Viola watched Celia search through the sitting room.
They hadn’t said a word to each other since Celia’s pseudo-spell had been
broken. Viola wanted to ask her companion what she was looking for, but they
had no way of communicating sensibly. She would have liked to be able to help.
‘Can I iron your
cassock?’ she asked
Celia stopped and
stared at her. She even looked down to check that she wasn’t either wearing or
carrying an item of clerical clothing. She put her fingers to her lips and
shook her head vigorously.
‘I saw the surly mole
catcher; I was just whispering to a custard…’ muttered Viola, irritated with
herself.
Celia nodded in
encouragement. She pointed at herself and then at Viola. She tilted her head
and pantomimed a person looking for something.
She said that we were looking for each other’s secrets, Viola thought, so I might as
well start looking for hers.
Viola stood up and
started to look for a map of some kind, or perhaps a chart or directions, the
witch hadn’t been very clear. Celia smiled at her.
They began to open
drawers and cupboards. Celia found a toy wolf in a big cupboard in the corner
of the room. It was ragged and one of its legs had been half pulled off but
Viola recognised it immediately, although she hadn’t seen it for centuries.
This was a toy that she’d played with in the temple when she was a girl. Someone
very kind had given it to her, but she couldn’t remember who it had been.
Memories could be so sad. Tears welled up in her eyes.
‘Wolfie!’ she
exclaimed and reached for the toy.
Celia looked
puzzled, as if Viola had said another outrageous thing, but Viola nodded and so
she let go of the toy. Viola held it for a second or two and then it
disappeared. Somehow its going was much less sad than its re-appearance.
Celia looked at
her and raised her hands up in a gesture of uncertainty. Viola pointed to
herself, went down on to her knees and rocked the now invisible wolf. Celia
seemed to understand that this was indicating the elf as a child. She smiled,
but this didn’t seem to get them any further.
They searched on,
and Viola found a hatpin on the mantelpiece. It was clearly Celia’s, but it didn’t
appear to be anything of great sentimental value to her.
After half-an-hour
of dream time searching they had found several other things: Viola’s school
shoes, Celia’s wooden top, a smock that Celia had used when helping her mother
clean the kitchen, an enamel bowl with a daffodil in it, a bowl of green
olives., a Visneorian bow, a viola and a cello. Celia stopped at this point and
pointed at the musical instruments and then to the two of them.
‘One ha’penny of a
brass band, that’s us…’ she laughed and put her hand up to her mouth.
Viola ignored her:
there was no point in trying to understand. All of these things seemed to have
some connection with them, but none of them seemed useful at all. It was
something specific they were looking for – a map and a book. A map to who knew
where and a book about who knew what.
As they searched, more
things turned up, and bigger and bigger things. The room began to expand to fit
all the objects. There was a wedding cake, a toy snake, an ant hill, an
Imperial major’s uniform, a loom, a small orange tree, and a beautiful green
patchwork quilt. They stopped when a large grey Imperial horse appeared. The
horse made Viola feel guilty; triggered a vague apprehension in the corner of
mind. She lifted her hands up and shook her head.
‘I will taste no
more hurricanes!’ she shouted
Celia winced and
turned away. The sound of Viola’s voice had an almost physical effect. Celia turned back and shook her head. She
lifted up her hands too, mirroring her companion’s pose. She held her breath.
Viola did the same. She felt like a school girl – I’ll hold my breath until the badness goes away. They stood there for a long while, hands
raised, and one by one the objects disappeared. Dream
logic again, thought Viola. The room shrank back to its original size. They
breathed out in relief.
Celia nodded to
the door. Viola nodded back. They happily left the room, back into the dark
corridor. Celia picked up the lantern from the floor – it seemed unaffected by
the comings and goings of all the other dream objects in the room.
They walked for a
long time in one direction down the dark corridor and found nothing, not even
the doors at the end that had once led out into the conservatory and the garden.
Then they walked for just as long the other way and with the same result. They
stopped at the door to the living room and turned to each other. The need to
communicate had become painfully obvious.
‘We’re blocked at all
the ports and will have to escape at dawn through the artisans’ quarter’ blurted
out Celia.
Viola nodded. She
understood exactly what Celia meant. They were stuck.
They went back inside and sat on the sofas. For a moment they had run out of ideas. Viola wondered if they could sit there until they both woke up, but feared that that could take any length of dream time.
Celia sat next to her,
arms crossed, concentrating very hard. She was mumbling or humming, as if she
were trying to remember a half-forgotten song. Eventually she seemed satisfied.
She stood up, raised her arms and began chanting. She struggled for a while to get out the right
words, but eventually they came, in an ever rising melodic phrase. The words
were in Rhylic and Viola understood none of them, but it was undoubtedly
beautiful. The air around them seemed to slow, as if it were becoming
transparent treacle. A pulse of light rippled through this viscous world.
‘Ioan
helpu ni! fynd i mewn ein breuddwydion! rydym yn gofyn am eich!’
The watery medium returned to nebulous air. A short, hirsute, red haired man came round the corner, as if on a morning stroll. He had an extravagant, equally red, beard. He inspected them gravely.
‘Witch and empire
– poor dabs,’ he said, ‘In this strange ‘mare of a place…’
Celia put her hand
up to cover her mouth and shook her head.
‘Can’t speak?’ he
said, in Ethian, ‘that’ll be the Enemies’ doing, those rum bastards. You should
be able to talk to me, though, I’m clearly not meant to be here, so whatever
this enchantment is won’t affect me…’
Viola glanced at
Celia, looking for some explanation, but she was bowing to the newcomer.
‘I am so grateful
that you have come’ she said, ‘I had no idea if you would hear me’
‘I heard you lass;
you sing very loud. I can’t stay long, though, the dream will sense that I’m
here, then it’ll dump me out.’
He smiled,
remembering.
‘I used to do this
a lot with my brother – when we knew nothing; when this time was young…’
‘Your brother…?’
interjected Celia, but then seemed to think better of it.
‘We need your
help…’ she said, instead.
Viola stood up and
waved vaguely at the man. Who was this? What enchantment had Celia cast?
‘What’s going on?’
asked Viola, ‘who are you?’
‘No… time… for that
now…’ Celia said, gesturing down the corridor. ‘We need to find a way out of here…’
The rufous man
turned to Viola.
‘You can call me
Jones; I’m a friend,’ He stopped himself and stared at her for a moment,
intently. He frowned and his voice became uncertain, ‘well, I’m definitely not
an enemy…let’s leave it that.’
‘Please…’ whispered
Celia.
Jones shrugged,
perhaps a little peeved to be abandoning the conversation. He walked out into
the corridor and it lit up, as if twenty candelabras had appeared there
simultaneously. Where that had been empty walls there were now endless doors, a
row of them on either side, with no gaps between them. Jones shrugged.
‘Best I could do…’
he said
There was a noise,
a howling that was almost a baying, behind them. Jones turned around. There was
a black wolf there; or if not a wolf, a wolf-shaped cloud of power.
The man looked
back, laughed, and then transformed, without warning, into a large ginger and
white cat with a huge bushy tail. Viola, who had seen the naga in Klethropolis do
this before, was more surprised than Celia, who never had[1].
Context is everything.
The cat looked round
and hissed at the wolf, then it turned tail and streaked away. The wolf raced
past them in pursuit. Viola had a brief
vision of them running endlessly down the corridor but, in fact, a blink of an
eye later the air had turned liquid again. There was another pulse of light.
Viola assumed that Jones, whoever he was, had gone again. The light in the corridor flared and then
went out. Celia picked up the lantern again. Its patch of swinging light was
now no more than a firefly in the darkness.
They advanced
stealthily down the corridor, Viola wondered whether endless doors were actually
any better than endless wall.
‘Out of the eel
pit into the elephant pen’ she said, but not meaning to vocalise it.
‘Eel pie is every
housewife’s delight, and fish pie every husband’s’ said Celia, as if to
herself. She snorted reflexively.
They looked at
each other and then burst out laughing. Viola didn’t really understand why she
was laughing but something about the comic look of surprise on Celia’s face
made her laughter infectious.
Their laughter
didn’t help with the doors, however. Once Celia had calmed down she went to
open the nearest door to them. Viola, in a sudden panic, shook her head and
pulled Celia’s hand away.
‘No’ she said. She
gestured with her hand to her ears and eyes. Celia nodded, happy enough to let
her take the lead.
Viola walked down
the corridor listening. At first she thought that this was the perfect silence
of a sterile world. Maybe this was just a trap; something to waste their dream
time, but she wondered how it could be useful to steal peoples’ time when they
were asleep. So, if not a trap, there must be something. Something, perhaps,
that only she could see or hear.
She pressed her
ear against one of the doors and summoned up all of her skill. As a child she
could find anyone at hide-and-seek: all she had to do is wait and listen. She
would do the same thing now.
She heard Celia
moving behind her. Typical noisy human she
thought to herself, reminded briefly of Kath. She turned and gestured at Celia
to stop moving. Celia nodded eagerly and held an exaggerated ‘still’ pose.
Viola shifted to a
different part of the door-wall. Her mind emptied of everything except sound. There
it was, a white noise at the very edge of any hearing. She turned to speak to
Celia.
‘I have found the
needle and the haystack is still intact!’
Celia nodded.
‘Grated cheese!’
she said.
Viola went back
and forth among the doors, judging the fall and rise of the sound, like a audio
dowser. Bit by bit she moved further and further down the corridor, attempting
to block the noise of Celia’s footfalls as she followed with the lantern.
Eventually she
found the door. Behind it Viola could hear the sea swell; there was no noise
behind any other door. It was not the outside roll of waves on rocks but the
sound that the sea makes underground as it rolls into a cave. She had a brief,
but painful, memory of being trapped in a box in a stormy sea, and Celia had been there too.
‘Thallata!, thallata!’ she whispered in
Archaic Elven.
‘What?’ asked
Celia.
‘This is the way’
said Viola and opened the door.
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