Angel Isle (13 page)

“Never thought I’d be seeing one of
them,
” said a voice nearby.

“Don’t mind if I never do again,” said another.

“You all right, young Ben?” said Ribek.

Benayu gave a shuddering sigh.

“They’re looking for me too, remember,” he muttered. “I never imagined power like that…and the horror…I never imagined it.”

Maja dragged herself out of her own nightmare, instinctively trying to join him in his, to tell him he was not alone. She reached to grasp his hand, clay-cold and clammy with sweat. He didn’t respond to her touch, nor come with her when she slowly surfaced into the here and now. He ate not a mouthful of his supper and seemed not to hear their voices, but sat all evening shivering and staring into the fire. In the end Ribek went to one of the food stalls and bought a phial of sleeping draft and forced it between his lips. Then he took off Benayu’s boots and with Saranja’s help straightened his body out—he seemed powerless to do even that for himself—and slid him into his bedroll. Sponge settled beside him and quietly licked his hand.

He was little better next morning. Ribek needed to support him to the latrines, and as soon as he returned he curled up again in his bedding and lay motionless until it was time to move. Pogo, aware through some weird horse sense that something was amiss with his usual rider, was in a skittish mood, so they heaved Benayu into Levanter’s saddle, where he sat hunched and listless all morning. Saranja led him, with Maja on the pillion, while Pogo took it out on Ribek by shying at trifles by the wayside.

Benayu sat with them silent at their midday rest, ate a few mouthfuls and slept in the shade, but when they moved on began to show signs of life, mutters and sighs and shakings of the head. But he ate steadily that evening, emptied his plate and set it aside, then spoke in a quiet, deliberate voice.

“It’s got to be done. It’s got to be done.”

He couldn’t hide the fear underlying the words.

It remained with them as the days went by, an unseen companion on their journey, as if the ghost of the Watcher walked beside them, invisible to all of them but Benayu. Mysteriously this made Maja’s own private nightmare easier for her to deal with. Compared to the almost solid reality of Benayu’s fear, hers seemed little more than a childish terror of the dark.
He
was the Watcher’s enemy, the one they were pursuing. Their prey. They probably didn’t even know of her existence. Without noticing, she found that she had started being afraid for him, not herself.

“Can’t we do
anything
to help?” she said one morning while Benayu was at the latrines.

“It’s hard on you,” said Ribek.

“It’s hard on all of us. It’s like being back at Woodbourne.”

Saranja glanced at her and nodded. She knew what Woodbourne had been like.

“We’ve got to bear with it, I’m afraid,” she said. “For one thing, we gave him our word, and for another we aren’t going to get anywhere without him. But we don’t all have to put up with it. Pogo will behave himself best alongside Rocky, so I’ll go ahead with Benayu and we’ll fix a seat for Maja behind Ribek.”

“We could take turns,” said Ribek.

“Let’s see how I get on,” said Saranja.

She got on very well, it turned out, simply by being herself. She didn’t try to cheer Benayu up, as Ribek might have done, or sympathize with him, as Maja would, but snapped at him if she felt like it, made his decisions for him, ordered him about. This seemed to suit him. Not that he became any less withdrawn, but less morose, more settled.

“Just what he needed,” Ribek told Maja. “He was pretty well on the edge of madness, I was beginning to think. His world had fallen to bits, and she’s put a little bit of it together again for him, a hut in a storm.

“Her too, I suppose,” he added after a pause. “She needs somebody outside herself. Not just a purpose, a person.”

Maja knew what he was talking about. It was one of the reasons the change suited her too. Maja wasn’t exactly afraid of her cousin, but she always felt on her best behavior with her. Saranja was so strong and direct and unafraid. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to be timid and unsure, as Maja felt herself to be. Or perhaps that was just a mask. No, more than a mask, armor. An armored knight with a fiery sword, the sword of her anger. How could you know what she was like inside?

Ribek was different, not timid either, but open and easy. And he liked to talk. He was, simply, more companionable. So Maja perched happily on a folded bedroll behind him, with her arms around his waist to steady herself, and listened to his account of life at Northbeck. He still didn’t seem to find it at all strange that she was so interested.

Looking back much later on their adventure, she decided that it was because of this closeness that the nature of her fantasy life began to change. So far it had all been about building up a picture of a place where she could belong in the same way he did, Northbeck mill, imagining the people who lived there, and her dealings with them, and the animals and neighbors and customers who brought their grain to be ground. Being married to Ribek had so far simply been a way of making this happen. He was there, of course. He set the broken wing of the owlet she found in the woods (it never learned to fly and rode around on Maja’s shoulder instead). He helped her rescue a child from the millstream. (Whose child? Theirs, of course, but she didn’t think about how they’d come by it. Like Ribek, it was simply there for the fantasy, but less real than him, or the millstream, or the yellow cat.)

Now though, the balance started to shift as the picture solidified. She found herself more and more reluctant to fiddle around with details once she’d decided on them. In real life, once something’s happened it doesn’t unhappen. There was no magic in her imagined world, apart from Ribek’s ability to hear what the millstream was saying, so no absurdities. Following this logic she found herself in a double bind. She couldn’t go on being the in-between sort of Maja-now/Maja-grown-up she had hitherto been. Maja-now had no place in her imagined Northbeck, where Maja-grown-up belonged. How grown-up? She decided she’d married Ribek when she was sixteen—he wouldn’t want her before that. She remembered the jewel seller at Mord, but he also liked farmers to send their prettiest daughters with the grain, though of course he only flirted with them. Or did he?…Anyway, they now had two children, the toddler who’d fallen in the millstream and the older boy she’d already arranged for because he could hear what the millstream was saying, so she’d be about twenty-two and Ribek a bit over fifty, but just as lively as he was now—having a much younger wife was really good for him—and they were still deeply…

Her imagination refused to make it happen. It wasn’t interested. No, more than that. She really didn’t want to think about falling in love, and kissing and cuddling and lying together naked and their children growing inside her body and so on. All that must have happened for her picture of living at Northbeck to become as real as she’d made it, but she couldn’t make it happen. It was as though some magician had deliberately put a ward round it, to prevent her seeing inside. In the end she gave up. Ribek was a lovely man, so of course Maja-grown-up loved him. That would have to do.

She didn’t notice when Maja-now started loving him too.

Steadily the climate changed again as they journeyed on south. They were already resting out the heat of each noon. Soon there were different crops in the fields, with different trees by the roadside, different shrubs and weeds in the patches of wilderness. For a while a huge river ran beside the road, with crocodiles basking on its mud banks and buffalo wallowing in its shallows. Long-tailed monkeys begged or thieved for scraps in the coppices by the highway. Trained dogs kept them clear of the way stations.

And still Jex did not speak.

The moon had waxed to full, dwindled to a sliver and waxed almost to full again when the clerk at a way station glanced up from their way-leaves and said, “Journey’s end, friends. Tarshu road’s closed. Another half day to Samdan, and then you’re stuck.”

“How long for, do you know?” said Ribek.

“They’ve been evacuating folk out of Tarshu this last month,” the man said. “And there’s still a few dribbling through. But nothing’s happened yet, far as I’ve heard. When it does, mind, it’s going to be big. Good idea to be some place else.”

“We’ve got to get to Tarshu somehow or other,” said Saranja impatiently.

“Well, madam, you’re just going to have to enjoy the bright lights of Samdan for a while. Though it’ll be packed solid with Tarshu folk waiting to get back in.”

“How much further on to Tarshu after that?”

“Two days when the road’s clear, but it’s going to be jammed solid a good while after they start letting folk back, so you’d best allow three.”

Across country they took six. Strange hawks quartered the sky by day, so between dawn and dusk they lay up in evacuated farms, then traveled on by moonlight. Benayu pulled himself together now that they were so near, and the danger so real. He dared use very little magic. All he could risk was puttting a screen round himself each sunset and transforming himself into a pigeon, so as to scout out a route for that night’s journey.

At first he kept them as far as possible in or near shadow, but on the second night, as they were making their way along a shallow, part-wooded valley, Maja sensed a faint magical force approaching rapidly from some distance ahead. From the feel of it she recognized it as having something in common with the hawks that she had tracked all day. It seemed to be coming not directly toward them but as if to cross their path a little way ahead. She whispered her news to the others and they turned aside into the shade of a coppice to let it pass.

Soon Benayu could pick it up too, and they felt it cross the further ridge in a broad line and, still invisible despite the moonlight, sweep down into the valley. On it came in absolute silence until it was near enough for the others to make out, first as a few moving blobs of darkness, then as a whole line which in a few heartbeats more became about forty wild dogs of some kind, spaced several paces apart so as to cover a broad swath of grassland as they raced along, noses down, whimpering faintly with the excitement of the chase.

The near end of the line passed about a hundred paces from the coppice. One of them checked, raised its muzzle and sniffed the air. A couple of others joined it. Saranja seized Maja, ready to heave her into the saddle. It was no use, they both knew. Once they were spotted this near Tarshu the Watchers would be on them in an instant. And then, as suddenly as they’d halted, the dogs gave up and moved on. They began to breathe again.

“Not good,” said Ribek. “They could still cross our scent anywhere and be after us.”

“Either we’ve got to find somehow to hide our scent, or we’ve got to choose ways where they won’t be looking for us,” said Saranja.

“As well as keeping out of the open?” said Benayu. “It can’t be done. It’s difficult enough as it is.”

“I don’t think we need worry so much about that,” said Ribek. “Night hunters like owls fly low. However good your eyesight is, you can’t see far at night, even in bright moonlight, but if you want to watch any kind of area you’ve got to fly high. That’s why the Watchers are using dogs. Best they can do.”

“I’ll think,” said Benayu.

They moved on in silence, expecting any minute to hear the sound of baying coming from somewhere back on their trail, but the night stayed silent until the stars began to pale.

Next night Benayu led them on a slow and twisting course over broken foothills, though there was far better going on the plain below. At one point they waded for a while up a stream, until they came out on a wide upland dotted with abandoned sheep. Here he used Sponge to round up a dozen sleepy and bewildered beasts and for a couple of hours drive them behind the travelers, blotting out the human scent trail. Then it was broken ground again for a weary while. Once they heard distant baying and guessed that somewhere the dogs had found quarry. Almost at once Maja sensed something magical joining the pursuit. The feeling ended abruptly and the dogs fell silent. At last they reached an empty farmstead with food for the humans in the larder, mostly mildewed or stale, and fodder in the storage bins. And sleep.

The farmstead was on high ground looking east. Maja was standing in the doorway next evening, watching the movement of hawks as she waited for Benayu’s return. She’d seen only one, briefly, in an hour or more, where there’d been at least one constantly visible on the day they’d started. She was distracted by a sense of something unfamiliar ahead and to her left. Far off, she decided after a while, and therefore powerful for her to feel it at all. And muddled, as if there were several kinds of magic going on at the same time.

Moving into the greater darkness inside the door she found that several beads on her bracelet were glimmering erratically, to no pattern that she could make out. She showed Benayu when he returned. He in his turn stood in the doorway and concentrated.

“Yes,” he said after a while. “I can feel it, just. I wonder. Perhaps something’s started to happen at Tarshu. It can’t last forever. We’d better get on.”