Benjamin, keen to test the astonishing properties of this contraption for himself, needed no further encouragement in becoming its second passenger: surely, surely, it would fall over once he started to ascend it. Yet there was only a slight totter, which occurred just when he swung himself around to take his place on the lower saddle, and that was that. With an enthralled grin he looked up to Lilac, ready and raring to exclaim just how utterly amazing this thing was, and then stopped himself: above, all he could see of his companion was her bum on the saddle, and he decided that it would be best to not say anything, lest she make a rather embarrassing innuendo of it. Instead, he concentrated on getting himself settled in, using the belts underneath his seat as per the lady’s recommendation. When done, he took a quick, cursory glance upwards - just to see if his effort at securing himself had followed Lilac’s example - and found the lady peering back down at him, her face framed by each of her thighs.
“Lucky I wasn’t in one of my cheongsam moods today, wasn’t it!” she said brightly, as though she was making another throwaway joke. If it was a joke, Benjamin didn’t get it; he had no idea what a shong-sam was, and had no great desire to find out, either. All he was concerned with, at that point, was the vehicle, and how he was supposed to help steer it when all the pegs within reach (which served as perfectly functional handholds, he discovered) were rigid, and without any visible turning mechanism. Fortunately, the obvious answer came before he had a chance to make a fool of himself by giving voice to the question: the thing, in all likelihood, was controlled by its topmost passenger; nothing was required of him except that he hang on, pedal, and remain calm in the face of the fact that there would really only be a saddle and a tenuous belt between himself and a giddying, interminable drop below.
“Right,” said Lilac. “All set, yes?”
“Uh-huh,” replied Benjamin, suddenly not so assured as to the sturdiness of the vehicle. He’d been thinking what it would be like to look down when the thing was in flight, and had found it somewhat disconcerting. “It is safe, isn’t it? You’ve driven - well, flown - one of these things before, right?”
“Course I have,” said Lilac, checking her satchel. “I pay a premium for this; I’m not going to waste it. So relax, okay?”
“Okay,” murmured Benjamin, taking a grim hold of the two pegs in front of him. He looked over to Naranarra, to see if anything could be read on his face which might contradict the lady’s confidence, but the old man’s expression was faraway and inscrutable. The boy offered him a wan wave, which was returned with a lack of enthusiasm that Benjamin found reassuring; it meant that, like Lilac, the old atulphi harboured no undue doubts about the safety of the contraption. Unless devices like these were always falling out of the sky, in which case Naranarra’s listless wave was one of sad resignation rather than indifference.
But that was merely fear talking, and Benjamin knew it. If the device were not so safe, would Lilac still be her usual chirpy self? Would Naranarra really be so indifferent? No, if there were problems, he would have already picked up on it. The lady was reckless, but she was no idiot. Of that he was certain.
Besides, she was far too proud to risk death by means of a faulty tandem. One only had to imagine the obituary to be sure of that.
“Here we go,” called Lilac, at which the boy began to feel the pedals move under his feet. So it was happening at last. Instinctively, he took his gaze upwards, looking beyond the lady to the haphazard agglomeration of machinery above. Slowly, very slowly, the mesh of components started to move, to turn. In a little while, it almost looked as if they were beginning to dance.
Lilac was watching the unfolding display also, her body shifting slightly from side to side as her legs worked the pedals. Benjamin followed suit, and was soon cranking at his own set of pedals with the same steady rhythm as that of his companion. Overhead, the spinning junk whirled faster, its reverberations echoing throughout the frame, its momentum pulling the propellers and fans outward like a centrifuge. He could see now that where there had once been chaos to the design, there was instead a wonderful, pirouetting pattern of waltzing wheels and strutting shafts, whose elegance of motion did much to allay his qualms about the thing’s ability to fly. To his mind, something so precisely engineered was not liable to lend itself to easy failure.
He suddenly felt himself swaying, as if he were upon a boat in a rough sea. Glancing down, he saw that the rooftop below was receding; they were taking off. With a few deep breaths, he contrived to convince himself that he wasn’t afraid. You’ll get the hang of it, he thought, not so fearful that he couldn’t appreciate it as exactly the kind of joke that Lilac would have enjoyed. He made a mental note to remember it should she call down and ask if he was alright, though if he’d still be sharp enough when the time came was another matter. With his rickety transport getting higher, and Niamago ever lower, he knew that whatever wits he possessed were, quite frankly, likely to be otherwise engaged.
But the device soon steadied, and that helped. Until Lilac shouted down and reminded him of the part he had to play in the mission, that was.
The emberquick! He needed to get his emberquick out, so that they’d know where to go. Which meant that he’d have to hold on with only one hand! Not good. Not good at all. Sure, he could ride a bike one handed; that was no problem. Hell, he could ride a bike no handed for anything up to eight seconds. But it was different when you were close to the ground; for one thing, it didn’t hit you so hard when you made a mistake.
Still, what else could he do? Tell Lilac that he was scared, and that he wanted to come down? Well, yeah, he could; but it was she who was in command here, not him. And he knew enough of her by now to know that she was not about to give up just because her passenger was getting a bit wussy. People capable of fighting demonic clowns whilst hanging upside-down from mile-high cages simply did not do things like that.
So without thinking - in case he hesitated to the extent of believing that he had a good reason to hesitate - he hooked his left arm around the central pole, and hugged it for dear life as he took his right hand away from the peg and plunged it into his pocket. His fingers found the emberquick without any undue fumbling - for which he was grateful - and once he had it in view, he saw that it was still glowing. With its song already in his head, he brought to mind his first great dream, and did his utmost to ignore everything that was making him afraid. Which was no easy task, considering that just about everything was making him afraid at the moment.
“Hey flyboy,” called Lilac, when she’d seen that Benjamin had done as asked. “So where do we go now?”
“Um -”
“Left or right. Or straight ahead. Where?”
He held up the emberquick and concentrated, inclining the crystal one way, then the other. With the feeling that the song had become a touch more persuasive on the rightward side, he let the lady know that that was the direction she should go.
“Is that a long right? Or a short one? How far?” she replied.
She was taking the mick, surely. “Oh - just keep going right. I’ll tell you when you get there, okay.”
“Get there? We haven’t even started.”
“I mean - when you’re on track. Just keep turning, and I’ll tell you when you’re ready to go forward.”
To his relief, Lilac took it in a long sweeping curve, giving him enough time to ascertain the intimations of the emberquick, as well as ensuring the turn wasn’t so tight that it caused their transport to tilt. Inevitably, though, she overshot somewhat. “Left now,” he shouted. “But not too much. Only a little bit.”
This time, the turning curve was sharper. And the tandem did lurch - but not as severely as the boy feared. In fact, the motion could have almost been described as serene. “That’s fine,” he said, with a good deal more confidence in his voice. “Yeah, I think you can just go straight ahead now.”
And the lady did so, without quarrel, quip or question.
14
On the basi
s that Niamago’s sun behaved like its earthly counterpart, in that it rose in the east and set in the west, Benjamin estimated that they were heading in a northerly direction. It wasn’t a precise calculation; the sun was still at something of its noonday apex, so he could just as easily be wrong. Nevertheless, it felt like he was travelling north, and that was good enough for him. Provided he kept to the course indicated by the emberquick, the only direction that really mattered was forwards.
It was difficult to tell exactly how high they were. Benjamin, like most schoolboys of his age, did not use feet or metres; he instead referred to an ascending scale based on the verbal impact of non-specific superlatives, such as ‘pretty high’, ‘really high’, ‘bloody well high’, and so forth. At the moment, he would gauge his altitude as being around the ‘pretty bloody well high’ range; he was roughly level with the uppermost storeys of the tallest buildings, though low enough to occasionally graze a jutting tier or dodge a looming walkway. Sometimes a hovel-stacked gully might make it seem as if they were higher; at other times the broad hump of a shanty-stubbled hill would make it appear that they were lower. Looking up, and witnessing so many atulphi driving their vehicles at even greater heights, Benjamin could easily believe that he was still at street-level. Looking down, and seeing the expanse below festooned with their equally numerous kin, he could just as easily imagine himself as being but a hair’s breadth from the edge of the sky.
If he had to make only one safe conclusion concerning his bearings, then it would have to be that he and Lilac were definitely getting closer to their mysterious destination. By simply summoning his first great dream and then adjudging the strength of the emberquick’s response - in much the same way as one would pay heed to calls of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ in a game of hunt the thimble - he was able to make sure that the gap between themselves and their goal continued to diminish. As to how far away their objective might be was anyone’s guess; for all he knew, hours and hours of cycling could lay ahead. He hoped not, of course; as much as he’d gotten used to the altitudes that they were travelling at (and he had to confess that the tandem was amazingly stable in its flight; if he closed his eyes, he could almost make himself believe that he was sailing in a gentle sea) he still didn’t like it much. It was just a little too similar to hanging from a stalactite in a cavern, or dangling from a rope-ladder over a ravine; the fall was so deep, and the handhold so fragile, it often seemed as if a fatal slip was only ever a heartbeat away.
And yet the vehicle, and the mode of travel, was safe. On some deeper level, he was certain of it. After all, would Lilac still sing so nonchalantly - the same silky, lulling tune he had heard when he first saw her - if she nursed even a titbit of anxiety about the device? And Naranarra - again, he had to ask: would that old atulphi really have been so unconcerned? The belt that kept him fastened to the saddle felt tight and strong; the tandem itself flew with grace and measure. No sudden jolt, lurch or spin had marred their journey so far. No cry of shock or surprise had come from Lilac’s lips. He remembered how he’d arrived in this land, a passenger in a vessel that had been held aloft and powered solely by a small flock of birds, and wondered if he had felt as imperilled then as he did now. No, he thought, his response quick and concise so as to spare any delusion, I didn’t. But then again, Lilac’s cage had a floor and bars. It gave the impression of being secure in a manner that the tandem did not. Out here, there was no floor, however slight it might be, between himself and the plunging depths below. And neither was there any visible barrier to halt him should he topple.
The tandem, however, did have an advantage over the cage on one significant point: it was a machine. A bizarre, implausible machine, admittedly, but one which had more going for it in terms of logic and physics than a bird-borne carriage. And when it came to choosing between the lift of an iron propeller or the flapping wings of some temperamental birds, it had to be said that this particular advantage was a decidedly large one. True, there was a magic at work in Niamago that could make people ski in the air and belch lightning; but Benjamin was still too much the child of a safe, cause-and-effect world to entertain the idea that it might be on par with, or hold sway over, the secure edicts of science. Perhaps, when he was back on land, he might think differently. In the meantime, he could only look forward to it.
***
There were, at least, some distractions along the way; no voyage, however fraught, across a land of living dreams could ever be entirely unbearable. They passed, for instance, over a street market - a smaller and more sedate affair than the one at Macallory Lane - whose spicy scents, drifting up, had left a pocket of pleasing, fragrant air. “Mankilits,” Lilac had said, slowing the tandem so as to get the most out of this piquant diversion; “nimply sauce. And feybrush. Hmmm.” Benjamin took a few good sniffs himself, quite happy to have the chance to muse upon something other than his predicament. He caught a whiff of what smelt like a combination of vanilla and ash; then a rosy fragrance, similar to Turkish delight. Next came a warm rum-and-evergreen aroma that made him think of Christmas, followed by a pungency that was peculiar and indescribable. The last was a lingering, grassy balm; when it was gone, he heard Lilac murmur to herself (all he could make out was something like ‘tiffbing’, and the words ‘up high’) after which she returned to her song, brought the tandem back up to speed, and resumed the journey with the blasé aplomb of someone thoroughly used to such interludes.
A little while later he saw a superhero. It was only a glimpse, but it was enough; the figure, caped, was flying without aid, his arms stretched out before him in classic comic-book style. He sped between two buildings, passing in the blink of an eye, and left in his track a lingering, luminous trail. Naturally enough, the boy was breathtaken - but not altogether surprised. Back at the pier, he had seen an atulphi wielding what could only have been a lightsaber, and if he and this flying character were anything to go by, then it was obvious that some atulphi here had qualities that were more the result of inspiration rather than imagination. It went without saying that a child could just as much desire the companionship of a wise and powerful space wizard than anything else, and that went for the prestige and protection that arose with being the best friend of a superhero too. Maybe there were cartoon atulphi about, or ones who looked like film stars. Maybe the atulphi themselves could be anything a child might wish for.
Immediately, Benjamin’s imagination took hold: could it be that there existed atulphi capable of devouring worlds and snuffing stars with a breath? Admittedly, he’d never heard of a child in want of so godlike a companion, but that was beside the point. And if it was possible that there might be no limits to the powers attributable to these beings, then where did that leave their dark counterparts, the phragodols? Did they, too, have the potential for omnipotence? Or was his imagination merely playing its usual trick, and getting the better of him?
Okay, so it probably was his imagination. But they were disturbing, compelling ideas all the same, and not easy to dismiss. He thought of asking Lilac about it all, but couldn’t quite figure out how to say what he wanted to say, so he left it. Hopefully, when they were both back on the ground, and safe and sound, he might find it easier to broach the subject. Until then, there was nothing else to do but plough on, and accept that whatever further distractions the immediate future held, they were not going to come in the shape of a diverting discourse.
***
As for Lilac, she was - unsurprisingly - not so reticent: “It’s interesting,” she said, not long after Benjamin had seen his superhero, “that you haven’t asked why we should refer to this exquisite conveyance -” she patted the central stem of their vehicle, so as to emphasise what she meant by ‘exquisite conveyance’ “- as a tandem. I’ve seen the things that go by that name in your world; quite different, I’d say. Yet you haven’t remarked upon it at all.”
“Haven’t I?” replied the boy, unsure of what she was really talking about. It hadn’t occurred to him that there should be anything
inherently wrong about describing this peculiar vehicle as a tandem. It had two seats, pedals, and it travelled - so what, exactly, was the issue here?
“Nope,” said Lilac.
Benjamin, whose interest in pursuing the subject was entirely negligible, responded with a curt “Oh well.” If it had been polite enough to do so, he would have quite happily said nothing.
Lilac seemed to get the hint: she went silent for a moment, and looked down to him with both a quizzical frown and an impish half-smile on her face. But it was soon obvious that she wasn’t deterred. “I bet you’re wondering,” she said, with the faint haughtiness of someone who doesn’t care that what they are about to say might be unwelcome, “how this machine could possibly work. In fact, I expect you must be puzzled about how any of these devices -” she swept a hand ahead of her, indicating all the soaring vessels about them “- manage to do what they do. To your eyes, they must appear ridiculous, yes?”
“I suppose so,” said Benjamin diplomatically. Despite having to admit to a great deal of curiosity concerning these machines (as well as just about everything else in this world) he had little inclination to make a conversation out of it. As with the ideas that had arisen from seeing the superhero, it was just too massive a subject to get one’s head around when one is dangling so high from so spindly and ludicrous a contraption.
Still, Lilac went on: “In your world, the physical rules are much more rigid. It’s awkward sometimes, but at least you know where you stand, yes?” She paused, taking time to giggle. “With us, though, they’re more flexible; more like guidelines. Often things work, often they don’t. It’s maddening, but the surprises are many. Not that the predictability that you’re used to is a bad thing; I’d imagine it seems fabulous when a good pie comes out good every time you take it from the oven...”
Benjamin, who resolutely did not want to hear about the quirkiness of Niamagonian engineering, decided that he would be better occupied by taking stock of their progress. With a little luck, the emberquick might give some hint that journey’s end was near, and when he brought his mind to bear on the crystal, he was pleased to find that this was so. There was now a definite air of coherence about the song, an idea of something recognisable in the jangling, tingling morass. In many ways, it was like tuning a radio, and hearing snippets of conversation and music amid the static; you might not know the content of the broadcast, nor the frequency, but you certainly knew that you were close to it. To Benjamin’s relief, it meant that the remainder of the voyage could now be measured in minutes as opposed to hours, and he wasted not a millisecond in letting Lilac know about it.