So then hack-hack, curse-curse, moan-whinge-whine.
Yazkool was the worst.
‘I didn’t know this would be so primitive!’
Or was Hrald worst? ‘I could have been at home, you know, in my tower, civilized. Playing the mandolin.’
(The idea that Hrald plays the mandolin is incredibly infuriating. I can just see him, in that stone City of Law and miseries, smilingly plinking away.)
This part of the journey took, not years, but a whole century.
Perhaps only a month.
Sometimes we saw more big cat-like animals, which made an impact on the deer (so they were even more difficult) and on Yazkool, who seemed to want to kill them, not to protect us, or to eat, but just for their spectacular skins.
Then, once or twice through those choked gaps in the trees, there were ruins of buildings.
At first I thought they were only pieces of other overgrown rock-hills. But some had carved roofs and columns. And once there was a huge stone statue of a robed woman, about twenty feet high – I’m not exaggerating or guessing, Zand told us all its height, showing off again, as if he had carved it. But it was older than Zand. Older than even Ironel had said she was, which was one hundred and seventy. That statue was hundreds, thousands of years old.
But I wasn’t in the mood for rare plants, animals, and educational ancient ruins. Or for any of this guided tour which had been forced on me.
The worst part is that it’s still going on, in a way, because it’s still right there now, jungle, stones, beasts, right outside this high window.
For anyway, at long last, my captors brought me here.
HERE
By the morning we arrived, I’d given up the notion of ever arriving anywhere. It was very silly, but I just thought we’d go rambling on and on until everyone died of boredom or anxiety or both.
Then we were bumbling along the road, which was more overgrown than ever. The deer were frisky and Hrald was grumbling. Hack-hack went the knives. Then a greenish glow came through the tunnel over the road, the last creepers gave way and last bamboo collapsed.
The world yawned wide.
After all the closed-inness, this abyss of space and sunlight was almost unbearable.
Colossal openness. Above, the shell of a white-blue sky, ringing with sun.
Everything hazed in sun, and spray – although at first I didn’t see why. There was too much to see.
‘Behold!’ announced Zand, in his own language.
He’d invented and built this too, of course.
Out of the jungles rose and rose, soaring upwards, a cliff of yellowish stone, bulging, pocked and cracked, and clambered by huge trees that looked small as grass blades.
It did seem the widest tallest thing I’d ever looked at. Higher and mightier than any city. And much more magnificent.
There was a rushing roar, which I’d heard faintly for so long, getting ever louder, but by tiny degrees, so I’d never really heard it, or understood I had.
It was a waterfall.
The House had had them. A fountain made to tip from a height, cascading over and down. The best one was above Hyacinth Lawn. It was about two storeys high.
This waterfall, here, began way up on the towering cliff. It burst out of the rocks, which were lost in a blue fog. Then it fell, tons of liquid, straight and solid as a pillar, yet it smoked and steamed from bounced-back water – and the spray, which filled the ravines and valleys below as if something was on fire.
Rainbows hung across the gulf of air, bridges we couldn’t cross.
Everyone had gone quiet. Even Y and H were impressed. It turned out they hadn’t seen the cliff before, or the waterfall.
Hrald didn’t even give me one of his guided-tour remarks.
I expect anyone else would have been thrilled, despite themselves, at seeing this amazing sight.
I felt as if the waterfall had crashed over me, crushing me. It was the last straw somehow. To see something like this, alone, and with them.
The place here is tucked in under the overhang, below the road, where the land goes jaggedly down towards the ravines at the bottom of the cliff.
It was quite difficult, descending all those overgrown terraces. (They left the carriage and deer in a sort of shelter with the slaves, at the top.) Everything was slippery from blown spray.
Dragonflies drizzled through the spray-rain.
Then, we got here.
The building is built of the yellow stone, like the cliff, and again to start with I thought it was a natural rock, then I saw windows with glass, glinting.
It’s just a low, square house, like something you’d find in Peshamba, maybe, but not so pretty.
In the courtyard H and Y started to act very picky and Now we must do this the right way.
No one seemed to be there, and then this woman came along the veranda above the steps. She looked like a servant, but she didn’t bow or anything, just came up to us and stood there. I thought perhaps she wasn’t used to visitors, out here, and hoped H and Y wouldn’t get nasty with her.
‘Is it one of those things?’ asked Yazkool.
‘Looks like it,’ said Hrald.
Zand spoke in his language. Something about, ‘Are the rooms ready for her?’
The servant nodded.
Her hair was odd. It didn’t look like hair, more like tangled string.
When she spoke finally, in Zand’s tongue, I realized.
‘Click-click. Follow-click-me,’ said she.
She’s a mechanical doll, clockwork, like the guards and things at Peshamba. Rather rusty, as they weren’t. Perhaps it’s the damp.
All three servants here are the same.
The Peshamban dolls had seemed very efficient, and they’d looked good, but I never really got used to them in the short time I was there.
These ones made – make – me uncomfortable. I suppose because I’m usually dealing personally with them.
Y told me to follow the first one. (Nobody
