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 suppose 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 realised 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 mo
re 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.