Romanov said, “Quiet!” all sharp and tense, and after that none of us dared make a sound.
It was quite difficult not to exclaim because we passed through archways with shell pink drapes where we all had to duck, and a hall where ivory fingers were pointing down from the vault, each one glittering with water, and along lacy terraces, and arcades of red pillars, where it was very hard not to call out at the strangeness. Once the light swung across a high wall of jumbled red and black formations that shaped themselves into such a hideous glaring face that the Izzys were not the only ones who half screamed.
Luckily the river was noisy by then. Wherever we came round a corner and met it again, it was tumbling in higher waterfalls. Probably it covered the noises we made at the hideous face and again when a wall seemed to put out a huge clutching hand. By then we were climbing steadily. The poor elephant was going slowly. I could hear her puffing amid the noisy water, and I could feel Romanov encouraging her.
At last he said, “This will do, Mini. It’s only twenty feet up from here.”
The elephant turned head-on to the nearest yellowish rock wall, and we assumed she was going to stop. Instead she went on walking. My hands clapped themselves over my mouth. Someone else squeaked. We were all sure we were going to crash into the rock. But the wall just didn’t seem to be there, even though we could see it, and the elephant simply went on trudging upward through it. There was rock right up against my face. I could see it and smell it, even taste it, but I couldn’t feel a thing. And after an eternal twenty feet or so we came up into daylight inside a giant dome.
It was daylight as you see it through sunglasses. I suppose the dome was tinted. But nearly all of us looked up nervously, expecting rain or thunder, even before we stared about and found ourselves in a thicket of fruit trees. They were all yellowy. Even allowing for that lurid light, I guessed those trees had not been tended for fifty years. I had a branch of misshapen figs almost in my lap and little undernourished oranges bobbed over my head. Grundo calmly picked figs. Nick reached up for an orange. Then they both threw them disgustedly away. I don’t think any of the fruit was eatable.
Romanov pointed. “Go that way. No, don’t worry about the vegetation. Go straight there.”
The elephant turned and walked the way he pointed. She made an awful mess. She stepped on trees. Trees got shoved out of the way, causing fruit to shower off them. Branches snapped and tree trunks crashed, and our knees were scraped by twigs as she marched on through. Bark and leaves and fruit rained over us. I looked behind and saw a squashed, cloven path of ruined trees and trodden fruit where we had been. The elephant’s funny little tail was quivering and jerking with excitement. I think she was enjoying this. When I looked to the front again, we were plowing through apple trees, and the elephant’s trunk was going out and back, out and back again, snatching apples and cramming them into her mouth—or it was until Romanov noticed.
“Cut that out, Mini!” he said, and hit her quite hard on her head.
She flapped her ears crossly and forged on. Shortly she crunched across a thicket of raspberry canes and came out into an overgrown field of melons. The melons were small and self-seeded, but all the same, you cannot imagine the effect an elephant has on a field of melons. There is the most incredible squelching and bursting. Seeds fly, and the smell of ruined melon comes up in waves. I was leaning over, so fascinated by the carnage, that I did not notice anything else until Toby said quietly, “I think we’re here.”
There was a space ahead that was fenced off with white plastic walls. Anyway, it was something half transparent made into walls that came up to the elephant’s shoulder. I thought I could see people beyond, though the light was queerer there, sort of filmy and foggy.
Romanov said, “Ten paces on, then stop and let us down.”
The elephant obeyed him literally. This meant that she walked straight through the wall, and it went pop, pop, CLAP as it tore in two and then clatter as she trod on some of it. But none of the people just beyond seemed to notice. They were simply standing there, in a grassy space, covered in the stuff that was making the light so queer. It was coming down from the roof, this stuff, in cascades and swaths of what looked to be white cotton-wool cobwebs. Everyone I could see was draped in it. They were all alive, though. That was what made it such a horrible thing to see. Every so often some of them would shift from one foot to the other or move their heads as if they were trying to get rid of a crick in the neck—but slowly, slowly, like people moving in treacle. The only good thing about it was that most of them didn’t seem quite conscious. The pink blurs of faces that I could see—though they were very hard to see through the white cobwebbing—seemed to be at least half asleep.
Mam and Dad are in there somewhere! I thought. I could hardly wait for the elephant to bend one of her front legs up so that Romanov could slither onto it and jump to the ground. And when he was down, he stood for a long, long moment, staring at the draped, white, slowly fidgeting crowd, until I nearly screamed at him to help us down to the grass, too.
“This is a very strange spell,” he said, turning to look up at us, all perched on our seat. “I’m going to need all the help you can give me to solve this one. Do any of you have any ideas?”
I was shaking my head along with the others, no, when I realized I was down on the ground. The elephant bulked above us, but almost at once she retreated to what was left of the fence and cowered there—if an elephant can cower. Nick went over and patted her trunk. “I know,” he said. “None of the rest of us likes it either.” Then he said, “Roddy!” and pointed.
It was the Izzys, naturally. They had gone right up to the edge of the silent, film-draped crowd. One of them was making mad balletic movements toward the nearest shrouded person, while the other one was dramatically on her knees with her hands clasped. “Speak to me!” she was saying. “I, the Isadora of Isadora, implore and command you! Speak!”
I got to her just as she tried to take hold of the swath of veiling that anchored the person to the grass. From this close, it looked sticky, like slightly melted spun sugar. I dragged both of them clear of it. “Don’t touch it, you little stupids!” I said. “It would probably get you, too!”
“But I wanted to break the spell!” Isadora protested.
Ilsabil said tragically, “How could you do this to us! That’s Heppy in there!”
It was Heppy, now that I looked closely. She was shorter and dumpier than any of the shrouded shapes around her. By peering, I could just pick out the muted glow of her orange hair through the whiteness. I could see her eyes most clearly of all. They seemed to track slowly across me as I leaned toward her, but I had no idea if she knew me or not. For a moment I felt absolute despair. Heppy was a witch after all. The people standing in there with her were all magic users. But if Heppy couldn’t break this spell, if none of them could, what chance was there of anyone’s ever breaking it?
Something caught the light inside the white film. I looked and saw Heppy’s hand moving, slowly, slowly, and the rings on her fingers glinting with the movement. I stared as Heppy’s hand rose and moved back and forth, in what was clearly a slow-motion wave or even a slow, slow blessing—a personal message to me to show me she knew me and was willing us well in our rescue attempt. My despair vanished, and I could have shouted for joy. My grandmother was evidently a very powerful witch indeed, and I had her blessing. Maybe after all this, we did like one another, just a little.
I smiled at her, though I am not sure she smiled back, as I seized hold of the Izzys and towed them over to Grundo and Toby. “Take hold of an arm each,” I told the boys, “and don’t let either of them go, even for an instant.” It did me good to give a few orders again. I felt brisk and confident.
The boys glowered at me. Toby shrugged and did what I said. Grundo reluctantly took hold of Ilsabil’s arm and said, “It would be far easier to get them draped in this white spell, too.”
“You dare!” I said.
Romanov was walking slowly beside the draped crowd with Nick. Both of them kept bending and staring at the white stuff and looking mystified. Toby and Grundo went after them, each dragging a twin. I followed. I rather carefully didn’t look at any more of the imprisoned people. More than half of them would be Court wizards whom I knew. Two of them must be my parents. I didn’t want to see them like that, at least until there was some hope of freeing them.
Goose Grass or Cleavers, said the knowledge in my head, along with the image of the long, skinny plant, covered in sticky whiskers and little green knobs. Binding spells. This seemed hopeful. I walked behind the others in a sort of dream, running through binding spells. There were hundreds, that was the problem. They were divided into spoken and ritual, and before I had run halfway through the spoken spells, I realized there were at least double the number I’d first thought, because you could reinforce any spoken spell by performing one or more rituals—and the other way round.
The very first ritual binding I came across was that old favorite knots and crosses. I discovered that you could make a net silently, or draw the pattern for tic-tac-toe, and bind most things to your will. If you made the net pattern with goose grass—nice sticky stuff—it was a truly strong binding for a short while, but if you said words as you made the pattern, the binding would last until the goose grass rotted. And so on. You could make hundreds of other patterns—cobweb, cat’s cradle, tatting, crochet, knitting—and use words, or you could perform other actions and say words. You could dance … Oh, it was hopeless!
Here we walked round a sort of bulge in the veiling and
came across a painfully thin man sitting in a chair on his own. The chair was suffused in piles of the white stuff, but it only came up to the man’s waist. His upper half was free, and he was leaning wretchedly against a low wall of the same sort of plastic that the elephant had walked through. Beyond the wall there seemed to be some kind of living quarters. We could see armchairs and a table, and from somewhere beyond those came a smell of cooking. The man seemed to have been put where he could smell the food but not get to it.