Wolf Wing Read online

  ‘Algol.’

  ‘She was brave,’ he said. ‘So brave no one knew what it really cost her. She was – business-like about it. She didn’t even cry. She left instructions for her burial, too. Everything was done how she wanted it. Goes without saying. She always got her way. Except over having to die.’

  Lightning splintered, and the dog turned and growled fiercely at the window. Hail slashed down the pane. Argul smoothed the dog’s head. ‘He’s brave too, you see? He wants to fight the weather.’ I could see the hailstones, some were as big as chickens’ eggs. Argul said, ‘Shall we call him Thu? It’s the name of one of the thunder gods the Hulta have. We say the thunder happens when he stamps his feet because they get cold, and so you have to light your lamps and fires to warm him.’ He smiled, and the dog wagged his tail. The other conversation was over.

  As we were lighting lamps and Thu was chomping a bone Argul had brought for him, someone knocked on the door.

  Argul said it might be the woman who rented out the rooms, come to make sure we had properly storm-proofed this one. Some people apparently throw open the windows, to ‘invite’ a storm in. (?)

  But when I opened the door, there stood one of the masked statues from the grove.

  Perhaps not very rational now, I yelled at it, ‘How dare you come up here! Go back to the square at once!’ Then, when it didn’t obey me, really unnerved again, I gave it a shove.

  The statue rocked on its runners.

  ‘Do no harm in Peshamba, Peshamba does no harm to you,’ it moaned.

  Argul was there, between me and it. (He forgets about the ring, too.)

  ‘What do you want?’

  The figure felt inside a flap of its robe. Which was of tubular metallic silk, not stone. The silver mask and round halo-hat had fooled me. It wasn’t a statue, only a Peshamban doll, from Marriage Street.

  ‘Here is your certificate of union,’ said the doll.

  It held out to us a quite exquisite paper, hand-painted all over with coloured flowers and birds, and even scented in some way, bearing a most wonderful almost-poem about how Argul and I were now legally joined in the sight of men, gods, and Peshamba.

  ‘It has taken longer to prepare than usual,’ said the doll, ‘due to the frost’s affecting the artist’s paints. May you be always happy together.’

  Then turning itself round, it went rather bouncily off down the stair, while Argul, Thu and I peered at it astonished, over and through the bannister.

  The next morning, the weather had changed again. It was still cold, but windless, and the sky was blue as those flowers the House called Forget-me-nots (and the Hulta called Remember-mes).

  We were out early, and the elephant-seller took us on a tour of his animals, kept in the park by the Travellers’ Rest. The elephants were gigantic – I’d only ever seen such creatures in the distance before, and then not believed what I was told about them. But they really do have sort of tail-noses. Also, they were now shedding off a kind of wool they’d put on in the frosts. The air was full of it, a soft fine snowfall after all.

  Thu goggled, but didn’t make a fuss. ‘His mother used to sit with the elephants sometimes. They’re noble beasts,’ the seller told us.

  Our horses were all ready, groomed and gleaming in the reborn sun. The horse Argul had picked out for himself was a tall widechested animal, smooth dark tea-colour, and black silk maned – like Argul! So I said they matched. The horse he’d found for me was a black mare, truly like Sirree, but with white strands in her mane and tail, and one white front leg, that looked as if it had come through a hole in her otherwise black clothes. I loved her at once, and she has a beautiful nature. When we took them out, oh, that was—We mounted up and galloped for miles over the meadows around Peshamba, and birds, who had been there all the time, were flying up like golden bullets from the grass, singing, into the air.

  ‘Look, Argul, there are flowers coming back!’

  It was a fact. By afternoon, when we rode into the town again, I saw buds on most of the trees, like little sticky hard jewels of swarthy green and red.

  So it was all going to be all right.

  If it had been witchcraft, or someone stealing the weather (!?) it’s stopped.

  The figures on the CLOCK are also all right again. We saw them move, tonight.

  Tonight, too, Argul and I went for a baked marrow supper on Marrow Lane (where they bake marrows). And they told us this was free, the whole meal. Apparently the first one you order after you marry is on the town. This was all nice, as the painted certificate had been.

  So the wedding wasn’t as cramped and mean as we’d thought. In fact rather public – if they somehow tell the eating-places.

  Tomorrow, we’ll be leaving. We’ll use Yinyay again, once we’re clear of Peshamba. The going is too slow and treacherous for horses, as I have cause to remember, between here and the House. A large part is desert.

  Argul has agreed we should try to rescue Daisy and Pattoo and Dengwi.

  Thu barked when we called Yinyay up to doll-snake size this evening, in our room. But when Yinyay produced a dog biscuit with chocolate covering, Thu decided Yinyay was actually the best thing to happen since dogs were invented.

  How the horses take to the Yinyay Tower will be another matter.

  It’s late now.

  ‘Come to bed, Claidi-baabaa,’ says Argul. Thu jumps on the bed at once and wrestles with Argul.

  Everything, after all, seems – great.

  I just looked from the window before blowing out the last lamp. May as well note half the trees in the garden over the wall are blossoming, white in the light of a pale moony street-lamp. At the wall’s corner, a shadow flickered. It was very tall, with a halo-shape hat, and below a glimmer of metal face—Then it was gone. Oh come on, Claidi. An official Peshamban doll, that’s all. The statues from the Mask Grove have all been taken back there by now, must have been, since they weren’t in the square when we were tonight.

  The ring stopped them. But … did the ring somehow start them too???

  I don’t want to think of the ring now, or Ustareth, who made it. Brave, clever, bossy, frightening, tragic Ustareth, who ‘had to go away’.

  Perhaps all the blossom will be out in the morning, in time for us to see before we leave.

  AT HOME

  Yinyay, of course, could easily locate the House, and most (all?) places. And she had fashioned overnight a stable for the horses, a really smart affair, with straw and hay and the right kind of food. (Somehow she herself seems to manufacture all this – I don’t understand how, or from what, and ages ago, when I asked her, she said something about atoms and molecules, as with her growing and shrinking – and lost me.) Perhaps not surprisingly, both horses took to their Tower stable at once.

  I did wonder, when Yinyay went soaring up in the air, how they’d feel about that. We stayed with them, in case. But – they took no notice. Really there’s hardly any sensation of flight or movement, and not much of going up and down. You’d only know something was happening from looking out of the windows, and the stable doesn’t have those.

  Yinyay assured us she would watch over the horses at all times. Like a wise nurse with two nervous mums, she added to Argul and me that if the horses seemed troubled, she’d let us know immediately.

  Thu meanwhile had watched Yinyay get big with adoring admiration and tail-wagging. (She gave him another biscuit just before she did it. Perhaps he hoped, now she was huge, she’d give him another huger biscuit.)

  When we went inside though, Thu forgot everything, even us, in his mad excitement to see and find everything. He galloped up and down the stairs, got into the lifts (yes, Yinyay has lifts) which obligingly opened for him as for us, tore round the living rooms, bedroom and library, barking and snorting. He ended up in the plant-room, which is like an indoor garden, fully stretched on a lawn Yinyay has made, and which she assured us (him?) is fine for burying bones. She’s even arranged a type of bathroom for him. He can even have a bath,
if he wants one!

  It seems odd to be travelling back across those landscapes I went through before, on the ground, first with Nemian, then with the Hulta.

  From the upper air, everything is changed, unrecognizable.

  Also, too, sometimes Yin probably takes a slightly different route.

  Nem and I got lost, and the Hulta always wander. It was when they wandered to Peshamba that Nemian got his bearings, unfortunately, and dragged me off through the marshes to his City.

  But I don’t regret that, not now. If I ended the evil rule of the Wolf Tower Law, then it was worth it. Though I still don’t entirely know, from what I’ve heard since, if I did.

  I thought, I know those hills.

  They look parched white from the air, desolate, rather like a model of hills made by someone not very inspired.

  Engrossed, I stared down from the library window, remembering how the Sheepers had bartered me to the Feather Tribe hereabouts, who would next have thrown me off a cliff as Lucky Sacrifice, if Argul and Blurn hadn’t rescued me. (Nemian had been useless, naturally.)

  So did I feel strange? Oh, yes.

  Then I saw that desert, which really is a Waste. It opened out on every side, and to the horizon’s edge. Like a tray of some yellow-brown spice no one ever buys because no one likes it.

  Now I was seeing the landscape I’d crossed the very first of all – before I met Argul. Now I was truly dropping backwards into my past. My horrible, hopeless past, at the House.

  I felt a wave of – almost fear. That startled me. I had nothing to fear now. Well, nothing physical. They couldn’t hurt me now.

  Only … will they remember me? I don’t mean the princes and princesses and ladies and gentlemen – I doubt if they will, having never really seen me in the first place, all those sixteen years I was there. I mean my friends. That I had deserted. Forgotten. No, not exactly, but—

  More than a year has passed since I left. Not so very long?

  Will they in fact remember me, but not want to remember me?

  Claidi, who ran away to freedom and happiness, and didn’t look back.

  This afternoon we landed briefly. We’d been flying quite slowly, and lowish, looking out. So when we saw this strange thing below in the desert waste, we just circled it leisurely and then went down to take a proper look.

  When I was in this same desert before, there was a sandstorm (a total nightmare), but it uncovered part of a sunken city. Presumably some other sandstorm had uncovered the gate.

  That’s what it was, you see. A gate. Or it might have been a doorway. Nothing else remained but it, and a few shards of broken wall either side, and some litter on the dust-powdery ground.

  It was very still, there. Not a trace of wind, or even air. The sky darkest blue.

  The gate towered up about thirty feet, five man-heights tall. It was of a sort of brown stone, and the high-up entrance was arched. But on top of that was a shape like a quarter moon on its back, with—

  ‘What a scary thing.’

  ‘Meant to be,’ Argul commented.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ I asked. The Hulta of course are always widely travelled.

  But ‘No,’ he said.

  What was on top of the gate was an eye. No, an Eye.

  It seemed to be made of polished pale marble, and maybe glass, unless they (whoever they were) had somehow found a green-blue jewel of that size, because the coloured part of the Eye seemed at least as big as a cartwheel. It had a burnished black pupil, too. And all of it was clasped in two brown stone lids, upper and lower.

  The Eye shone dully, fixedly staring away and away.

  I said, ‘Perhaps it’s another sort of watcher. Like at Peshamba and the other big towns. Like the City, and Chylomba—’

  We stood, staring up at it, even Thu, who had come with us, as it stared off into the distance, and then—

  Then the two lids slowly blinked, and the whole Eye moved – and was looking down, right at us.

  I heard Argul curse.

  My hair stood on end, and so did Thu’s. He was growling.

  But from the ring, nothing. No defensive flash. And nothing from Yinyay nearby.

  So this wasn’t an attack. It must only be what I’d said. The Eye in the high gate was a watcher, and it was watching.

  Nevertheless, we did walk off slowly and kind of sideways. We kept our eyes on the Eye until we got back to Yinyay.

  I called up to her then, ‘What is it? Is it trouble?’

  Yinyay only then looked over, herself, from all her storeys up, higher certainly than the gate.

  She said, ‘I do not think it causes trouble. I do not know what it is.’

  I thought Yinyay knew everything.

  Anyway, we got back inside and her doors shut, and Thu bounded upstairs as if demons were after him.

  As we rose again into the air, we saw the Eye was now watching our ascent. When we sailed right over, it revolved completely upwards, in a rather repulsive way, to see where we were going.

  Neither Argul nor I was quite comfortable until it vanished over the horizon. Thu didn’t appear until dinnertime.

  We have reached the House.

  It’s there, standing in its miles of high-walled Garden, just as I recall.

  This is how Nemian must have seen it first, drifting here in the balloon, before he got too near and the House Guards unpacked the cannon and blasted him out of the sky.

  We haven’t gone that near. We parked out on a rocky area about half a mile away.

  No one seemed to notice our arrival.

  The House never had watchers. And let’s face it, the Guards were all star twonks.

  Really, there are no signs of anything going on there at all, just a sunset blooming over behind the fortressed walls, rosehip red.

  I saw them last at dawn, with sunrise on them from the other direction.

  Some birds just circled up, and settled down again, inside.

  Yinyay says the river, which goes through the Garden, runs under these rocks. She says, although it looks as if no one is at home, the House is packed with people.

  We sat at a table, Argul and I.

  ‘How do you want to handle this?’ he asked me.

  ‘Oh I’ll – well, the way I said.’

  ‘Right.’

  But I’m not sure now. I’d had it planned. Even asked Yin to make me a show-off dress. And now that seems ridiculous.

  ‘I think we should wait until morning,’ Argul said. ‘Visitors at night may cause an overreaction.’

  ‘Yes, that’s probably best.’

  In the morning I decided on the dress after all. It was made of the Peshamban silk I’d bought, light crimson and embroidered with peach-coloured flowers and silver beads. It was not the garment of a maid-slave of the House, nor like any of the stupid House fashions.

  Really, though I refused to admit it, I’d known I would feel like this, coming back here. I felt like a servant without rights, again. I felt like the child who’d been pushed for punishment into the Black Marble Corridor, where eerie winds whined through ‘cleverly’ positioned holes, and there were pictures in oils of weeping exiles cast from the House into ‘Hell’ outside. I now knew all that about Hell was lies. I knew so much more than I ever had. And I was with Argul. And I had Yinyay and the ring and – well. I was still afraid I was going to feel one foot tall and seven years old, the moment we got inside the Garden walls.

  We’d agreed against taking Thu. My ring would protect me, and though Argul’s sapphire didn’t defend him the same way, it still gave him flight, could open doors, windows and so on.

  Though alert for any violence, he seemed to have no insecurity. Why should he? He was born free and grew up a king and a warrior. He is, though he always dismisses it, a prince of the Towers.

  Part of my Plan had been not to attempt any Invasion Tactics (part of why Yinyay was parked some way off). I felt we couldn’t dive in and try to snatch Daisy and the others. There were a lot of
people here, and there might be undeserving casualties.

  We walked to the Front Door.

  Oh yes, the House has one. I’d never known, when I lived there. Yinyay had told me that morning.

  Did they ever use the Front Door? Maybe not, since for decades no one went outside – except when exiled. Then, I suppose.

  Nemian and I got out through the tunnels under the Garden, with the help of all the keys the Old Lady Jizania gave me.

  Now the Front Door would almost certainly open, not from a key, but from our scientific jewellery.

  The sun lit the stonework. I could smell trees, flowers, from inside. And then a whiff of hippo from the river.

  The Door was a big oblong, set between pillars, lofty enough you could walk through even if you were nine feet tall.

  It was shut, obviously.

  We stood and waited.

  After a moment, I thought, It isn’t going to open.

  Then I heard the locks grating, unused for years, cranky, which is why they took so long to respond.

  Grumbling, grinding, the Front Door of the House yawned slowly wide.

  And there before us lay the lush lawns of the Garden, and the river sparkling in the sun between the blades of reeds and purple irises.

  It was lovely. The way I’d suddenly seen it was, that time just before I left.

  Argul stepped through first, making sure. But there was nothing to fear in such a heavenly place. Unless you were a servant or a slave.

  Going along those dainty paths, through those little woods, by those grottoes of carefully-arranged picturesque fake ruin, was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done.