TWENTY-FIVE

Nick Mallory Upperom Doc Printout for R. Venables

(1)

Rupert wanted me to write this. He said it was for something called the Upper Room. He said they needed a full report and he was having to make one as well, and would I mind very much? Even they don’t know the things about Babylon that I do. They wanted it for their records. Kind of a debriefing, he said.

I didn’t much want to. I don’t like writing things and when I try to think about Babylon I sort of think I don’t know what happened. I tried to get Rupert to bribe me to do it at first. I know he’s been transferred to a project in another set of worlds now, and it sounds fantastic and I said I’d do a report if he would tell me what he was doing now. But he wouldn’t. Well, it was worth a try. He told me to do it anyway.

Anyway I started. It was difficult at first, but then there was a breakthrough and it got quite easy. That part is on the rest of this disk. This part is the bit I’m adding to the disk I’m giving Rupert and copying to the one for Maree to take to Koryfos. Koryfos really seems to want it.

When I’d done the report I copied it on all the disks I’d got. I’d got quite a lot. I can’t get used to having so much money. I do things wrong, like buying a hundred ready-formatted disks and forgetting that what I really want is a modem. The money is because my mother didn’t make a will and I count as her next of kin, and Gramos Albek did make a will, leaving everything to Mum. So I got the clothes business and the arms factory. I haven’t got the factory yet. Rupert and Dad are doing stingy stuff about setting up a Trust for that, but they sold the clothes shop to Mrs. Fear, who used to run it really anyway, and now I have an allowance in the Post Office and humongous amounts in a building society and money to burn. I said I didn’t think it was fair on Maree or Dad, but Dad says he has his pride and his books do bring in a pittance after all. Maree says she wouldn’t touch anything belonging to those two with a bargepole as long as the Cabot Tower. But I think Maree’s all right for money. Koryfos has given her some kind of estate over there. She says she and Rupert are having fun laundering the money so that she can use it on Earth.

We persuaded Dad that there was enough money to pay someone to do the cooking. Maree can’t, Dad won’t learn, and I only know spaghetti. So Dad goes and gets Mrs. Fear’s sister Yvonne, because she was the last person Mum sacked from the shop. This is carrying charity too far. Yvonne cooks worse than Maree. I spend £100 a week buying food I like instead. What I mean is that there is money for things. I bought all these ready-formatted disks. I put my report on all of them and then hid the disks in all sorts of different places before Maree drove me over to Rupert’s place in her new car.

Rupert’s house is quite small, but it’s really good inside. You should just see his roomful of computers and the sound system in his living room. They’re trying to persuade my Uncle Derek (Maree calls him her as-it-were-Dad these days) to move in there. Maree and Rupert want to live in the bigger house just along the road where the pond is, as soon as Maree’s qualified, but that won’t be for a while yet, and she wants Rupert to keep an eye on my as-it-were-uncle. I think Uncle Derek is too independent-minded for that. If he stays in London, I shall buy Rupert’s house. I really like it.

When we got there, his latest lot of quack chicks had just hatched. You couldn’t go in the kitchen for fear of treading on them. The Lady Quack always nests under the sink. Lord Quack comes in through the cat flap Rupert’s put in the back door for them, and then goes out again in a hurry when all the chicks rush at him. He came and sat in the living room with us while we had lunch. Rupert is a really good cook. I wish he’d give Yvonne some lessons.

When we’d finished eating, Rupert said, “Ready, you two?” and when we said yes he told me to have my printout ready and to hold it in my hand. Then he said, “Whatever you may think happens, you must remember that you’re never really going to leave this room where we are.”

I keep wondering why he said that. I had a sort of feeling that it was what he was supposed to say to outsiders (meaning me). And I don’t believe it was true. Magids seem to have to lie quite a lot. I like that, personally. I know that when we’d finished it was hours later and my feet ached from having to stand up all that time. But we started by sitting round in three chairs facing the bookcases and the sound system.

After a while, though nothing much had changed, Rupert said, “Right,” and got up and went to the bookcase. He swung a piece of it back like a door. Inside there was a foggy-looking staircase. “Follow me,” he said, and started to climb up it. It was wooden and it creaked. Maree went next. She was very nervous. You can always tell when Maree’s nervous because she looks extra fierce and gloomy and keeps pushing up her specs and blinking. I went last, and I wasn’t nervous at all at that point.

The stairs went up and up and round in a spiral for quite a long time. After about half the climb, I realized that we’d already gone higher than Rupert’s house by a long way. I got very interested. And the higher we climbed, the foggier the stairs got, until everything was sort of milky—or just a bit like a film negative—but the stairs were still made of wood. They still creaked. I could smell the dusty wood-smell of them and I know they were as real as I am. It was quite warm, too, and that made the wooden smell stronger.

When I reckon we had climbed at least as high as the top of the church spire in the next village, or maybe higher, we suddenly came under an open arched doorway, on to a bare wooden floor made of very wide boards that creaked worse than the stairs. And I saw we were in the Upper Room. It was pretty big, but I never saw how big, even though I could see the walls and see that they were plain and whitewashed, because it was all the same milky, film-negative whiteness as the stairs. The people there were like that as well. There were lots of them. Half of them were sitting against the wall on benches that looked built in there, and the other half were sitting in chairs round an enormous wooden table that filled most of the room. They seemed to stretch off into the distance. I could see the ones up the other end bending forward or leaning right back in their chairs to look at us.

It was odd, with these people. You got the feeling they were from all different times and places, even though they all dressed the same. Some of them had the kind of faces you only see in very old paintings. And there were two kinds of them. I can’t describe how I knew that. It had nothing to do with where they were sitting or how they looked. I just knew that some of them had been alive once and some of them never had.

The only one who wasn’t sitting down was a little man with a half-bald head and rather bandy legs, who came skipping up to Rupert, grinning all over his face. He was as real as everything else. Rupert bent down and hugged him and then kissed him on both sides of his face like a European politician. I thought the little man must be French or Russian or something. Then he started speaking and I recognized the croaky voice. He was the ghost who was in Rupert’s car. Even then I wasn’t nervous, though Maree was, worse and worse. It was so warm and quiet there.

“I’ve given my evidence already, lad,” the little man croaked. “I’m staying on to confirm yours.”

“Great,” Rupert said. I thought he was a bit nervous too. “I was afraid I wasn’t going to see you again. You remember Nick and Maree, don’t you? This is Stan.”

We shook hands. It was all normal, except that Stan croaked, “Pleased to meet you face to face, if you see what I mean.”

Then Rupert sort of ushered us all forward to the end of the table. There was no one sitting at that end. It was wide enough for us all to stand in a row along it. Even in the milkiness, I could see that the table was thick black oak, and under our feet, where we were standing, the floorboards were worn in a dip from other people standing there.

And then suddenly I was nervous. It was all those faces, all looking. I could see Maree shaking. Stan patted my arm. I looked down on the top of his head, half bald, half curly grey hair, and it made me feel a bit better. But those faces. Some of them were—well, like Koryfos. Even the normal ones looked like judges do without their wigs on television. You know the way they have mouths that don’t seem to smile in the same way as normal people’s. And it made it worse that they were all rather hard to see in the milkiness.

Rupert said, “Magids and Archons of the Upper Room, may I sponsor to your presence Sempronia Marina Timosa Euranivai Koryfoides, as the latest Magid of our number?”

Now I knew why Maree was so nervous. I had noticed she was wearing smart clothes, whatever she says, but I’d thought they were just because she was meeting Rupert. She always dresses up for him. I hadn’t realized it was her day for being sponsored. She bowed.

Someone halfway up the table, a man with a dry sort of voice, asked her if she felt ready to be a Magid, and she pushed at her glasses and more or less snapped, “As ready as I’m ever going to be.”

Then they started asking her all sorts of questions. It was an oral exam really. And I can’t say anything about the questions. I heard them quite clearly at the time, but they seem to have arranged to have them all blurred in my mind when I try to think what was asked—rather like what I thought had happened over Babylon. But Maree did quite well answering. Everyone asked her things, but the chief askers were halfway up the table on both sides. I think that’s where the important ones sat.

And I can’t say anything about the next bit either, because Maree says she’ll kill me if I do. I know she could kill me too, but she says how to do it is a deep secret. She’ll let me say that what she had to do next was a sort of ceremony of magic, like the Tea Ceremony in Japan, and that’s all. That was because she went wrong in the middle. She had to go back three stages and do it again from there. But I was impressed at what she could do. And envious. I can’t make light in the shape of the Infinity sign float over my head. I’ve tried.

She finished properly in the end. One of the people on the benches came and gave her a bundle of robes like the ones they were all wearing, and she put them on and went all milky like they were. That frightened me. It was so like when she was stripped. Stan saw and patted my arm again. Then they told her by all her names that she was now a Magid. She stopped looking nervous and she beamed, all white and foggy.

After that it was Rupert’s turn. He was really nervous by then. He had gone stringy-faced. One of the ones in the middle of the table asked if he had made a full report “of Koryfos, the heirs of Koryfos and the matters associated.” He said he had. And he laid a thick bundle of papers on the end of the table. I couldn’t help trying to read the first page, but all I saw in the milkiness was the first line. That said: “About a year ago, I was summoned to the Empire capital, Iforion, to attend a judicial enquiry.” I think he’s done what I did and added some more later.

All the faces turned to the papers. There was a long, long, thoughtful sort of pause. It was rather horrible. Rupert got out a handkerchief and wiped at his face.

Then, all at once, they seemed to know all about what he’d said in the papers, and they began asking him about it. Really hard questions. Did he know the Emperor was going to beam Timotheo? Did he even suspect it? Why had he taken such a casual attitude to the Empire and its affairs? Was he acquainted with the nature of the bush-goddess? Had he looked her up in the Magid database? On and on.

Rupert explained what he’d done and his reasons, carefully each time. Sometimes he even defended himself, but he didn’t make nearly such a good job of it as I would have done. I kept thinking of excuses he could have made. Twice I made excuses for him. Maree and I both chipped in when they asked why he had let us go after him to Thule and then Thalangia. Maree got really angry, the second time.

“We made sure he didn’t know a thing about it,” she said. “We only followed him because Rob was hurt and couldn’t take us. Damn it, how else were we going to find the way? You can’t just sit there and blame him for something we did!”

I expected them to get angry with her for that, but they were quite polite. Someone right down the end of the table that I couldn’t really see said, “My dear, there’s no need to get so heated. We are not blaming the Magid. We are trying to find out truly how and why these things happened.”

“You could have fooled me!” Maree said. Some of them even laughed.

But that didn’t stop the questions.

After a while I realized why Rupert was not making excuses. Every time he explained something truthfully, in a way that seemed to clear things up, it was cleared up. The pages they were asking the question about just sort of filtered away from the end of the table. I noticed it first when Stan was croaking out about some of the advice he had given Rupert. Quite a chunk of pages vanished after Stan had finished. But if the people were not satisfied, the pages stayed there. Sometimes they even spread out in a row along the end of the table. This happened when they were asking why Rupert didn’t prevent the murders on the top of the hill. And I began to see that if you didn’t tell these people what happened and why, exactly honestly, you were going to have to stand there for days—weeks maybe—until you did. Around then, I started wondering if it was as much fun being a Magid as I’d thought.

The pages spread out again when they were asking about Babylon. They were really interested there. To begin with the questions were the important sort of things you’d expect, like, why had Rupert sent all three Empire heirs to Babylon? (you know, I hadn’t realized he had!), and, had he considered what he was doing? Did he know how few people came back? Had he attended to the rhyme, where it said this?

Rupert suddenly cracked. “No I didn’t!” he said. Well, he almost shouted really. “It was the only way I knew to get Maree back! I felt as if I’d just been stripped myself, if you must know!”

Nobody said anything. The pages just gathered themselves back into the pile, and they started asking other questions, much calmer, detailed sort of questions. The things they wanted to know surprised me. Had the flock of goat’s wool disappeared? Rupert went calm again and said it had, and so had the bottles of water and our clothes. And could he say more what the landscape looked like? He said he couldn’t. Then they asked about the quacks. They were really interested in them. Nothing like that had ever happened before, they said, and could Rupert account for the way the quacks came back as mature birds? He said he couldn’t, but they weren’t just mature, they were clever now. Quacks are normally rather stupid birds, he said. And Maree spoke up and said she thought the quacks had dimly known they were foolish and hadn’t liked the idea. But how had the quacks managed to ask for what they needed? someone along the benches wanted to know.

Maree said, “We haven’t the faintest idea. They got there long before we did. And I don’t know how that happened any more than I know why I was so long after Nick coming back.”

At that, that chunk of pages vanished, but slowly, as if the people were regretting not knowing more, and they went on to the last part and asked about when Dakros appeared. I hadn’t known Rupert was worrying about me so much. I’d have told him not to. I can get out of most things.

Then all the pages were gone. Rupert looked nervous again. A lady right near our end of the table said to him, “Didn’t you realize Charles Dodgson was a Magid? I thought that was quite generally known.”

Rupert was just going to say something to her, when a man further up the table waved at him for attention and said, “You’re not quite right about the Roman augurs, you know. They were mostly pretty stupid. I was actually the chief surveying engineer, and I often had real trouble persuading the blessed augurs to let me put the camp on the node. There were at least three sites where they forced me to miss it. It still annoys me. I wanted you to know it wasn’t my fault.”

Rupert laughed and said, “Thanks!”

After that there was a bit of a pause, full of wood creaking and robes rustling. Then the dry-voiced man leant forward from his place halfway along the table and asked, “What is your assessment of your performance, Magid?”

“Pretty awful,” Rupert said. “If I could make a mistake, I did. Sometimes I think I invented new mistakes to make. And I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for the deaths of those children.”

Long silence.

Then I heard the person I couldn’t see in the distance. He had a voice you remember though. He said, “Not that bad, Magid. Until today, you were the youngest Magid among us, and we were guilty of throwing you into the midst of one of our riskier and more tangled Intentions. To tell the truth, we expected you to go to pieces. The most we can blame you for is that you were often too pleased with the workings you were able to perform, and did not always remember why you were performing them. All of us have felt the same in our time. Archon or human, we have all once been new to our abilities. We now hope you will accept some less arduous assignments for the next year or so, in order to profit by and assimilate what you have learnt on this one.”

“I hope so too,” Rupert said. I could see he really meant it.

Then it was my turn. Rupert had explained to me that, because I wasn’t a Magid, I was going to have to read my report aloud. I still don’t quite understand why. He said things about the Upper Room wanting to respect my integral autonomy. Or something. Anyway, all the faces turned to me. I held up my print-out to read it. And I hadn’t any voice at all. What came out was huskier than Stan’s, and I had to push to get that much out. I had to cough hard. I could feel my knees shaking. The edges of the papers fluttered like mad moths.

“Come on. No one’s going to eat you, lad,” Stan said.

“That’s right,” Maree added in. “They’ve just consumed Rupert. They’re not hungry any more.”

“Er—hum!” I went. I felt a fool. Then I did read it out.

(2)

“The first part of the way was not too bad. We could have got on quite quickly if Maree hadn’t been so slow and weak. I had to hold her up by her elbow and pull her along. It was quite easy to see the road. It was very stony, and all the stones were faintly lit up from one side as if the moon was shining on them from somewhere, but when I looked round the way the light was coming from, there was nothing. The sky was dead grey-black. I couldn’t see much of the land around. But I could hear it. There must have been dead grass growing all over, because it rustled faintly all the time, in gusts, as if there was a wind blowing across it, only there was no wind. It was the kind of dead, warm calm that makes you sweat a lot. And there was a smell coming off the land that made me think there must be acres of peaty bog out there.

“The way looked quite simple when I was standing in the hotel room looking out at it, but when you got out there it was all ups and downs. It was really hard, getting Maree along it. When we’d got over the first big hill and down into the valley beyond, it began to get to me. It was the way you couldn’t see anything except the road curving about in front, and all the rustling, with no wind to make it. Then, in the bottom of that valley, the road broke up. It was suddenly all big stones, and boulders with sharp corners and sides. I think it was an old riverbed. There was no water, but I could just make out the dry dip winding through the valley on both sides of us, choked with these big rubbly stones. And on our left were square stone lumps and a bit of curving stone that looked like an old broken bridge. Something had destroyed it. We had to clamber about beside it.

“While we were crawling through this bit, Maree seemed to get very eager. She began to struggle around with excitement. I didn’t know what to do with her. I supposed she was anxious to get on, but I didn’t know really, and suddenly everything got to me and I wanted to scream. She was like someone mentally handicapped. I started thinking that maybe the road was destroyed worse than this further on, and maybe what destroyed it was waiting for us, and there was only me to keep Maree safe and get her along it, and I didn’t think I could. I’d never been in charge of someone this way before. And the two of us were utterly alone. I realized I had a very bad feeling about this trip.

“But I had to get Maree to the end somehow, so I sort of squished my mind back together and kept on pulling at Maree, and we got across the dead river and up the next hill somehow.

“After that it wasn’t so bad, mostly because Maree began to be more like a person. She still wasn’t speaking very well, but as we went winding over more ups and downs, she sort of chanted, ‘Up and down, up and down, all the way to London town. On and on, on and on, all the way to Babylon.’ And when I asked her what that meant, she said, ‘Skipping rhyme. You do bumps on the “lon.”’ I didn’t know what she was on about. Then she said, ‘Did you put anything like this in Bristolia?’

“I said, ‘It’s a bit like the Unformed Lands.’

“She said, ‘Talk about it.’

“So I talked about Bristolia all through the next bit, and I felt a lot better, and then we were suddenly coming down a long slope towards another river.

“There was water in this one. I could see it glinting. Otherwise it was dead black. It was enormously wide and, from the way the glints rushed along, it was flowing really fast. There was a huge long bridge over it. I could see the bridge faintly lit up like the road, arching away into distance. The near end had tall sort of gateposts on either side that seemed to be carved into statues. When we got nearer, I could just pick out that the statues were creatures with wings. But I never saw them clearly. By the time we were near enough to see, the whole gateway and the path in front of the bridge turned out to be in black shadow.

“We had just walked into the shadow—and it was cold in there—when the statue on the left spoke. That gave me such a fright that I thought for the moment I might pass out. It had a big hollow voice, a bit like the noise you make when you blow across the top of a milkbottle, and it said, ‘Halt! In the name of the maker of forms!’

“Then the one on the right spoke too and said, ‘Halt! In the name of the maker of force!’

“And I thought at first that both of them spread out a wing to block the way on to the bridge. But when I looked closely, it was more like a grille, in spidery, feathery shapes, like the crystals you get in rocks. I pushed at it, and it felt dead cold—and it wouldn’t budge.

“Then someone else came and looked at us through the middle of the grille. I never saw him clearly, but he was pretty terrifying. He said, in a sharp, cold voice, ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

“My teeth were trying to chatter by then. I bit them together and said, ‘We need to get to Babylon.’ And I backed away pretty quickly.

“He said, ‘You can’t get to Babylon as you are. Turn back.’

“‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t go back because of Maree. What do we need so that you’ll let us through?’

“I swear he smiled. He said, sort of amused, ‘Much less than you’ve got, or a certain amount more.”

“I couldn’t see how we could have much less, so I said, ‘What certain amount more?’

“‘You’ll have to go back and ask the ones who sent you for that,’ he said.

“‘Oh God!’ I said. ‘Look, isn’t there any chance of you letting us through as we are?’

“‘No,’ he said. ‘Go back and ask for another verse.’

“‘All right then,’ I said. I was annoyed and in a panic, because the candles would be burning down, and Maree was so slow. ‘Then I’ll have to leave Maree here while I go back,’ I said, ‘or we’ll be all night. You won’t hurt her while I’m gone, will you?’

“He was furious that I thought he might hurt Maree—I could tell, sort of feel it raging through the grille at me like cold wind. ‘Nothing will touch her,’ he said scornfully. ‘Go away.’

“So I made Maree sit down just outside the shadow where it was warmer, and I wasted a lot of time telling her to stay there and not to wander away, and then getting her to promise she wouldn’t move from the spot. In the end she said, ‘You run. I’m fine,’ as if she’d understood after all.

“So I turned round and ran. That part, going back, was awful. I hated being all alone, and I was scared stiff Maree would wander off, and I kept thinking how this was wasting the candles, and I was afraid I wouldn’t see the hotel room and go straight past it or something. I went as fast as I could, but I had to go slower after I twisted my ankle down in the dead river. And in some ways I remember it as endless. Yet at the same time it was over quite quickly. It was really only a few minutes before I saw a spreading, winking light at the top of the hill in front, and when I was down at the bottom of this hill, I saw that the light was two of the candles. They looked surprisingly big from there.

“I went panting up that hill and there I was, inside the room again.

“They looked pretty stunned to see me. I could tell Rupert thought at first that we’d been to Babylon and Maree hadn’t come back. So I told them how they wouldn’t let us across the bridge without something more. Rupert kind of sagged with relief that that was all it was.

“He wants me to tell what happened while he was off fetching Zinka.

“Not a lot, at first. I went round to the three-cornered space by the bed. I meant to sit on the bed beside Rob, but I was so impatient that I just kept walking up and down and fidgeting with the bottles on the fridge and so on. Rob went up on one elbow and watched me anxiously. Will said to sit down, I was disturbing the quack chicks, but I couldn’t. So they began running about and cheeping, and I think Rob caught the restlessness too, because he sat up and slid his hooves to the floor and asked me what it was like out there.

“Rob is someone I can talk to. There aren’t many other people, bar Maree, that I can tell real stuff to, but Rob’s always going to be one. I’ve been over to see him quite a lot since all this happened and we’ve talked of everything. (Rob wants to come to Bristol to see me, but we know he’d cause a bit of a sensation there.) This time I told him a bit of what I’ve put down here, mostly about being down in the stones of the dry river, because it was the worst. I didn’t say much. I could tell Will just thought, Oh, it’s hard going out there, but Rob understood what it was like being all alone with Maree behaving strangely and not being able to see.

“Next thing I knew, Rob was out of bed. He said, ‘Yowch!’ because his side hurt, and trampled with his hooves and made faces. His face went all white and twisted for a bit. Then he found his shirt and started putting it on.

“Will said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Rob?’

“Rob said, ‘Getting ready to go to Babylon with Nick. They need my help.’

“‘Don’t be a damned fool!’ Will said. ‘You’ve got one side stitched up. It’s hard going. You’d tear it open again. And it’s dangerous in other ways.’

“Rob stuck his head up proudly, hair flying all over, and said, ‘Bother the danger!’ He said he owed it to Maree. She’d stitched him up and he’d lured her into getting stripped in return. And Will said, really very snidely, I thought, that oh yes, Rob had gone from worm to hero in one bound, and why didn’t he stop posing and lie down? And Rob more or less roared, ‘I am not posing!’ After that they really yelled at one another and the chicks got pretty frightened.

“I didn’t say anything. I wanted Rob along. It was a real relief to think I’d have company, as long as Rob could stand it. And I could see his wound was beginning to feel easier as he trampled about shouting. In the midst of it, Rob whirled round on me and asked if I had a piece of string. I found a rubber band in my pocket. Rob took it and put his hair back in it. For a second it looked exactly like a horse’s mane, until the rubber band snapped and his hair all came tumbling round his face again.

“Rob twiddled the broken rubber in his fingers gloomily. ‘Centaurs always tie their hair back when they’re going into battle,’ he said.

“Will laughed. That made Rob so mad he turned round and went back to bed again. I was feeling really depressed and wanting to hit Will—only he’s bigger than me all over—when Will realized that the door had come open and the quack chicks had run away out into the corridor. Will went leaping after them, swearing a blue streak, and shouted at me to come and help round them up. So I climbed over the candlesticks and went out there.

“The chicks were really frightened. They were running every which way, and I could have sworn there were at least twenty of them, instead of just the two. And you know how when you’re chasing something that small you run all bent over with your arms out like a baboon. Well, I was doing that when I ran slap into Gram White. Thunk. I looked up and found Mum was with him.

“I remember thinking, I wish she wouldn’t go around with him! They don’t make a nice pair.

“Mum said, ‘Oh, there you are at last, Nick! I want you go come along with me now.’

“I shooed one of the chicks back in round the door and said, ‘OK.’ I tried to give Will a look under my arm to tell him I wouldn’t be long, but he may not have seen. He was into serious chick-chasing. Then I went along the corridor with Mum and Gram.

“You see, after Maree’s parents-as-it-were took her off to London, I was left on my own and I had to work out a way to deal with Mum. I know that sounds unfeeling. But I had to. I used to sit and blame myself about it, and then go on and work it out quite coldly. The week after Maree left I realized I wasn’t going to be able to call my soul my own unless I did. Mum wanted me to do everything with her—not my things, her things—and to tell her everything I was thinking. And she looked through my pockets and read my computer files and all my school exercise books. Another thing about Mum is that she enjoys it if you fight her. Maree always went wrong there, fighting Mum. It gives Mum a real buzz to get you under. But she gets—no, I mean ‘enjoyed’ and ‘got,’ I keep forgetting—she got bored if you gave her her own way, and even more bored if you told her lots and lots of thoughts and stuff that was not her kind of ideas.

“My very first cold thought after Maree left was: Mum isn’t interested in me, she’s only interested in me belonging to her. So I invented Bristolia. She got more and more bored with that, though I got more and more into it. Stupid really. I’d only invented it to cover up other things I wanted to think about. I filled my computer with Bristolia and she very soon stopped looking at it. Then I worked out how not to fight her. I just said OK quite pleasantly whenever she wanted me to do anything with her, and waited until she stopped noticing me and then went away. She almost never checked up on what I was doing. She wasn’t interested enough.

“That was what I did that evening. Only they were marching along on either side of me like police and the candles were burning down and Maree was waiting out there, and I was still scared she’d wander off, so I thought I’d hurry it up a bit. I said, ‘What did you want me for then?’

“I hope that was not what sent Gram White following after me. It was out of character for me. I usually wait quite patiently for Mum to issue her orders once she’s found me. But Rupert thinks Gram was after Rob really. Could be. After the fuss and the trail of blood Rob left all through the hotel when he came, everyone knew there was a centaur there, even if most of them seemed to think it was me in disguise.

“I could see Mum hadn’t actually got any orders. She just wanted me where she could see me. Gram White said, ‘We don’t want you consorting with those people in that room, young man. They’re not nice to know.’

“I said they were harmless in there, only rather boring. I yawned a bit.

“Then Mum said, ‘Go to bed, darling. Have an early night. You were up till all hours yesterday.’

“So I said I would go to bed (and I did in the end, didn’t I?) and went slouching off. It wasn’t hard to look tired after all the pulling at Maree I’d done, and all the running to get back. They stood watching me. I had to go all round all the corners on the top floor. Seven right-angles. I ran as soon as I was out of their sight, but I still only just made it back to Rupert’s room before they sent Rob off without me. Rupert says I must have broken a fairly strong compulsion-working in order to come back, but I didn’t notice. I think I may have been quite used to breaking compulsions put on me.

“I know it gave me an awful shock when Gram White suddenly came round the corner and shot at Rob. Rob too. Neither of us had ever had anything like that happen to us before. We couldn’t wait to get our handfuls of seeds and our candles lit. Then we pushed off at once. I knew the room door was open behind us, and I kept expecting Gram White to come through behind us, shooting. I didn’t relax until we were well down the first hill.

“Carrying those candles made a lot of difference. The road was far easier to see. You could even see vague, shivering grass on both sides. And it didn’t seem to matter how fast we went. The candles didn’t blow out. There wasn’t any wind, even from moving. The flames just went straight up. Rob went at a fast walk and I sort of trotted. And in no time at all we were through the dead river and going down towards the bridge where they’d sent me back. I asked Rob if it had seemed a long way and he said no. He was limping a bit, but not badly. It was mostly the stitches dragging, he said.

“When we came down to the bridge, my heart did strange things—sort of hopped up into my throat and then kicked in down in the right place but going like crazy—because I couldn’t see Maree. But she was there. She was in the black shadow at the gate, hanging on to the grille with her fingers and talking to the guardian on the other side.

“‘It’s the frustration that does it,’ I heard her saying. ‘Everything went wrong lately.’ Then she heard Rob’s hooves and turned round slowly, as if she couldn’t believe it. ‘Rob!’ she said. ‘And candles! Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick. Are they important?’ From then on, she was talking almost normally, except that nearly everything she said was peculiar.

“‘Candles, water and a handful of grain with salt,’ Rob said.

“‘What about air?’ Maree said.

“‘Our own breath,’ Rob said. Being mage-trained, I suppose he knew better than me what Maree was on about.

“We tried to fix her up with her candle and grain, but she insisted on checking Rob’s side first. She said she hoped he wouldn’t have to put too much strain on it. But finally we got her to put a bottle of water into her jacket pocket—I took one too—and take the grain and the candle. It was creepy when we lit her candle. She went whiter all over, and a bit luminous, as if the candle was lighting her from inside, not outside.

“When we looked away from Maree, there was no grille across the bridge and no one standing there. Not even the two statues. We shrugged at one another and walked out across the bridge. Rob’s hooves didn’t make as much noise there as you’d suppose. In fact, everything was nearly noiseless. That big full river rushing below didn’t make a sound. The bridge was as broad as a main road and it arched uphill, and it all seemed easy enough until we’d come to the top of the arch and were going down the other side.

“Then it all went weird.

“For a start, the bridge only seemed to be there where the candles lit it. Everything was like that from then on. After a while we got used to taking our own lighted space of realness with us, and it was just the way things were, but then, not having seen anything like it before, we were pretty frightened. You looked up, and there was black nothing beyond a few feet of perfectly good road. You had to keep your eyes on the lighted bit. But you couldn’t look straight down. The candles spread a ring of shadows round your feet, and the shadows were black nothing too. It was worst underneath Rob’s body. He seemed to be walking on an oblong of emptiness. When he saw he was, he braced all his hooves and just stood there, panic all over him. His tail at the end of him lashed. But Maree and I were nearly as bad.

“‘We—we have to keep going,’ Rob said at last.

“‘The only way to go on is to go on,’ Maree said.

“So we got going, creeping along, afraid we were going to go down into the emptiness every next step.

“As if that wasn’t enough, there was a feeling from under the lighted part as if the emptiness was waiting for us to fall through. It was an emptiness that was alive. I can’t describe it, though I knew it was black and pointed—it was worse than any of Dad’s demons. We all knew it was alive. We heard it shifting and creaking and felt cold breathing up from it. It kept level with us under our feet.

“Rob said, sort of inching along sideways, with his teeth shut, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so frightened in my life.’

“‘Good,’ said Maree. ‘I’ve been dying to say that too.’

“I couldn’t speak.

“Then it got worse because, the nearer we came to the other side, the more broken up the bridge was. It was in pieces like ice-floes. Down in between the pieces the emptiness waited for us to fall. And we only saw each new piece as our candles came near enough to light it. Some of this was worse for me and Maree, like the time the next floe was a huge stride away, and we had both hands full and couldn’t hold on to one another for balance. You just more or less shut your eyes and stepped long and hoped. Some of it was worse for Rob, when the pieces were small and irregularly spaced. He had to sort of tiptoe, hoof by hoof. Once or twice his eyes rolled and I thought he was going to go berserk. But we all managed, piece by piece, and after what seemed miles of it, we saw the carved pillars at the end of the bridge. We went between them and on to firm ground with a rush.

“It was no better there, just different.

“The road we lit up with our candles was really only a path, partly overgrown with gorse bushes or brambles or something, and some of these were taller than Rob. The spines were fierce. Rob had a bad time there, because he couldn’t turn sideways like Maree and I could. Then, when there were gaps in the bushes, there was a vicious wind. The candle flames fair roared sideways in it. Even so, the candles never blew out. We gave up trying to shield the flames after a while. It was very awkward anyway with the hand you were trying to use full of grain. Besides, we needed that fist, all of us, to push the thorns back with.

“I can’t remember when our clothes disappeared, but they went, shoes and all, at some stage. At first I just felt perishing cold. Then a dirty great bramble went clawing straight across my belly and I realized I was stark naked. Maree was naked too, up in front of me, looking more luminous than ever, and when I looked round, I saw Rob had lost his shirt. I was absolutely freezing by then. I could hear Rob’s teeth chattering. Maree was chanting out, ‘This is so embarrassing, this is so embarrassing!’ but actually I thought having no shoes was worst. The stones in the path were sharper than the thorns, and there were dead thorns down there too. It was so awful, I did wonder about turning round and going back, to tell the truth. But I remembered the bridge.

“After an age, the path ran through a sort of clearing in the bushes where the wind was worse than ever. There was something pale there, sort of darting and fluttering at us just ahead. We all saw it at once. I yelled. Maree stopped. Rob nearly gibbered, ‘What’s that?’ It looked demonic.

“‘It looks like the week’s washing coming for us to kill us!’ Maree said. ‘Oh!’ And then she went rushing towards the flapping things, crying out, ‘This aye night, this aye night!’

“‘What is it?’ Rob shivered.

“‘Fire and flete and candle-light!’ Maree yelled up ahead. ‘Come on, idiots, it’s clothes!’

“We went over there and—well, I know we weren’t anywhere ordinary, but I could hardly believe it all the same—the clothes caught on the bushes were Maree’s old skirt and sweater, and the jeans and sweatshirt I’d given her to take down to the charity shop. It made me think a bit. Down on the ground were quite a lot of old shoes. There wasn’t much point wondering how they’d come there. We stuck our candles in the ground and got into the things one-handed. I used a sharp stone to make a hole in the toes of the biggest pair of trainers. That was so awkward that I didn’t care about rhymes and spells any more. I stuffed the grains in my pocket so I could work on the shoes with both hands. Then I realized that my little bottle of water had gone with my other clothes. I looked round to tell Rob, and there he was, shaking all over, with his arms wrapped round his top half, and no clothes in the bushes to help him get warm.

“‘Didn’t you ever give away any old clothes?’ Maree asked him.

“‘No,’ he shivered. ‘Knarros made us wear everything until it fell apart.’

“‘Have you still got your pouch?’ I asked. ‘Will’s pouch, I mean.’

“I was going to say that if he hadn’t got it, then we’d lost all the water, but he looked at me as if I’d just had the brainwave of the century. ‘Of course! Thanks!’ he said. He got the pouch open and then stuffed his handful of grain inside it and pulled out the lump of goat’s wool. He passed me his flaring, streaming candle to hold and tore a piece off the lump. Then he set to work pulling and teasing out that small bit. It kept opening up. In no time, it was big enough to flap about in the wind, but Rob caught the edges down and went on pulling.

“‘Oh, a horse blanket,’ Maree said.

“It ended up bigger than that, a fine fluffy thing, like mohair. Rob tied the ends round his neck. Maree told me to spread it right across Rob, down to his tail. So I did, and it clung there. It seemed such a good idea that I took half the rest of the wool and made a sort of shawl with it. Maree said she was warm, but when I touched her, she was icy. I made a shawl for her too. We knotted them round our necks and set off again. I was feeling a whole heap better, but Rob and Maree seemed to get more and more tired from then on.

“That thorny path went on and on. I think it was sloping uphill all the time, but you know how hard it is to tell things like that when all you can see is the little ring of light you’re walking in. But when we came to the end of the thorns at last, the way in front was really steep. It was all bare rock, eaten into hundreds of spikes and ledges and edges, like a stack of knives. I was surprised Rob could get up it, but he said there was plenty of traction. It was Maree who had trouble with it. She almost couldn’t climb it. In the end, Rob stopped and said we’d never get up like this and Maree had better ride on his back.

“‘But it’ll hurt you!’ we both said.

“Rob knew it would. He answered in the really irritable way you do, when you know you have to do something nasty, ‘Put her up on me and don’t argue!’

“He held all three candles while I heaved Maree up on to him. It was lucky she had gone so light. I’d never have managed her normal weight. And it did hurt Rob. He stamped and winced and got more irritable than ever. Maree lay down on her face on his back because that seemed to hurt him less. And while I had both hands free, I took the spare bottle of water out of Rob’s pouch and put it in my pocket. I was glad I did later.

“Then we went on, toiling up across the sharp edges, until suddenly Rob gave a yell and all his hooves slithered. I thought his side must have torn open again, but it wasn’t that. There were three kids standing at the edge of the light, on the other side of Rob from me. I couldn’t see much of them except their white, peaky faces. They were just standing there, sort of staring, two youngish boys and a girl. They didn’t do anything, but Rob got in a real state.

“‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t!’ he said. ‘I always liked you!’

“We were all looking at the kids when birds started coming out of the dark at us. You’ve no idea how frightening it is, great big birds coming whipping and whirring into your face out of nowhere. They were black birds and white ones. First they dived at us. We shouted and batted them off, so they left us and started trying to peck bits off the three kids. The kids didn’t seem to know what to do about it.

“Maree shouted, ‘Quick, quick! The grain, the grain!’ And she leant off Rob and scattered some of her handful on the rocks at the kids’ feet.

“The birds swooped down on it at once and began fighting one another for it. They behaved as if they were really starving. I was trying to get my grain back out of my pocket when Rob took hold of the plastic bag with the spare grain in it and poured the lot out in front of him. The birds dived on that too. The black ones—they were mottled brown in the candle-light really—threw the grains aside and went for the salt, but the pale birds gobbled down the grain.

“‘Run away. Now, while they’re busy,’ Maree told the three children. They looked at her as if they didn’t understand, but after a bit they backed off into the darkness. They didn’t seem with it at all.

“We went on before the birds could get interested in us again. Maree said, ‘But we ought to stay and help those poor stupid kids!’

“Rob said, ‘There’s nothing any of us can do to help them.’ He sounded so wretched about it that Maree didn’t say any more.

“Beyond that was what felt like half a century of climbing and slithering. At least the wind had died down a bit, but it was still blowing, cold, sudden gusts. None of us got too hot. And at last we came out on what felt like the flat top of a hill. For a few blissful seconds, we thought we had got where we were going. There were what seemed ruined buildings all round us. Then Rob held his candle up beside the nearest ruin, and we saw it was really a weird pinnacle of rock. Very black rock. The path went down to the size of a rabbit run and went winding this way and that among hundreds of these spikes of black rock. Some of them were low—knee-high—and some towered like church spires. And each one was a peculiar shape. Every so often, the path seemed to stop, and we all thought we had arrived at last, but then one of our candles lit a white gleam of it winding away between more of the pinnacles.

“Rob had trouble squeezing through. Maree got down to make it easier for him. She said she was rested, but she looked pretty weak to me. But she went marching ahead, holding her candle high, with the wind gusting the flame to show new black spires each side. The wind made strange sounds in these rocks. At first we thought that was all it was. Then the sounds were definitely voices.

“Most of it was just murmuring and mumbling. That was creepy enough. Some of it sounded to be in strange languages. But I nearly jumped out of my skin when someone said, just by my shoulder, ‘You won’t get away. I’ll be waiting for you outside after school.’ It seemed like a real threat. But there was no one there.

“After that, we were all hearing voices, but I don’t think we heard the same things. Whatever Rob was hearing, it made him try to cover his ears. Candle-grease ran into his hair and his hair sizzled sometimes, but I could see he preferred that to listening. Maree was going along with tears running out from under her glasses. I mostly got more and more annoyed after that first scare. There was one voice that kept saying in a bored, self-satisfied way, ‘No need to worry. Consider it done.’ It really got up my nose. The worst of it was, it sounded like my own voice. I yelled back once or twice. I yelled, ‘Oh, shut up! I do say nice things sometimes!’ But it didn’t stop. In the end, I was so fed up, I shouted at Rob to tell me what the voices were saying to him.

“He turned round as if I was salvation. He shouted back that they were telling him his looks would be ruined if he went on. ‘They keep saying I’ve only got to squeeze between the next gap this side and I’ll be home,’ he said. At least, I think that was what he said, but my voices kept drowning him out and muddling everything else.

“And it went on, like bedlam, until we wormed between two last pinnacles of rock and the voices, and the wind, just stopped.

“Then there was a long, long straight stretch. Rob and Maree were fine in this bit and they walked side by side, talking. Rob didn’t know what to ask for in Babylon, would you believe! He said that Will had made him see he badly needed to ask for something, but he couldn’t see what. He told Maree some of the things Will had said.

“While they talked, things got to me again. It was the way there was only darkness in front and behind and to the sides. Particularly at the sides. I felt as if I was walking on a tiny ribbon of land with a void all round. That cold, hungry void with sharp points in it that was under the bridge. While Maree was saying to Rob, ‘You sound as if you ought to be asking for a new soul,’ I went to the side of the road and held my candle out to see what was there.

“There was nothing there. Truly. There was just an enormous precipice. Like a fool, I went scuttling over to the other side of the road and held my candle out there. And it was just the same. Another precipice. We really were walking along a ribbon in the middle of nothing.

“After that I didn’t hear a word Rob and Maree said. They walked along, seriously discussing Rob’s soul, and I shuffled after and had the purple shaking-cold nadgers of sheer terror. I was so scared I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and crawl—I did crawl coming back—but I was ashamed to crawl in front of Rob and Maree when they didn’t mind at all. I didn’t feel better until we got to the hanging gardens.

“We called them the hanging gardens almost at once, and I think that is what they were, but they were not at all like you’d expect. The first we knew of them was that we were walking on spongy, tufty stuff that gave off a lemony smell and seemed to sway a little under our feet.

“Maree said, ‘Lemon verbena! Nice!’

“The tufty surface went up quite steeply, swaying more and more as we went, and after a bit our candles picked out a tower half buried in growing things. It looked like the rook from a chess set, only easily house-sized. After another bit, there was another tower on the other side, and this one looked like a pagoda made of china. The growing things draped everywhere. The candles lit up flowers and the smell was too sweet, worse than a Body Shop. Then there was a tower on the near side again, like a pyramid with too many steps—or maybe that was one of the later ones. Anyway, after the first three towers, the path was going up nearly vertically and the flowery, scented ground was not just swaying, it was swinging about. By then it was quite obvious somehow that all the towers were tall as lighthouses, with their bottoms way, way down in an abyss, and that the gardens were hung from the towers high in the air. As soon as you realized that, the swinging ground felt really flimsy.

“Maree panicked and froze. From then on I had to drag and haul her along. Rob couldn’t help me. If he hadn’t had hands to pull himself up with, he would have been really stuck. As it was, there were times when his front hooves were on one swinging bit and his back hooves were on another, and he was just helplessly spreading apart. Before long, I was having to help Rob as well as Maree. I took my shawl off and tied it round my waist. Then I hauled Maree up as high as she would go before she started crying and begging me to stop. I tried to park her near one of the towers most times, where the ground didn’t swing so much, and then I went back down for Rob. I did that over and over again, one-handed, holding the candle up to see my footing and Rob’s. The flower scents kept changing, to sweet, to spicy, to herbal. They made me hot and annoyed. I crunched flowers underfoot to get a purchase while I heaved at Rob, and I lost count of all the towers and the different pretty shapes they were. I just climbed grimly up and down, hauling Maree, parking her, going back down for Rob, until I was exhausted.

“We got to a part that was more open because it was made of thousands of hummocks of pale moss. It was so pale, you could actually see it ahead and to the sides, looking as if it went on forever. It swung about here worse than any part we’d been through. Maree was happier there in spite of the swinging, but Rob was in real trouble. Some of the trouble was that he could see better here and see his hooves being swung apart. Most of it was just the swinging.

“He was doing a really bad spread, with his front hooves almost under my chin while I hung on to his hand, and his hind hooves right down below, so that he was more or less rearing up, when the whole hillside began swaying, hard.

“‘What’s doing it?’ he screamed.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have told him. But I was panicked too. I looked down past Rob and I saw a candle lighting the leaves below us into that bright green you get when the colour’s too bright on your telly. Whoever was down there was coming up fast, with great leaps, pulling on the plants to help himself up, and that was what was making the swaying. ‘Someone else is coming,’ I told Rob.

“Rob swore and struggled. We were both sure it had to be an enemy. Rob glanced down over his shoulder and saw the light too. ‘I’m no help to you like this!’ he said, and he tried to jump. His back parts sort of bunched and pushed, but he was sore and stiff from his wound and the bunching just spread him worse than ever. Then his hind hooves slipped on the moss and the entire horse-end of him went right through into the space underneath. In no time he was frantically dangling. He dropped his candle and grabbed for a clump of moss. I saw the candle falling, under the moss, and falling and falling and falling. That was when I knew I had better not let go of his other hand. I sat on his front hooves to anchor them, even though that hurt him, and I hung on like mad to his hand. It was awful. I was so tired anyway that my arms felt like string.

“Maree was a house-height above us. She screamed and came scrambling down. And the person below shouted out, ‘What’s the matter?’

“‘He’s falling through!’ Maree screamed. ‘Help!’

“‘Hang on!’ the man shouted. And he came up like a train, making the mosses surge about worse than ever. By then I didn’t care who he was or whether he was friendly, or anything. Rob and I stared at one another by the light of my candle that I’d stuck in the moss so as to hang on with both hands, and I just willed the man to hurry.

“Then he arrived and he was the strange man who had worn different clothes in the mirror. I didn’t even care about that. I was just glad he was strong. He took one look at Rob, stuck his candle in beside mine and knelt down to grab Rob under the arms. ‘You pull too,’ he said to me. ‘One, two, three!’ I almost couldn’t pull. The man did it all himself really, hauling backwards until he was more or less lying up the slope, while Rob came slowly, slowly, up through the moss, then scrambled and found a purchase with a back hoof and pushed himself. And finally he was out on top.

“For a bit, we were all folded up beside the two candles, panting. Tears were running down Rob’s face and Maree was sitting up above us saying, ‘Thank you. Oh, thank you,’ over and over again.

“‘I won’t say “Think nothing of it.” It was hard work,’ the man said, when he’d got his breath. ‘But I’m glad I was here. This is a vile spot for a centaur.’

“‘Worse than some,’ Rob agreed. He found the spare candle Zinka had given us and lit it with Rupert’s spare lighter.

“I said, ‘I saw you. In the Hotel Babylon.’

“Maree said, ‘So did I.’ I remembered then that she thought he was fabulous and I looked up in case she was fainting or anything. She wasn’t. She was looking at the man in a way that was puzzled but sort of understanding as well. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Rupert Venables knows you.’

“‘I’m not sure who I am yet,’ he said, rather ashamed about it. ‘But I used to be the next-door neighbour of Rupert Venables. You know him, do you?’

“‘Met him six weeks ago. Hated him. Met him again at the hotel and feel as if I’d known him for years,’ Maree said.

“I said, ‘Yes, we all know him quite well.’

“‘Then,’ the man said, ‘if you see him before I do, tell him I’ll be in touch.’ He stood up and looked ruefully at the palm of one of his hands. ‘Three grains left,’ he said. ‘The rest went down the way you nearly went, centaur.’ He put the grains carefully in his pocket.

“‘We can give you a few more,’ Rob said.

“‘Three should be enough,’ he said, and he held the hand out to Rob. ‘Come on. I’ll help you up the rest of the way, and these two can help one another.’

“So we set off like that. Rob did much better with somebody helping him all the time, saying things like, ‘Don’t stretch. Use this tuft, it’s bigger. Now jump up to here, but steadily.’ But Maree was really tired and I felt weak as a kitten. Rob and the man got further and further ahead. At last, when their candles were just little twinkles high above, they shouted down that they would wait for us at the top.

“That was the last we saw of them. At the time, it was upsetting. But Koryfos explained to me, back at the hotel, inside the troop carrier, that they had tried to wait, but the place at the top wasn’t arranged for that. Whether they stood still or whether they walked, they went where they were going. And coming back, they found they were going a different way. ‘And believe me,’ he said, ‘it was much worse than the way we came. Rob was lucky to survive it.’

“This was because it really was Babylon at the top of the hanging gardens. As soon as we got to it, Maree and I, we knew. But I don’t think I can describe it. Partly this was because it was so many things at once, somehow. I can remember it as just the dark flat top to the mountain, or I can remember it as an absolutely huge tower—that we were inside and outside of, both at once—or I can remember it as just standing in an incredibly bright light. But when I think of it as the light, I think, No, there were colours in it, and some of the colours were ones you don’t see anywhere else and don’t have words for, and they were in ripples like the Northern Lights, except they were like moving signs, too. Then I think, No, again, they weren’t ripples, they were pillars. And I simply don’t know. And the oddest thing, which makes it even harder to remember than not knowing the colours, is the way everything had at least twice as many directions it was in as normal. I mean, when I think of Babylon as the tower, I know it went through ten or twelve right-angles, up and down as well as around, just like the hotel, only in this tower I could see all the different directions and it was really strange. And there were other things.

“Maree doesn’t even remember this much. All she can recall is the last bit, when we both think we arrived beside a thing like a stone trough—only it was as strange as everything else because it had all the other directions too, which made a queer shape for a trough. And we thought about it a bit. I said, ‘We can’t just stand and ask. They have to tell us it’s all right to ask first.’

“Maree said, ‘Give me a bottle of water.’ I’d only the one, but I passed it to her, and she carefully poured about half of it into the trough—and you had to be careful, because the water went round all sorts of directions too and made it hard to aim. Then she passed the bottle back to me and said, ‘Now you pour some. Then scatter grain.’

“I did, and it was even harder with the grain. It went all over the place and round all the corners and only a few seeds went in. But as soon as the seeds had gone into the water it all began foaming and sort of growing, until it was rushing like a river at the brims of the trough.

“Then I think a voice spoke. But I’m not sure, because if it was a voice, it was more like notes or chiming. And it seemed to me to tell us Maree could ask first, provided she was in great need.

“I nudged at Maree. She sort of jumped. I whispered at her what to say. She nodded happily and I thought she understood. She pushed her glasses up and said, ‘I ask that my little fat Dad should be cured of his cancer.’

“I couldn’t believe it. It was a total waste. I knew I was going to have to ask for the other half of Maree for my own wish and I could have screamed. There was no chance of getting her back if I didn’t, and I would have wasted everyone’s trouble. I think I cried at the waste. But it was pointless to have come all this way and not ask. So I asked for her.

“And there was a sort of chiming. Maree suddenly went the right colour. She even looked heavier. And she seemed to have her mind back properly. Anyway the shape of her face was right again. And I suppose I was glad. Well, yes, I was glad.

“Then there was another chiming, and this one meant we had to go. But I think it gave me a hint too. Anyway, I thought of the stories, Orpheus and so on, and I didn’t look at Maree again. I just turned round and started to go back.

“I’ve no idea how I got so far ahead of her. Maree doesn’t know either. She thinks she had my candle in sight most of the time. I heard her behind me quite often. I heard her scrambling down the moss after me, and I felt it swaying under her. I heard her walking while I was crawling along the ribbon of rock with the precipices on either side. I just don’t understand it.

“Going back was awful. The worst of it was, you knew just what you were in for. The one thing that wasn’t the same was when I was coming down the rocks like the stacks of knives. I never saw the children or the birds there. But the rest of it was all there, waiting. Another difference, now I think, was when I got to the thorns. I kept expecting my clothes to vanish again, but they didn’t. The only thing that did vanish was the shawl made out of the goat’s wool. And when I got to the bridge, there was nothing at the other end, no gateway and no statues. By then I was so tired I almost didn’t notice. I was just glad that nobody tried to stop me, and trudged on. I was so tired that I almost didn’t know I could stop when I got back to Rupert’s room at last.”

(3)

They all listened hard to me reading, leaning forward, attending to every word. I was so busy reading at first that it took me a while to notice that the sheets of paper were sort of filtering away as I read them. Almost every time I put a page underneath the pile after I’d read it, it went. By the end, I was holding three sheets of paper. I looked. The top one was the part about the birds and the children.

Someone quite a long way down the table asked, “Do you know who those three children were?”

I said, “Yes. They have to have been the Emperor’s other children who were killed.”

“And what do you think the birds were?” another distant voice asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought maybe you did.”

“I wish we did,” the person right beside me at the end of the table said. “This is as strange to us as it is to you.”

Then I had only two pages. The top one was now the bit after I’d come back and we were chasing the quack chicks. My stomach wobbled.

It was one of the people on the side bench against the wall who asked me about that. She was an old, old lady with sucked-in cheeks. She said, “What are your feelings about your mother now?”

I couldn’t answer. I simply didn’t know how—and I’d been trying to work it out ever since Dad and Maree and I went back to Bristol.

The old lady said, “Try to answer. It might help.”

The only way I could manage to answer was to talk about something else. I said, “Last year, I had a boil on my neck. It was quite impressive. It grew and it grew and it was a sort of purple-red. And all the time it was growing it was wonderfully neat and well shaped, quite round and pointed and regular, with a funny little dip in the middle at the top. When I looked at it, I used to think it was such a perfect shape that it almost seemed as if it was a proper part of me and meant to be there. But it hurt more and more, in a dull sort of way, and it made me hold my head on one side. In the end, Dad marched me off to the doctor with it. The doctor took a short look, then he lanced it. That made the most appalling mess and it hurt ten times more. When I got home it looked even more of a mess. It was not even a good shape any longer, and it kept running and felt horrible, but the pain was a much better sort of pain, even though it went on for a long time and I’ve still got quite a mark.”

“Fair enough,” said the old lady.

That left me with only the one sheet. I looked down at it and I sort of clenched. It was the last sheet, and I was absolutely not going to tell them what I’d wanted to wish for. But I wasn’t sure how I could stop them making me.

Somebody right along the table asked. He said, “You’ve left out your motive. You haven’t said why you went through with this.”

“What do you mean?” I said, defending for all I was worth.

“I mean,” he said, “that you’ve made it clear why you hung on to the centaur and asked for the other half of your sister, but there was at least one occasion where you wanted to turn back, and your account shows that you could have done. Why did you go on?”

“Oh,” I said. I tried not to show them how relieved I was. “I went on because I was interested, of course. I wanted to know what would happen.”

That seemed to amuse them all. There was quite a ripple of laughter round the room, and when it stopped, all my papers had gone. Rupert seemed to think we were going to leave then, but they hadn’t quite finished. One of the stern ones in the middle of the table said to me, “One moment. This account of Babylon contains substantial parts of the deep secret of the Magids that is called Babylon. For this reason, we are going to have to expunge all trace and memory of it from you. Please understand and forgive this assembly for it. It is necessary.”

That is just what they tried to do. I really didn’t remember a thing—though I was puzzled to see that Maree was the right colour again, and couldn’t think why—until I got home and found the note I’d left for myself. Look for disks. So I looked all over and found about twenty of the hundred disks I’d hidden. The rest were gone, and the file wasn’t on my hard disk. But I don’t think the Upper Room realized how cunning I’d been.

You see, after Rupert told me that the computer games people didn’t want my Bristolia game after all—they said it was too complicated!—I decided I’d do a Babylon game instead. Blow that about deep secrets! Rupert and Maree say that the basic job of a Magid is to gradually release all the special knowledge anyway. And besides, I want to remember. It strikes me as one of the best ways of forcing that Upper Room to make me a Magid too. That was what I’d been going to ask for, until I had to ask for Maree instead. Now I’ll have to get to be one another way round.