Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

He was still talking when Saranja came back. The dress uniform of a female Captain Commander in the Imperial Army was a brass helmet with a purple plume worn over a shorter version of the standard head-scarf framing the face. Below that a dark olive jacket, tight-laced up to the collar, with gold epaulettes, belted in at the waist; short, many-pleated skirt over close-fitting breeches; black boots, belt and belt-pouch, highly polished. A light curved sword hung from the belt.

They’d all been sitting while Ribek talked. Striclan rose and kissed Saranja’s hand. She flushed, adding to the aura of romantic dash, but collected herself and turned to Maja, drew her sword and saluted her. The salute looked exactly right, long practiced, though it couldn’t have been anything she’d done before. As with Maja, she wasn’t acting the part, but being it. Her body knew how to do that.

“Thank you, Captain,” said Maja. “We are grateful that you were able to join us.”

They ate their midday meal off a table and sitting in chairs, while Benayu waited on them. He ate separately when they had finished. Maja’s old body told her that it was used to a nap at that point, so she had one, sitting upright in her chair, and woke refreshed. Then Ribek asked her permission to join her and they talked for an hour or more about their imaginary lives. He was a self-made man, she learned, having inherited a small water mill in a distant northern valley, done well by good luck and hard work, bought more mills and was now a wealthy industrialist with three children already in the business. To Maja, it all seemed perfectly real, as true as anything her buried self knew about him. And in another way he was still the same Ribek, himself through and through. He showed no sign at all of being overawed either by her high social standing or her formidable presence. As for herself, she had no need to invent. Every minute that passed, more of the real Lady Kzuva’s knowledge, her memories, her experience of the world was there, present on Angel Isle. She told Ribek the name of the pet greyhound she had had when she was a child. She couldn’t have done that when she’d woken.

Benayu had stood throughout a respectful distance away. At one point Maja had thought of beckoning him over to ask how long the effect of the potion he’d given her that morning would last, and whether it would be a good idea to renew it before they set off, but though his eyes had been looking toward where she sat he’d clearly been in one of his trances. Now, however, he came over with the salver already in his hands, and when she’d taken the cup and thanked him he turned to the others.

“Your pardon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I think we should practice invisibility. It’s not as easy as you’d think, because you won’t be able to see each other. But if you all hold hands that’ll stop you bumping into each other. It makes it simpler for me, anyway. You don’t want to move around more than you can help, but if you have to you’ve got to remember where the others are and leave them room to get past things and so on. I may be too busy to put thoughts into your heads, so you’ll have to pass messages along the line by squeezing or shaking the next person’s hand. If you’ll please hold hands you can sort that out between you now, and then I’ll fetch the animals.”

Invisibility was, as he’d said, much harder than Maja would have thought. She was at the right of the line so that she could use her cane, and she knew where her hands and feet were in relation to herself, but not in exact relation to the ground she was standing on except by looking down through her own feet and seeing where the grass was pressed flat. And she couldn’t have told to within several inches where the end of her cane was. They practiced getting out of Benayu’s way without jostling each other when he walked toward them, and only got it right after several tries.

“I suppose that’ll have to do,” said Benayu at last, and they returned to visibility. “Here is your brooch, my lady. Shall I pin it on for you?”

“Please.”

The brooch was a silver plain bar bearing three horses, their bodies overlapping, grazing beside a tree. Even at that scale, Maja could tell which horse was which. She nodded and he pinned it onto her dress. She turned and saw that Rocky, Pogo and Levanter were no longer where they had been, though Sponge still lay there, drowsing untroubled.

“Well, there’s clearly no question of our sneaking up behind some general and peering over his shoulder while he looks at a map,” said Ribek. “Hello, there. Coming along for the ride?”

The last few words were spoken to a golden squirrel that had come scampering up behind, climbed his body as easily as if it had been a tree trunk, and was now perched on his shoulder. A small white owl floated soundlessly down and settled beside Saranja’s left epaulette. A dark green snake slid to Striclan’s feet. He picked it up and lifted it so that it could loop itself round his neck. Something brushed against Maja’s cheek. When she reached to investigate it clambered onto her forefinger. She inspected it through her eyeglasses—a large, furry-bodied moth with rich brown wings that flickered with purple sheen where they caught the light. She lifted it so that it could settle onto her head-scarf.

“It matches your eyes, my lady,” muttered Ribek.

She smiled, accepting the compliment.

“No doubt they have a purpose, but I think I must have dozed off.”

“We felt it might impress the Pirates if—”

But Ribek’s explanation was interrupted by Benayu.

“All set, ladies and gentlemen? I’ll be going ahead to choose a clear spot on the command deck for you. If you’d be so kind as to hold hands again…”

CHAPTER

24

They vanished, animals and all, and Angel Isle was empty apart from the calling seabirds. Now, suddenly, the inward Maja asserted itself and a wave of apprehension swept through her. They must all have been feeling a good bit of adult anxiety but been too proud to admit it, in the case of the Lady Kzuva perhaps even to herself. This was different. This was a child’s terrors of being set in front of an audience of important men and women and being expected to perform some feat that would be far beyond her, even if she’d had the slightest idea how to begin. Without thought she squeezed Ribek’s hand for reassurance. He didn’t return the gesture but started to shuffle to the right, then realized his mistake and laughed aloud.

“False alarm,” he called. “Whoops!”

His grip on her hand tightened. Angel Isle vanished dim on her right. She felt a rushing motion, incredibly smooth, incredibly fast. She could see the glitter of ocean to her left, the glare of sky overhead, the mainland, but all hurtling away so quickly behind her that even with her younger eyes all detail would have been lost. The movement ended as instantaneously as it had begun, without any jolt or forward lurch of her body, and she was in an enclosed space unlike anything she had ever seen before. She tucked her cane under her arm and used her free hand to put her eyeglasses to her face.

They were in a metal-and-glass room more than twice as big as the kitchen at Woodbourne, but with three curved, outward-bulging walls that consisted mainly of large clear windows. One of these was immediately behind her. Through the one opposite her Maja could see two airboats floating along, a small one fairly near and a larger one in the distance, with blue and white banners flying from their bows.

There were a couple of dozen people in the room, four of them soldiers guarding the two closed doors in the straight, windowless wall to her right. These wore baggy lime-green uniforms and carried things that must be weapons, though they didn’t look as if they’d be much use for spearing or slashing or bashing anyone. Two more soldiers were sitting at a big table in the middle of the room, working at documents, another three were sitting at small fixed tables manipulating mysterious machines, and another was talking quietly into a shiny gadget he held in his hand. On her left, with their backs to the room, a dozen or more people were looking out through the single window that stretched almost the whole length of that wall. They were listening to a tall, pale, gaunt-faced man in a much smarter lime-green uniform as he explained to them something that was happening beyond the window. Looking at him, Maja saw at once why Saranja called the Pirates Sheep-faces. The language he was using was full of odd gargling sounds. Five of his audience were also in uniform, but the rest wore a variety of clothes, slightly odd in style, neat but dull. Three of them were women.