The Third Door

13 - The Barge

Invisible beneath the hood, Rye and Sonia slipped through the darkening city. The main roads were thronged with people and crowded with heavily loaded carts. There was a hum of excitement in the air. Sellers of food and drink were doing a roaring trade, and fiddlers, pipers and accordion players were making music on every corner.

The windows of the chieftain’s lodge were dark. The building looked deserted, but hundreds of people had gathered outside it all the same, many waving small flags striped in red and yellow.

‘You would think it was a festival instead of a war,’ Sonia whispered.

Rye nodded grimly. He was watching two daring children knocking on the door of the lodge. They had been playing this game for some time, but the door had remained firmly closed.

Plainly the scraps of gossip he had overheard were true. After the explosion at the museum, Farr was taking no risks. His lodge was an obvious target, so it had been locked and abandoned. Janna, Zak and Petronelle had been sent to a secret place of shelter. Guards, councillors and servants had gone with Farr or returned to their family homes.

It had been a relief to find out that Janna had recovered enough to be moved. But now she was out of Rye’s reach. So were Petronelle and Zak. There was no one else he could trust to believe in him, to help him reach Farr quickly and easily.

‘We will have to make our own way to Farr as best we can,’ he said to Sonia, as they turned down a side street to avoid the crowd. ‘How far away is Riverside? The barge stopped there, but my memory of that time is very hazy.’

Sonia stopped by a closed shop and with the tip of her finger drew in the dust filming the window.

‘Say this is the river,’ Sonia said, pointing to the wavy line she had drawn. ‘Here is the sea, where we are, at the beginning of the line, and here are Fell End and the Fell Zone at the end. Riverside is roughly halfway between the two—here.’ She pressed her finger to the spot marked ‘R’ in her sketch.

‘But why would Farr’s army mass there, such a long way upriver?’ Rye exclaimed.

‘Why not?’ Sonia shrugged. ‘We do not know where the Harbour is from here, Rye, and we have no idea what Farr’s plan of attack is, either. The famous pipeline passes Riverside—I saw it with my own eyes as I came here. It follows the river all the way to the sea like a great silver snake on stilts.’

Rye frowned in puzzlement. If the pipeline was to supply drinking water for troops, why did it run to the city? It did not make sense.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. The shadows were closing in again. His memories were still very patchy. The most frustrating gap of all was the blank space just before the beast attacked Zak at Fell End. Rye knew that for some reason those moments were important, but he simply could not recall them.

‘You will find Farr in Riverside, Rye, I am sure,’ he heard Sonia say lightly. ‘And Sholto and Dirk too, perhaps. You told me that the Fell End wounded were left there.’

Rye’s head throbbed. Sonia’s voice had been too casual. She wanted to find Dirk and Sholto far more urgently than she was admitting.

Sholto in particular, no doubt, Rye thought. But he said nothing, and in silence moved on with Sonia to the outskirts of the city and the place where the river met the sea.

Hours later, Rye was huddled in a sheltered corner of a loaded barge, weak as a baby goat and seething with frustration. His hopes of starting for Riverside without delay had come to nothing. By the time he and Sonia had reached the river docks they had both known that he, at least, could go no further without rest. The powers of the ring and the feather could not help him. He simply did not have the strength to run, fly or even walk. He did not have the strength to do anything but creep into this dim hiding place with Sonia and wait for the barge to carry them upriver.

Sonia was curled up beside him, breathing evenly. Once she had helped him into shelter she had quickly fallen asleep. Somewhere very near, a barge worker on night watch was softly playing a mouth organ. The plaintive tune drifted on the breeze, mingling with the sounds of creaking wood and lapping water.

By the light of the crystal, Rye had tried reading more of the Three Brothers book, but far from relaxing him, every word had made him more anxious, more desperate to be gone.

Determined to find proof that the disc in the gold casket was what he thought it to be, he had flipped through the book looking only for passages about the Fellan. He had marked those he had found by slipping shreds of straw from the barge’s deck between the pages. Now he restlessly opened the book at the first of these markers and read the lines again.

Since time began, the forests of Dorne have been home to beings steeped in magic. The Fellan, as they call themselves, can change their shapes at will, move from place to place in a breath, speak to one another in their minds, tame the savage beasts that share their realm, and perform many other wonders. They are beautiful to look upon, and live far beyond the normal span of human years. They do not trade or work with tools, for the forest provides them with all they need.

Many of my readers know these things, I daresay. I have repeated them here for the benefit of any who do not. If the history of the Three Brothers is to be understood, the strange nature of the Fellan must be understood also.

When, long ago, people from across the sea began settling on Dorne’s coast, the Fellan were not troubled. Fellan have no use for the coast. The sea is their enemy. The salt in the water weakens their magic, as metal does, and the fierce sun of the shore scorches their delicate skins. Besides, the Fellan of that time knew full well that though the newcomers worked with metal they were not evil beings, but merely wanderers seeking a home.

For some time the two peoples lived in harmony—and indeed marriages between Fellan and newcomers were not uncommon. The children of these unions loved the sea as well as the forest, and in their blood the drive of the human and the magic of the Fellan were combined.

It came to pass, however, as the years went by, that pioneer farmers began pushing inland, cutting trees to make open fields for crops and herds. If the Fellan resented what was happening no one knew it, for they withdrew into the depths of their shrinking forests, and from that time on they were rarely seen by human eyes …

Gripped by the same feeling of unease he had felt the first time he had scanned these lines, Rye snapped the book shut and tied it up in the red scarf again. He closed his eyes and ordered himself to sleep, but still sleep would not come. Thoughts were flying around his mind like frantic birds trapped in an empty house.

Chieftain Farr was certainly in Riverside—Rye and Sonia had learned that much by listening to the workers who were lifting great barrels from cart after cart and stacking them onto the decks of the barges tied up at the docks. Most of the army had already marched upriver, it seemed, though some of the last troops, leaving late in the day, had made the journey in barges that had been fitted with slay shields.

Those barges were long gone. The barge on which Rye and Sonia were hiding had no shields, and would not leave until the danger of running into a slay attack in the inland had passed.

The delay would not have seemed so bad if Rye had been able to learn anything more of Farr’s plans while he waited. But plainly none of the barge workers knew any more than he did.

None of them seemed to know anything about the pipeline, either, or at least no one mentioned it. It was clearly visible on the other side of the river, a great silver tube mounted on stone pylons that held it clear of the ground. Perhaps the dock workers had grown so used to it that they barely saw it any more.

The place where the pipe seemed to end—a humped shape rearing up on the shore—had been clearly visible too, despite the darkness, when Rye and Sonia boarded the barge. No doubt it was a huge tank, Rye thought. He wondered fretfully why Farr had not had it built further back, where it would not spoil the beauty of the shoreline. In Weld, such ugliness would never be allowed.

Then he smiled weakly at his own foolishness.

You are not in Weld now, Rye …

No, he thought. The Warden of Weld had actually forbidden the building of Tallus’s light columns on the grounds that the columns would clutter the city’s tidy streets! It was hard to imagine anyone here, even Councillor Manx, valuing tidiness above a test that might save countless lives. Farr certainly would not. Farr would stop at nothing to protect his people.

Slow footsteps sounded on the deck. The mouth organ stopped.

‘I’m thinking it’ll be safe to cast off now, Jacko,’ a rough voice said. ‘It’s half after midnight, and the danger area’ll be well clear before we get there. With this load on we won’t make any speed at all.’

‘You’re right there, Skip,’ another voice grumbled. ‘We’re terrible low in the water.’

Rye pressed the light crystal to the barrel in front of him. Through the misty window that appeared around his hand, he saw that the speakers were standing very close by. One was a wiry old man in a striped jersey, a mouth organ in his hand. The other was heavily built, with a closely shaven head and several gold earrings.

‘Have you looked in any of these here barrels, Skip?’ the old man asked. ‘Nothing in them but junk, that I can see. It’s beyond me why Farr wants them taken upriver.’

‘That’s up to him,’ his companion replied. ‘He knows what he’s doing, don’t you worry, and we’ll find out what’s in his head soon enough. He’s making his move the day after tomorrow, they say. Stand by, then, Jacko.’

‘Aye aye, Skip.’

The day after tomorrow, Rye thought in relief, settling back as the footsteps paced away. I can still get to him in time.

Slowly his tension drained away. The bell tree stick and the bundle containing the gold casket and the book were safe in his belt. The little bag of charms hung around his neck, beneath his shirt. Above him, the velvet sky was scattered with bright stars.

There was a hiss of steam and a soft chugging sound began. The barge began to move. And almost before it had left the dock, Rye was asleep.

He slept deeply, for once untroubled by dreams. And so it was that when at last he woke with a start, the loud hooting of the barge ringing in his ears, he opened his eyes on bright day.

He sat up, confused and blinking. He peered through a narrow gap between two barrels, over the side of the barge.

The riverbank was slipping by. There was the pipeline, snaking along beside the road. There were fields of brilliant yellow, and green fields where plump, placid beasts grazed. There were houses, halls, shops and paved streets all surrounding a tower that seemed to reach to the clouds. There were people, waving. And there was a broad, weathered dock, and a proud sign facing the river:

The barge had slowed to a crawl, but to Rye’s surprise and dismay it showed no sign of stopping. In moments it had laboured past the sign and the people who had been waving on the bank had begun turning away.

Frantically feeling in the brown bag for the red feather, Rye glanced round at Sonia. Plainly she, too, had only just woken. Despite her long sleep, she still looked very tired.

‘Sonia, we must get to shore—now!’ Rye whispered, gripping her arm and scrambling to his feet, pulling her with him. He made sure the hood was in place, held up the feather and thought of flying.

He knew at once that it was no good. His feet lifted only a little way from the deck before plumping down again. He gritted his teeth and tried again, but this time there was no result at all.

‘What is wrong?’ he hissed. ‘Why does it not work? I am rested!’

‘Perhaps … the metal in the barge,’ Sonia murmured.

‘Then we will have to jump.’

Sonia’s eyes widened. She watched silently as Rye stuffed the red feather back into the bag and pulled out the sea serpent scale.

‘If the metal on the barge is the problem, this will work once we are in the water,’ Rye told her. ‘We are not far from the bank.’

Sonia hesitated only a moment before giving a brief nod. Together they squeezed out of their hiding place and slipped along the loaded deck to a place where the side railing was clear.

Halfway over the railing, Rye’s stomach lurched. He had forgotten about the book! Water would destroy it! Frantically he began tearing at the knots that fastened the red bundle to his belt.

‘Ho!’ a startled voice yelled behind him. ‘Skip, look! Gordy, get over here! We’ve got a couple of stowaways! There, by the rail!’

‘They can see us!’ Sonia panted. ‘Oh, Rye—’

Feet began to pound towards them. There was a clang and a curse as someone stumbled, but a second pair of feet ran on.

The old man called Jacko appeared from behind a stack of barrels and made for them, his hands reaching out to grab them.

The bundle came free at last. Holding it high above his head, Rye tightened his grip on Sonia.

‘Now!’ he roared. And together they jumped with a second to spare, leaving Jacko leaning over the railing, bawling curses as he snatched at empty air.