Prospero's Children (26 page)

“She could not have returned by that route anyhow,” Ragginbone said with unnatural calm, tipping the picture forward to examine the reverse, which was still intact. “Nor could he.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?”

“He has gone after her,” said the Watcher. “Or after the key. Into the past.”

The entrance of Mrs. Wicklow with Robin on her heels cut short any further explanations. There were confused questions, bewilderment (Robin), suspicion (Mrs. Wicklow), stammered introductions. “This is Mr—” Will began, and then stopped, conscious that Ragginbone was clearly an ineligible name for a respectable inhabitant of the real world.

“Watchman,” said the old man, borrowing from the title Fern had bestowed on him.

“Lougarry belongs to him,” Will added. “At least, she belongs
with
him.”

“If he’s t’ Watchman,” said Mrs. Wicklow
sotto voce
, “happen she’s t’ Watchdog. But who are they watching? That’s what I’d like to know. If you ask me—” she turned to Robin “—there’s a lot going on here that you haven’t been told, and I think it’s time you were.” By “you,” it was apparent that she meant “we.”

“Exactly,” said Robin. “To start with, where the hell’s Javier?”

“He’s gone,” said Will baldly.

“His car’s still there.” Robin glanced out of the window.

“He did not take his car,” said Ragginbone with peculiar emphasis. “He seems to have vanished—into thin air. We know he did not leave via the back door: Mrs. Wicklow would have seen him. He did not leave via the front door: Will and I would have seen him—after all, we saw him go in—and he would have taken his car. In short, he did not leave at all. He has simply—vanished.”

“Impossible,” said Robin. Mrs. Wicklow looked skeptical. “People don’t just disappear like that. Perhaps he’s nipped down to the cellar . . .”

They looked in the cellar. For good measure, they checked upstairs as well. It took some time to establish the total vacancy of the house.

“He ain’t here,” Mrs. Wicklow conceded at last. “That’s definite, even if nothing else is.” She gave Ragginbone a look at once dour and darkling. “I need a cup of tea.”

“I need a drink,” said Robin.

“How are we going to explain this?” Will hissed in Ragginbone’s ear.

“We don’t,” said the Watcher. “People will find their own explanations. They always do.”

“I suppose I’ll have to inform the police,” Robin was saying, pouring his recently acquired duty-free Scotch. “Rather embarrassing, I must say. Man gone in a puff of smoke, so to speak, and in my house. Police are bound to think it’s a bit suspect. I mean, he can’t just—dematerialize.”

“These things happen,” said Ragginbone, accepting Robin’s slightly hesitant offer of whisky. The senior Capel was wondering if his son’s unlikely friend might be a former businessman or academic, fallen on hard times due to a serious alcohol problem. “The world is full of unsolved mysteries. However, calling the police at once would be a little hasty, I think. After all, Javier Holt is an adult: you are not responsible for his well-being. And what disappears must reappear—somewhere. He may return.”

“There’s the car,” said Robin. “Can’t just leave it there.”

“Why not?” said Ragginbone.

“I don’t like it,” Mrs. Wicklow said after he had left. “What they call unsolved mysteries is mostly just tall stories on t’ telly, but when all’s said and done, people don’t just vanish. Particularly nasty slick types like that Mr. Holt. They’re t’ sort who always pop up when you don’t want them to.”

“All the same,” said Robin, “he’s gone, hasn’t he? Just— well—gone.”

“If Javier has gone into the past,” Will asked Ragginbone when they were alone, “does that mean the Old Spirit has too?”

“Not entirely,” said Ragginbone. “It’s a little more complex than that. The Old Spirit already exists in the past, remember; he could not risk returning to a time where he might be brought face to face with himself. Using an ambulant guards him from that danger, or so he must believe. In any event, the Old Spirits seem to have avoided Atlantis: they feared the power of the Lodestone. However, as far as I am aware he cannot control an ambulant in the past from his position in the present—the puppet is too remote from the puppeteer. It is an interesting situation. The ambulant must be more than merely a vessel after all: its will is his, its spirit is his; its soul is dispossessed, but its brain must retain a degree of operational independence. To achieve that, I imagine he would have to put a certain amount of his native strength into it.”

“You mean, it would be very strong?”

“Maybe.” The hint of a smile teased at Ragginbone’s mouth. “But if the ambulant was lost,
he
would definitely be weakened.”

“How does that help Fern?”

“It doesn’t,” Ragginbone admitted. “She is beyond our help.” If there was a faint emphasis on “our,” Will did not catch it. “But should the ambulant be destroyed or unable to return, that might help us here. Azmordis would have—mislaid—a little of his core power. That would be all to the good.”

“I don’t care about that,” said Will. “I care about Fern.”

“Continue to care,” said Ragginbone. “Who knows what love can do? The immortals affect to despise it, calling it a fleshly weakness, but we who are human prize it above all things. The love of family, the love of friends, the love of lovers. We like to believe it can endure when all else withers. Dearest of vanities. Maybe—”

“Leave out the philosophy,” Will snapped. “I’m not in the mood.”

Ragginbone smiled, and was silent.

It was the longest afternoon Will ever remembered, even longer than the one he had spent waiting for Fern to come back after the chase with the bike. Ragginbone headed up onto the moor—“The wind will blow the philosophy out of my head”—and Will went back to the river, but it was empty of shadows. The sun, racing through drifts of cloud, kept pace with the wheeling Earth as though the day refused to be left behind. As is always the case when you have time to kill, Will thought of several things he could do and decided, for various reasons, that all of them were ineligible. His watch had broken some weeks ago and when he returned to the house he felt rather than knew that it was growing late. The afternoon was still golden, the wind had dipped: it was very hot. Javier’s car stood in the driveway, the unlikely relic of an improbable venture: for an instant Will pictured it standing there forever, glistening, waiting, always unoccupied, always unclaimed. I suppose Javier took the keys with him, he thought bitterly, briefly diverted. What use are car-keys in the past?—And then: Dad will be really worried about Fern by now. What do I tell him?—She’s just popped over into another dimension for a while. Not sure when she’ll be back—Oh
shit
. Ragginbone could have been more use . . .

He went in through the kitchen door. Mrs. Wicklow had evidently been persuaded to go home. (Will was sure it would have taken persuasion: the housekeeper had long decided— with some justification—that the Capels required far more of her attention than Great-Cousin Ned.) The clock, which was slow, told him it was five past seven.

His father was in the hall.

And in the end, it wasn’t difficult.

“Where’s Fern?” Robin said. There was no fear in his voice and no uncertainty, only the dreadful blankness on the far side of anxiety.

“She’s gone, Dad,” he answered. “Like Javier. Just gone.”

Gone.

IX

She had been climbing the stair for a very long time. She could not remember being at the bottom of the stair, or how she had come there, only climbing endlessly upward. Her legs were not tired. The stair was erratic, sometimes twisting this way and that, sometimes coiling in a spiral, yet her goal was always ahead of her, the tiny bright rectangle of the exit, a casement or a door, not far above but never growing any larger, though she knew she must be getting nearer. Walls went past on either side of her, dim openings, great pillars half ruined or only half imagined, passages to nowhere, archways soaring into nothingness. There were gossamer nets which might have been spun of stone, window-glimpses, chinks of a sky whose color she could not quite make out. The light was soft, the shadows pale. The air was neither stale nor fresh. She was not out of breath, but after a while she realized that she did not seem to be breathing. She tried to remember what came before the stair, and why it was so important that she should reach the top, but her brain was blurred, her purpose forgotten. Memory had shrunk to a crowded miniature even smaller and more distant than the one ahead of her, a vivid microscene in which pattern and detail were no longer visible. She kept going. She could not think of any alternative. No time passed; all Time passed. Then she was at the top of the stair, and there was the exit, not a remote crevice but a low doorway under a brow of stone. She stepped out into the sunlight.

Into the Past.

She was standing on a mountainside above a city. She could see broad avenues fanning out from the base of the slope like the rays of a star, criss-crossed by other streets both wide and narrow, forming a jumbled mosaic of roof and wall and pavement stretching unbroken toward the horizon until all features were lost in the haze of distance. Far beyond there might have been a suggestion of amber fields, the dark flames of trees, thin lines of verdure marking the passage of invisible rivers, but she could perceive no clear details. The main thoroughfares might once have been laid out to a pattern, but time had long since submerged the original design in the labyrinthine wanderings of lesser streets, which had sprouted from the principal system as naturally as tendrils from the branches of a vine. Some of the buildings were well spaced out, porticoed and colonnaded, surmounted by towers, domes, cupolas, divided by squares and crescents, gardens and fountains; others huddled together under crooked eaves, hiding the narrow slots of alleyways and cul-de-sacs. The mountainside faced nearly due west and the city was drenched in sunset light, shadowed in bistre and umber, a golden city sprung from the imagination of Man when Everest was a sand-dune and Stonehenge merely a pebble on the beach, a city already ancient when all else was young. The vastness and wonder of it held her as though entranced: never in her short life had she even dreamed of such a place. This is Atlantis, she told herself. I am in Atlantis. And as she stood and gazed there flicked into her mind an image of another city—of gray walls looming like cliffs, geometric towers of crystal and iron, roads cleft like gorges between monstrous buildings, the breath of acrid fumes and the ceaseless snarl of shining vehicles with no visible means of propulsion. She pushed the horror away, baffled by her own eccentric fancy. It was as though something in her mind had slipped, and the image had found its way through the chink, imprinting itself on her thought. The weakness frightened her. The shock of her arrival—the impact of the vast and unimaginable metropolis—must have temporarily overpowered her. She tried to clear her head but it felt light and curiously fuzzy, as if a fog had seeped in, veiling something in her subconscious which should not have been there. Flashes of memory came and went like a picture drifting in and out of focus. She pulled herself together and looked round to see precisely where she was.

The mountain was in fact a volcano, long extinct, which stood at the southernmost tip of the island. On the seaward side a lava-delved fissure in the rock had been eroded by the hungry tides to create a deep channel spanned only by a waveworn arch of stone, while within the ancient crater was a natural harbor, sheltered from every storm, its waters green and still. The Atlanteans had ringed it with wharfs and jetties and ships of all kinds were moored there: fishing boats, pleasure boats, longboats, triremes, quinqueremes, slavers, and traders. Hollowed in the mountain walls surrounding the port were quayside markets, taverns and caverns, murky store-rooms curtained with nets and hazardous with coiled ropes, anchors, fishing spears, and harpoons. A tunnel, facing north, led to the main gates of the city, which could be closed and sealed, in the unlikely event of an assault, not to protect the town but the harbor. But she had not come that way. Somehow, she must have found one of the few hidden stairs, narrow, dark, and precipitous, which burrowed through the mountain, winding upward to emerge on the outer slopes through unobtrusive doorways whose significance was long forgotten by both neighbors and passersby. Here, the mountainside had been molded into terraces and the pillared homes of the wealthy looked out over the lower city, while paved roads not designed for horse-drawn traffic looped or zigzagged their way down to the plain. Below and to her left she saw the huge dome which she knew must be that of the temple, inlaid with gold and reflecting the last fires of day with a brilliance to outdazzle the sun. The Atlanteans had no fortifications, she noted, thinking of the wooden walls of Géna and the stone walls of Scyre. But then, they saw themselves as the first bastion of civilization in a world still primitive; secure in their dominion and the power of their Gift, they feared neither invader nor pirate. And for a few minutes she was daunted, seeing the splendor of their city. What could she hope to achieve here, alone and unaided, a stranger from far away on a desperate quest to perform a Task that could not be done?

She was suddenly aware that she was very tired. Perhaps that was why she felt so peculiar, defeated before she had begun, with her mind playing tricks. She had arrived earlier that afternoon on the argosy from Scyre: she could remember gazing upward in awe as they rowed under the ocean-made bridge, and seeing the encircling cliffs open out around them, and tying up at the docks, and how the solid ground had rocked and heaved underfoot after so long at sea. It couldn’t have been much more than a couple of hours ago, yet the images seemed strangely distant, like childhood impressions revived thirty years on, their colors grown richer and their details fainter with the passage of time. Storybook pictures, elusively unreal. She had no recollection of locating the stair nor of her climb in the dark, except that it had seemed interminable. Yet during that period something had happened to her: other memories, other thoughts had invaded her brain, creeping into the secret places where she could not find them, lurking in her subconscious waiting for an unwary moment when they could emerge. She could
feel
them there, an alien presence, potentially terrifying, stirring at a word.
City
—the alarming visions returned, but now she glimpsed a pavement thick with hurrying figures, and rain streaming, and small portable canopies carried on sticks, red and blue and black, striped and patterned, bobbing and jostling like spiked flowers dancing above a moving current of people. Clouds slid behind a building that appeared to be made out of transparent tubes, lit from within by an evil white glare. She pushed the chimera away, back into the fog from whence it came. Perhaps this is how insanity feels, she thought in horror. Like something hiding in your head. She needed sleep. She would be all right, if she could only sleep. She found her way down the mountainside via long flights of steps that carried her from one swoop of the descending road to the next. At the bottom, the ground leveled out abruptly. A wide throughway circled the volcano, much used by horses; slaves who seemed to have no other job were clearing away the droppings. They wore heavy iron collars and the scars of old whippings mottled their bare backs. She crossed the road and was soon walking down another street, heading vaguely toward the temple. She was so tired now she could barely lift her gaze from the paving and when she halted she swayed on her feet. People stared at her barbarian clothes, her pallid skin, the hair cropped close after a bout of lice picked up in Scyre. (She had been lucky it was only lice: they said you could catch every disease in the world in Scyre.) She stopped at a wine-shop to ask for an inn, her impure Atlantean betraying her northern origin. The man there told her to take the next turning, or maybe the next; she was sure she would get lost, but moments later she was standing before an archway with above it the familiar laurel-bough which meant “Strangers Welcome” anywhere in the empire. She went in, and a woman whose kindness belied her brusque manner showed her to a room on an upper floor and insisted on helping her to bed. “Nothing to eat, thank you,” she murmured. “Later . . .” She rolled over and tumbled instantly into oblivion.

She awoke in the small hours with no idea where she was or, more frightening still,
who
she was. She thought the window should have been a tall rectangle with a gray lightness filtering through loosely hung drapes, but she knew that was nonsense. Her mother’s cabin had no windows, no drapes, only the fire dying slowly in the hearth and the red glow shrinking inward on the fading embers. She should have been at sea, in the tent-like structure near the stern erected for paying passengers, staring through the open flaps at the unwavering stars, rocked in the cradle of the wide wild ocean. But the floor beneath her bed was solid, unmoving, and only a few strands of night leaked through the shutters screening the double arch of the windows. I’m in Atlantis, she reminded herself at last, picking the pieces of her identity out of a jumble of conflicting images. Atlantis. The realization filled her with an unexplained sensation of panic. She sat up for a while, listening to the sounds of a city at night: the rumble of isolated wheels, horse-hooves tapping on paving, shouts, footsteps, silence. Something was missing—a murmuring rumor, like the hum of bees around a hive, a background noise which was associated with the word
city
in the depths of her subconscious—but she could not think what it was. Eventually she lay down again and slid slowly back into sleep.

It was much later when she woke again, still stupid from slumber, and tottered over to open the shutters. The sun was high and hot. She made use of the pot provided, filled the earthenware basin from a tall ewer, and washed her face and hands. Then she dressed, wishing she had more suitable clothes. Her close-fitting breeches were designed for mountain climes, unstitched to the thigh and laced tight against calf and crotch, the leather cured into suppleness and thinned by long wearing. In Scyre, she had replaced her boots with sandals and her tattered skins with a loose shirt of undyed cloth which managed to be simultaneously yellowish and grayish, but she was still much too warmly clad. Her purse was strapped to her belt under the shirt; she hoped she had enough money. “You will not need it,” the Hermit had said, “once your Task is complete,” but his gaze was fixed on the stars and he rarely glimpsed the pitfalls of practicality. The man sent to be her guard and guide had carried a small bag full of coins, but both he and his wealth had been lost overboard in a storm during the sea-crossing. Now, she could not even recall his name. “You are chosen,” the Hermit had informed her in front of the whole village. His face was withered but his eyes shone brighter than sunlit rain. “It is written on the sky and whispered in the wind. I have been watching and listening a long, long time, and now the message is clear. You need only courage and a true heart. If help is required, it will be found. You are nominated by Fate, and she, of all people, does not allow her choices to be proven wrong.” Nevertheless, inns cost money, fares must be paid, and even Fate needs a little support. The elders of the village had donated some of their personal treasures, and these had been sold in Géna to provide her with funds. One or two had been extremely reluctant: they had a low opinion of Fate and none at all of the mad old man who lived alone on the mountain harkening to voices no one else could hear. But: “The village is honored,” said the Eldest, and that was that.

She found the breakfast table in the courtyard, under a tree dusted with blossom. The inn was neither large nor luxurious but a fountain played there and in an adjacent bathhouse several of the guests were sharing a sunken pool; she would have liked to join them but in her northern home, climate and modesty forbade casual nudity. It occurred to her, inhaling the mixed scents of flowers and baking, that she had not smelled a midden since she arrived. Géna had the inevitable reek of too many people living too close together and in Scyre when it rained the streets ran with liquid filth, but the ship’s captain had told her Atlantis enjoyed a drainage system which kept the roads clean and the air sweet. She thought it strange she had not noticed such unnatural freshness the previous night. But she had been so very tired, tired beyond exhaustion: she was still not sure why. The sundial showed her it was past noon. Too late for breakfast. She helped herself to new bread, curd cheese, and olives by way of lunch and sat down to eat at leisure, absorbing the tranquility of the courtyard and the general strangeness of her surroundings. The fountain rose in a slender spire of water, empowered by she knew not what, above a carved stone bowl that never overflowed; the tree-shadow spread like lace across the paving; at one point, the sound of a drum or gong was carried from somewhere in the city, a throb so deep it seemed to come from the ground itself, like the first note of some profound subterranean disturbance.

“What was that?” she asked her landlady, who appeared shortly after.

“The drum in the temple.”

“What does it mean?”

The woman shrugged. “It is a warning. There is a ceremony afoot. The temple precincts are sacred: during such ceremonies, ordinary citizens are forbidden to enter there— though few of us would wish to. Still, rumor, they say, is a seed carried on the wind: it has no need of a legitimate eye-witness. The recent sacrifices break every law.”