Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

Benayu’s shoulder was trembling beneath her hand.

“Are you all right?” she murmured. “You’ve done wonders.”

“I’m just about done for. I can’t keep everything going much longer.”

“It is not needed. I am not a sensitive, so the child is safe in my shelter. The sea is affecting you more strongly than you predicted?”

“It’s just the last straw. I can manage the little stuff, talking in your heads, that sort of thing. But I’m not up to anything else big. Nor’s Chanad. Ribek’s in charge now. This had better work. Ugh—I didn’t realize how cold it was going to be.”

He shuddered again. Maja turned from the window, looking for the three hired magicians. They were standing a little way back, their faces unreadable behind their chosen masks, but their postures tense and watchful. She beckoned them forward.

“I think I have met you before, haven’t I?” she said to the silver woman. “Your appearance was less, ah, striking then. You came for a post in my household, but I’d already chosen someone else. Your name begins with a Q , I think. Quirril?”

“Quiriul, my lady.”

“I’m sorry to find you here.”

“It was that or be conscripted by the Watchers, my lady. I chose what I thought was a lesser evil. The same with my colleagues here.”

“You must have had a hard time, so long out at sea.”

“Very hard, my lady. We became so feeble. It is like the weakness after a fever, and we dared not tell them.”

“Well, the Watchers are gone and that’s over now, so you can return home. When you are recovered, you could perhaps offer your services to the President-designate. She is going to need a lot of help. Meanwhile, if you are up to it, you could provide us with some warmth in here.”

She turned back to the window. Still nothing to see but densely falling snow. The two generals seemed to be engaged in a furious argument. Striclan came round to her other side. His snake had disappeared. Gone in under his shirt for warmth, presumably.

“Benayu is exhausted,” he said, “and Saranja and Ribek are fully occupied. I may as well simply tell you what is going on. Pashgahr wants to abort the landing—”

“It is already aborted, is it not?”

“I would have said so. But Olbog is determined to go ahead, whatever it costs.”

“He probably thinks he has been made a fool of. It is the one thing that type of man cannot endure.”

“What I suggest would mean pretending we can do something I doubt we can in fact do, with Benayu and Chanad out of action—”

“I would advise against it,” Maja interrupted. “The danger is that he might then try to destroy us before we can carry out our threat. Benayu is in no position to defend us. I have begun an attempt to suborn the hired magicians, but they too are greatly enfeebled. We are on a knife edge, Mr. Ruddya. We must stake everything on what Ribek is doing. It seems to be as effective as we could wish. Ah, that’s better.”

A faint draft had sprung up while she was speaking, warm, and smelling pleasantly of lowland pastures. Benayu stopped shivering.

“No doubt you are right,” said Striclan. “Look, I think the snowfall is less than it was.”

She glanced at the window. The flakes were already smaller and fewer, and in two or three minutes had ceased completely. The late sun appeared over the western hills once more, shining in under the cloud canopy onto a glittering island that reached in almost to the shoreline of the bay and further yet to north and south. It was far more than simply a rumpled surface of snow-covered ice, all at roughly the same level, every detail lost beneath the snow cover. Cliffs and crags of ice rose directly from the sea, and then rose further into three jagged parallel ridges, culminating in a rough peak almost level with the window through which she was looking.

Scattered among the ledges and crannies of this forbidding surface lodged the snow-swathed ships of the Pirate fleet. Among them were two airboats, forced down by the mass of snow on their gas bags, which, relieved of the weight of the boats themselves, still floated buoyant above them. The remaining airboats were still aloft, but sinking steadily to join them. Maja realized that the All-Conqueror itself was far lower than it had been before the snowfall. What an end to a proud invasion. But she felt no triumph. Not yet. They were still on a knife edge.

Beyond the closed doors an alarm bell still sounded, but the cries of command had stopped. No doubt all orders had been given and the crew were readying themselves for the landing. There was silence too in the command deck, but not for long. Murmurs broke out and increased—astonishment, alarm, anger, apprehension. Ribek raised his voice above the incipient hubbub.

“Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. I want to show you something more important than anything you have yet seen. Will you all come to the window and stand in a single line…Thank you. Now, I want you to look through my eyes and see what I am seeing. I promise you that I will not tamper with your inner selves in any way. You will remain exactly what you are, apart from having seen something that very few humans have seen before you, and perhaps having a greater knowledge and understanding than you have now. For that purpose, will you please hold hands all along the line.”

Maja felt him take her hand in his. She sensed a hesitation on her left and turned to see what was happening. General Pashgahr was already in the line, and two of the others had joined him, but the rest were waiting to follow General Olbog’s lead, and he was still standing where he had been, a little back from the window, looking steadfastly at Ribek as if he could destroy him by glaring.

Even powerful men such as those we will be meeting have an instinct to respect women such as yourself . Maja moved a little back, interrupting his line of sight, held out her hand to him, and smiled her grandest, kindliest smile.

“General Olbog…,” she murmured.

He came, a child at a party, who has arrived determined not to participate but then been overwhelmed by the greater moral force of the adult presence. Again he hesitated, but took her hand. His own was dry and muscular, the grip of a man who prides himself on a firm handshake.

“Be gentle with it,” she told him. “Old bones, you know.”

He forced his lips into the flicker of a smile and grabbed the hand of the man next in line. Together they turned to the window and saw what Ribek was seeing. She heard the gasps spreading along the line.

Nothing had changed, and everything. The impossible island was still there, not one snowflake, not one ice-splinter different. It was its nature that had changed. What had been a series of rugged infolded ridges was now the scaly loops and coils of an immense reptilian body. The dragon that had hunted them down the sunken lane above Larg would have seemed ant-sized beside it.

She had only a glimpse, and then it was gone, and the frozen island was there once more. Then, for a flicker, it was the incredible immense creature before the island returned. The flickering increased in speed until the dizzying double visions merged and she was staring more steadily at something that hung, poised, solid and real, between two possibilities, both equally impossible, the frozen island that in the space of a few minutes had emerged out of nowhere into these sub-tropic seas and showed no sign of melting, and the gigantic animal, far colder than any temperature at which life could exist, far larger than any size at which it could sustain itself.

Even in detail the uncertainty remained, as though every part of it refused to choose between One or Other, and insisted on its existence as both. The odd-shaped summit, with its swaths of snow lying between ice-green scaurs and outcrops, and pocked and pitted here and there as if some huge hand had thrown a fistful of boulders against it, was certainly an icy summit, but equally certainly it was the creature’s head, resting on the curving outer fold of the body. The two largest holes were just empty pits, but gleamed with the liquid luminosity of deep-sunk eyes. Two apparently random mounds marked by shallow pocks also existed as a pair of scaly hummocks bearing the quadruple nostrils on the blunt snout, lidded with flaps of skin that stirred to the slow breathing of the cavernous lungs. Hollows and crevasses were folds and moldings of the tough hide, as it followed the shape of the skull beneath. Beyond it the central ridge was the vast reptilian body, curving round in the form of the northern ridge, and back again beneath the head to become the southern ridge as it dwindled into the tail. Every detail both This and That, occupying the same space at the same time. Things that could not either separately or simultaneously be true, but were.