Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

“They weren’t making much of a secret coming just now,” said Saranja.

“Somebody put the new Eye in,” said Ribek.

“I don’t think it was Watcher stuff,” said Maja. “That’s got a funny yucky feel. I felt it just now when they went over.”

Benayu sighed in anxiety and frustration and shook his head.

“No point in guessing,” he said. “All I know is the further we are from Mord, the better.”

The road wound mainly uphill through wild country, ancient woods, tangled with undergrowth and half-fallen trees, alternating with stony, scrub-covered hillside. They met a few travelers going north, but apart from one or two battered roadside sheds didn’t see a building until they came in the dusk to an official resting camp, with fees and bribes to pay, but food and fodder to be bought, and other travelers for Ribek to question casually about the possibility of crossing the country southeastward to visit a sister he hadn’t seen for sixteen years. She lived at a town called Parangot, down beyond Tarshu, he said. He was told he’d need to make a long twelve days’ journey south before he found a good Imperial road, twice as much making the crossing and then, well, it depended how far south of that his sister lived. They hadn’t heard of Parangot. Not surprising, as he’d made it up, but someone happened to mention that it was a good thirty days on from where they were to Tarshu.

As they slept under the stars Jex spoke in Maja’s dreams. His voice seemed only slightly less faint and strained than before.

“I have important news. Some of my friends are now aware of me, and have spoken directly to me, though I still cannot answer or question them. Our road south is closed to us. The Watchers have been wholly preoccupied with preparations to meet the coming attack on Tarshu, and were not prepared to lose any more of their number until that was finished, so sent only a junior magician to investigate the loss of two of themselves beyond Mord, and then a more experienced one to investigate the first one’s disappearance.

“This work is now finished. My supposition is that meanwhile this second man must have discovered something that they believe to be connected with the coming assault by the Pirates. Hence the urgency with which fresh Watchers have now arrived.

“Once at the pasture, they will speak with the shepherds and look into their minds, and search for magical traces in the cottage where Fodaro lived with Benayu. I think we must assume that they will then know whose brother Fodaro was, and from that perhaps guess whose son Benayu may be.

“Furthermore, they have set up checkpoints on this road at which all travelers are rigorously examined. You must leave it as soon as you can. Other roads south are less strictly watched, apart from random checks at way stations of licenses to practice magic. Tell the others.”

“Yes, of course. You sound stronger.”

“I am, a little. Fortunately I was prepared for the moment when the Watchers passed over us south of Mord, or it might have been a setback.”

“Benayu pulled us inside his screen, but I still felt it. And you changed for a moment, didn’t you?”

“It was useful to me. I will be able to protect you more effectively.”

“Can anyone—one of the Watchers, for instance—tell that you’re there, tell you’re doing that?”

“Not as far as I know. Over the generations we have learned to hide ourselves. It is essential for our survival.”

“And supposing I don’t want to be shielded for a bit…?”

“Tell me so in your head and I will withdraw for a while. Farewell, Maja.”

“Good-bye, Jex. Come again when you can.”

The others heard the bad news without surprise.

“They must have found the picture of the airboat Saranja drew,” said Benayu.

“Fodaro would have destroyed it, surely,” said Saranja.

“When I last saw him he was scratching magical signs round it—at least that’s what they looked like,” said Maja. “Trying to put them off the scent, I suppose.”

“Good idea,” said Ribek. “Just like him to think of it. Not his fault it didn’t work out. You know, Benayu, the more I learn about Fodaro, the better I like him.”

At a lonely place south of that camp Benayu dismounted and climbed a little distance from the road. Maja sensed a steady, prolonged tremor that seemed to move in a circle around him but then none of the expected shock of magic as he became a raven. He rose, circling, and flew south.

They had their midday rest on a grassy bank beside the road. A few travelers passed in either direction. Some of them were wearing the standard dress of the Empire, familiar from the story told in the Valley, the men in little conical caps with upturned brims and a tassel, loose brown jackets and baggy knee breeches; the women in long skirts and long colored scarves with tasseled ends wound twice round over their heads. The tassels on both caps and scarves were decorated with blue beads, by which one could tell the wearer’s grade in the elaborate social system of the Empire.

“I suppose we’re going to have to dress like that,” said Saranja.

“I don’t know,” said Ribek. “Nobody seemed to bother with it much up in the mountains. I expect Benayu can easily fix it if we have to.”

The horses grazed contentedly in the noon stillness. Saranja sat, chin in hand, brooding. Ribek slept, snoring lightly. Maja was happily exploring the new fantasy life that had been gradually growing in her mind over the last few days. It was very different from her usual fantasies, because this time it actually seemed possible. She wasn’t a dashing adventuress with her own wonderful charger and magic sword, nor the poor captive of some evil slave trader, who made a daring escape from his clutches and became a key witness to bring him to justice and free his other slaves. It was far simpler than that. She was only a few years older, and Ribek had asked her to marry him and come and live with him at Northbeck and share the place where he belonged. From time to time as they journeyed she’d been asking him an innocent-seeming question and he’d answered unsuspecting, giving her another detail to flesh the fantasy out.

Now she was busy forming a picture of his older niece, not the one who had lent her the warm coat but the one who looked after the ducks that lived on a platform in the stream to keep them safe from foxes, when she sensed a familiar blip of magic somewhere behind her and knew from the feel of it that Benayu had returned. A few moments later he walked out of the trees.

“I’ve found something,” he said. “I don’t know that it leads anywhere. It keeps seeming to peter out, but then it picks up again. We’d better take it anyway. There’s a checkpoint at the next village. This isn’t an Imperial Highway, so you don’t normally need a way-leave to use it, but that’s what they’re asking for here.”

The path certainly didn’t look very promising when they reached it—a rough logging track, with a stack of felled trunks beside it waiting to be picked up by the timberwain. Sure enough, it seemed to end at the place where the trees had been felled, but they pushed on between the tree stumps and came out onto an open hillside, trackless but easy going, climbed to a ridge and found what seemed to be a footpath winding southward into the hills, though there was not a building in sight or anything to show who might have made it.

The same for mile after mile, their path time and again seeming to stop in the middle of nowhere, only to renew itself. It was well into the afternoon and Maja was deep in her fantasy again when she realized that for some time now she’d been growing increasingly uneasy. The others seemed to feel it too, Benayu with surly silence, Ribek with pointless chat, answered by Saranja with an indifferent shrug or grunt. The horses and Sponge plodded listlessly on. Something was wrong—something missing, Maja eventually decided. It was like total silence. Even in ordinary silence, when there’s no particular noise reaching your ears, there are always very faint background sounds, nothing you’d normally notice, but there. Total silence is a blank, so empty that you can almost hear it by its very absence. So now. All natural objects have magic in them, too faint to notice but still giving out its own slight vibration. Not here. Nothing from the boulders, or the patches of scrawny shrubs and coarse grass.