Sagaria (9 page)

If I stayed where I was, I was going to get smothered to death, and quickly. There was no way I could go back now. The only thing to do was press forward, and hope there was air – sweet, precious air I could breathe – on the other side of the barrier.

I inched my way a little further in, then gathered myself and plunged straight ahead.

Right away, I was falling. The liquid stuff had vanished and I could see again. I was floating softly downward through what appeared to be a tube made of gleaming blue light. My mind seemed to be filled with that same blue light too, because my thoughts weren't frantic any longer but strangely, unnaturally calm. It was like I was sitting beside a slowly flowing river watching the smooth, untroubled surface of the water – that's the sort of calm I mean.

Then there was bright sunshine. There was still a cylinder of blue light around me, but above me I could see clear, pale sky and below me I could see …

Clouds!

I was far above the cloud tops, and I was dropping straight down toward them! Yet, I was still perfectly calm about this. I wasn't terrified the way I'd have been if you'd thrown me out of a high-flying airplane, or something. I wasn't excited, either. I was capable of seeing the beauty of the crenelated cloud surfaces and the way the sunlight played on top of them, so it wouldn't be true to say my mind was completely free of emotions. It was just … well, “content” is probably the best way to describe it.

Then I was in the middle of the clouds and could see nothing but gray-white mist. Before I had a chance to think, I'd broken through to see the distant
ground beneath me, spread out from one curved horizon to the other like, a vast patchwork quilt.

A quilt that rapidly expanded. I was continuing to fall at colossal speed – though it still didn't frighten me in the slightest. I could soon make out details of the patchwork: forests, fields, rivers, hills. Rushing toward me was a land so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. The colors were so intense I felt as if I were living inside a painting.

The plummeting blue cylinder, with me inside it, began to slow down at last. I was a few hundred feet above a forest which was a height that would normally have made me dizzy and terrified, especially since nothing seemed to be supporting me, but after my long descent it seemed the treetops were so close I could almost reach out and touch them. Then, still slowly dropping lower, I began to drift sideways as well, until I reached the fringes of the forest and was above a gentle valley whose slopes were smothered in pastel-colored flowers. A little stream ran down the middle of the valley, and halfway up one of the slopes was a small grove of trees. It soon became clear to me that this copse was my destination.

The column of blue light gently set me down on the grass near the clump of trees and, after a few moments, faded into nothingness, leaving me standing on my own.

The world I found myself in wasn't quite silent. There was a breeze moving through the branches of the nearby trees and they were making that lovely liquid sound that's almost like speech or song, so you feel as if there are words you can't quite hear. Birds were chattering in the trees and insects were humming between and around the flowers that peppered the grass. A bright butterfly looped lazily past my nose, and I could have sworn I heard the tiny sound of its wings flapping in the air. There was the fresh smell of grass and the musty smell of healthy forest, brought to me on the wind.

Maybe it was the butterfly passing so close, but all of a sudden the emotions that had deserted me since I'd been sucked in by the glittering portal came flooding back. For a few moments I was awash with terror, but that rapidly abated until it was no more than a sort of background wariness. There was wonderment too, but even that wasn't as overwhelming as you might have expected. You see, Sagandran, I had an overriding sense that I
belonged
there. That's not to say that I didn't think I belonged here at home too. I was a stranger in this other world – yes, I was that – but I didn't feel as if I were an intruder, or as if the other world would regard me as one. Quite the opposite: I felt as if I were being welcomed by it, even though I couldn't see anyone who might be doing the welcoming.

I don't know how long I spent just gazing around me with my mouth open (it was a wonder that the butterfly hadn't flown right in), but eventually it occurred to me to look at the ground. When I did, I could see a very faint band of slightly lighter green, and the blue cylinder had planted my two feet firmly in the center of it. Following this faint line with my eyes, I could see it stretch off in both directions, meandering a little here and there, but roughly following the course of the distant stream that tumbled down the valley's center.

I didn't need to think too hard to know I was standing on a path of some kind. It could simply have been a trail made by sheep or rabbits, but it seemed too wide for that – about a yard across – and anyway, I couldn't see any animal droppings. No, it was a path, all right. Perhaps the beings who lived in this other world didn't feel the need to hew their paths out of the soil and cover them in stones or concrete the way we do. The small difference in coloration was quite enough to indicate where the track went.

Where did the track go? If the blue light that had brought me here chose to put me on this path, it seemed obvious I was expected to follow it to reach something. But in which direction? Both seemed equally good. One led up toward the head of the valley, which I could just see in the misty distance. The other, going gently downhill, got gradually closer to the broadening stream until the two of them rounded a curve in the valley and were lost to sight.

Partly because the idea of going downhill rather than uphill seemed a very good one to my legs (which were still slightly shaky from my experiences in the well and the tunnel), and partly because I wanted to see what was around that corner, the second was the way I chose.

I don't know how long I walked along the path, but it must have been for a few hours, though the sky didn't grow any less bright and the sun seemed to stay as high, so maybe time was playing tricks on me. My legs soon lost their weakness and seemed to gain strength from somewhere outside me. Before I'd gone more than a few hundred yards, I was strolling along quite jauntily. I think I was even whistling.

I hardly noticed it at first, but the path I was walking on became slowly wider. The grass was trampled down, as if a lot of people walked along it regularly, and soon the track became an earthy swathe.

Finally, I could see what looked like the edges of a village around a swelling hillside: some scattered houses, people moving about. I quickened my pace, and before too many more minutes had passed, I was looking at something bigger than just a village. Clinging to the two sides of the stream – which had become a river by now – was a township, its red rooftops gleaming in the sunlight. There was a knoll near the edge of the town on this side of the river, and on top
of that knoll was a dainty castle, its walls and turrets hewn from a sparkling, dark purplish stone. Those glittering walls looked like they were carved out of a brightly starlit sky. Closer to me, to either side of my road, there were people working in cultivated fields, and there were also a few travelers on the road itself. One or two of them were leading carts toward the settlement.

I hurried forward, then slowed my pace again as I realized one of the people on the road was walking straight toward me, heading out of the town. I became a little apprehensive again. Would he recognize from my clothes, if in no other way, that I was a stranger in these parts? Would it bother him that I was?

The latter question troubled me for only a moment. I'd already felt the friendly welcome this otherworld was offering me, and I assumed that the same spirit extended to its occupants. The former question was answered as soon as the man came within earshot.

“Hello there,” he cried.

It didn't strike me as at all odd that he spoke the same language as I did. I'd later puzzle over it, but at that moment, it seemed perfectly natural.

“Fine weather,” I said, or something prosaic like that.

Believe it or not, all we talked about as our paths crossed was the weather. All the questions I was burning to ask somehow got stuck at the back of my mind, so it was only as he was retreating into the distance that I wondered why I hadn't asked them. I almost ran after him, but already I could see another traveler walking toward me, a woman.

The same thing happened again. We exchanged a few everydays – not about the weather this time, though I can't remember what it was we said – and then she was gone.

The same thing happened over and over with each new person I met upon the road as I continued my amble toward town. Once I was among the streets, which were narrow and winding and sometimes lined with market stalls, it was the same there as well. People were perfectly willing to talk to me, but they never said anything of importance, and I always forgot to ask the questions I really wanted to ask until it was too late. I stopped at a fruit stall to speak to the man there, and all that happened was that he gave me a bright green fruit that looked something like a cross between an apple and a pomegranate, if you can imagine that.

Confused, I wandered onward, munching on the delicious fruit. It tasted more like an apricot than anything else, though not much like an apricot either, and it had a strong scent that tickled the back of my nostrils. Yum!

It slowly dawned on me that the best place I could go was probably the castle. In a way, I was an ambassador from my world to this one. The job of an
ambassador is to speak with those who rule, and my guess was that the castle was where I'd find them. It was easy enough to make my way there, even though the streets twisted and turned so much, because all of the houses in the town were low (the tallest ones were only two stories) and the castle was, as I've said, perched on top of a little hill. No matter where I was, I just had to cast my gaze above the level of the rooftops until, sooner or later, I saw the tip of a turret glinting in the sunlight or a flag waving in the breeze.

At last, I was in front of the castle gates. They were imposing and made out of some kind of beaten reddish-brown metal I couldn't rightly identify and they seemed almost taller than the castle as I stood there in front of them. A cluster of about half a dozen guards faced me. Their faces were alert, but they didn't give me the impression they ever had much actual guarding to do; they were only lightly armed, and they wore no metal suits or vests like the ones you see in movies. They stood around quite casually, as if they were more curious about me than wary of my intentions.

“Who are you and what do you want?” said one, moving a little forward of the rest.

“I'm a stranger who's come to this world from my own,” I replied. “An ambassador, if you will. I wish to speak to your king.”

If I'd said this in front of any official building in our world, you realize, Sagandran, I'd have been hauled off to the funny farm, or worse, before I finished the sentence. But the reaction of these guards wasn't at all like that.

“You must indeed be a stranger,” said their spokesman with a friendly, if slightly snooty, smile. “The city of Spectram doesn't have a king. It's the queen you'll be wanting to see, Queen Mirabella.”

He turned around and gave a little gesture of the hand to his companions, and they quickly opened the castle gates. “Quickly,” did I say? Well, you know what I mean. In fact, the gates would open only very slowly and cumbrously, raising a great screeching and grating as they did so. The sort of racket you make when you have to force open an attic door that's stuck because it's been shut for longer than anyone can remember. But these gates were obviously frequently used. For as much as I wondered about it at all, I assumed people in Spectram didn't know to put oil on hinges, or maybe they just didn't have oil. Now I think it's more likely the gates were left that way to impress visitors to the castle.

The guard who'd spoken to me led me along wide corridors with brightly colored tapestries hanging on the walls. The colors needed to be bright, because the lighting was far dimmer than we're accustomed to. There was no electricity in this castle, just torches flickering in sconces at irregular intervals. The carpets beneath my feet were in the same vivid colors as the tapestries. I could see that
the images on the carpets were, like the tapestries, telling some kind of story, or stories, but the guard was walking so quickly, I didn't have time to find out what the story was as I hurried to keep up with him. I vaguely noticed lots of carved wooden chairs and little tables as I scooted by.

We climbed a couple of stone stairways that wound and spiraled. One of them, I'm certain, managed to spiral in two different directions at once, which was very confusing and made my eyes hurt. I had to keep my gaze on my feet instead of looking about me, so I could concentrate on climbing those stairs one step at a time.

At last, we came out into a big, sparsely decorated hall that was flooded with colored daylight shining in through tall, wide, stained-glass windows on every side. The guard bowed respectfully toward the far end of the hall, then turned on his heel and left me.

The room had to be in one of the towers, because there were windows on all sides, yet none of the towers I'd seen as I approached were as broad as this. Either everything had shrunk – me included – or the Sagarians knew how to fit big spaces into much smaller ones. Later, I learned the latter was true, but at the time I was more concerned with my surroundings, and especially with the person sitting at the other end of the hall on a throne that dwarfed her, so that she had to reach up and out to put her forearms on the rests.

I've said the hall was sparsely decorated, and I think I may have misled you into thinking it was all bare stone walls and wooden floorboards. Not at all. The room lacked the ostentatious magnificence of the passages I'd come along to reach here, but the decorations it did have were exquisite. There were mother-of-pearl pillars, fresh flowers in vases in a profusion of colors, abstract geometrical patterns of astonishing complexity on the walls and three great chandeliers whose crystals echoed the colors of the flowers and which must have borne thousands of candles. I didn't envy the task of the person who had to light them each night, nor even that of whoever had to snuff them in out the morning. With the sun shining through those big stained-glass windows, it seemed as if the pictures there were just aching to come alive, as if the people and animals depicted in the colored glass wanted to jump down and join us.