John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

Quentin put his hand out to where his walking stick lay on the ground, frowning. He didn’t touch the stick; he just frowned at it.

Victor said, “Powers off. We must be too far from the school boundaries. Amelia, did you say your bag was getting heavier?”

Quentin was looking more and more pensive as we walked on, staring left and right across the snowy tree scape, as if searching for something. Colin trudged along, scowling and answering any comments with curt sarcasm. Vanity was happily depicting her future life in London as a model or actress. I was daydreaming about the new Age of Discovery that would follow once I told the men on Earth that there were other dimensions to be found and named and mapped, and other worlds in them. Victor marched without pause and without fatigue, slightly ahead of us, expressionless.

Vanity commented to Colin, “There’s no need to be so bleak! Everyone else on Earth gets by without magic powers. We can live our whole lives as normal people, free, doing whatever we want!”

“Great,” Colin muttered back, “there’s a zenith for you. I can climb the adverse cliffs and after fateful struggle find what’s shining at the utmost peak: the triumph of being ‘normal.’ Write that down in the history books. They’ll name cars after me.”

Vanity said, “Well, for you, getting to the level of ‘normal’ will involve a climb.”

“Sure. And your dream for your new life is what again? To be a clerk in a shop, or wait tables, and haunt bars after hours to find a lonely butcher or an investment broker to marry?”

Vanity snapped back: “It will be better than your new life as an inmate in the psychiatric hospital for the criminally stupid.”

I said, “Actually, we do not know if we are interfertile with human beings. Or, for that matter, with each other. We’re not the same species.”

Colin said, “If we must test it, we must. I’ll make the sacrifice for Science. Do you girls want me to do you both at once, or one after another, or…”

Quentin said suddenly: “It doesn’t make sense.”

Colin said, “I’ll say it doesn’t. What does ‘species’ mean to shape-changers? We should be able to alter our sperm and sexual organs to be able to…”

Quentin said quietly, “Why didn’t they build the school here?”

Colin said, “What? In the woods?”

“In a spot where our powers didn’t work. Why raise us on the estate grounds, if our powers worked there? Why not raise us five miles East or West? Or in Timbuktu?”

I said, “I can think of several reasons. One: We might have needed our powers to keep us healthy when we were babies; Boggin said something to that effect. Two: Our powers might have arisen back so slowly, that they don’t even know we have them yet, and the original estate was wide enough to keep the boundaries out of range. Three: Boggin actually wanted us to develop our powers, because he wants to use us on his side of the war. Four: Our powers only work when there are Greek gods around, and, no matter where we were raised, Boggin had no choice but to be nearby himself to…”

Quentin interrupted me, which was unusual. “Or we are under a curse. Remember how you said Mrs. Wren stopped Dr. Fell. We crossed a ward of some sort, or violated a prohibition. It was just after lunch.”

Vanity said, “Dr. Fell. He could have put something in the food.”

Victor stopped. We all stopped.

He was a score of yards ahead of us, climbing a gentle slope where broken rocks protruded through the snow. Ahead of him, we could see the tops of the trees growing on the far slope. The far slope must have fallen sharply away before Victor’s feet, because the crowns of these trees were no higher than he was.

He turned his head, and shouted (for he was many yards ahead), “We missed the highway entirely. I see the bay.”

I shouted up, “Which bay? Rhossili Bay, Port Eynon Bay, or Oxwich Bay?”

He shouted back, “It’s not labeled in a prominent place!”

I shouted up again, “If you see Cornwall across the Channel, you’re looking South. If you see Worm’s Head, you’re looking West!”

I paused to look upward as I said it, but the sky was still as gray as old cotton, and the clouds were no brighter in one direction than the other. I said aloud, “How could we reach the water without going through Penrice, or the campgrounds? Even if we were headed due East instead of South, we should have crossed the B-4247 between Rhossili and Scurlage.”

Colin stomped up the slope past me, kicking snow from his boots at every step. He gave me a dark, sinister smile, saying, “Anyone can make a dot on a piece of paper, write a name by it, and pretend there is a town there.”

I stepped into motion again, toiling up the slope next to him. “But we’ve all been to Abertwyi. Where is Abertwyi?”

Colin said, “We were led there. We didn’t go there under our own power.”

“Why would that make a difference?”

“They changed the paths there. If there is a there.”

“How?”

“The girl who believes in the Fourth Dimension is asking me to explain it?”

“Look, there has to be a world somewhere. What about France?”

“What about Slumberland, Narnia, and Oz? France is obviously a made-up place. Those places only exist if we believe in them.”

“You’re more skeptical than Victor is.”

Colin just snorted at that. “Hmph! Vic? Well, I should jolly well hope so.”

And in a tone of voice that made it clear he thought Victor was both (1) the most naïve and (2) the most dogmatically pigheaded boy in our group or, maybe, in the world.

At that point, Vanity and Quentin (who had forged ahead of Colin and me while we slowed to talk) achieved the brink of the slope where Victor stood.

Vanity let out a shriek of pure joy. “She came! She really came! All my life I’ve been waiting, and I didn’t even know it… and, and… Victor! You idiot! Why didn’t you tell me she was here!”

Colin and I raced up the last few steps of the slope.

A silver ship, a trireme sleek as a spear, lay shining atop the waves below. By the prow a painted eye gravely gazed toward shore, wise and watchful. I think it was painted.

“Oh, she came!” Vanity breathed in breathless joy, and her whole soul was in her eyes.

The land fell very sharply down. A few trees clung to the far slope, and then, in a sudden brink, a cliff fell to the sea. White and gray water surged among the rocks; white and gray seagulls hopped from stone to stone, or shivered in the chill wind. One or two birds skimmed the waters on crooked wings, silent.

About a quarter of a mile out in the water was a ship. Perhaps I should call her a boat, she was so small.

She was silvery-white, with a prow like a Greek trireme, sloping like a sleek nose into a bronze-jacketed ram at the waterline. Two eyes had been painted on the prow, one to port and one to starboard. A mast like a white finger rose from blocks amidships. Aft, a small deck rose into a shape like a peacock’s tail.

She was slender and sleek, built for speed like a racing scull, but the rail and the fantail were set with hammered silver, and the bench at the stern was carved and polished and set with white cushions held by silver nails, and all so finely crafted as to make the whole vessel shine like a lady’s jewel. The mast held nothing but a lamp, intricate with silver wire and nacre. There were no oars; there was no steering board or rudder.

The whole vessel was perhaps forty yards long, four yards broad at the waterline, with planks forming outriggers perhaps six yards wide above. She lay as lightly on the waters as a swan, as slim and finely crafted as a Japanese sword.