?’ She saw their faces grow suddenly sharp and
serious
. ‘You are, aren’t you? You’re being followed by those two men – the ones that were asking about you back there. There’s things you haven’t told us.’

Eden looked sideways at Timon. Timon stared straight ahead.

‘Yes,’ Timon said at last, speaking rather unwillingly. ‘We do have enemies – two enemies – who are following us … the Nennog’s messengers. Ozul and Maska! Have you seen them?’

‘A while back,’ Garland said, pointing upwards. ‘When the top of the gully was a bit more open I looked up and saw them riding along up there. They were keeping watch on us. And they don’t have vans. Riding that way they’ll get to the head of the gully a long way ahead of us in spite of the hills.’

‘I know you don’t believe us,’ said Timon, ‘but what we told you was true … we come from another time – a future time – and we came here to get away from my uncle the Nennog. And he wants us back as quickly as possible. Because everything we do here alters the future. A little thing changed here could alter whole histories out ahead of us. We’ve told you that. And if we’d got our time shift exactly right in the first place … if we’d saved your father … which is what we meant to do … well, things would probably have changed in our own time. I can’t explain it all because I don’t understand it myself, but we’re fairly sure the Nennog would have lost power. He might have even stopped existing. But you need computers and screens and time-jump units to explain it properly …’

‘Be simple! Be simple!’ Eden interrupted his brother. ‘Ozul and Maska are our enemies, and if they take us back I think the
Nennog will kill us. He killed our parents. And Ozul and Maska might kill us for him.’

‘Why are you so important?’ asked Garland, who found herself believing this fairy tale of theirs.

‘Because when we came we brought something with us,’ Eden said. ‘We didn’t steal it. It was ours in the first place, though we don’t quite know what it is. We only know …’

‘Eden!’ said Timon warningly. He looked apologetically at Garland, and opened his mouth to say more. But before he could explain or apologize or say whatever it was he was planning to say, the sound of angry voices came back to them from the head of the Fantasia procession. There was something so urgent about those voices that Garland forgot the boys and their strange tale along with the mystery of what they had stolen.

She ran towards the argument, sliding and edging, jogged towards the head of the procession, aware that the two boys were sliding and edging close behind her. She came alongside her own van, saw Maddie and Yves standing and gesturing, looked on beyond them and saw they had almost reached the mouth of the gorge. There it was, leaping up and spreading its arms of rock wide, making a dark ‘V’ against the cloudless sky beyond. But the lower cleft of the ‘V’ was closed in. The way ahead was blocked with rocks and branches and this blockage was not an accidental one.

A crowd of people stood there, confronting the Fantasia and among them, blinking and grinning, were the two men she had glimpsed only an hour earlier: Ozul and Maska.

And there in the very centre of the group was someone Garland remembered from other journeys. A giant figure was confronting them, towering above everyone else … partly because of the rocks that seemed to be rising up under her, hoisting her towards the sky, and partly because she really was
so very tall. Ida! Great Ida! The chieftainess of the gorge tribe. She was shouting at Yves and Maddie in her curious voice … deep and echoing, as if the gorge itself were speaking through her.

‘Give them to us! Give them back to their father!’

Garland heard twin voices, almost in chorus, speaking softly behind her.

‘Oh no!’ they whispered briefly, and then she heard their footsteps. Garland did not turn to look behind her. She knew the boys were sneaking away, and that merely looking back at them might betray them.

‘We haven’t known them long,’ Maddie was saying. ‘But we’ve taken them into the Fantasia. We have to be true to our own.’

‘Maddie,’ said Yves in a low voice. ‘We’ve only had them with us about a day. We don’t know anything about them … and their families do have rights …’

‘Well, where
is
their mother?’ asked Maddie. ‘Where’s their father? Because you can’t tell me those two men out there are anybody’s fathers …’

‘They belong to us,’ Garland called, interrupting Maddie, and saw Yves’s shoulders stiffen, while Maddie turned to look back over her shoulder in astonishment. ‘I know,’ Garland cried again. ‘I know I didn’t want them … but we
did
take them on, didn’t we? You voted them in, and so now we’ve got to be true to them.’

‘Listen,’ Maddie said, shouting back to Ida now, ‘we have to talk this over. We have to parley. That’s our custom. And if we decide – if we decide not to hand the boys over we’ll just go back again … take the long path over the hills.’

‘No going back!’ said Ida, pointing upwards with a curiously triumphant gesture. Maddie, Yves, Garland – perhaps the whole Fantasia – looked up and saw with horror, there among
the trees and ferns that lined the walls of the gorge, some of Ida’s men, standing beside rocks and boulders, levers in their hands. As the Fantasia looked upwards, some of those men
suddenly
sprang into action, leaning and straining, and among the ferns a great mossy boulder shifted unwillingly, then jumped away, crashing down, breaking branches and smashing small trees, as it rolled towards them.

‘Watch out!’ Maddie screamed, though there was nothing the Fantasia could do to protect itself. But the boulder missed them, shattering itself on other stones on the bottom of the gorge. Sharp fragments sprang into the air, chinking and
pattering
sharply against the windscreen of Maddie’s van.

‘Talk in! Talk out! Talk up and down or left and right!’ yelled Ida. Her huge song echoed out over the Fantasia vans and horses, seeming to vanish into the gorge behind them, before it came booming back again, swollen with its own echoes. ‘But don’t talk long! And then, after all your talk, do what we’re telling you to do. We’ve been paid to get those boys back to their family, and when we’ve been paid to do something we do it. So give us those boys, and you’ll pass on by safely.’

There was a rippling movement as the Fantasia people scrambled down from their vans, trampling the ferns and mosses as they crammed themselves into that narrow space on one side of the gorge.

It was a parley of a sort, but not an ordered one. Everyone began shouting at once. Listening to the voices as well as she could Garland could tell that some people were now keen to pass the boys over. Others shouted that Maddie was right. The Fantasia had to be true to its own. Garland found that, since the morning, her own ideas were changing.
Blast!
she thought.
Can’t I even rely on myself any more?
She looked up at those men standing by the stones high on the side of the gorge, and imagined more rocks crashing down on them. Yet she certainly
did not want to hand Timon and Eden over to Ozul and Maska. Where were the boys anyway? They had disappeared. Well,
of course
they had disappeared. She had heard them go. And if she had been the one Ozul and Maska had been demanding she would have disappeared too.

Garland suddenly saw her bow and quiver hanging on the side of the van. Nobody noticed as she unhooked it. The argument was raging on and on, Fantasia people arguing with other Fantasia people. (‘Fantasia people are true to each other,’ Maddie was declaring yet again.) Nobody noticed as – one! two! three! Garland stepped backwards … nobody except Maddie that is.

‘Garland!’ she shouted. ‘Garland! Don’t you do a runner!’ But there was so much distraction it was easy for Garland to pretend that she had not heard her mother. Sliding around the back of the wagon she looked up into the forest on the opposite side of the gorge. Where were Timon and Eden? Where
were
they? They must be hiding up there somewhere. It might be hard to see Eden, that bush-coloured stick boy, but Timon’s golden hair should flare out like a soft flame. His blue eyes might even light up some shadowy hiding place. If he were
hiding
up there, not wanting to be found, he might have to close his eyes. But even if he screwed his eyes tight and clapped his hands across them, she would still find him. Sliding into the bush herself, Garland began climbing, leaving the Fantasia below her.

She climbed upwards on a series of rough wide steps under the tangle of trees and ferns clinging onto the gully wall. Scrambling up from one step to another certainly was hard work, but there were resting places in between. Garland paused, panting a little and listening hard.

‘Timon?’ she said aloud. ‘Eden?’ She was sure that there would be too much noise down below for anyone to hear her
speak. The boys
must
have gone this way. They
must
be close at hand. ‘Where are you?’