Angel Isle
Authors: Peter Dickinson
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Young Adult, #Childrens
Contents
For Hugh
(
and Jean, who doesn’t have to read it
)
Prologue
A
woman led a lame horse across an unpeopled landscape. For much of the way all seemed peaceful, but then she would come to an area where buildings were shattered or gutted with fire, young crops trampled flat, and bodies, both human and animal, sprawling in their blood and now rotting unburied. Ahead of her lay the heavy line of the forest, and close beneath it the remains of one last farm. So Saranja came home to Woodbourne.
Six years ago she had left, swearing to herself she would never return. For five of those years she had been the house slave of one of the warlords beyond the Great Desert, until he and the two children she had borne him had died when his keep was stormed by his brother’s army. In the chaos she had escaped, and continued to stagger on through the darkness. When dawn had broken she had found herself already in the desert.
Six years ago she had almost died, crossing it, though then she had carried food and water. Now she had nothing. But she did not turn back. Death would be better than the life she had been living. This time, though, the desert seemed to let her through as if it had chosen to do so. It provided her with two freak thunderstorms and a waterhole large enough to support a colony of birds which, having no predators, laid their eggs on the ground. With those, and things that she had learned from her first crossing to recognize as food, she had come through.
And then, seeing what had happened in the Valley, she had known that she must go and find out if anything was left of Woodbourne.
Not much. When a thatched and timbered building goes up in flames, very little remains but the central chimney stack, standing amid a pile of ashes and a few rafter ends.
No voice answered her call. She hadn’t expected one. Her brothers would be fighting the raiders, or dead, her mother and aunt hiding in the forest with the animals.
She scuffed with her feet among the fringes of the heap. It was a way of preventing herself from weeping, because she felt she had no right to. Of her own will she had cut every connection with Woodbourne, even grief. All that was over.
Something glinted in the ashes. She stooped and eased out a golden feather, perfect, looking as if it had been shed that very morning. She pulled it free, and another came with it, attached at the quill by a twist of golden hair. She laid them together and ran her fingertips along them. The idiot story flooded back into her mind, the story that she had never believed, thinking it just a mechanism by which her mother could bind her for all her life to Woodbourne, as she herself had been bound, because Saranja had once made the mistake of admitting that she sometimes imagined she could hear the cedars talking.
With a sigh she turned to the horse, a useless old gelding she had found yesterday—or rather he had found her, wandering out of nowhere and nosing up to her for food, and had then simply followed her. She hadn’t driven him off, because he was company of a kind, and also fresh meat that she didn’t have to carry. She had imagined till now that he followed her so persistently only because he didn’t want to be the only living creature in the landscape.
If it’s you, you’ll need a horse as well as the feathers.
“Waiting for me, weren’t you?” she said. “Now all we want is some fellow from Northbeck.”
She looked back along the way they had come. A man was limping up the road toward her, leaning heavily on his staff. Without thought her fingers caressed the golden feathers as she waited for him, until she realized that her hands were full of a peculiar glowing warmth. She looked down. Feathers and hair seemed to shine with their own light. There was no need to go up into the forest. If she could do it at all, she could do it here.
The man came into the yard. He was about forty, slight, dark, with a look of arrogant energy beneath his obvious weariness and pain. There was a bloodstained bandage round his left calf.
“Ribek Ortahlson,” he said.
“Well, I’m Saranja Urlasdaughter. Hold his head, will you.”
She moved round to the horse’s flank.
“I’ve no idea if this will work,” she said.
She whispered the name.
“Ramdatta.”
Her hands knew what to do.
PART ONE
TARSHU
CHAPTER
1
C
old, hungry, terrified, Maja watched the two strangers from her secret den beside the mounting block, beneath the burnt barn. That was where she’d run when she’d seen a troop of the savage horsemen from the north come yelling up the lane all those days ago, and lain there cowering. Her uncle and the boys were away fighting the main army of the horsemen, but they must have caught her mother and her aunt. Maja couldn’t see what they did to them because of the smoke, but she’d heard their screaming. Then the smoke of the burning buildings had got into the den and overcome her. After that she didn’t remember anything for a while, and when she woke the savages were gone and the farm was ashes around her.
She had felt too ill to move, and too terrified of the savages, and her throat had been horribly sore, but at last she’d crept out and climbed up to the spring and drunk, and then stolen round the farm like a shadow and found her mother’s body and her aunt’s lying face down in the dung pit, and a lot of dead animals scattered around. Her aunt used to make her help with the butchering, so she cut open a dead pig with her knife and roasted bits of its liver on the embers of her home, and despite the soreness of her throat had managed to swallow it morsel by morsel. By the time she’d finished, it was beginning to get dark, so she’d crawled back into her den and curled up in her straw nest and slept there all night without any dreams at all.
She’d spent the next day collecting dry brushwood and straw and the burnt ends of rafters and beams and piling it all into the dung pit on top of the two bodies. As dusk thickened she’d used a still smoldering bit of timber to set the pile alight.
“Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,” she’d whispered as the flames roared up, then turned away dry-eyed. She didn’t seem to feel anything. She was vaguely sorry about her mother, and vaguely guilty that she’d never learned how to love her. There hadn’t been anything there to love. She’d dreaded and hated her aunt, but her aunt had shaped her world and she felt a far greater sense of loss at her going. Now that shape was shattered and all she had was emptiness, until her uncle came back from the fighting, if he ever did.
The dead animals had soon begun to rot, but some of the chickens were still alive and hanging around because they didn’t know anywhere else to go. There was good barley out in the little barn in Dirna’s field, which her aunt grew there every year to feed to the unicorns, so the chickens learned to come to her again when she called to them, and she managed to coax some of them into laying. She ate the cockerels one by one and found a few things still usable in the vegetable patch and the orchard, and survived, afraid and lonely.
She had found her den long before. Ever since she could remember she had needed somewhere to hide. Hide from her uncle’s sudden, inexplicable rages, from her aunt’s equally savage tongue, from her boy cousins’ thoughtless roughness. Only occasionally did anyone hurt her on purpose. Indeed, once or twice when she was small and at the end of one of his outbursts her uncle had slammed out to the barn, her aunt had deliberately sent her out to call him in, despite her terror of him. It was one of her aunt’s ways of punishing her, though she’d never been told what for. So she’d crept through the barn door, tensed for his anger, but instead he’d called to her and put her on his lap and fondled her like a kitten for a while, and spoken gently to her, though she could feel his rage still roiling inside him—and it was the rage itself that had terrified her, not the fear that she herself might suffer from it. Usually it had been her big cousin Saranja who’d suffered, or the two boys—and they had been always angry too. Even her own mother had been too vague and feeble to notice her much, let alone stand up for her when she needed help. She must have had a father, of course, but she’d never known him, and had no idea who or where he was. She didn’t dare ask. Saranja had been the only person besides her uncle who had sometimes smiled at her, as though she had meant it.
But then there had come the day she had taught herself never to think of, and at the end of it Saranja had gone away and the rage had been ten times worse than before and her uncle had never spoken to her kindly again.
And it was all Maja’s fault. It always had been, even before that. Since she was born.
There was a bit of the heap of ashes that had been Woodbourne which she fed with fresh wood to keep the embers going, and then hid under layers of ash when she’d finished her cooking. She’d just done that when she’d spotted the woman trudging along the lane with an old horse trailing behind her, and a solitary figure limping along further back. They hadn’t looked dangerous, but all the same she’d clucked to the chickens, who’d come hustling over, imagining it was the start of the evening drill that kept them safe from foxes. She’d laid a trail of barley to lure them into the den and lain in the entrance to watch, letting the scorched branch of fig that screened it fall back into place.
Now the woman came into the yard and stared around. She was grimy with long travel, but despite that was beautiful in her own fierce way, with a mass of glossy dark hair hanging well below her shoulders. Maja had a vague feeling she’d seen her before—or perhaps it had been in a dream, or perhaps she’d just imagined her in one of the stories she told herself. She had the look of a queen, angry, proud and sad—a defeated queen who refuses to accept her defeat. Maja used to tell herself a lot of stories like that during her lonely and miserable years, stories of adventures she would never have and courage that would never be hers.
The horse shambled in behind the woman and stopped, as if it didn’t know what else to do.
The woman called out in a strong voice.
“Anyone there?”
No one answered, so she started to wander around, scuffing here and there with her feet at the edges of the pile of ash that a month ago had been Woodbourne. She stooped and pulled what looked like a golden feather from the ashes. Another followed, dangling below it.
Maja stared. The roc feathers! Why hadn’t they burnt with everything else? She knew them well. Once a year, after supper on the eve of Sunreturn, the whole family would sit and listen to her mother telling them the old story of Tilja and the Ropemaker, and her aunt would fetch the feathers out of the box where she kept them—she never let anyone else touch them—to show them it was all true, and then put them back when it was over.
The woman smoothed them between her fingers and turned and said something to the horse, then looked back along the way she had come. After a while a man limped into the yard. He too was stained with travel, but unlike the woman looked sick and exhausted. There was a bloodstained bandage round his left leg. All the same, he also looked like someone out of one of Maja’s stories, the last loyal soldier in the queen’s defeated army, perhaps, a laughing warrior, an officer used to giving orders. Despite everything, his neat triangular beard gave him a jaunty look. Maja decided she liked him. She wasn’t afraid of him.
“Ribek Ortahlson,” he said.
That was obviously his name. Ortahlson! That was in the old story too. He must come from Northbeck and a man in his family sang winter after winter to the snows to make them fall and block the passes, so that the savage horsemen of the northern plains couldn’t come raiding, the way they had now—just as a woman from Woodbourne sang winter after winter to the unicorns in the forest so that the sickness stayed in the forest and the armies of the great empire to the south couldn’t get through to tax the Valley of everything it owned.
The woman answered but she was facing away from Maja, who couldn’t hear what she said. They both turned to the horse, which had wandered up to the mounting block, letting Maja hear and see everything. The woman laid the feathers on the horse’s back, behind the shoulders, and began to stroke them. She whispered something, and the whole Valley seemed to shake and shimmer. The shock-wave thundered through Maja’s body, and she passed out.
When she came to—it could only have been a few seconds—the quills of the feathers were sinking into the hide. The horse shrugged, raised its head, and gave a long sigh as if of sudden, huge contentment.
The woman stood back beside Ribek, watching the feathers twitch as they embedded themselves into the muscles that had grown to receive them. At once they started to thicken and extend themselves. The quills became bone. The individual barbs lengthened into vanes. A joint appeared below them, dragging with it a fold of hide along the undersides of the quill. All along this fresh plumes erupted, as golden as the original pair. The horse itself started to grow to accommodate the major muscles that its wings were going to need, and still to remain in the true proportions of a horse. At the same time its original indeterminate dunnish hue lightened and brightened to a glowing chestnut. It raised its head, stamped a hoof and snorted like a charger. The movement allowed Maja to see that it was no longer a gelding, but a stallion, entire. The whole landscape seemed to pulse and quiver as the woman continued to stroke the now enormous wings.
Vaguely for some time Maja had been noticing a dull drumming that had been coming from the southwest. Abruptly it changed its note. Absorbed in the wonder of the event, neither of the other two seemed to have noticed it.
The woman sighed.
“I never believed it,” she said. “I was still hoping it wouldn’t happen.”
“I’ve always believed,” said Ribek. “To see it is something different. What now? To judge by the story we’re expected to ride it. I’ve never ridden a horse—we’re boat people and millers.”
“We can’t go on calling it ‘it.’ What do you call a horse that’s partly a roc?”
“A rocking horse? I’ve ridden a rocking horse at the Gathering when I was a kid.”
“A
name,
” said the woman. The tone of her voice, Maja thought, meant she didn’t really get it that anyone could be lighthearted at a moment like this. She seemed to change her mind.
“Well, I suppose Rocky’s not a bad name for a horse,” she said, and repeated it, trying it out on her tongue.
“Rocky?”
The horse tapped a forehoof gently on the ground as if it approved.
“Rocky it is then,” said the woman. “Bareback’s possible, but it’d be tiring any distance. Suppose…it can’t do any harm…”
She moved forward and laid her spread hands on Rocky’s back. With apparent confidence—but diffidence seemed to be not in her nature—she spoke the single word, “Harness.”
Again that shock-wave. This time Maja stayed conscious, though if she’d been standing she’d have staggered and fallen. Then the tremor and glitter of the landscape and a series of piercing thrills, as one by one a double saddle appeared, stirrups, saddlebags and scallop-fringed reins and bridle, the leather all glossy scarlet, the buckles and studs gold, and the plume on the bridle a fountain of golden feathers. The woman looked up, frowning. The movement broke the spell of the wonderful and beautiful event, and Maja looked up too, and gasped. Something almost as astonishing, but this time terrible and strange, was happening in the sky.
Hidden till now by the treetops of the forest edge beyond the farm, an immense, dark bag-thing had appeared, floating toward it, shaped like a fat sausage pointed at both ends, held up by nothing, but carrying below it a sort of long, thin basket, as big as the largest boat on the river. Even more dangerous and terrifying because they were so much nearer, five enormous birds were flying steadily ahead of it. Each of them towed a bag like the first one, nothing like as huge but still as big as a haystack, below which dangled a harness carrying a man in a bulging dark helmet and jet-black uniform. They seemed to Maja to be flying directly toward her. This had happened to her before, many, many times in dreams—the monsters who knew where she was hiding, and were coming for her now. Always in dreams, she had woken before she saw them. This time she was awake, and they were real. Her limbs locked rigid with terror.
The two humans had their backs toward them and hadn’t seen them. But now the horse had. He didn’t like it at all. He started to fidget, to stretch his great wings for flight, to try to rear. The woman shouted to the man to load the kit into the saddlebags and come and hold the bridle. And as soon as she could she darted round to the mounting block and slid into the front saddle. The man hurried to follow. The horse was almost on his hind legs. Maja broke out of the terror-trance. She scrambled from her den and up the block.
“Take me too!” she shouted. “Don’t leave me behind! Please! Please!”
The horse was rearing, his hind legs tensed to spring, his wings spread for the first mighty buffet that would carry them into the air. Maja felt herself caught by the collar and flung forward and upward. She grasped desperately for something to hold on to. Another hand caught her out of the air and sent her crashing against the horse’s neck. Rocky squealed and bolted north. Maja clutched, found a handful of mane, and then another, and then just clung there, while the great wings smote the air in panic.
She felt some sort of a struggle going on behind her and managed to crane round. By now they were well clear of the ground. Ribek’s legs and waist were dangling down by the horse’s flank, with him grasping the after saddle and wrestling to hoist himself further, while the woman, with one hand twisted into Rocky’s mane, was reaching round with the other to help him. At last he made it and settled down, gasping, into the saddle.