Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1 Page 9

  Though this all had looked accidental at the time, perhaps none of it was. Perhaps, as Tropella had said, Candy had business in the Abarat. Was it possible?

  She was just a schoolgirl from Chickentown. What business could she have in a world she hadn’t even seen?

  But then was the idea any less likely than the fact that the sky over her head was now filled with stars from the heavens of another universe? Even the darkness between those stars—the darkness of space itself—was not like space as she saw it from her bedroom window. There were subtle colors pulsing through it: shades of deepest purple and rich royal blue, moving like tides across the sky, ready to be swum or sailed.

  In the time that she’d been turning all these wild ideas over, the Sea of Izabella had quieted down considerably. The waters were virtually flat now, and the step of the Sea-Skippers more hushed because it was easier going. It was even possible for Candy and the Johns to chat normally, as their bearers skipped side by side.

  “We’re moving through the Ring of Darkness right now,” John Drowze explained. “That light you see ahead of us”—Candy had not seen any light before, but now that it was pointed out, she saw a distinct paling of the sky close to the horizon—”the light at Efreet—”

  “—one of the Unfettered Islands,” Sallow broke in to add.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they govern themselves,” said John Slop. “They don’t pay taxes to the Abaratian government, nor are they part of the Commexo Company.”

  “Oh, don’t get political on us, Slop,” John Drowze complained.

  “I just wanted her to understand the complexities of—”

  “Nobody understands the complexities of the islands anymore,” John Mischief said despairingly. “It used to be so simple. You had the Islands of Night and the Islands of Day—”

  “And almost constant war,” John Serpent interjected.

  “At least everybody knew where they stood. You had your allegiances and you lived and died by them. But now?” He made a noise of profound disgust. “Now who knows?”

  “Oh, do stop,” said John Drowze wearily.

  If there was more to be said on the subject (and undoubtedly there was) nobody got to say it, because at that moment Pux whispered—

  “Quiet, everyone.”

  “What’s the problem?” said Serpent.

  “Lookup.”

  Everybody turned their gazes skyward. There were dark forms, like those of huge birds with the bodies of men, circling around, blotting out the stars.

  “Vlitters,” said Deaux-Deaux.

  “They won’t touch us,” Sallow opined.

  “Maybe not,” said Pux. “But if they see us, they can report us to Inflixia Grueskin. We’re in her waters.”

  Candy didn’t ask for the details on Inflixia Grueskin; the name was descriptive enough.

  “Are you going under the Gilholly Bridge?” Mischief whispered.

  “It’s the quickest way,” said Tropella. “And we’re all getting tired. Trust us. We know what we’re doing.”

  Mischief duly fell silent. By degrees the travelers approached the bridge in question, which spanned perhaps half a mile’s width of glacial water between two islands. On one side the light was still embryonic, barely delineating the shapes of the cliffs and the immense buildings that were perched on top of them. On the other side, the light was noticeably brighter. Candy could see a temple of some kind, or perhaps the ruins of a temple, and beside it a row of pillars.

  One of the creatures Pux had referred to as Vlitters swooped down and skimmed the shining water, its lower jaw cutting through the reflection of the starlit heavens. Candy caught only a glimpse as it dived, skimmed and rose again. It was an odd-looking beast: a cross between a bat and a human being. Though it had failed to see the Sea-Skippers and their passengers, the Vlitter did see something edible. It scooped up a fish the size of a baby, which let out a furious doglike yelping as it was taken, and continued to yelp until the Vlitter consumed it, mercifully somewhere too high up to be seen.

  They moved on, with the yelping of the doomed dog-fish still echoing off the walls of the temple and the cliffs, away from the calm waters beneath the bridge. The sea became steadily rougher as they cleared the protection of the islands, and Candy was glad for all their sakes that the journey’s end was close at hand. What would she have done, she wondered, if she hadn’t the good fortune to meet the card players at their game? She would surely have drowned, despite all that Mischief had told her about relying on the kind arms of Mama Izabella.

  They moved off to the left now, and what Candy saw ahead was yet another puzzlement. The sky, which had seemed to be growing lighter, was darkening once again. There was an immense bank of blue-gray mist filling the panorama ahead of them, and there were more stars showing through the mist. No doubt of it, the glimpse of day she’d seen had been only that: a glimpse. Now night was approaching again.

  The sight of this murky vista was clearly a welcome one for the Sea-Skippers.

  Pux was so happy he broke out into song as he skipped. The ditty was sung to the familiar tune of “O Christmas Tree,” but the words were unexpected.

  “O woe is me!

  O woe is me!

  I used to have a Hamster Tree!

  But it was eaten by a newt,

  And now I have no cuddly fruit!

  O woe is me! “O woe is me!

  I used to have a Hamster Treeee!

  “You like my song?” Pux said, when he was done.

  “It wasn’t quite what I was expecting,” Candy said. “But yes. It was certainly… um… unusual.”

  “I’ll teach it to you!” Pux said. “Then you’ll have something to sing as you go around the Yebba Dim Day and people will think, Oh she’s one of us.”

  “Is this a very well-known song?”

  “Believe it or not,” said John Serpent, his expression one of profound distaste, as usual, “yes.”

  “Then I should learn it,” Candy said, secretly glad to be causing the condescending John Serpent a little discomfort. “So,” said Mischief. “From the top. Altogether now.”

  Everybody joined in with the song this time (except Serpent and Moot), and Candy quickly picked it up. By the time they came to the fourth rendition, Pux said:

  “This time a solo, from Miss Quackenbush.”

  “Oh no…”

  “Oh yes,” said Deaux-Deaux. “We’ve carried you all this way. The least you can do is sing us a song.”

  It was a reasonable request. So Candy sang out her first Abaratian song as the mist ahead began to thin, and they skipped their way into the Straits of Dusk.

  “Nice. Very nice,” said Pux when she was done. “Now I’ll teach you another.”

  “No, I think one’s enough, for now. Maybe another time.”

  “I don’t imagine there will be another time,” said Tropella. “We very rarely come into the shipping routes. It’s not safe. If we go to sleep on the waves, we risk getting mown down by a ferry. That’s why we head back out to the Ring of Darkness. It’s safer there.”

  “Don’t be so sure you won’t meet this lady again,” Mischief said to the company. “I believe she’s in your lives forever now. And we’re in hers. There are some people, you know, who are too important to ever be forgotten. I think she’s one of them.”

  Candy smiled; it was a sweet speech, even if she didn’t quite believe it.

  Nobody seemed to know what to say when Mischief had finished, so there was just a thoughtful silence for a minute or two as the mists ahead of them continued to part.

  “Ah…” said John Sallow. “I do believe I see the Yebba Dim Day.”

  The last scraps of mist parted now, and their destination came into view. It was not an island in any sense that Candy understood the word. It seemed to be a huge stone-and-metal head, with towers built on top of its cranium, all filled with pinprick windows, from which beams of light emerged to pierce the mist.

  “Set
your watch to Eight,” Mischief said to Candy.

  “I don’t understand,” Candy said. “One minute it looks like it’s dawn, the next it’s night, and now you’re saying set my watch to eight o’clock.”

  “That’s because we’re now in the Straits of Dusk,” said John Sallow, as though the matter were simplicity itself. “It’s always Eight in the Evening here.”

  Candy looked well and truly confused.

  “Don’t worry,” said Deaux-Deaux. “Eventually you’ll get the knack of it. For now just go with the flow. It’s easier that way.”

  While Candy set her watch to eight o’clock, the Sea-Skippers brought them around the front of the immense head of the Yebba Dim Day.

  A steep staircase ran like a vein up the side of the place, and more light poured from a host of windows and doors. There was a great riotous commotion coming out of the head, the din of voices shouting and singing and crying and laughing, all echoing across the water.

  “So, lady,” said Deaux-Deaux, “here we are.”

  The Sea-Skippers brought them to a tiny harbor in the nook where the titan’s chest met his arm. There were a number of small red boats in the harbor, many of which were in the process of entering or leaving—and a sizeable crowd on the quayside. The entrance of the four Sea-Skippers—along with their passengers—caused a good deal of confusion and comment.

  Very soon people were appearing from inside the Great Head to see what all the brouhaha was about. Among these newcomers were several people in uniforms.

  “Police!” said John Sallow sharply.

  The word was echoed among his brothers.

  “Police?”

  “Police!”

  “Police!”

  Mischief turned to Candy and swiftly caught hold of her arm.

  “So quickly—” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to go. So quickly.”

  “Because of the police?”

  “Keep your voice down,” said John Serpent; his usual charmless self.

  “Hush!” Mischief said to him. “Don’t you ever talk to my lady that way again!”

  “Your lady!” Serpent snorted, as though in these final snatched moments he wanted to express his contempt for Mischief’s respectful handling of Candy. But there was no time. Not for Serpent; nor for Mischief; not even for Candy to say more than a hurried: “Good-bye!”

  The police were coming down the dock, parting the crowd as they advanced. Candy doubted that they’d recognized the criminals yet (though Mischief’s antlers made him exceptionally easy to spot); but they were interested in these new arrivals, and Mischief wasn’t going to allow their general curiosity to turn into an arrest scene.

  “Do you have a permit for those Sea-Skippers?” one of the policemen hollered.

  “This is where we part, lady,” Mischief said. “We’ll meet again, I know we will.”

  He took her hand, turned it over, and lightly kissed the palm. Then he jumped into the water.

  “Hey, you!” a second policeman yelled, barging through the crowd to make his way to the end of the quayside. “It’s him!” he yelled.

  “Oh no,” Candy heard Deaux-Deaux say. “This is a pleasant introduction to the Yebba Dim Day.”

  “We should have gone to Speckle Frew,” said Tropella. “It would have been a sight quieter.”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” said Pux.

  “He’s getting away!” the second policeman was shouting.

  “Who?” came the reply from one of his companions.

  “Whatshisname! The one who cleared out Malleus Nyce’s house in Tazmagor! Him! Whatshisface!” He was steadily becoming redder and redder as his frustration mounted. “The master criminal!”

  At which point about seven people in the crowd said: “John Mischief!” at the same time.

  “Yeah! That’s what I said,” the policeman replied lamely. “John Mischief!”

  Now all eyes, both those of the crowd and of the officers, were fixed on the patch of turbulent water where John Mischief had last been seen.

  One of the policemen, a huge blue-skinned man with a square-cut orange beard, now attempted to commandeer one of the faster-looking boats in the little harbor, apparently intending to give chase in it. But its owner—who was almost as big as the officer, and had the advantage of being six or seven yards away, across a span of grimy dock water—wasn’t playing.

  “You! Get that boat over here!” the officer yelled.

  The man deliberately neglected to look in the officer’s direction and proceeded to maneuver his vessel out through the knot of boats. Clearly the idea of losing his precious boat to a belligerent officer with more testosterone than sea-sense had made him nervous. The attempted retreat enraged the officer even more.

  “Come back!” he yelled. “Your vessel is commandeered!”

  “Let it be, Branx!” one of the other officers called. “There are plenty of other boats.”

  But Officer Branx wasn’t going to have his authority disregarded. Pulling off his jacket and boots, he jumped into the dirty water and began to swim toward the retreating vessel, yelling as he went.

  “You bring that boat right back here! Do you hear me? Right back here!”

  His absurd behavior had trebled the crowd on the dock. The wooden structure was creaking, sending up a warning to those perched on it that it would not be wise to perch there much longer. The warning was, however, ignored. And the noisier the crowd became, the more people emerged from the Great Head to see what was going on.

  “You know, Candy,” Tropella said, “I don’t want another hurried good-bye—”

  “But if I’m going to go without being noticed, this would be a smart time to do it?”

  “Don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely,” Candy said.

  Everybody’s attention was on the swimming policeman, who had managed to reach the escapee in the boat and had hauled himself onboard where—despite cries from his fellow officers that he should desist—he proceeded to harangue the boat owner, who promptly hit the policeman with an oar. The oar broke, and Officer Branx toppled over the edge of the boat like a silent comedian, sinking into the filthy water.

  Consternation! Now it was the boat owner who dived in to drag the unconscious man up out of the water, mindful, no doubt, of what the penalty would be if the overzealous officer drowned. The dowsing had shocked Policeman Branx out of his unconscious state however, and as soon as he surfaced, the altercation began afresh. The two men struggled and flailed in the water for a while, during which time Candy—having exchanged the very briefest of farewells with the Sea-Skippers—slipped away through the crowd toward the door of the Yebba Dim Day.

  As she went she glanced over her shoulder, so as to have one last glimpse of her friends to fix in her head; just in case Mischief was overly optimistic in his beliefs, and none of them ever met again.

  But Mischief had long gone, and all four Skippers had already leaped into the water and dived down under the boats so as to escape the harbor undetected.

  Candy experienced a sudden and acute sense of loss. She felt utterly and painfully alone. Without John Mischief, how would she get by in this strange world?

  It wasn’t that she felt the need to turn around and go home. There was nothing for her back in Chickentown, or at least nothing that she wanted. She hated her father. And her mother, well, she just made her feel empty. No, there was nothing for her there. But coming here, entering this strange New World, was like being born again.

  A new life, under new stars.

  So it was with a curious mingling of anticipation and heavy heart that she pressed against the flow of the crowd and eventually brought herself through the doors and into the city that stood on the Straits of Dusk.

  13. In the Great Head

  Candy had always prided herself upon having a vivid imagination. When, for instance, she privately compared her dreams with those her brothers described over the breakfast table, or her
friends at school exchanged at break, she always discovered her own night visions were a lot wilder and weirder than anybody else’s. But there was nothing she could remember dreaming—by day or night—that came close to the sight that greeted her in The Great Head of the Yebba Dim Day.

  It was a city, a city built from the litter of the sea. The street beneath her feet was made from timbers that had clearly been in the water for a long time, and the walls were lined with barnacle-encrusted stone. There were three columns supporting the roof, made of coral fragments cemented together. They were buzzing hives of life unto themselves; their elaborately constructed walls pierced with dozens of windows, from which light poured.

  There were three main streets that wound up and around these coral hives, and they were all lined with habitations and thronged with the Yebba Dim Day’s citizens.

  As far as Candy could see there were plenty of people who resembled folks she might have expected to see on the streets of Chickentown, give or take a sartorial detail: a hat, a coat, a wooden snout. But for every one person that looked perfectly human, there were two who looked perfectly other than human. The children of a thousand marriages between humankind and the great bestiary of the Abarat were abroad on the streets of the city.

  Among those who passed her as she ventured up the street were creatures which seemed related to fish, to birds, to cats and dogs and lions and toads. And those were just the species she recognized. There were many more she did not; forms of face that her dream-life had never come near to showing her.

  Though she was cold, she didn’t care. Though she was weary to her marrow, and lost—oh so very lost—she didn’t care. This was a New World rising before her, and it was filled with every kind of diversity.

  A beautiful woman walked by wearing a hat like an aquarium. In it was a large fish whose poignant expression bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman on whose head it was balanced. A man half Candy’s size ran by with a second man half the first fellow’s size sitting in the hood of his robe, throwing nuts into the air. A creature with red ladders for legs was stalking its way through the crowd farther up the street, its enormous coxcomb bright orange. A cloud of blue smoke blew by, and as it passed a foggy face appeared in the cloud and smiled at Candy before the wind dispersed it.