“Oh, you needn’t bother!” Blade kept saying, slightly to the side of each new lady. It was hard for him to look at them. Their clothes were so very gauzy that he knew he would stare and gape quite rudely if he once started looking properly.
“No trouble,” they answered, laughing. “Now you’ve arrived, this is our last day here, so we don’t mind a bit.”
Another pair of ladies came to Blade with a tiny cup of very sweet coffee and a wide tray of sticky cakes. “Take the green ones,” the lady with the cakes advised him. “Those are the ones the griffin said were godlike.”
Blade forgot to tell her she needn’t bother. He even looked at her. “Lydda was here?”
“Oh, yes!” they all said. “And we want you to tell us all about her. Did your father really make her?”
Blade enjoyed himself even more after that, telling them about Lydda and the other griffins, while they sat around him in a half circle with their hands clasped around their gauzy knees—except for the lady who had washed Blade’s socks, who was now darning them—and stared at him with wide, beautiful eyes. He felt as godlike as the cakes.
And then they suddenly all stood up. “We have to go now,” said the one with his socks. She passed the socks to him, neatly mended. “Tell the Emir that there are going to be no more slave girls from now on, here or anywhere else.”
“I—ah—” Blade began, thinking he ought to explain that the Emir was not behaving as if he would listen.
But they were all gone. They had not left by any of the doors. The room was simply empty apart from somebody’s silk scarf slowly fluttering to the tiled floor in a warm blast of scented air. It felt like a mass translocation to Blade. He was still wondering where they could have gone when the scarf reached the floor and became a folded piece of paper, lying on the tiles. Blade padded over and picked it up. It was, to his astonishment, a note from his mother.
Dear Blade,
Please give the Emir the message about slave girls. It’s important. I’m thinking of you a lot and looking forward to your visit here with your Pilgrim Party. And tell Derk that I’ve remembered about the dragon.
All my love,
Mara
“Where are all my slave girls?” thundered the Emir, just as Blade had finished putting on his socks. The Emir seemed quite normal now. He came rushing into the empty room with Derk behind him and stared about irately, more or less as anyone might who was suddenly minus twenty pretty ladies.
Blade, rather hesitantly, told him what the sock-darning lady had said.
“But there are always slave girls!” the Emir howled. “The tourists expect them!”
Derk was looking weary. “This is something you have to deal with yourself, Your Highness,” he said. “We have to go to Chell. Perhaps you could consider hiring some girls.” At this the Emir began shouting that hired girls were not slave girls, and Derk turned wearily to Blade. “Blade, if you would.”
Blade took hold of his father’s sleeve and brought them north a long way to where Derk had said Chell was. “They translocated,” he said as they arrived. Chell was perched in front of them on a hill, crowned with a castle and surrounded by vineyards. “Hey, it’s beautiful!” Blade said. “Are they really going to destroy it?”
“Chell and nine others,” Derk said. “That’s the tours for you. Who translocated?”
As they walked uphill between the vines to the city, Blade told Derk about the ladies. “I think the one who darned my socks must have been a wizard,” he said. “She had the feel—Oh, and she left a letter from Mum.” He passed the note to Derk.
Derk’s face sagged as he read it. “So your mother remembers that Scales burned me. Good of her.” He passed the note back.
He looked so strange that Blade said, “Are you all right, Dad?”
Derk just grunted and took hold of a bunch of grapes hanging out over the path. “Ripe,” he said. “Looks like a good vintage, too. I suppose they’re leaving them because of the siege. Barnabas would cry at this waste. I’ll see if I can save the grapes.”
“Don’t you want to talk about Mum?” asked Blade.
“No,” said Derk. “I want to see what’s wrong in Chell.”
But they could find nothing wrong in Chell. Inside the walls everyone was going cheerfully about the business of preparing arrows and making armor, just as they should have been. Derk and Blade were shown up to the castle, where they were met by the Duchess of Chell, who seemed quite resigned to losing her city and her grape harvest.
“It’s the way it goes these days, Wizard,” she said. “I’m sorry the duke’s not here to meet you himself. He’d tell you the same. Can I offer you any refreshment?”
Derk refused, on the grounds that they were both full of the Emir’s sticky cakes, and they went away again, through the city and downhill among the vines. “There is somet
hing wrong,” Derk said, “but I’m blowed if I can see what. Could you?”
“I thought,” Blade said doubtfully, “that they all seemed a bit too cheerful.”