CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER
5
Peter and Julia didn’t need to look at each other. They were both running, running as fast their legs could carry them, running with all their strength toward the beach and toward the sound of that scream.
Louisa fell behind almost at once. She had never been an athlete and didn’t have Julia and Peter’s endurance, besides which she was still chewing and hampered with the satchel of food. When she finally caught up, red-faced and breathless, the satchel slapping against her side, Peter and Julia were crouched behind a grouping of bushes, whispering and pointing at something she couldn’t see.
“What is it?” Louisa asked. She threw down the satchel and peered over the bushes at the crest of the ridge. They were standing at the top of a dune that went down to a sparkling sea, and there was a ship on the sea … but that was all she saw before Peter pulled her down roughly into the long grass.
“Stay down!” he hissed. “We can’t be seen—don’t you understand that?”
“But maybe someone down there will know how to get …”
“Quiet!”
Louisa closed her mouth, sat down roughly on the ground, and began to cry. Peter gave her a withering look, resisting the strong urge to kick her, and went back to spying on the beach.
“Just there—no, there,” said Julia, pointing. “See? The woman who screamed—she must be with them.” Peter nodded. A longboat had just pushed off from the beach, and in it they could just make out a few bedraggled figures being rowed out to sea by six uniformed guards. “But where are they going?”
“Look,” said Peter. Julia cast her eyes over the horizon and saw a schooner anchored out in the deep water. It was riding high in the water, its sails billowing out from three enormous masts. The longboat nearest shore was one of a dozen that were rowing steadily toward it, all of them full of the same guards and their bedraggled prisoners.
“What will we do?”
“Do? We’ll go home—home to Mummy and … and Bertie!” Louisa was blubbering helplessly on the tall grasses behind the bushes.
Peter raised an eyebrow at his sister. “We should have left her at the castle,” he muttered.
Julia chose to ignore him. “Those guards, taking all the people … why are they taking the people?”
“I don’t know,” Peter replied. “But I’ll bet that’s why we were brought here.”
Julia nodded, her eyes still fixed on the schooner. “But how do we find out where they’re going? Unless they happened to leave a boat behind we can’t very well follow.”
Peter’s eyes scanned the shoreline. “There are some reeds down there. We’ll cut them up and swim, breathing through the tubes. It’ll be like snorkeling!”
“Very clever, Peter. And if we should get tired, or if we can’t keep up with the ship?”
“Ah. I see the difficulty.” The longboats had almost all reached the schooner now, and Peter and Julia watched from a distance as the prisoners were boarded onto the ship. People they had known, perhaps, or the children of those they had known. It was a long, slow process—the prisoners did not seem particularly eager to board the schooner—and only one of them at a time could climb up the flimsy rope ladder. But finally it was done, and one by one the longboats were hoisted back onto the schooner.
“We should go down to the beach,” said Peter. “See if they left … anything.” Julia nodded and rose. Louisa was still blubbering.
“Louisa, we don’t have time for this,” Julia said sternly. “Some friends of ours are in trouble, and we need to help them, and if you stop crying you can help them too.” Louisa looked out from between the fingers she’d been sobbing into.
“All right,” she said.
Perhaps you have once had some occasion to run down a dune—during a family holiday at the beach, perhaps. If so, you will understand the exquisite pleasure that comes from the sensation of tripping and falling as you run, the hot sand squeezing between your toes as you fight to stay upright. You know the ecstasy of tumbling over and over, your feet never quite catching up to each other, until you collapse at the bottom.
Peter, Julia, and Louisa did not have such an experience as they descended the dune. They were trying to be careful, and they were trying to be quiet, and most of all Julia and Peter were trying to keep Louisa from hurting herself and starting to cry again. It was, Peter muttered to himself, just like having a child hanging about.
There was nothing to be seen on the beach. No prisoners, no guards, no longboats, and nothing that would give them a clue as to where the invaders had come from and where they were taking their prisoners. A few footprints on the beach, and that was all. Peter kicked his right foot savagely and a spray of sand burst up into the air. A dead end.
“I wish Gaius were here,” Julia said, looking out at the schooner. It had hoisted its anchor and was turning toward the horizon, its billowing sails filling with wind. “Should we go to the garden, do you think?”
“What garden?” asked Louisa. She looked positively overwhelmed, and Julia began to feel a bit sorry for her. It was worse for Louisa, Julia thought. She didn’t know anything about this place, and here she was thrust into the middle of everything.
“The King’s Garden,” Julia said. “It’s a place sacred to the Lord of Hosts, and if we go there we might find some clue about all of this.”
“Lord of Hosts?” Louisa asked, bewildered.
“He’s—well, he’s the one in charge around here,” Julia explained. “We can’t see him, but he’s watching over everything, and I think he must have been the one who called us.”
“Come on,” said Peter. “Let’s go the garden. Things usually tend to happen there.”
The garden wasn’t far from the beach, and the path through the woods had been cleared since last they’d walked it. The terrain was level and there was a sweet breeze whistling through the leaves, and had it not been for Louisa the walk might have been pleasant indeed. For they couldn’t have been ten minutes into the journey when she started to complain.
The sun was too hot, the ground was too hard, the birds were too loud, the bag was too heavy. At this last Peter valiantly took the satchel of food, finding it noticeably lighter than it had been when first packed. But a moment later Louisa decided that she’d been walking too long. She sat down against a tree and began to cry.
“I think we should leave her here,” Peter told Julia unsympathetically. “We’ll never make it to the garden at this rate, and she’ll be safe until we can come back for her.”
Julia was, truth be told, inclined to agree, but she shook her head. “You know we can’t just abandon her. And besides, we’ll all be safest in the garden. It’s not far.” She went to her stepsister and put out a hand to help her up. “It’s not far, Louisa,” she said again.
And indeed it wasn’t long before they came to the garden. The familiar silver glow welcomed them in, but once inside its borders Peter and Julia found that the garden was, as it had been the first time they’d seen it, badly overgrown. Vines and weeds had grown wild and untended, strangling the buds of flowers that had once bloomed there and choking off the life of the garden in their thorns. The great fountain in the center of the garden had run dry, the stone basin encrusted in mosses and lichens. Peter and Julia felt that they had stumbled upon an ancient ruin, long neglected, its purpose all but forgotten.
“This is it?” said Louisa. “This is your precious garden?”
Julia was too upset to answer. Peter shuffled his feet on the ground, kicking aside a mess of vines. “It didn’t look like this when we left,” he said. “It’s been left to rot. I can’t think …”
And just at that moment something rather extraordinary happened.
There was a sound above them in the sky—the sound of the beating of massive wings. Peter, Julia, and Louisa looked up to see a dark blur which quickly took on the shape of a bird—a falcon, Peter said under his breath. It pulled its wings tight into its body and plummeted toward them, landing with a dull thud near the stone throne at the other end of the garden.
All three of the children had gone absolutely white with terror as the bird came down, for it was like no falcon they had ever seen. It was absolutely enormous—the size of the dragons in fairy stories, Julia thought with a start. Each of its golden eyes were the size of the children’s entire heads, and one snap of that enormous beak could have broken their backs.
“Back up,” said Peter slowly, never breaking his gaze with the falcon’s eye. “Slowly. Into the trees.” Evidently even Louisa knew that this was a time to be silent, for she obeyed without the usual protesting and weeping.
The bird saw that they were moving and twitched its head to the side. It beat its wings once, and the children could feel the rush of air on their faces.
“Do we run?” asked Julia in a low breath, and Peter was about to answer when the falcon lifted its head, opened its beak, and let out a terrible screech. And Peter and Julia would have run—would have run until the breath left their bodies—had Louisa not chosen precisely that moment to faint dead away.