THREE
Mini stopped and waited for me about fifty yards on. I could see her enormous ears spreading anxiously against the dim sky as I limped after her.
“Are you all right? I haven’t hurt you, have I?” She was a thoroughly considerate elephant. When I reached her, she said, “I’d prefer it if you’d take hold of my harness again. I feel safer that way.”
I think that was considerate, too. I grabbe
d hold gratefully and practically leaned on her as we walked the last part. It turned out not to be far, just time for my knees to stop throbbing and my toe to start behaving normally. By that time we could almost see the crags at each side of the path. Then a moment or so after that, we sort of came down sideways onto the rest of the world and out onto a wet, green slope, where Mini’s feet went suck, suck, suck in the grass. And we were in wonderful, bright, pinkish light.
Mini went, “Oh! I’ve gone blind in one eye!” and started to panic again.
Her harness turned out to have been pink and scarlet, with silver decorations. Part of it was that kind of flat hat that goes on top of an elephant’s head, and she had scraped it sideways on the cliff, so that it draped across her eye and one tusk. Her tusks, I was glad to see, had been banded with metal and neither of them had been broken.
“No, you haven’t gone blind!” I told her. “Put your head down so that I can reach it.”
She nodded her head down at once. She was really well trained. I hauled the whole wet, heavy lot of harness down across her face and her trunk so that it fell chinking down her legs and she could step out of it.
“That’s a relief!” she said, and blinked around with her big gray eyes. Elephants have ridiculously long, shaggy eyelashes. “It’s sunset!” she said.
“Making my third in two days,” I said, turning to look.
The sun was behind me, flaring pink and gold paths over sheets of water as far as I could see. The sound of water rippled and husked and whispered everywhere. Everything smelled of water, softly and strongly.
“Where are we?” Mini said.
“Romanov’s place,” I said. As soon as I was facing the water, I had no doubt of it. The water was all joined up to look like one sea or a huge lake, but the part on my left was clear blue like sea around a coral coast, with little waves frilling on white sand, and the part in front of me was muddy and rippling against rushes. Round to the right, the rushes were taller, but the gray water there was coming in fairly big waves and the rushes were blowing in a wind we couldn’t feel. You could see the lines dividing the different kinds of water if you half closed your eyes. They rayed outward toward the horizon like huge slices of pizza. Even the sun, setting in the midst of red and purple clouds, was divided into an orange part and a smaller slice that was much redder. It looked really odd. I remembered Dave saying that Romanov lived on an island that was made from parts of several worlds, and I knew where we were.
I also knew that if Romanov was here, then we were going to meet his big spotted cat any moment. I was suddenly not quite as glad to have got here as I had been.
“Oh, dear,” Mini said. She was shuffling her front feet, and one of her back legs was rubbing up and down the other. She looked like an enormous, embarrassed schoolgirl. “Do you think there’s anything to eat in this peculiar place? I’m so hungry.”
I remembered reading somewhere that an elephant can be a match for a tiger. I swallowed a bit and said, “We’ll go and ask. But if we happen to meet a whitish creature about so big”—I showed her with my hand halfway up my chest—“er, do you think you can, well, you know, sort of kick it? Or trample it, perhaps?”
“I suppose I could,” she said doubtfully. “Is it fierce?”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s all right if Romanov’s with it. It does what he says.”
“Oh, good,” she said.
We turned away from the patchwork water and climbed the grassy rise to the high part of the island. My eyes were going this way and that, dreading the sight of that big cat. Mini’s trunk flapped wistfully toward a big clump of trees in the distance that were three kinds of green from the patchwork effect.
“I could eat those,” she said.
“Romanov won’t like it,” I said. “Come on.” We crossed a dividing line into yellower grass and pushed warily through some bushes—or I did; Mini trampled them, and if the cat had been in there, we’d have known, and it wasn’t—and came across the shoulder of the hill beside a high brick wall. I wasn’t tall enough to see over it, but Mini was. Her trunk kept stretching out across the wall and then guiltily curling back. “Is the animal behind that?” I asked her.
“Only vegetables,” she said. “They smell delicious.”
Round the corner of the wall, I peered cautiously down at another piece of water. Deep blue water, this time. There was a long, low house by the shore there, sheltered by some pine trees. It looked really elegant, a bit like millionaire dwellings you see on telly. I could see a diving board off one end, big picture windows, and lots of clean new woodwork. And no big cat, to my relief. “Nearly there,” I said, and down we went.
As soon as we were on the flatter ground near the house, a crowd of hens rushed at us and nearly gave me a heart attack, running and cackling. They got in among Mini’s feet, and she was forced to stand still for fear of treading on them. “I think they’re hungry, too,” she said.
Then a white goat came bounding up and nearly gave me another heart attack for a second, until I realized it was a goat. It was almost exactly the size the scornful cat had been.
“You want me to tread on this goat?” Mini asked dubiously.
I don’t go for goats. I hate their smell and their mad eyes. And they have horns. “No, no, no!” I said, backing away. “It’s only a goat.” At that, Mini’s trunk flipped out toward it, in an interested sort of way. The goat stared in what seemed to be horror and then galloped away yelling. “What did that?” I said.
“She’s never seen an elephant before,” Mini said. “Do find us something to eat!”