CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER
7
Dawn had just begun to touch the sky when Peter began to feel a change in the bird’s flight. It had tucked its wings in closer to its body and was beginning, he felt instinctively, to descend. He reached behind him and touched Julia’s leg, shaking it just enough to rouse her. She sat up straight and yawned, removing a hand from her brother’s waist to rub her eyes.
“Are we—oh,” she said. “Still on the bird, are we?”
“Afraid so,” said Peter. “But something’s beginning to happen, I think. Look.” He pointed to a spot just below the horizon, and Julia could make out a flock of birds swarming above the waves. Gulls. “They wouldn’t come this far out to sea unless there were land nearby,” said Peter. A sudden inspiration striking him, Peter reached into his pocket and retrieved the compass he had been given by his father. He flicked open the top and squinted in the dim morning light. “North,” he said. “North by northeast. What’s north of Aedyn?”
“Khemia,” said Julia. “It must be Khemia.”
They watched silently as the sky began to brighten. Peter’s eyelids were heavy and might have begun to droop had they not seen something new on the horizon: a huge bank of clouds, tinted red by the dawn. As they drew closer they could see the jagged tip of a mountain jutting through the clouds like a knife.
The falcon banked to the left as they approached, beginning a steep descent that brought a new round of screaming from the direction of its talons. Peter held tight to its neck and Julia held tight to Peter as they fell from the sky. They seemed to be heading straight for a forest—straight into the trees. Julia squeezed her eyes shut and screamed straight into Peter’s ear, quite certain that they were about to crash. She felt the rushing of leaves and twigs around her and was shaken by a thump! as the falcon landed, and she and Peter tumbled off its back onto soft, cool sand. Louisa lay a few feet away in a clump of reeds—it looked as though she’d been dropped just before the falcon landed. She had fainted again. Seeing her stepsister collapsed in a heap on the ground, Julia breathed a sigh of relief. At least she wasn’t screaming … for now.
Peter had tumbled onto his stomach in the sand, and he raised himself to his feet to have a look around. The place seemed deserted enough: a natural harbor, close to the sea and surrounded by a grove of trees. They could conceal themselves quite easily here if the need arose. He stretched his arms above his head, then reached out a hand to help Julia to her feet.
“I suppose we ought to try to wake her,” said Peter grimly, nodding in Louisa’s direction.
“It’s been rotten for her,” Julia agreed, and picked her way through the reeds to the water’s edge. She peered carefully in both directions. There was no one in sight, and she cupped her hands together and bent to scoop up a handful of water. She trod carefully back the way she had come and dumped the water unceremoniously all over her stepsister’s face.
Louisa woke with a splutter and a gasp. Peter, seeing that she was likely to start screaming again, clapped a hand tight over her mouth. “Now look here,” he said, teeth clenched. “I’ll take my hand away if you promise to be quiet—very quiet. We don’t know exactly where we are and we don’t know who our friends or enemies are, so we need to stay hidden, and most important of all you are not to scream. Understand? You have to be very, very quiet.”
Louisa nodded beneath his grip, and Peter took his hand away. “Very quiet,” he said again, and Louisa pushed herself up and wiped a hand across her eyes. She’d been crying.
“I didn’t want to come here,” she said. “I never wanted to come to this beastly place. I only wanted to see where you were running to.”
“You were trying to get us in trouble,” Julia corrected, but Louisa ignored her and went on.
“And you brought me here, not a soul for miles, no one who knows how to get me home, and maybe enemies, and that horrid bird taking me all across an ocean in its claws—oh it’s awful, just awful!” And she began to cry again. They were not, it must be noted, quiet tears.
Peter heaved a world-weary sigh and looked over at the falcon, who had been waiting very patiently at the edge of the clearing. It had cocked its head and was watching Louisa in a curious manner. It opened its beak and gave another one of its shrill, screeching squawks.
“I wish it could talk,” Julia said. “I wonder what it might tell us about all of this.”
“Nothing!” sobbed Louisa. “It wouldn’t say a thing, because it’s a horrid, beastly bird and if Bertie were here he would shoot it!” Her voice was getting louder, and Julia thought she had probably forgotten the part about remaining silent. The falcon flapped its wings once, twice, cocking its head to the other side, and Louisa gave a soft whimper and scrambled away to the cover of the reeds. Peter sighed again and ran a hand through his wind-tousled hair. He had absolutely no idea what to do.
“I suppose we’ll have to scout out the land,” he told Julia. “We can find out if the ship has arrived with the prisoners, and what they’re doing with them.” Julia nodded, then hesitated as they both looked at Louisa’s weeping form.
It was quiet for a long moment.
“We’ll help her,” Peter said finally. “We can’t just stay here.” He took his father’s compass out of his pocket, flicked it open, studied it for a brief moment, and pointed to the right. “That way,” he said. He picked up the satchel of food—what remained of it — and Julia, deciding not to question Peter’s sense of direction, went over to the reeds to help Louisa to her feet.
“Come on,” she said to her stepsister. “It’s time for us to go.”
The going was hard—much harder than it had been back in Aedyn. There was no path to speak of, and all they had to go on was Peter’s compass. They found themselves crawling over huge boulders and ducking under fallen trees, and it wasn’t long before all three of them were covered from head to toe in mud and scratches and bites from the insects that swarmed around them. Louisa’s complaints had taken on a desperate, screeching tone that meant she was not far from tears. Julia, who had believed she hated nothing in the world so much as heights, was discovering that in fact she hated the buzzing whine of Khemia’s insects a great deal more, and did not spare a thought for her stepsister. And Peter stayed focused on the terrain, moving slowly but always to the east.
As they walked they began to smell something rotten in the air. It grew worse as they continued trudging over the rough terrain, and the children found that they were all holding their breath, taking gasping breaths of stagnant air just when their lungs were ready to burst.
“Oh, it’s horrid,” cried Louisa at last. “It smells like something rotten and dead.”
“It’s sulfur,” said Peter. “It must be coming from the mine. Here …” He stopped and took the satchel he’d been carrying off his shoulder, rummaging about in it for a moment before retrieving a bright green woolen scarf. He thrust it at Louisa. “Tie this around your face. It’ll be warm, but it’ll cut some of the smell.” She took it without a word and tied it in a clumsy knot at the back of her head. Julia noticed that she’d managed to tie a great deal of hair into it as well.
The smell grew even more dank and choking as they continued, and the wet heat hung around them like a blanket. Peter, Julia, and Louisa all privately thought that they had never in their lives been quite so miserable. And just as they were thinking it, the situation became a good deal worse.
A fallen tree trunk was lying across their path. There was only a narrow space between the tree and the ground, but the trunk must have been six feet across—too thick for any of them to easily climb over it. Peter was just about to drop down and crawl underneath when the earth opened up in front of him.
There was a sound like screaming as the ground broke away and steam poured out of the fissure. It smelled of something rotten that had been concealed in the earth far too long, and Julia thought—though she did not remember it until later—that she had heard words in the screaming.
Peter had, not for the first time, gone absolutely white with terror. A few more feet, a bit quicker under that fallen tree trunk, and the fissure would have opened right under his feet. He closed his eyes and tried to steady himself, forcing down the wave of nausea that was rising in his stomach. He cleared his throat and stared straight ahead, not wanting to look back at the girls and let them see how frightened he was. He could hear Julia and Louisa’s gasping breaths behind him, and he inhaled deeply to settle himself.
“We’ll go around that way,” Peter said, pretending to look at the compass. He started forward and heard the girls’ quiet footsteps behind him. He wanted to run—wanted to get wherever it was they were going before the earth opened up again—but Julia and Louisa might not be able to keep up, and anyway who was to say that the ground was any safer closer to the volcano?
But there were no more earthquakes or fissures, and after a time Peter’s face returned to its normal color. They continued east, and after a few miles they found themselves in a clearing at the top of a hill. They looked out over the forest and saw, under a red sky, a great plain laid out before them. And in the center of the plain was the volcano.
It was massive—far greater than it had appeared when they had first seen it from the falcon’s back. At its base there was a huge gash in the earth, and even from this distance the children could see hundreds of people swarming around it, all of them bent under heavy loads and the whips of their masters. The wave of nausea returned to Peter’s stomach, and he bent over and was violently sick into a patch of bushes.