Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

Saranja slid the feathers into her pouch and rose. Fodaro held his spread hands above the lizard, as if warming them over a fire.

“Well, he’s here, at least,” he said. “But not yet as fully here as we need him to be.”

“Would that work on Ribek’s leg?” asked Saranja, obviously impatient with such abstractions. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it, Ribek, by the look of you?”

“Not too good, but it can wait. Depends how urgent everything else is.”

“Not that urgent, I hope,” said Fodaro. “But Jex and the roc from which your feathers came are of a different order of being from ourselves,” he said. “A human hurt requires human healing, whether physical or magical. Benayu will see to it…. No, better not for the moment. I’m sorry.”

“I’d rather let Saranja take a look at it first, in any case,” said Ribek wearily. “I’m sorry, Benayu. I don’t distrust what you do the way she does, but I’m not used to it, and I prefer to stick with what I know. And there’s always a price, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Where Saranja’s been these last six years the men did precious little besides fighting each other, so she knows about wounds. Mine wasn’t too good when she dealt with it this morning, but your mountain water is clear and clean. I’ll ask it to help. They’ve all got a bit of deep-earth healing in them, water sources, until we start poisoning them lower down.”

He turned and limped over to the stream. The other four followed him. The two magicians watched for a while in silence as Saranja unwound the ragged bandage as far as she could, cutting off a bit of the loose end and using that to sponge and soften the clotted blood until she could pick the next winding free with her knife-point. It was clear from her movements that as he’d promised she knew what she was doing.

“Yes, you are right,” said Fodaro suddenly. “Any use of magic demands a price from the user. Out there, in the Empire, a serious magician would have demanded silver for healing a wound like yours—gold, even, if the wound was badly infected. Up here, though—”

“‘Would have demanded’?” interrupted Saranja without looking up, but Fodaro waited as she eased the last winding away and began on the blood-drenched pad that covered the torn flesh. The blood was still oozing, and the scabbing for the most part soft enough for her to peel the pad gently away. Ribek’s breath hissed between teeth and lip, but he didn’t flinch. The wound was a tear rather than a slice, not deep but angry-looking, running slantwise across the upper part of the calf. Saranja sniffed at it and frowned.

“Do you know what you need?” asked Benayu.

“Should do. Ribek told you. Mothermoss would be nice, but I’ll be lucky to find it here. There should be harmsain in the wood, though. Here, Maja—clean it up best you can, while I look. When you’ve finished, put a pad over it—here—and wrap it up to keep warm.”

She dampened one of the cleaner bits of bandage, folded another into a wad, gave them to Maja.

“Don’t go too far,” said Fodaro. “It’s still possible that you may need to leave in a hurry.”

She nodded and walked off toward the trees. Benayu glanced enquiringly at his uncle, who shook his head.

Ribek had caught the look.

“Let her find what’s there, if that’s what she wants,” he said. “I’ll do. We aren’t used to this sort of thing. There was almost no magic in the Valley. Saranja’s family can hear what the cedars are saying, and mine can listen to moving water, and that was about it. There was a chop or two left in the basket, wasn’t there?”

Benayu fetched the basket and then joined Fodaro, and crouched with him beside the lizard. They talked in low and worried voices. Ribek ate slowly while Maja worked away at his wound, which had clearly been troubling him more than he had let on. Then he hunkered away from the stream, stretched out in the sunlight and closed his eyes. By the time Saranja returned with a sheaf of twigs and leaves he was fast asleep, and Benayu had a small fire going beside the little circular pool, with a metal pot suspended over it.

Saranja eyed this, frowning.

“How did you know?” she said, instantly suspicious.

“Maja told me you’d need it, and Fodaro says we’d better lay off magic—even silly little things like lighting a fire—for the moment. So I did everything else your way, fetched the pot and the flint with my own hands, I mean. There’s good clean water in the pool. What have you got?”

“Nothing I was looking for. Most of this is only a bit better than nothing, but the bitter-bark’s fine, only it’s got to be an infusion.”

She picked out a bunch of twigs bound with a rag, and used this to handle them as she peeled the bronzy bark from the white wood. Maja reached to help.

“Watch it,” she said. “The raw sap is poisonous. You can use a couple of other sticks to put the bark in the pot. Keep it stirred, and just simmering if you can. Are we actually in a hurry, do you know?”

“There’s remarkably little we do know, these days,” said Fodaro, looking up. “Less than ever now, until Jex comes to himself. He exists simultaneously in two…places. That’s all it’s safe to tell you. But normally he can communicate through his other self with creatures of his kind elsewhere in the Empire and tell us what’s going on out there. In the meanwhile perhaps you could tell us this story which you’ve mentioned from time to time. It could very well be useful.”

Saranja sighed.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” she said. “Better get it over. We’ll let this cool now. Put me right, Maja, if I get it wrong. It’s been a long time.”

She lifted the pot from the fire with a stick and wedged it behind a boulder, then moved with the other three into the shade of the cedar, and they settled down close above the lizard.

“You’ll have to check with Ribek,” she said. “Everyone in the Valley tells it a bit differently, but his family and mine are the only ones it really matters to.”

“The Valley?” asked Fodaro.

“It’s over there,” she said, pointing west. “I don’t know how far. We came a bit roundabout, because first off we were escaping from some Sheep-faces in an airboat…. Forget about that—I’ll draw you a picture and explain later.”

She picked up a twig and started to scratch an outline in a patch of bare earth.

“Rocky flies incredibly fast,” she went on, “and that second day he kept going till it was too dark to see. Then we slept on a sort of ledge in the mountains and flew on all next day, with one short break by a river. We slept again halfway up a mountain and got here, when? A bit after midday, about?

“Anyway the Valley’s completely cut off from everywhere else, and has been for—oh, I suppose it’s got to be twenty generations, however long that is. But it wasn’t always. According to the story, we used to keep getting invaded by wild horsemen from the north and—just as bad, if not worse—the Emperor’s armies coming up from the south to drive them back. In the end things got so bad that we decided to send a sort of delegation to look for a powerful magician to stop this happening. She was called Asarta—”

“Asarta.”

Maja heard the stone whisper in her mind, coming, it seemed, from unbelievable distances away. Saranja must have heard it too. She shuddered.

“I don’t know if I can take much more of this,” she said. “I don’t mind giving Rocky his wings and taking them off again, for some reason, but otherwise…And I really hate it when it happens inside my head. In the story there’s an ancestor of ours—mine and Maja’s—called Tilja, who could undo magic. That was the only part I used to like.”