Chapter seventeen

Hyperborea

 

She awoke and put her hands up to her face.  Her eyes were dry. She knew that something very sad had happened in her dream, but she could remember nothing except that there had been a blue ocean, a white-sailed boat and a black-haired girl. For a moment she wondered why that could possibly make her feel so low but then she felt the cold stone of her cell.  All memory of the dream was driven from her mind. She was in a prison in the far north of the world and she had no idea how she could ever escape.  She could feel the anti-magic band around her right wrist; it seemed to hum to her, filling her head with an incessant, fragmentary melody that prevented the spells from forming in her mind. It was a gentle form of torture. Any spell that she began to cast died in her mind and on her lips. This was a worse nightmare than any of her half-remembered dreams.

She had been in her cell for about three days. All she had was a mattress strewn on the floor, a torch that lit the room at night, and a high skylight that let a trickle of light in during the day. Slender servants brought her food – she assumed that this was another of the sterile castes in the hive of the Dwarf society. None of these helpers knew any Ethian but their speech was clearly a dialect of the common tongue and so she could understand a lot of what they said. Not that that helped her much as they either knew very little or they had been instructed to tell her nothing.

 

The helpers came a few hours later and undressed her. There was no explanation. One subgroup folded her clothes carefully and then carried them away; another dressed her in several layers of soft silk. The feeling against her skin was a strange mixture – comfortable but strangely intrusive, as if every layer was simultaneously probing and caressing her.

‘What sort of silk is this?’ she asked

A murmur of awed laughter spread through the servants.

‘How can you ney ken?’ whispered one of her dressers, ‘’tis Mammy silk’

Celia wished she hadn’t asked. She now had a vision of a spider in a dawn garden, weaving an orb web for her prey. Could dwarves secrete silk? Was that even possible? Was she being wrapped up like a snack in a paper bag?

All the servants left in a flurry of giggles. They had seemed excited by their duties and Celia wondered whether her nakedness – she was so much taller, so much curvier, than the little, apparently sexless creatures – had contributed to their excitement. She cringed with embarrassment at the thought of it.

A few minutes later a tall, very thin, humanoid entered the cell. She looked very like Heather-sister but was, if anything, a few inches taller. She bowed low.

‘I am Broom-sister. I have come to take you to Mammy’

Celia screwed up all of her courage and got up from where she had been sitting on the mattress on the floor.

‘I’m ready’ she said, completely untruly.

Broom-sister led her on, through a bewildering array of tunnels and chambers, which seemed to fill the whole of some extended three-dimensional space. Walkways dipped, rose and changed direction with no apparent logic or plan. Her guide, however, seemed to know exactly what she was doing.

‘Mammy is in the middle’ she said at one point, as if that really helped. ‘The holding areas are at the top. It is a substantial journey’

By now Celia was used to the walking; it was the waiting she hated. She wondered when they would come to the end of their journey and what she would find there. With no cue to tell her where they were every turning and every opening became a possible destination. She just wished that they could get it over with. If she were going to be eaten then it would be better if it happened quickly.

There were more and more big burly guards, who could only have been soldiers. This was the only hint that she might be nearing the centre. The passageway narrowed until they could only walk along it in single file. Then they came to a heavy wooden door. In front of it stood the widest humanoid creature that she had ever seen. He was dressed just like Captain McEuan, in military uniform, but his girth seemed to stretch the material almost to breaking point. Celia wondered if the clothes had ever fitted him or whether he was in the process of spectacularly growing out of them. She had no idea how they would get past him.

Broom-sister nodded at him. The guard turned, with some difficulty, and knocked ponderously on the door with his huge fists. There was an answering knock and then a conversation of knocks of great complexity. After that the door swung open and revealed a much larger room-like space behind. Another long thin she-dwarf ushered the guard back beyond the door into a little larder-like space. Broom-sister gestured to her prisoner.

‘Juniper-mother; this is Witch Celia from Eth’

Juniper-mother smiled and reached for Celia’s hand. She pulled her in past the door and into the dark, warm space. Celia was shocked to see that her new captor was pregnant. She was as thin and angular as the other sisters but her belly was clearly huge with child. She looked like a gravid scarecrow.

The guard shuffled forward in front of them. Celia turned to see his fleshy frame occlude the doorway, then he was back out again and he closed the door behind him. The darkness was sudden and it took several moments before she could see the faint red glow that illuminated the room.  Juniper-mother’s face was very close to hers.

‘Have you birthed?’ she asked

Celia shook her head; she scarcely felt scared – this was all so strange.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, child. There is still time though, yes?’

A completely unexpected voice inside herself shouted I really hope so but all she could bring herself to do was to nod.

Juniper-mother nodded back but then said nothing more. This seemed to have exhausted topics that she was interested in. She hurried Celia along through a twisting series of increasingly warm tunnels and chambers. The tunnels were narrow and each chamber had a cradle with a baby in it. All of them seemed to be sleeping soundly and the whole complex was eerily quiet for a nursery. It was hard to see much, anyway, due to the darkness and the speed that they were travelling. Celia was beginning to realise that it wasn’t a spider’s web she was walking into, it was a hive.

Finally the tunnel broadened out into a flat, low-roofed, room about the size of a football field.  Helpers and soldiers milled about them but they seemed happy that she was with Juniper-mother. They nodded and chattered as they went past. The helpers seemed very busy and the soldiers seemed very fierce. Celia was completely bewildered and increasingly terrified. She had never felt more out of place.

In the centre of all this activity sat Mammy, several inches taller than Juniper-mother but equally pregnant. She lolled on some sort of silken sedan and the area around her was bound up with silk, leaving only a narrow entrance that led into her boudoir. Surrounding the silk box, illuminated by bright white lights on the end of poles, were bushes with waxy green leaves. Crawling across them were the largest caterpillars Celia had ever seen. Her flesh crawled under her silk layers. Mammy rocked forward and pointed a long bony finger at her. 

‘Witch Celia...’ she shouted out, ‘come over here and talk to me...’

Juniper-mother let go of Celia’s hand.  She nodded at her and Celia stumbled forwards. She felt entirely alone. In her mind’s eye she had a clear vision of a declawed bear wandering into a tiger’s den.