The Sword of Feimhin (8 page)

He felt the hand of the dwarf mage around his shoulders, and heard the belch that informed him Qwenqwo was seeking recourse in the bottle. But why should he not? When called on he fought without fear or self pity. There was no one Alan would have preferred by his side in times of danger.

Alan said, ‘We've lost another day.'

‘The king plays for time. He must be seen to be doing the right thing, by his son and the queen – by his people.'

‘Do you have any idea what Zelnesakkk is waiting for?'

Qwenqwo tamped a refill of tobacco into his pipe, but he paused before lighting it, deep in thought. ‘Knowing the Gargs, it will have to be a force of nature. A portent, perhaps?'

Alan rubbed so hard at his brow it felt bruised. He looked out at that same ocean the queen had skimmed, reflecting on her ritual, and on Iyezzz's insistence that he should attend. The Garg prince had expected something to happen. And, so far as Alan could see, something had happened: the flying fish had risen out of the sea to fly in communion with the queen. Iyezzz had been excited at the time, but it hadn't been enough to persuade the King.

Was there some additional reason why Iyezzz had been so insistent on Alan accompanying him to witness the queen?

The Garg prince's behaviour had been tense, as if he was hinting at something he had been forbidden to talk to Alan about. Some game the devious Mahteman was playing? Something so big in the minds of these superstitious beings that Zelnesakkk held back from any alliance of their peoples.

Mo and Turkeya were just as intrigued by Iyezzz's behaviour as Alan. Iyezz had taken the two of them out of the Garg city, and now they peered out over the golden waves of desert that stretched northwards, as far as the distant slopes of the Gargs' Flamestruck Mountains. The Garg prince had been very secretive when he had taken them out of sight of his own people and then ferried them up here, one by one, to discover this nondescript plateau high in the hills that encircled the Thousand Islands. Then, with the promise that he would shortly return, he had left them alone in the rarefied air. His yellow eyes had been so liquidly bright they had practically glowed, and his skin had shone in a way Mo had come to recognise as excitement.

Turkeya turned his downy face to the sky, where the dark silhouette of the Prince was clearly visible, hovering several-hundred feet above them. In Turkeya's frown, as in his tall stature, Mo glimpsed his distant bear-like origins.
He muttered, ‘I have a bad feeling about this, Mo. Look at him – he's up there watching us.'

Mo wasn't too worried. She guessed there were thermals up there that would be pleasant to float on. The plateau was one of hundreds amid the conical peaks that were peppered with caves.

‘I think he's more likely to be looking out for us.'

‘You're too trusting by half.'

Mo had to admit that Iyezzz
was
playing some game. Turkeya had never trusted their Garg companion, in spite of the fact that he had very likely saved their lives on the perilous journey to the Tower of Bones. ‘How,' he'd demanded on a number of occasions, ‘could anyone trust a creature with eyes like a snake's?'

‘I don't know why he brought us here any more than you do – but I think that whatever it is, it must be purposeful.'

‘Huh!'

Turkeya performed a quick sweep of their surroundings with his eyes. There were thorny bushes bearing clusters of scarlet berries and the shaman plucked a handful, sniffed at them, then tested one of them between his teeth. ‘Mmmm – sweet.'

Immediately he jerked and squealed.

‘What is it?'

‘Something bit me on the bum!'

Mo couldn't help but giggle.

‘It's not funny.'

‘No,' she grinned. ‘But the look on your face!'

‘Huh!' He dropped the berries into the dry grey dust, his eyes darting here and there, searching for the teeth that had nipped at his bottom.

Mo narrowed her eyes, peering closely at the arched entrance to a nearby cave. Even though Mo trusted Iyezzz far more than her companion did, she still fingered the Torus that dangled on a leather thong around her neck, her nervous fingers also finding the bog oak figurine suspended on the same thong, a strange shape carved by nature that resembled a female figure with three faces. It was one of her most precious possessions, a gift back on Earth from Alan's druidic grandfather, Padraig.

‘This place gives me the creeps,' Turkeya grumbled. ‘What's the great secret? What could be so important we have to hide the fact we're coming here, not just from Alan, and the Kyra, but even from the other Gargs?'

Mo shrugged, having no idea.

But just as Turkeya was about to add to his grumbling, Iyezzz returned, descending through the air with a noisy fluttering of his wings.

‘I think it is safe – you can now appear.'

Who was Iyezzz addressing? Mo and Turkeya looked around the empty plateau. ‘I've had enough of these games,' Turkeya exclaimed. ‘Either he tells us what's going on or I shall insist on returning to the shore.'

‘Certainly I will explain.' Iyezzz's skin flickered through shades of cooling colours, greens and blues and golden, as
if to placate the young Olhyiu. ‘The Mage Lord, Alan, has pressed me, again and again, as to why the Eyrie people should keep their own counsel on the impending war against the Tyrant.'

Mo looked up at him, confirming the impression of high excitement in the red-veined yellow eyes. ‘Is this why you brought us here – to explain the reason for your father's cautiousness?'

‘Yeshhh! For you – for the sake of our friendship and alliance – once more do I accept the risk of my father's ire.
Kwatekkk!
I break taboos.'

Mo recognised the word, kwatekkk – it was the Garg word for forbidden. She murmured, ‘What is it, Iyezzz?'

‘These are times of great change. The rules that once served us must be broken. I will introduce you to one whose presence here is our greatest treasure – a secret that must be protected at any costs.'

Turkeya rolled his eyes. ‘What secret? What's so special about this place?' Turkeya was increasingly apprehensive, staring at the landscape of conical-shaped hillocks of rock, with their hundreds of caves. He gestured at the caves, ‘They might be teeming with watchful eyes.'

Iyezzz sighed, in the sweeping way that only a Garg could. ‘Even the most unsophisticated shaman might know of a sage known as Magtokk.'

Turkeya stared at the Garg. ‘Legends. Tales of magic and mischief to amuse children around the winter's hearth.'

‘Magic and mischief?' Mo grinned.

‘A real being – as you are about to discover – but one so loathed by the Tyrant, your sworn enemy, that he has been persecuted and hunted through ages past.'

‘Oh – you're claiming he's here?'

‘Ach – my pupil, and most protective ward, has no need to explain. It was I who asked for this meeting.'

As one, Mo and Turkeya spun round to discover the source of the voice. There was the strangest impression, as if they were gazing at nothing more than a cloud of smoke. Mo continued to examine it as a presence solidified out of the empty air in front of them. All she could make out, at first, was an enormous bundle of shaggy brown-orange hair perched on a boulder within feet of them. But, gradually, Mo found herself gazing at the strangest creature: an animal that resembled an enormous male orang-utan. Mo had only ever seen an orang-utan up close in London zoo, but this creature was much larger, and far shaggier, than those she recalled. His eyes, which were chocolate-coloured, deep set and surrounded by wrinkles, were partially clouded with age and peered out of a huge face of matte black skin, massively widened at the cheeks with flaps that arched from his mouth to the top of his head and a drooping moustache that fed around the mouth to become one with a luxurious reddish beard. His thick tangles of hair fell in waves from his shoulders and arms to shower over the ground at his feet. He was the shaggiest, most wonderful, creature Mo had ever seen.

‘Who – or what – in heaven's name are you?' Turkeya said.

‘Ach,' she heard a great bowling whisper of a voice, as if it issuing from the depths of an empty barrel, ‘a poor miserable excuse for a magician. Magtokk is my name, known to my friends as Magtokk the Mischievous, given my fondness of trivial and even wanton delights.'

Mo pealed with laughter. There was such a mischievous twinkle in those chocolate-brown eyes she just wanted to throw her arms around his neck and hug the improbable monster.

‘You … you're an orang-utan!'

‘A seemly creature I lifted from your mind.'

Mo simply blinked.

How had he arrived so close to them without either of them noticing? A hairy hand on the end of an enormously long arm beckoned Mo closer.

‘Mo Grimstone – I think it was fated that we meet.'

Turkeya placed a cautious arm on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. Magtokk the Mischievous had an immense physical presence she just couldn't resist. Soft fingers enveloped her hand, as if their owner were intent on consuming her whole. His eyes widened as they fell on the Torus dangling on its thong. He lifted his eyes to meet her own. Mo enjoyed being the focus of his all-consuming curiosity.

Iyezzz bowed his entire upper body, his skin flickering through waves of colour like rainbows. ‘My friends, Mo and Turkeya, allow me to introduce my most revered and respected tutor who, despite his fondness for self-deprecation, is known to the Eyrie people as Magtokk the Wise.'

Mo copied the Garg prince in bowing, not knowing how else she should greet the elderly mage.

‘Magtokk the Wise – if that is how I should address you?'

‘Magtokk the big head, according to some. But I am fonder of Magtokk the Mischievous.'

Mo was recalling the creature that had nipped Turkeya's bottom. ‘It was you – you bit him?'

Even Turkeya couldn't hide the fact that the slow grin that was making its way over the huge face, with its sea of grey leathery wrinkles, was infectious. ‘I could not have the bear cub gobbling my supper.'

‘But you were invisible!'

‘All knowledge is invisible until one's eyes are opened to it.'

Mo paused to consider what he was saying, or perhaps hinting at. ‘Iyezzz said that you wanted to meet us?'

The prince spoke. ‘Magtokk's people, like our own, were persecuted – not by the Great Witch, but by the Tyrant himself. He is rare indeed – a fugitive who has escaped the clutches of the great enemy for millennia. His presence here puts us all at risk. This is what my father, the King, has been at pains to conceal from you.'

‘What do you mean, Iyezzz?'

‘So great is the Tyrant's loathing of Magtokk that, were his presence to be discovered, he would destroy us all.'

‘But why, then, have you risked this secret by bringing us here?'

‘I will admit that I have talked about you at length with
my tutor – talked about all of you, including Greeneyes. Magtokk was curious to meet you.'

Turkeya was visibly tensing. Mo's hand reached out to touch his shoulder, to reassure him as Magtokk spoke.

‘I am most obliged to my young ward. The prince has spoken eloquently of you. But now you are here, we have much to discuss.'

‘Magtokk, will you help us to destroy the Tyrant?'

‘Come, Mo Grimstone – and you too, Turkeya, son of Siam! Come join me in my hall of splendour – what you imagine to be a cave.'

Mo must have blinked, and in the act of closing her eyes, even for the briefest moment, Magtokk had disappeared from his perch on the rock and was nowhere to be seen.

*

‘Since the bear-cub has taken such a liking to my berries, perhaps he would like to indulge himself, this time with my permission?'

Turkeya didn't look remotely interested in food. Mo saw how he was twirling on his heels, his eyes widening at the strangest, most magical, chamber he had ever witnessed. Its shape – if it had a shape at all – was like viewing the carapace of the strangest, most exotic insect from the inside. The light in the atrium fell to a modest glow that pervaded the walls and roof and there were shadowy niches that contained sculptural objects – though they could also have been natural oddities, chosen for their shapes.

‘Observe,' Magtokk declared.

Mo's eyes held the image of Magtokk for a brief moment, before he disappeared to be replaced by a shimmering blur of movement. And then he reappeared, or, rather, dozens of him reappeared. She heard the magician chuckle, a deep throaty laugh that filled the entire atrium.

‘So you see how easily I hide. Such disguises do I affect while living always on the go. Yet I dream. Ach, how I have dreamed of liberty over the ages I have lived! I don't know if I am the only survivor of my people. I have prayed that there may be others living in secret like me, waiting and hoping for the day when a new force might come along, one capable of challenging the Tyrant's vainglorious rule. And now here you are, Mo Grimstone, one of four friends who have journeyed far – from another world, no less – accompanied by Turkeya, shaman of the stout-hearted Children of the Sea. Already you have destroyed the Tyrant's most dangerous ally, the Great Witch Olc, in her Tower of Bones.'

Mo couldn't believe what she was hearing. ‘You've been waiting all this time – for us to come here?'

‘Indeed.'

Magtokk was himself again, a robust shaggy figure with a great rounded dome of a head atop burly sloping shoulders. He leapt into the air, landing atop a projection, where he hung upside down, holding on with his feet, his fur dangling at all sorts of improbable angles. He didn't seem to notice, or perhaps care, how ridiculous he looked.

‘This war into which you are heading will be bitter and dangerous.'

‘I think that Alan understands the danger. We all do. That's why we need every bit of help we can find.'

Turkeya was staring at Mo, as if he couldn't believe that she was trusting the creature. The organutan leaped again, discovering another equally precarious perch, this time holding on with one hand.

‘On that we are agreed.'

‘So, will you help us, Magtokk?'

He was more interested in traversing a section of wall, swinging from one precarious perch to another, all the while humming a tune. ‘Forgive my need for exercise. It really does help me to think. I worry, you see, that my help might prove more of a hindrance – even a potential danger to your brave purpose.'

‘Oh, Magtokk, please stop this capering. You're making me feel so dizzy I can't begin to think.'

‘Surely it is you, young lady, whose very presence is bedazzling me.'

Turkeya was looking sideways at Mo, baffled by the behaviour of Magtokk the Mischievous.

Mo pressed him, ‘Why does the Tyrant hate you so much?'

‘That is a very long story. Long …' Magtokk leaped clean across the atrium from one wall to another. ‘Long, long …' He leaped again, this time performing a somersault before he came to rest, patting his drapery of fur back into a comfortable blanket around his shoulders, and taking a seat on a stone immediately opposite Mo. He brought his huge face
up close to hers, exposing two scary horseshoes of teeth in a yawn. ‘So long,' he concluded, ‘that it will have to keep for another time – a time perhaps when we are not so hard-pressed.'