“It was,” said the white-faced woman. She stared down lovingly at the silf. “She must have learnt so much by now. And grown, too.”
“But that will be enough today,” said the stately gentleman with the glowing sword. He walked over to the woman and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you think so, my friend?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing quickly at Benjamin. For a moment, it felt as if she was on the verge of asking something more; yet she said nothing, and with her head down and the silf still cradled in her arms, she withdrew timidly back into the crowd.
“Okay people,” said Lilac, her shoulders hitched and her palms held outward, as though she’d been caught in a shrug. “You’ve seen him, and you know what he can do.” She paused, looked wearily at her young charge then turned back to the crowd. “His journey here has been long, and, in being his first, jarring too. As Beyno said, he needs some rest. So kindly disperse, please, and let us pass. Okay?”
There was a second of inaction before the robed man nodded, smiled, and drew away from them with a curt bow. In the wake of this cue, a number of others also bowed and retreated, and soon the crowd was dissolving with all the tenacity of an aspirin in water. Eventually, all that was left to linger were the stares of the departing welcomers; with the way now clear - or as clear as any reasonably well attended pier could be - Lilac wasted little time in proceeding onwards. “I’m glad that’s done with,” she said, when boy caught up with her. “I don’t care for being the centre of attention; perhaps it’s because I’m so shy.”
“Shy?” Benjamin asked. “You?” If anything, Lilac Zhenrei had proven to be anything but shy. Or was she simply making another joke, one whose punchline was lost on him?
But no, she was serious: “It’s all bluster,” she said, scratching at her neck. “When I’m in company I worry so much about saying the wrong thing, I cover it up by speaking a load of bushwah. Sure, I could keep quiet: but then I’d fear that my fellows might take me for a vacant lot. So I’ll babble away like a brook, in the hope that every so often, something clever and profound comes out. Trouble is, when something clever and profound does pop out, I’ve been so busy babbling that I haven’t listened to the conversation. Ever said something like ‘if life always ends death, then what is the business of living but making the best of one’s murder’ when people are talking about their favourite desserts? You just get a reputation for being pretentious. This is why I like making bad jokes; it’s ironic, you see...”
“Hm,” Benjamin said, his attention wandering elsewhere. Self-absorbed angst was not yet a big deal to him, and with so many new and marvellous sights rousing his curiosity, he soon lost interest in the conversation. Lilac, seeing that the subject was of little appeal to her audience, and suddenly - painfully - aware of how much she’d wittered on about her tendency to witter, let the matter drop. For now, and for the time being, she would just have to be content with the role of compliant tour-guide. Which wasn’t so bad, really.
Benjamin himself was barely even aware that Lilac had stopped talking. Walking along the pier, his sensibilities had been caught completely by the ornate pavilions, outlandish vehicles, and all the milling atulphi in between. Everywhere he looked - left, right, ahead, up, down - there was something new, something unexpected. He passed an acrobatic unicyclist who pedalled the device with his hands; he saw a cigar-chomping woman that talked to a face in her top-hat. He found a pavilion, far-eastern in design (like much here, he’d already noticed) whose gables, shaped like dragon heads, belched flame; underneath, multicoloured atulphi of various ages, sexes and distinctions sat gossiping as something that looked very much like an animated teapot strode to and fro across their laps. A little further on, and he discovered the vendor stalls, where peculiar foodstuffs and bizarre seaside novelties - balloons that buzzed and radiated aurorae, stuffed toys which turned out to be edible - were fervently plied. And then there were the smells: coffee, toffee, spices and all the sweetest shades of sugar mingling with salt air and scents unknown. Above, birds too colourful to be seagulls whirled and cackled, along with those atulphi who preferred to keep their counsel up high. He was about to ask Lilac why the pier should be so busy so early in the morning, when a large, upright white rabbit (dressed, alarmingly, in gold pantaloons and a T-shirt illustrated with a pointing hand and the slogan: He’s HARVEY, not me!) nudged by, an action which prompted another query instead.
“Why are there so many rabbits here?” he asked, even though he felt that somehow, he already knew the answer.
“What, the hurrixes?” replied Lilac. “I thought I told you.”
Well, she’d mentioned something about them, back when they were still voyaging across the Amar Imaga, though it was hardly a potted history. “Hurrixes. Is that what you call them?”
“Yup,” said the lady. “And as for your question: well, it’s all down to lack of imagination, I suppose. Too many of your kind seem to want the company of rabbits as children, and if they can’t get one as a pet, then the inevitable happens. I blame the Easter Bunny.”
“Oh,” said Benjamin, happy enough with the explanation. Lilac, however, had more to say on the subject.
“The hurrixes, though, think differently,” she continued, a note of disdain weaving into her words. “They think the fact of their abundance makes them special. Not quite, I say; they’re simply common, and a nuisance with it. Believe me when I say, my child, that when one hurrix moves in next door to you, the next thing that happens is that the whole street becomes full of them. And then you have to move out, because of all the trouble they cause.”
“Trouble?” said Benjamin.
“Oh yes,” said Lilac, affecting gravitas. “We’ve all heard the stories: of how the younger ones congregate in the alleyways and on the corners, muttering away to each other in that language of theirs; it might not be true, but it certainly does feel like they’re plotting something, and it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And the problem is made worse because so many of them - the hurrixes, I mean - won’t speak any other language; they say it’s because they find it difficult to speak the ordinary tongues, but I’m not so sure. Most of us reckon they do it just to be bloody minded. Either that, or they’re lazy.”
“Hm,” said Benjamin, unwilling to oblige with a concrete response. The gist of what Lilac had been saying was disturbingly familiar to him, in that it was not so different from what certain boys in school often said about those with darker skin than they. Benjamin, it had to be admitted, was himself no innocent in this respect; like so many boys of his age, if it brought out a laugh in his classmates then he was prepared to do what was necessary, no matter how cruel the amusement might be. From Lilac, however, he expected better. And, travelling along the pier with a little less enthusiasm than before, he was again troubled by the feeling of having learned something nasty about someone he liked.
9
It was only when they were exiting the pier, and stepping onto the rich and teeming soil of Niamago proper, that Benjamin finally got round to voicing the obvious question. “Where are we going?” he asked, ducking as some buzzing creature swooped by his ear. Judging by the tone, and the fact that they were at the seaside, it was probably a wasp, though it was long gone before he had the chance to find out for sure. Oddly enough - and despite not having good reason to suspect otherwise - he found the idea that there should be insects in this place surprising. It was like discovering a gritty sugar-crystal in a tasty sweet, or an amusing glitch in a computer game; a flaw not entirely unexpected, nor even troublesome, but still strangely irksome in that he couldn’t quite bring himself to feel comfortable with it.
“Dear child,” said Lilac, in response to Benjamin’s query. “Where are any of us going? But no -” she slapped herself lightly on the side of her face in mock self-chastisement “- you really shouldn't ask me things like that, okay? I'm trying to break my philosophical habits at the moment, and it's very difficult. You know, I once found myself ruminating on a p
iece of Rando cheese - which has very big bubbles - and upon seeing that most of it was made up of empty space, I realised that the essential definition of Rando cheese requires the component of nothingness. I mean, what was the cheese: solid matter, or the bubbles? That was when I decided to give up, because it seemed to be getting unhealthy by then. In the end I just ate my cheese and swallowed the idea - holes and all!"
"Right," said Benjamin, utterly nonplussed as to what she was getting at. "So where are we going?"
"Ah," replied Lilac. "That's easy: we’re going to my place. After that, I expect we shall do some sightseeing. Meet a few of my friends too, I hope. First, however -” she pointed to a street that branched off from the promenade they were now walking along “- we must attend the Macallory Lane Market before going further.”
***
The Macallory Lane Market, as Benjamin had imagined, was a bustling thoroughfare of stalls, marquees and hollered commerce. It wasn’t that much different to the markets he occasionally attended back home (and again came that pang: that this was all a dream, and that soon, very soon, he would find himself awake) except that this particular example was, of course, a great deal more exotic. As ever, his gaze was drawn upwards: to the airborne atulphi trailing bunting and advertising banners, and then to the uppermost heights of the buildings either side of the street, where edifices gothic and oriental formed opposing cliff-faces of haphazard architecture; to the weave of linen-bedecked washing lines up high, and the slender walkways in between. Even the sky had something unusual to offer: against a narrow backdrop of cool morning blue, the few clouds skimming above were not like those he was used to. They might have been similar in general shape and drift, but the colours that swam through them - pearlescent streams, like those he’d seen in the Amar Imaga - were something else entirely.
He was soon brought back down to earth (or was it dreamland?) with a bump when someone nudged by roughly enough to make him stagger. Scowling, he turned round to glare at the offender - and was then greeted with the sight of perhaps the most peculiar atulphi yet seen.
Edging away from the boy, as if aware of what it had done, was what could only be described as a shimmering fountain of green. There was no real shape to it, no form; only a strange impression of leafiness, or verdancy. And neither was there any sense of depth to the thing: it was flat, two-dimensional, and curiously irritating to look at. That it was an atulphi, there could be no doubt; as well as being charged with all the subtle livelinesses that one finds only in the living, it murmured as it retreated, issuing faint, indiscernible words that quickly melted into those of the thrumming passers-by. Eagerly, in the hope that he might catch her attention before the creature itself was also lost to the throng, Benjamin tugged at Lilac’s sleeve. “What?” she barked, flapping her arm free of his grip and staring down it him with the vehement glower of someone rudely interrupted. She’d been perusing a fast-food stall, apparently; a place whose greasy scents remained just as cloying and pervasive as those of any other marketplace, no matter what the world.
“There,” he said, pointing out the green thing to her. “That - what is it?”
Lilac shrugged. “If I were more popular here, then I could tell you. Instead, all I can say is that not everyone in your realm sees - or even dreams - in quite the same way as your very good self.”
“Which means?”
Lilac nodded towards the creature. “He, she, whatever, was probably given life by a child that never saw very far beyond the trees. Someone from a rainforest, I would expect. Or a jungle. That’s my guess, anyway.”
It was good enough for Benjamin, but only for a little while. Inevitably, Lilac’s explanation had led to other questions, such as: what might a creature like that eat? Or - and more importantly - if that was the kind of atulphi that a human could dream up, then what about the nonhuman kind? Could there be alien atulphi here as well? Or even atulphi born of whales and dolphins, the two animals which were generally supposed to be as intelligent as humans?
Benjamin was just about to consult Lilac on the matter - because, quite frankly, questions like that needed answers as soon as they arose - but was diverted when he noticed the stares that he was eliciting. And these were not the lingering, interested kind of stares that he’d received on the pier, but the sort that (in his mind, at least) one might expect if one was to go into town with one’s flies undone. They were furtive stares. Glances held a little longer than was polite, eyes that found it awkward to leave their subject. Embarrassing stares.
He checked himself. Nothing amiss, save that he was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown - and in a place as outlandish as this Niamago, wandering around in your jim-jams was not likely to make you noteworthy. So what else could it be? Was it because the atulphi knew, somehow, that he was human? Or was it down to the fact that there was something visible that marked him out as a dreamshader?
He brought his fingertips to his cheeks, just below the eyes, and recalled what Lilac had said to him not so long ago: “You have the eyes, Benjamin. You have the gift.” And then there was Ichabod Dome, who’d gazed so hard at his face before grandly applauding the authenticity of his condition. “It is in my eyes,” he said, in the hushed tone of someone confirming the truth of a deeply held suspicion.
“Hey, dawdlebug!” shouted Lilac. Looking back, he saw that she’d moved further down the thoroughfare, and was now busily waving a hand above her head, signalling for his attention. “Hurry up sometime, okay? I lose you, and you get lost - and then I miss a lot of stimulating parties looking for you. Quick now!”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he called back, following with a light huff that was more the result of resignation than impatience. There was a definite strain of the harassed schoolmarm about Lilac Zhenrei, and he was fast finding out that it didn’t always become her.
When he at last caught up, he found her waiting at another stall, one whose trestle-tables were covered only with sheets, an extensive scattering of small crystals, and nothing else. And behind it, conferring very quietly with each other, were two typically unusual atulphi: a man who would have appeared completely normal if it wasn’t for the fact that he was dressed entirely in a suit of Venetian (or what Benjamin presumed were Venetian) masks, and another man, bronze-skinned and rattish in his look, who scratched incessantly at a bright, spark-spitting light at the left-hand side of his nose. Benjamin only realised that he’d been staring at them when they caught sight of him and stared back. Faintly embarrassed, he let his gaze drop to the tabletops, at which point Lilac, guessing that he must be genuinely interested in what might be on offer there, spoke up.
“Do you know what these are?” she asked, picking up a few of the crystals. She held them out in an open palm, as if about to demonstrate something.
“Emberquicks,” said Benjamin, glancing at the lady. “There was one on your fishing rod. You lost it.”
One of the two stallholders snickered, and Lilac shot them both a look so sour it could curdle vinegar. “Correct,” she said, bringing her attention back to the boy. “About them being emberquick, that is.” She gently shook the crystals, and they began to glow a soft amber. “And I didn’t lose my last one. I know exactly where it is. Old Rot has only caused it to be temporarily misplaced, that’s all.”
Benjamin, mildly curious at how the crystals could convey such a light, reached over and took one from Lilac’s hand. It was smooth, faceted, and cool to the touch. He brought it closer to his eyes, fascinated at how the luminescence seemed to brighten whenever he took a breath, and then became aware that there was a sound coming from the thing too.
It was a dim chiming hum, almost musical, and seemed as much the product of his own mind as it might anything else. Back home, at night, and usually just as he was drifting off to sleep, he would sometimes jolt awake in the belief that some imaginary noise had really happened. The sound incurred by the crystal felt a lot like that - something imagined, yet with the effect of being almost real - and no sooner was t
he idea made clear in his thoughts, then the quality of the sound changed.
It was louder, for a start. And less calm. There was a jingling in the background, a subtle percussiveness. The boy pulled the object further away from his eyes, testing to see if perhaps it was movement that was causing these slight changes in the hum. It wasn’t. What are you trying to tell me? he wondered, sure that there was some sort of rapport going on between himself and the emberquick. He held it higher, turning it one way then the other, scrutinising, until he was distracted by the whoosh of a swooping, skyborne atulphi. And once more, ever so discreetly, the sound became different.
For the tiniest fraction of a second he knew why. Then, instantly, it was gone. He lowered his arm, but allowed himself to keep staring upwards for a moment. It was when I noticed the atulphi, he thought. That was when the music changed again. But why? Overhead, the bustling skyscape remained unchanged: the flitting atulphi still flew; the glittering, shimmering clouds continued their meandering pilgrimages up high. What does it mean? he said to himself, as he brought his gaze back down to the emberquick. It had not stopped glowing, and neither had the music ceased.
When he looked back up, he found that Lilac was watching him with a puzzled expression on her face. The two stallholders, too, were staring at him intently, as were a few members of the passing public. The moment had apparently been significant enough to draw a certain amount of interest; so what, exactly, had happened?
“Are you okay?” asked Lilac. “Did you -” she nodded at the crystal in his hand “- did you see a dream, or something?”
Benjamin shook his head. “No, not dreams,” he replied - at which the hum, still at play somewhere in his mind, changed again. “There was a sound,” he continued, his gaze falling again to the emberquick. “Music. I think.”