The Girl and the Guardian

  As the murky waters of the lake closed over him, cutting off the starlight, Korman felt himself once again truly adrift, as he had been long ago when he wandered in the wilderness, after the Arcra-Nama was lost and he was expelled from the Order of the Red Dragon. But then he had felt despair – until the Lady had appeared – whereas now he felt light and joyful, though he knew he might be going to his death; or something worse than death. He felt the glow of love, which makes light of death. The only shadow on his heart was his concern for Shelley. ‘Never, never would I have left her, if I had remained a true Guardian,’ he thought. ‘But then, was I not being a true Guardian when I tried to protect the children who appeared? It was a deception, and the Lady told me so, but I would not listen. Thus I caused her downfall. And she… she followed me, tried to save me, and so was caught in their evil net, while I escaped.’

  He reined in his thoughts. He had gone over that day too many times over the years – always it ended in despair until he remembered his resolution: to ride the living moment, free from the failures of the past. ‘Hishma,’ he heard Dawnrose in memory, softly reminding him. He was doing it now…

  Suddenly he felt a pressure-wave against his left side, as if some large creature was passing him. A ripple moved fast towards the shore. He was alarmed, but kept swimming. ‘Was that what Shelley felt?’ he thought. ‘Who knows what foul things may now live in this lake? But I cannot fight them unless they attack; and if they creep out to hunt me on land, I cannot help that either. Lady, I trust in you and in our destiny. So I come to you; only, keep Shelley safe!’

  Now he focused on his swimming and breathing through the reed, entering with practised ease the meditative state where all is clear and calm, as he kicked then glided, then kicked again, like a frog, just below the surface. He kept to a straight course heading north, using an inner compass that he had come to trust. The Pale Moon was rising, making every ripple on the glistening lake surface visible. Foul odours emanated from the shore as he drew slowly nearer, and he suppressed the urge to gag as he sucked in the putrid air through the thin reed.

  All his senses as a warrior were now on full alert. He strained to catch any vibration or energy that would guide him to the right place to land. But all he felt, as he swam blindly headfirst into peril, were the mindwebs, trailing tendrils of deception, groping over the ground and through the air of the Avenue of Despair, thicker than he had ever felt them. He was entering the enemy’s place of dire warning, and unless one had the mental defences of a master, the mindwebs would find a way into all one’s thoughts and steer them like lemmings over a cliff into the Void below. He still had his silver skullcap on, but this was of little help so near the stronghold of death. He had to rely on the clear mind and the mirroring of all mindprobes to deflect attention away from himself. He knew that his nemesis, Hithrax, was close. He sensed his presence, felt the net closing in around him. If he did not reach the shore very soon, and find a hiding place from which to weave a counter-mindweb, Hithrax and his Kiraglim would find him. At least, he reassured himself, their mental eyes would be on him, and not suspect that Shelley was hiding elsewhere.

  He felt the thick mud of the northern shore soft against his back. Relieved, he slowly turned so as not to ripple the water. ‘Pah! The mud is foul-smelling!’ he thought as he struggled up the slimy bank. ‘The old shoreline must be far inland now, its fair beaches strangled by the thorn roots, turned into dark thickets of fear.’

  He looked up and down the shore. To his left the Hill of the Skull loomed black, high into the night sky. ‘Too close,’ he thought. ‘I have somehow come ashore further west than I planned. I am being drawn into their web!’ The thorn wall loomed along the Avenue of Despair which ran along the shore, straight into the maw of the dark Labyrinth. An odour, as of the final stages of animal decay, came into his nostrils and would not go away. He could not tell where it came from; it was all-pervasive, and he felt it dragging his mind from higher thoughts to feelings of disgust at life and its inevitable decay. It was the Teaching mindweb, he knew, but he found himself thinking that they had a point. In fact, he now felt that the magical Unfolding and the precious gift of freewill, to affect the Unfolding by love and faith were mere illusions, and the only reality apart from the Void was the inexorable wheel of futile Life and suffering. He began, in spite of his resolve to serve the Lady of Life forever, to thirst for release from that service into the everlasting rest of the Void.

  He stopped beneath the overhanging tangle of lesser thorns that lined the bank. He gathered his courage and resolve by thinking of the Lady, then scrambled up through a prickly gap. He lay quiet in the spiny weeds of the roadside. Before him, dominated by the dark mass of the First Mother Thorn, Zaghrabnah, and her most feared branch, the Hedge of Horror, was the accursed road that led to the Gateway of Despair, not more than a hundred yards from where he lay.

  It needed no gates; fear and despair overtook all who walked beneath, and turned them into sleepwalkers, stumbling forward into the darkness until they found the Dark Labyrinth, where the final vision of the Void awaited them. The entrance was formed by the huge knobbly arches of the first branches which the sapling Zaghrabnah had put out before she had grown into the sprawling monster she was now. High above those arches were others, reaching out further into the thickets, buttressing the vegetable brain of the thorn as she grew, probing and creeping up the Hill of the Skull, putting forth near the summit a vertical trunk crowned with spiny branches like a giant, fruitless palm tree.

  In the middle of this bristling crown of thorns was a platform where guards, Mindprobers and Mindscouts, ceaselessly looked out over the whole valley as from a high watchtower, serving the Mother Thorn which gave them life – and took it away, to be reborn in a new form, unless they found eternal rest in the Void.

  Korman felt their menace in the heights, and made his mind clear and smooth as a mirror of polished silver. Then, without a tremor of will or fear to give him away, he crept onto the white crushed-shell road. It was muddied and rutted by the iron wheels of the Deathwagons, but still glowed eerily in the moonlight. He crossed over and disappeared into the shadows under the towering wall of thorns.

  ‘If you would only give me the word, Lady, I would draw my sword and lay waste to the roots of this accursed Thorn,’ he prayed. There was no answer, only the creaking of the thorns above him. ‘But no, I must find you first, speak to you face to face, and learn your will,’ he whispered into the night. He thought bitterly, and not for the first time, ‘If only I had not made that vow, I could take matters into my own hand, attack now, and have the victory.’ He whispered again, ‘Sometimes, Lady, I curse the hour I heard of your Way, with its waiting and gentleness, its forgiveness and surrender.’ He clenched his fists, and the fingers of his right hand, now fully healed and strong, itched to take hold of the swordhilt. He quoted to himself the words of the Tan Krithür, the Sayings of the Concept:

  The power of a Guardian and a Tidak lies in his word, not his sword.

  ‘My mind agrees. But ah, my heart aches to draw you now in anger, my Arcratíne, sword of destiny, bright defender of Aeden!’ The words of the war chant, Hethür, Krithür, Shaktha! sounded in his mind. For a long while he stood there as if paralysed, his hand on the swordhilt, while the moon slowly rose, the clouds serenely passed overhead, and the night sounds went on, the creaking of thorn branches, the slow mournful call of the thorn-cricket, the struggles of moths in giant spiders’ webs high in the thorns, the rustling of giant cockroaches and stick insects in the prickly deadwood among the snaking roots of the impenetrable thorns. Then there was a tremor in the branches, and he knew it felt his desire to kill it. He took his hand from the swordhilt and painfully willed himself to move, creeping along the Hedge of Horror away from the dreadful arches. He tried to pierce the thick darkness under the overhanging thorns, looking for the one he had known so briefly and lost for so long, except in visions and visitations which brought joy, but also anguish. All those year
s he had longed to see her again and to speak with her face to face, and for her to wipe all tears from his eyes. Then, he hoped, they might go on united as one, living and creating together to restore the ancient glory of Aeden. For Korman was human, though she in some sense was not, and to be human is to always seek for more.

  He continued to creep along the hedge, eastwards. It was a walk he knew he would relive in nightmare – if he lived. The Hedge of Horror seemed to go on forever as recess after recess appeared in its thorny face, and hung within each recess was another victim of the law of the Aghmaath, which was without mercy: all who were brought to the Dark Labyrinth for endarkenment, but resisted, were brought forth as examples of the futility of life, to be cast into the thorns. This punishment was called Enthornment.

  There they would stand, slowly pierced by the surgically probing needles of Zaghrabnah, until their minds would wander into a space that was neither life nor death, and they would collapse, hanging in their thorny coffins as a warning and a lesson in the futility of self-will until such time as the Mother and her sons, the Aghmaath, agreed that they should be digested. This some called the living Death.

  And some say that Zaghrabnah, at her sons’ request, could awaken the enthorned ones at will for questioning, and all they knew would be wrung out of them. But mostly she despised such information; she did not need it to cover the lands and smother all other life – except that of her sisters. These were the other Mother Thorns which she allowed to grow beyond the reach of her own six long branches.

  Of course she also preserved the life of her symbiant sons, the Travellers, born of her, thorn of her thorn, will of her will. She did not know that they had grown weary of life in her, and had plans of their own, to one day snuff out all life including hers, and finally even their own; they kept this ultimate plan from her by their mindwebs.

  For although they had no mercy on their ‘sons and daughters’, as they called all their captives, the Aghmaath did have a deep and passionate pity for souls. This pity was why they sought to enlighten all rational creatures, to open their eyes to the source of all suffering, that is Pagralax, the ‘Stomach for Rebirth,’ which is the Will-to-life itself, which they felt only too keenly within their own natures, a will more fierce than that of nearly every human. And it was through mercy, because of their own desire to be free of life’s restless passion, that they sought to free all others from it, and thus bring them to the merciful release of the Void. As they often said to their victims:

  Makzagam v’Zurglime achrag

  ‘One must stab deep to set free from the thorns.’ Or as we say, ‘You have to be cruel to be kind.’

  As Korman crept along the line of the hedge, he came to an earlier victim. Hanging in its thorny alcove of pain was the empty skin and on the ground at its feet, fragments of its bones, all that remained of the first to be enthorned. Now they were finally digested, picked over by the thornbirds and dried in the sun. He covered his face, suppressed the urge to retch, and passed on to the next horror.

  The worst were in fact the living. Their eyes, white in the shadows cast by the towering thorn wall in the light of the Pale Moon, stared unseeing, but some slowly blinked as he passed. He saw some that he thought he recognised from the boy Tímathians of Baldrock, and he dreaded to look at them, in case he saw the face of his brother Hillgard. He thought of Brighthope, the father of the Trader Lightpath, and wondered which of these living dead or rotting corpses was him, whose name was a hollow mockery in that place of despair.

  Then with a shock he saw two that he did know, and the tears burned in his weary eyes as he gazed for a long nauseous moment on the faces of Kernan and the shepherd-poetess Magrethána. They were deep in the thorn-coma, their expressions beyond horror or delight, masks behind which their souls still hid, in what state he dared not imagine. With a stab of regret he remembered the spyglass: he had left it for Shelley, and when she used it she would see these people… And as his horror and fear of the thorns grew, so an irrational urge came over him, to throw himself into their embrace and make an end of it. He knew they were calling him, tendrils reaching into his mind, trying to lure him in like glow-worms luring a fly.

  So the night wore on into an endless nightmare for Korman as he stumbled from one alcove of horror to the next, and the mindwebs of the Avenue of Despair wove into his mind, and spider-like thoughtforms crawled in, poisoning his thought with the acid of doubt, eating away all thoughts of the worth of life and love, beauty and freedom, until he struggled to even recall what those words meant, or why he should have valued them so much.

  It was in this state that he came upon an alcove in the thorns much larger than the rest. It went back perhaps twenty paces into the thorns, and was fifty paces or more wide – big enough to accommodate twenty or more bodies.

  But there was only one. It was the Lady. She was upright, and higher up, as if on a pedestal or mound, and the thorns held her fast by wrists and ankles, waist, neck and brow.

  Korman reeled in shock. What he had sought, or thought he sought, was the one thing he was not prepared to see. He bent over in agony. His will stood opposed to itself in a knot of conflicting impulses: to run away and be sick; to run forward to embrace her, to moan aloud and curse; but most of all, to draw his sword and slash and hack at the merciless thorns that held her.

  He slowly raised his head again, deathly afraid to see that she was, after all, just skin and bones like the others he had seen. Or worse, to see her unhinged, insane, staring mindlessly at him, slowly blinking. But now his strained eyes managed to focus, almost against his will, and he saw that there was something different about this enthornment. He stood for a moment in awe, then knelt, still staring, mesmerised. All thought of an ambush was gone; he felt sure that no Aghmaath could linger near that presence… And indeed, though there was a hidden den nearby, such enchantments were woven about the place of her enthornment that he was – for a time – unseen and unheard by his enemies.

  In the pale silver moonlight which now lit the whole alcove, Korman saw that the thorns around the Lady were blooming with dark-red roses, except that in that light they looked almost black; and her hair was not matted but seemingly combed, the curls flowing like two rivers about her shoulders, and winding into the tendrils like golden vines wrestling with the cruel thorns. Her eyes were shut and her beautiful face was peaceful, serene, as if she was only sleeping. Her hands were slightly outstretched, as if trying to welcome him, and he felt that at any moment she would wake up, stretch, and step gracefully down from the thorny dais on which she seemed almost to float. Her long dress, though torn and ragged, looked clean, and glistened pearly white in the moonlight.

  He had come to a scene of shame and horror, and found it a temple of beauty, or so it seemed to him at that moment in the magical moonlight, and on the altar was the Goddess of Beauty and Love incarnate. Amazed, he forgot his thoughts of hacking and destroying, and felt only love and joy, as if he had walked through the gates of hell, and found himself in the courts of paradise.

  He stood there for a long while, not wanting the spell to be broken, before he dared to softly call her name, her true name which she had told him long ago. But there was no reply, and she did not stir. He went forward and knelt before her, bowing his head. Then he rose, and stretching up, placed between her lips the reviving medicine which Dawnrose had given him to revive the Lady. He was shocked, and relieved, to feel her faint breath on his shaking hand, but her lips were cold as winter, and her skin was deathly pale. ‘The living Death,’ he thought bleakly, and his head bowed and his hands dropped.

  He backed away from the Lady, and looking at her, tried to see into her sleeping mind. He called her name again. Still there was no reply. Nothing moved, and a great numbness and weariness of heart came over him. He felt as far away from her as ever, as if he was a ghost, unable to make himself heard or seen. He could not risk hacking at the thorns that bound her: they would sound the alarm through the Dreamweb and the Aghmaath woul
d come; and if he cut any, the others would poison her immediately and she would not wake, but die in his arms in terrible pain.

  He retreated, flung himself down on the hard ground in the shadow of the thorns in a dark corner of the alcove, and set about weaving, with his remaining strength, mindwebs of hiding and of deflection. He felt like a tired old spider in a dusty forgotten corner of some bleak house in a land of nightmares. Then he shut his eyes, horrible memories crowding into his mind and spawning even more horrible apparitions. But he resisted them with the vision of the Lady and the miraculous dark roses around her.

  ‘The Fairies must be here, too! They have tended to her, and caused the roses to bloom,’ he thought, and he remembered his staff, cut long ago from this valley, how it had bloomed again with roses and the fire imperishable to defeat the hermits in the crater, and a little warmth and hope welled up in his weary heart. ‘Where there is life, there is hope,’ he whispered, and then he slept.

  But in his dreams horrible undead creatures came out of the Hedge of Horror and trod the Avenue of Despair, and came crowding into the alcove where he lay, and he was forced backward into the thorns, and held fast. Then the Lady turned to him and her eyes were like theirs, empty sockets. In terror he started awake, gasping for air, and saw her there still, and she was alone in the moonlight, and her eyes were still closed, and soon his heart stopped pounding and the horror receded.

  He meditated, letting all sounds and sights dissolve from consciousness, and he was again at the centre of his being, and after a time he felt his oneness with all life, and with the Lady, and he knew that in the deepest level they were never apart, but were as one, together with all those who had ever loved and lived. Then he gave thanks and fell into a dreamless slumber.

  Shelley awoke to the sound of birds. Or so she thought at first; the music of the dawn chorus in the forest around was loud and joyous, as if the birds knew nothing of the troubles of the world: that the thorns would soon grow over their trees and their nesting places and the fruit would die on the withering branches; that when they sought food in the thorns and were entangled in their tendrils the thornbirds would come for them and tear at them with sharp beaks…

  But now she noticed other voices in the chorus of joy. It was the dawn song of the Fairies of Namaglimmë, greeting the new day. Unlike the birds, they knew only too well of the evil in the world, and the song was partly sad in its verses. But it was joyful and triumphant in the chorus. The notes were as high and pure as the birds’ singing, but unlike theirs, definitely made up of words, though in no language Shelley had heard. She smiled to hear them, and knew that these singers were the Fairies who had cut the thorn branches, and probably tended the grapes as well. She wished she could meet them. ‘But they are probably scared of all big people, after the terrible things the Thornmen and their slaves have done here,’ she reflected sadly. ‘They probably hate us all. I don’t blame them.’

  The morning was fine, and in the forest, with no view of the Valley and its horrors, she felt as if she was in another realm, even another time. ‘Maybe this whole island is in Faery and is floating along in another timeline,’ she mused. But as the sun rose higher, ominous sounds came faintly to her ears from the thorn thickets of the valley: the mournful sound of gongs, and the slow, hollow beat of a distant drum. Sacrificial smoke rose from many places. She shuddered to remember the black chimney in the slaves’ field.

  Shelley spent the rest of that first day in the courtyard, pulling more ivy and thick moss and ferns, and clumps of tough grass, exposing the outlines of squared and sinuously carved stone buried beneath. And in one place there were grasses with large glossy seeds just like beads, speckled grey and white and red: Job’s tears, her mother called them. She gathered some to make a necklace as her mother had shown her, and remembered how they grew in her back garden, and she felt warm at heart to think of her mother again. It had been a long time.

  The floor of the courtyard was paved with variously shaped and subtly coloured flagstones which formed patterns, radiating from the central well and from the alcoves and rooms around it, with golden lines between them. The overall effect, as far as she could see under grass and moss, must have been of intersecting waves in shallow water in the sunlight. She discovered there were five circles, partly walled with ruined stone, opening out into the courtyard, and each had a subtly different colour and style of carving on what remained of its ruined arches and pillars.

  She loved the place more and more as she uncovered its secrets, and remembered how she had yearned to live somewhere like this, where beauty was built into everything, not just tacked on as an afterthought. She reflected that she had found such a place – Aeden – but had arrived too late. ‘And now, if Korman is right I have to try and save it anyway,’ she said aloud. But as she spoke, she felt an uneasy sense of someone or something listening to her, and she decided not to speak aloud any more.

  Later in the day she was getting hot after clearing the vines from a very comfortable-looking stone love-seat, carved with the sensuous forms of mermaids and mermen. ‘I think I’ll go for a swim in the well!’ she thought. ‘It’s big enough to be a swimming pool. Korman said the priestesses swam in it!’ She hesitated, then took off her clothes, dropping them on the sun-warmed flagstones lining the well, and stepped shyly down the five shallow steps into the water. It seemed the only thing to do in the temple of the Goddess, to swim naked in the sun-sparkling well. The water was cold at first, but soon it just felt deliciously cool as she splashed and swam about. It was deep, over her head, but she felt safe, though the deep coolness below her feet was full of mystery and the hidden energies of the Zagonamara. This did not frighten her now; rather it exhilarated her, and she allowed herself to be charged and energised from head to foot in the sacred waters. She even tried diving, something she had always feared, and opened her eyes in the clear water, looking for treasures on the bottom. Silvery flashes surprised her: there were fish, descendants of the sacred fish of the temple, still living in the well. She thought she saw a glitter of gold below, but she wasn’t sure, and her lungs were bursting, so she swam back up towards the golden disk of the sun which beckoned to her from high above the silvery surface. But the sight of the gold lured her down again, and this time she saw two goblets, like the ones she had found before, but finer, with rubies set in their sides. They were lying half-buried in the gravel beside a place where the clear upwelling water made the pebbles dance. She grabbed the cups and swam up, her heart beating with joy at finding such precious things.

  She placed the goblets glittering in the sun at the edge of the pool, then kicked off again and floated on her back sunbathing, squinting up into the deep blue sky of Aeden, thinking about Korman and all the other wonderful people she had met. She imagined swimming with Quickblade in the sacred well, naked and unashamed, and drinking sweet wine with him from the golden goblets.

  She wondered lazily if the Fairies could be watching her, but somehow it didn’t seem embarrassing if the little people saw her.

  When she finally got out of the well, she was totally refreshed and at peace, and taking the goblets, lay down on the warm flagstones to dry in the sun, while Bootnip eyed the goblets covetously. But there was a slight prickling in the back of her neck. She looked around. ‘There it is again! It feels so like I’m being watched,’ she thought. But it didn’t worry her too much; it didn’t feel anything like the Aghmaath, and she trusted her intuition now, more than she ever dreamed she would. She had always gone for logic and clear, scientific thinking. ‘Spock would definitely not approve,’ she smiled to herself. ‘But I bet he’d be interested in the wonderful effect of that water. I wonder if that’s what’s behind that funny word, “well-being”?’

  When she was dry, she put on her clothes, curled up in the newly uncovered love-seat and daydreamed. She remembered Korman occasionally, and wished him well, willing him to return safely, but feeling peaceful and confident after the swim in the sacred well. Soon she was dozi
ng pleasantly in the golden afternoon sun.

  Korman had woken at the same time as Shelley, but there was no dawn chorus for him, only the thin sad piping of a thornbird somewhere in the thickets behind the Lady where she hung still. He awoke as if into another dream, or nightmare, in which the silent form of the Lady, neither alive nor dead, was the focus.

  The drug had failed. He was in despair. He had not realised how much hope he had hung on that small vial of herbal essences from Dawnrose. Now, in the light of day he saw that all was not beautiful about the Lady. There were lines of fresh blood coming from her brow and neck where the thorn tendrils held her fast, and running down her hands and feet. Her skin was pale and tinged with blue, almost corpse-like. He was heartsick and nauseous. But with long practice he found the feel of the earth beneath his feet and the breath in his lungs, and was content. This was his life, and his battle, and he had chosen it. He drank a little water from the flask at his waist, and ate some dried fruit thankfully (though there was no apple left to say a grace over) and nuts from his pocket, then meditated.

  The sound of gongs in the distance made him flinch, but he sat lightly, ready to spring up if anyone discovered his hiding place and pierced the veil of his mindweb.

  All that long first day Korman waited in his hidden corner of the thorny alcove for a word from the Lady. But none came. He began to debate in his mind whether to use the sword, or the Vapáglim which he still kept next to his heart ready to use if all else failed, so that he could perhaps use it, in spite of Hillgard’s warnings, to return to Shelley. And the sword was before his mind whether he shut his eyes or opened them, flaming as it had done that night on the Fire Hills, and often his hand went to the hilt. He heard the words of the war chant endlessly pounding in his head, Hethür, Krithür, Shaktha! as if to taunt him as a coward.

  All his training in the way of the Guardian and in the Concept and keeping one’s word to the death, became as scraps of dead memory, and all his heart and mind were filled with the sight of the Lady in the thorns, and the desire to draw his sword to free her became a burning fire that consumed all other thoughts, even his hunger as he ate the last of his food, and the vigil became also a weary fast. But looking at the amber loyalty ring which he still wore, he reminded himself again and again that for her he would remain true, and not break his vow.

  At last the day drew to a close. Not a sound had he heard outside the alcove; no Deathwagon passed, no Aghmaath stalked down it. But Korman heard the cockroaches scuttling through the prickly leaf-litter in the half-light of the thorn forest as it crackled and grew overhead. The air was still and humid, and large blowflies buzzed in and out of the alcove, but whether because of the thorn’s protection of those it had claimed, or because of some magic, none alighted on the Lady or drank the blood that slowly oozed from her wounds; nor did the thornbirds that flitted in from time to time peck at her.

  Shelley, dozing on the love-seat as the afternoon wore on, had felt the sense of being watched begin to prey on her mind, and she decided to try climbing a tree which she had noticed at the edge of the courtyard. It was tall but had strong spreading branches which grew out of the trunk almost at right angles, spiralling up into the canopy. Bootnip, and the goblets, were gone, but she didn’t bother going to look for them. She climbed the tree with a blanket and her diary, and some grapes and apples she had found in the old orchard a little way down a track. She found a comfortable fork in a big branch high up with a view of the courtyard below, and a glimpse of the northern shore of the lake.

  She was a little concerned at the possibility of being seen, but the shore was a long way off, and the broad green leaves were thick about her. The fork in the branch gave her something to wrap her arms and legs around as she lay back. Soon she was in a happy reverie, thinking of all the trees she had climbed at home and at her grandfather’s farm. ‘New Eden, he called it. I wonder why? Maybe after Mount Eden, where he used to live before he “escaped” to the country! But he did have some wonderful trees there!’ Then she thought, ‘This tree is so comfortable, once you settle yourself into the branches. I bet I could sleep up here quite safely. After all, the apemen did it. We’ve even got the toe-curling instinct left over from when our feet could grip the branches too! How strange, that we came from apes. If we really did.’ The depth of cosmic time and its vicissitudes and metamorphoses was dizzying to her sometimes, just to think about; but she loved to ponder the mystery. ‘To think that all the time there was the flow of life, and the universe was kind of pregnant with all this, but first there were just little critters like Trilobites, then Ammonites swimming the oceans, ruling the roost – that is, on Earth scientists say they did – I wonder what fossils there are on Aeden?’ She remembered the Bottomless Canyon, and the layers and layers she had seen on her way down. ‘But now is best of all,’ she thought, ‘because people are here, and trees like this one.’

  She shut her eyes and lay back, and an awareness of the life of the tree grew in her until she felt herself one with it, and opening her eyes she felt that the bright leaves and the deep blue of the late afternoon sky beyond and the glistening of the myriad tiny spider’s webs were now all part of Faery, and she imagined that she could meet some of the Fairies that she had heard singing. But there was no sign of any little tree-houses. ‘Unless…’ Her eyes lit upon a tall tree that had no branches on its smooth bole until it opened into an umbrella-like canopy higher than Shelley’s tree. Deep in the canopy she could just make out a small clear globe, almost hidden by leaves, resting, she thought, in the fork of a branch. It gleamed as if facetted. There was something in the lower half of it, which with a little imagination could be tables and chairs and other furniture. She rubbed her eyes. ‘Probably just some kind of exotic fruit,’ she thought. She saw glimpses of others. ‘Hey, maybe it’s one of those bubble trees Korman was telling me about!’ But the day was still hot, and she didn’t bother climbing down to go over and see if she could make a climbing loop for her ankles and get up the other tree and investigate the globes.

  So it was that she did not meet the Fairies of the sacred isle of Lake Deadwater (or the ‘Rainbow Lake’ as they still called it). But they saw her, and wondered.

  ‘I think I’ll try sleeping in the tree tonight,’ Shelley said to herself. It was the end of the first day, but the second night of Korman’s mission, and Bootnip was sulking in Korman’s pack in the cupola, guarding the two jewelled goblets, refusing to come out.

  She had an evening meal of grapes, apples and some nuts which she found under a tree in the orchard and managed to crack with a loose flagstone, placing them in little hollows in the paving to stop them from skidding out from under the blows. They looked, and to her delight tasted, very like macadamia nuts, her favourite on Earth. She felt sad too, remembering home, and the back garden and mum in it pottering around, and hot meals and warm beds. But she stopped herself. She knew from experience that it only made her breathless and giddy with sadness to think of her old world. It was just too different, too far away.

  And besides that, she was healthier and fitter now than she had ever been on earth, with a kind of energy that glowed in her more and more, sometimes almost frightening her. One day, when the time was right, she would return. Until then, she was determined to live in the moment, as Pipes had taught her. ‘Hishma,’ she murmured, remembering her joy at finding she could balance with him on the crest of the waves as they swept in on his big surfboard at the Waveriders’ beach, now so far away. She saved some of the nuts, and took them to Bootnip, who growled, but carried them one by one back into the safety of Korman’s pack and began gnawing hungrily at them, still growling. ‘I miss Worriette,’ she said to him in disgust.

  Up in the tree, she wriggled a little this way and that until she found a perfect way to drape her limbs and not have to hang on, and then settled down to watch the stars above – those that she could see between the leaves – and the courtyard below, where the well reflected the stars and little leaves fl
oated lazily on its calm surface. ‘Isn’t it amazing,’ she thought, ‘how when I first came to Aeden I really thought I had to have a mattress to sleep on, and hassled poor old Korman about it, and now here I am up in the fork of a tree, as comfy as can be!’ She remembered how he had taught her some of the constellations and other features of the night sky of Aeden during their time together, and she tried to find them before she slept. ‘There’s the one he said was especially for me – the Comet of the Kortana, in Damarha Ainenia, the Belt of Ainenia. It’s pretty smudgy and faint, though,’ she thought. ‘Yet it’s probably a whole galaxy. The real comet, when it comes, will be much brighter, I guess.

  ‘And there’s Pagzür-Estapherim, Hopeflower Valley. Now that’s bright!’ She traced the trail of clustered stars, dazzling white diamonds, sparkling sapphires and fiery topazes.

  Above Hopeflower Valley was a big dark oval, velvety black: Ovo Valä, the Womb of the Mother. And twinkling all alone in that darkness was blue Estaraësta, the Hopestar.

  She had dozed off and been pleasantly dreaming for a little while when something woke her with a start. There was a swishing sound below, and when she looked down the surface of the well was undulating. Straining her eyes she saw a glimpse of something long, black and sinuous, longer than a man, thicker than a man’s thigh, thicker (she thought) than his waist, gliding off up the steps and disappearing into the shadows. If it was a snake, it was a very big one.

  She gasped, her heart pounding. All her old fears of snakes and eels returned to her, and now the night was full of menace. Now nowhere would be safe, not even a tree… She felt the thrill of fear change her whole metabolism. With racing heart and animal cunning fuelled by adrenaline, she went over many ideas to get to safety, but none were convincing. Shaking, she decided to stay where she was.

  The rest of that night passed in sudden alarms as she was wakened from uneasy dozing by noises in the trees, twigs cracking or a night breeze swaying the branches on which she lay, quiet as a mouse, hardly breathing. Once, as she lay awake, not moving her head but looking this way and that, trying to identify each shadowy shape and silhouette in the darkness around her, an owl hooted in the branches right above. Its cry was much deeper and throatier than the sound of owls heard in the distance.

  ‘Could it be a giant owl?’ she found herself wondering. She felt like a little monkey in some primeval forest, shivering in the dark beneath an all-seeing predator about to swoop down on it and carry it off to feed its young. But the owl stopped hooting, flew off and resumed its cry far away, off the island, somewhere in the valley, and it sounded normal again, and she sighed with relief and went back to sleep.

  In her dream, the huge black snake slithered up her tree, and sick with fear she retreated up the tree from branch to branch, until she was so far out the branches began to bend and break. Waking, she gripped the branch, shaking so violently that she feared she would fall. But gradually she relaxed again, and fell into a nervously exhausted slumber.

  The second day of vigil came, the day before Midsummer’s Day, if they had known it. Many little things happened to Korman and Shelley as they both waited, but the main feature of the day, especially for Korman, was how terribly slowly it crawled by, and how futile and empty it felt. And the thorns in the valley kept growing. He felt them growing, and in their increase was the decrease and choking of all other life, except for the Thornmen and the insects.

  Shelley woke early, in spite of her tiredness, and ventured down the tree, but did not dare to go for a swim in the well even when the heat became oppressive. She began to feel exhausted from her almost sleepless night up in the tree, and could not focus on any of the diversions she had enjoyed the day before. A sense of foreboding was replacing her confidence that Korman would return. She remembered the Lady’s words in her message to him,

  Break out from this world

  To be with me where I am

  and she began to suspect that it was to his death that she was calling him, like a banshee whose cry signalled death to the hearer. She tried to shake off the unpleasantness of this suspicion, but it grew on her until she wished she had never encouraged Korman to go.

  Finally she went to the cupola and lay down to nap, keeping one eye on the courtyard and the well. Bizarre daydreams came and went as she dozed and awakened many times, dreams in which Korman had sent word that he and the Lady were now staying with the Aghmaath, and she was alone, trying to find a way out of a Labyrinth of thorns. Quickblade came to rescue her from the black snake, she thought at first, but he told her that it was his friend, and should be hers too. Then he left her with the snake, petrified, and she had to try to talk the snake into not eating her, and beg it to let her go so she could escape from the thorns, which were growing over everything, feeling for her with their spiny tendril fingers. And the snake just curled itself around her body so she couldn’t move.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Korman and the Lady