A pale, faint light, marvelously familiar after all that strangeness, gleamed ahead. They were gliding peacefully toward it when Maja heard Benayu’s shout from ahead.
“Down! It’s too narrow!”
A thump and a clatter, and Pogo’s squeal of hurt and outrage, and Benayu’s voice again.
“Hold it! Let’s have some light.”
Immediately the walls of the tunnel glowed, and there was Saranja swinging down from the saddle and helping Pogo struggle to his feet and then starting to feel him over. The floor of the tunnel was strewn with broken boulders and its walls seemed to have been scorched with fire.
“He’ll do,” said Saranja. “Oh, come on, you stupid horse, it could’ve been a lot worse. What’s happened here? It wasn’t like this when we came through.”
“That was the Watchers getting through,” said Benayu. “I told you there’d be an explosion. At least I got one of them.”
He gestured toward what looked like a bundle of charred gray cloth lying among the tumbled rocks. A skeleton hand protruded from between its folds.
“We’re going to have to lead the horses, and take it slowly,” said Saranja. “They’re no good on this sort of footing. They’re not goats.”
“Wait,” rumbled a deep voice behind them. Maja wriggled herself round and saw the lion’s body filling the tunnel. It opened its jaws and blew out a long, slow breath. A warm gale swept along the tunnel, picking them all up, horses, people and dog, and floating them out over a moonlit ocean where the animals could once again stretch their wings and fly. Behind them the tunnel collapsed in thunder.
They rose, circled and landed on the summit of Angel Isle.
CHAPTER
19
“Wake up, Maja,” said Ribek’s voice. “Benayu wants to know what you’d like for breakfast.”
“Oyster-and-bacon pie,” she mumbled.
“Bit rich for an invalid?”
“I’m not an invalid. I’m just tired. I just want a little to taste.”
“Provided you have some chicken broth first. Your stomach’s shrunk too, remember.”
“All right.”
“Good as my grandad made, I’ll have what you leave, well as my own,” said the Ropemaker.
“Two oyster-and-bacon pies,” said Benayu’s voice. “One chicken broth, three lots of lamb chops, one raw and two medium-rare, one spiced kidneys. Lime water, ale, and coffee. Fodder for the horses. Anything else?”
“Rhubarb-and-ginger crumble,” said Ribek. “Milaja Finsdaughter at Frog Bottom does a good one.”
“Coming up. There’ll be a ten-minute wait on Saranja’s kidneys.”
“They taste best if you can make them disappear from under a warlord’s nose,” said Saranja.
“Look, I’ve got an Empire to sort out,” said Benayu, obviously delighting in the challenge.
“First things first,” said Ribek.
An extraordinary sense of well-being pervaded the little encampment. They were in a smooth patch of thymy turf ringed by a wall of the jutting rocks of which Angel Isle was made. Maja had seen the place only briefly last night, by the light of the pale glow the Ropemaker, back in his human form and wearing his turban, had shed around him as he had knelt by her side and stared down at her. Now, even with her eyes shut against the morning glare, Maja could hear the exhilaration in everyone’s voices. Not wanting to miss a moment of it, she opened her eyes, rolled on her side and tried to push herself up. Instantly Ribek’s arm slid under her shoulders to help.
“I can do it,” she said crossly.
But she couldn’t, and in the end was forced to let him lift her and resettle her in a nest he’d made out of the bedding rolls with her back propped against one of the rocks, arranging her limbs much as he’d done when she’d been a rag doll inside a magical egg in that other universe. Not enough stuffing, she thought, gazing at the stick-thin legs stretched out in front of her.
“How are you doing?” he said quietly.
“Better. I think it was that extra-dimension stuff wore me out. I could feel it eating me away. It wasn’t Benayu’s fault, or Jex’s. They had to let it happen so I could follow the trail. I’ll be all right now we’re back in our own world. Look, I’m a rag doll still. Floppy legs.”
“We need Striclan back to feed you up. Can’t go on asking Benayu to keep doing this.”
“What about the Watchers? Won’t they notice?”
“The ones who came after us are still trapped on the other side of the barrier, and he’s put a screen all round the island. He seems to think it’s all right. Ah, this smells like your broth.”
“First things first, you said,” said Benayu, not bothering to hide the boyish pleasure he felt in showing off, just as he might have done on the mountain pasture where they had first met him all those months ago. The soup tasted as good as it smelled. She sipped it with dreamy relish as the warmth flowed into her bloodstream. She let Ribek have a taste of it and drank the rest herself. The next course arrived as she put the mug down.
“I could show you the warlord’s face if you like,” said Benayu as he handed Saranja her pungent-odored bowl.
“All right…Oh! That’s Tarab Arkan. He was a real beast. He treated his women like trash, punched them and kicked them when they had daughters and then gave them away to his bodyguard to do what they liked with. Nobody dared suggest it might be something to do with him that he didn’t have any sons. He’d have had them flayed alive! I’ll savor every mouthful.”
They ate in contented silence, apart from Sponge’s joyous snarls as he wrenched at his raw chops. Ribek had been right, though. Maja could tell she would have enjoyed the pie if she’d been well and strong, but now it was far too rich. For a while she dipped corners of bread in the sauce and chewed them slowly, but in the end passed almost a whole bowlful over to the Ropemaker to finish. Then she closed her eyes and drowsed against Ribek’s shoulder, half listening to the Ropemaker telling the others in short, jerky sentences about his childhood in Barda. His father was a fisherman who had drowned at sea when he was a baby, his mother had married a man who didn’t want him in the house, so he’d lived with the grandfather who’d made the oyster-and-bacon pie. But he’d died when the boy was six and he’d been sent to live with the village ropemaker, more as a child slave than anything, though he’d been called an apprentice. He’d picked up the trade simply by watching what his master did, and this included using a few simple spells to supple a rope or strengthen a splice and so on.
He grasped them instantly, and worked them almost without thought, and when his master realized this he told him other charms that he knew of but couldn’t do himself, and they too came to the boy easy as breathing. Soon he could rig a fishing smack in a morning, or tie two ends of cord into a pattern of knots that would of its own accord repeat and repeat itself until it was a full-sized fishnet.
He got no thanks. The reverse, if anything. He was still his master’s apprentice, and so still a slave, but now a valuable one. For fear that he might be kidnapped by a rival, or run away and look for a kinder home, his master kept the boy locked up when he wasn’t under his eye, leaving food for him when he went to carouse with his cronies. A rat arrived, searching for scraps, and the boy made friends with it, studied it, searched out its inner nature, and as if by instinct turned himself into a rat. He crept out by the hole through which his friend had entered and scuttled down to the foreshore, where there was a skiff waiting ready for him to rig it next morning.
He did the work by moonlight. At one point he was aware of a wind-charm blowing in the breeze off the ocean, so he wove it into the halyard. When he’d done, he winched the skiff down the slipway, let the incoming tide set it afloat, for no reason that he knew of loaded several coils of spare rope aboard, hoisted sail and told the wind-charm to take him wherever it had come from. Unhesitating, it took him to Angel Isle.