Sabriel (Abhorsen 1)

“Thank you,” said Sabriel. Tiredness weighed down on her, tiredness and the weight of awareness. Awareness of her enemies, like a darkness always clouding the edge of her vision. “We will go now. My good wishes stay with you, and my hopes for your safety.”

“May the Charter preserve us all,” added Touchstone, bowing to the old man. The Elder bowed back, a bent, solemn figure, so much smaller than his shadow, looming tall on the wall behind.

Sabriel turned to go, but a long line of villagers was forming on the way to the door. All of them wanted to bow or curtsey before her, to mutter shy thank-yous and farewells. Sabriel accepted them with embarrassment and guilt, remembering Patar. True, she had banished the dead, but another life had been lost in the doing. Her father would not have been so clumsy . . .

The second-to-last person in the line was a little girl, her black hair tied in two plaits, one on either side of her head. Seeing her made Sabriel remember something Touchstone had said. She stopped, and took the girl’s hands in her own.

“What is your name, little one?” she asked, smiling. A feeling of déjà vu swept over her as the small fingers met hers—the memory of a frightened first-grader hesitantly reaching out to the older pupil who would be her guide for the first day at Wyverley College. Sabriel had experienced both sides, in her time.

“Aline,” said the girl, smiling back. Her eyes were bright and lively, too young to be dimmed by the frightened despair that clouded the adults’ gaze. A good choice, Sabriel thought.

“Now, tell me what you have learned in your lessons about the Great Charter,” Sabriel said, adopting the familiar, motherly and generally irrelevant questioning tone of the School Inspector who’d descended on every class in Wyverley twice a year.

“I know the rhyme . . .” replied Aline, a little doubtfully, her small forehead crinkling. “Shall I sing it, like we do in class?”

Sabriel nodded.

“We dance around the stone, too,” Aline added, confidingly. She stood up straighter, put one foot forward, and took her hands away to clasp them behind her back.

Five Great Charters knit the land

together linked, hand in hand

One in the people who wear the crown

Two in the folk who keep the Dead down

Three and Five became stone and mortar

Four sees all in frozen water.

“Thank you, Aline,” Sabriel said. “That was very nice.”

She ruffled the child’s hair and hastened through the final farewells, suddenly keen to get out of the smoke and the fish-smell, out into the clean, rainy air where she could think.

“So now you know,” whispered Mogget, jumping up into her arms to escape the puddles. “I still can’t tell you, but you know one’s in your blood.”

“Two,” replied Sabriel distantly. “‘Two in the folk who keep the Dead down.’ So what is the . . . ah . . . I can’t talk about it either!”

But she thought about the questions she’d like to ask, as Touchstone helped her aboard the small fishing vessel that lay just off the tiny, shell-laden beach that served the island as a harbor.

One of the Great Charters lay in the royal blood. The second lay in Abhorsen’s. What were three and five, and four that saw all in frozen water? She felt certain that many answers could be found in Belisaere. Her father could probably answer more, for many things that were bound in Life were unraveled in Death. And there was her mother-sending, for that third and final questioning in this seven years.

Touchstone pushed off, clambered aboard and took the oars. Mogget leapt out of Sabriel’s arms, and assumed a figurehead position near the prow, serving as a night-sighted lookout, while mocking Touchstone at the same time.

Back on shore, the Mordicant suddenly howled, a long, piercing cry that echoed far across the water, chilling hearts on both boat and island.

“Bear a bit more to starboard,” said Mogget, in the silence after the howl faded. “We need more sea-room.”

Touchstone was quick to comply.

chapter xviii

By the morning of the sixth day out of Nestowe, Sabriel was heartily tired of nautical life. They’d sailed virtually non-stop all that time, only putting into shore at noon for fresh water, and only then when it was sunny. Nights were spent under sail, or, when exhaustion claimed Touchstone, hove-to with a sea anchor, the unsleeping Mogget standing watch. Fortunately, the weather had been kind.

It had been a relatively uneventful five days. Two days from Nestowe to Beardy Point, an unprepossessing peninsula whose only interesting features were a sandy-bottomed beach and a clear stream. Devoid of life, it was also devoid of the Dead. Here, for the first time, Sabriel could no longer sense the pursuing Mordicant. A good, strong, south-easterly had propelled them, reaching northwards, at too fast a pace for it to follow.

Three days from Beardy Point to the island of Ilgard, its rocky cliffs climbing sheer from the sea, a grey and pockmarked tenement, home to tens of thousands of seabirds. They passed it late in the afternoon, their single sail stretched to bursting, clinker-built hull heeling well over, bow slicing up a column of spray that salted mouths, eyes and bodies.

It was half a day from Ilgard to the Belis Mouth, that narrow strait that led to the Sea of Saere. But that was tricky sailing, so they spent the night hove-to just out of sight of Ilgard, to wait for the light of day.

“There is a boom-chain across the Belis Mouth,” Touchstone explained, as he raised the sail and Sabriel hauled the sea anchor in over the bow. The sun was rising behind him, but had not yet pulled itself out of the sea, so he was no more than a dim shadow in the stern. “It was built to keep pirates and suchlike out of the Sea of Saere. You won’t believe the size of it—I can’t imagine how it was forged, or strung across.”

“Will it still be there?” Sabriel asked, cautiously, not wanting to prevent Touchstone’s strangely talkative mood.

“I’m sure of it,” replied Touchstone. “We’ll see the towers on the opposite shores first. Winding Post, to the south, and Boom Hook to the north.”

“Not very imaginative names,” commented Sabriel, unable to help herse

lf from interrupting. It was just such a pleasure to talk! Touchstone had lapsed back into non-communication for most of the voyage, though he did have a good excuse—handling the fishing boat for eighteen hours a day, even in good weather, didn’t leave much energy for conversation.

“They’re named after their purpose,” replied Touchstone. “Which makes sense.”

“Who decides whether to let vessels past the chain?” asked Sabriel. Already, she was thinking ahead, wondering about Belisaere. Could it be like Nestowe—the city abandoned, riddled with the Dead?

“Ah,” said Touchstone. “I hadn’t thought about that. In my time, there was a Royal Boom Master, with a force of guards and a squadron of small, picket ships. If, as Mogget says, the city has fallen into anarchy . . .”

“There may also be people working for, or in alliance with, the Dead,” Sabriel added thoughtfully. “So even if we cross the boom in daylight, there could be trouble. I think I’d better reverse my surcoat and hide my helmet wrapping.”

“What about the bells?” asked Touchstone. He leaned past her, to draw the main sheet tighter, right hand slightly nudging the tiller to take advantage of a shift in the wind. “They’re fairly obvious, to say the least.”

“I’ll just look like a necromancer,” Sabriel replied. “A salty, unwashed necromancer.”

“I don’t know,” said Touchstone, who couldn’t see that Sabriel was joking. “No necromancer would be let into the city, or would stay alive, in—”

“In your day,” interrupted Mogget, from his favorite post on the bow. “But this is now, and I am sure that necromancers and worse are not uncommon sights in Belisaere.”

“I’ll wear a cloak—” Sabriel started to say.

“If you say so,” Touchstone said, at the same time. Clearly, he didn’t believe the cat. Belisaere was the royal capital, a huge city, home to at least fifty thousand people. Touchstone couldn’t imagine it fallen, decayed and in the hands of the Dead. Despite his own inner fears and secret knowledge, he couldn’t help but be confident that the Belisaere they were sailing towards would be little different from the two-hundred-year-old images locked in his memory.