Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

Human eyes are not made for such seeing. Maja’s fought for mastery, for the right to choose between This and That. Her mind resisted, fully certain of what it was seeing through those eyes, the absolute thereness of the creature, its presence, its power. All along the line she could hear murmurs of the same struggle.

She turned to see how General Olbog was taking it. He was also struggling, being forced to recognize the reality of the vision, and hating it. In the middle of your worst nightmare some part of you still knows it to be only a dream. What if you then wake to find that it’s true? General Olbog didn’t look like a man who paid much attention to whatever dreams he had, if he remembered them at all. As soon as he stopped gazing through the window he would try to treat what he had seen like that—a trick of the light, another stupid bit of conjuring, pay no attention—but henceforth it would return to him in his dreams, and he would remember them on waking. For the moment, though, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it, but stood staring out of the window and shaking his head, like a drunk man trying to clear his mind.

“You are looking at the great Ice-dragon of the northern wastes,” said Ribek quietly. “It and its partner to the south built and maintain the two realms of ice and snow on which the well-being of this world depends. We do not have the power to summon it, the Captain and I. Nobody has that, no magician or group of magicians, however powerful, has that. All that we two can do is ask it. Nothing that has happened since we came to the window was done by us—it is all the Ice-dragon. It came of its own will. It brought the ice and snow of its own will. If it had chosen it could have crushed every ship of your navy in the grip of its ice as easily as a cobnut is cracked open between two stones. Instead, of its own will it has chosen that you should see it. Though the power to call to it runs in my family, only once in several generations does one of us see it, and then never as clearly as you are now doing.

“Why you? you may ask. The task of the two Ice-dragons is to maintain the well-being of this world. More than once in the remote past, the earth has sickened and needed first cleansing, then renewal. The two Ice-dragons have extended their realms to cover the entire earth, frozen it for a long age, and then withdrawn to allow the life of the world to renew itself among the tiny, unnoticed creatures that survived below the ice.

“Now, once again, there were signs that such a time was coming. The so-called Watchers, with their insatiable lust for power, were one such sign. Their ultimate purpose was to incorporate all life on earth into themselves. In the eyes of the Ice-dragon they were the seeds of a disease that would in the end have sickened the whole earth. Fortunately we were able to act in time and destroy them before it needed to do so itself.

“I cannot expect you to see yourselves in a similar light, but I can assure you that the Ice-dragon does. It has not come here, as we have, to prevent you from committing a single great wrong. It has come as a warning to you of what will follow if you continue on the course that you seem to have set yourselves. The very name of the great vessel that carries us all is a signpost on that course. I do not tell you this of my own knowledge. Like the vision of the Ice-dragon that you saw through my eyes, you are hearing through my mouth what it wishes you to be told.

“Now I think we have seen enough. It is dangerous to look too long on such a being. It can madden the strongest mind.”

He withdrew his hand from Maja’s and the island was only a craggy patch of ice, littered with the ships of the pirate navy. The tension broke like a wave breaking, into a hubbub of comments and questions. Maja turned to General Olbog.

“Thank you for joining us, General,” she said. “It was interesting, was it not?”

There was nobody handy to interpret, but he caught her tone, favored her with his mini-smile, grunted some guttural politeness, nodded by way of farewell and turned away.

“I’ve got to get us out of here,” muttered Benayu. “Fading faster than I expected. Won’t have anything left if I don’t go soon. Need Chanad to help, as it is.”

“I will talk to Ribek. You go and sit down.”

A dozen people, Syndics and soldiers, were already crowded round Ribek, bombarding him with questions. Most were men, taller than she was. She rapped an officer on the shoulder with the handle of her cane. He turned his head, cut his protest short when he saw who it was, and made a gap. The movement caught Ribek’s eye. She beckoned, drew aside and waited for him to join her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw somebody sidling in earshot. The Pirates’ translator.

“My boy Bennay’s been taken ill, and I do not have the remedy with me,” she said. “I must get him ashore.”

“It’s time we went in any case, my lady,” he said. “If you would be so good as to tell the others…”

He turned to his audience.

“Please,” he said. “No more questions for the moment. We have to leave in a minute. We have done what we came to do by preventing your attack on Larg. This was an emergency action. We do not have the authority to act further on behalf of the Imperial Government. We will leave you to discuss what you have seen and heard, and we will be ready to meet you for a truce conference an hour before noon tomorrow morning on the headland you can see to the south of Larg. We will permit one airboat large enough to carry your delegation, but no larger, to be cleared of snow to bring them ashore under our safe conduct. This will be a sign that you accept our conditions. If we receive no such signal your fleet will be destroyed at sunset.

“So we bid you farewell, and hope to see you tomorrow on the headland. Madam President-designate, if you are ready.”

Chanad was talking to the three renegades. She looked down and nodded. Maja and the others gathered around her. Saranja turned and saluted the room. Chanad made a gentle gesture of closure, and the space where they had been standing was empty.

CHAPTER

25

The citizens of Larg had been watching from their walls in awe and fear as the Pirate fleet closed in on them, regardless of wind or tide—fear that changed to amazement as the ships and airboats were blotted out by a brief but intense blizzard in the midst of the calm and sunlit bay, and then changed again to delighted relief when the blizzard cleared, revealing the impossible island of ice, with the ships stranded and helpless on it and the snow-burdened airboats drifting down to join them.

They saw three winged horses emerge from the largest of the airboats and some keen-eyed watchers recognized Saranja’s streaming mane. So it was that when Saranja and Striclan, the only two of the travelers able to cross Zara’s still functioning ward, headed down the hill to tell the Proctors what was afoot, and what would now be needed, they found a welcoming party climbing to meet them.

Maja fell asleep under the stars once more, well fed and on comfortable bedding ferried up from the city. The needs of her Lady Kzuva self woke her in the small hours, and on her return she paused and stared out to sea. There, plain to her long-sightedness, stood the flame-crested pillar that imprisoned Azarod, black against the moonlit glitter of the island, both astonishing in themselves but still only rock and flame and ice, things of this world. The scene twitched, and now she was seeing them as they might have been seen in the worlds where they belonged, the raging demon and the immense unknowable dragon. She couldn’t remember going back to her mattress, apart from a vague sense of having floated there, with all the quiet magic of the sleeping world now vivid to her extra sense. She was too dazed to register the strangeness of the change.