htoo mhuch f’mhe,” she confessed. She did not speak as well as Pretty, even without a bit in her mouth.
To Derk, Beauty meant as much as the hundred and ninth gizmo did to Callette. He would have died rather than part with Beauty to the University. So he smiled and patted her shining black neck. Not ants, he thought. Not insects at all. Something even more splendid than Beauty. And when he mounted and Beauty bunched her quarters and rose into the air rather more easily even than Kit did, he felt tight across the chest with love and pride. As they sailed down the valley, he considered the idea of a water creature. He had not done one of those yet. Suppose he could get hold of some cells from a dolphin …
He landed in the centre of the village to find nearly every house there being knocked down. “What the hell’s going on?” he said.
The mayor left off demolishing the village shop and came to lean on his sledgehammer by Beauty’s right wing. “Glad to see you, Derk. We were going to need to speak to you about the village hall. We want to leave that standing if we can, but we don’t want any Pilgrims or soldiers messing about in it destroying things. I wondered if you could see a way of disguising it as a ruin.”
“Willingly,” said Derk. “No problem.” The hall had been built only last spring. “But how did you know – how are you going to live with all the houses down?”
“Everyone in the world knows what to expect when the tours come through,” the mayor replied. “Not your fault, Derk. We knew the job was bound to come your way in time. We had pits dug for living in years ago, roofed over, water piped in, cables laid. Furniture and food got moved down there yesterday. Place is going to look properly abandoned by tomorrow, but we’re leaving Tom Holt’s pigsty and Jenny Wellaby’s wash house standing. I heard they expect to find a hovel or two. But I can tell you,” he said, running a hand through the brickdust in his hair, “I didn’t expect these pulled-down houses to look so new. That worries me a lot.”
“I can easily age them a bit for you,” Derk offered.
“And blacken them with fire?” the mayor asked anxiously. “It would look better. And we’ve told off two skinny folk – Fran Taylor and Old George – to pick about in the ruins whenever a tour arrives, to make like starving survivors, you know, but I’d be glad if you could make them look a little less healthy – emaciated, sort of. One look at Old George at the moment and you’d know he’s never had a day’s illness in his life. Can you sicken him up a bit?”
“No problem,” said Derk. The man thought of everything!
“And another thing,” said the mayor. “We’ll be driving all the livestock up the hills to the sides of the valley and penning them up for safety – don’t want any animals getting killed – but if you could do something that makes them hard to see, I’d be much obliged.”
Derk felt he could hardly refuse. He spent the rest of that day adding wizardry to the blows of the sledgehammers and laying the resulting brick dust around as soot. By sunset, the place looked terrible. “What do you think of all this?” Derk asked Old George while he was emaciating him.
Old George shrugged. “Way to earn a living. Stupid way, if you ask me. But I’m not in charge, am I?”
Neither am I, Derk thought as he went to mount Beauty. The frightening thing was that there was nothing he could do about it, any more than Old George could.
Beauty, rattling her wings and snorting to get rid of the dust, gave it as her opinion that this was not much of a day. “Bhoring. No fhlying.”
“You wait,” Derk told her.
Next day he flew north to see King Luther. The day after he went south to an angry and inconclusive meeting with the Marsh Dwellers, who wanted more pay for pretending to sacrifice Pilgrims to their god. He flew home with “Is blasphemy, see, is disrespect for god!” echoing in his ears, wistfully wondering if his water creature might be something savage that fed exclusively on Marsh people. But the next day, flying east to look at the ten cities scheduled to be sacked, he took that back in favour of something half dolphin, half dragon that lived in a river. The trouble was that there were no big rivers near Derkholm. The day after that, flying south-east to talk to the Emir, he decided something half dragon would be too big.
The Emir was flatly refusing to be the Puppet King the lists said he should be. “I’ll be anything else you choose,” he told Derk, “but I will not have my mind enslaved to this tiara. I have seen Sheik Detroy. He is still walking like a zombie after last year. He drools. His valet has to feed him. It’s disgusting! These magic objects are not safe.”
Derk had seen Sheik Detroy too. He felt the Emir had a point. “Then could you perhaps get one of your most devoted servants to wear the tiara for you?”
“And have him usurp my throne?” the Emir said. “I hope you joke.”
They argued for several hours. At length Derk said desperately, “Well, can’t you wear a copy of the tiara and act being enslaved to it?”
“What a good idea!” said the Emir. “I rather fancy myself as an actor. Very well.”
Derk flew home tired out and, as often happened when he was tired, he got his best idea for animal yet. Not an animal. Something half human, half dolphin. A mermaid daughter, that was it. As Beauty wearily flapped onwards, Derk turned over in his mind all the possible ways of splicing dolphin to human. It was going to be fascinating. The question was, would Mara agree to be the mother of this new being? If he presented the idea to her as a challenge, it might be a way of bridging the chilly distance that seemed to have opened up between them.
Pretty came dashing up as they landed by the stables and Beauty almost snapped at him. She was as tired as Derk was. “At this rate,” Derk told Shona, who came to help him unsaddle Beauty, “we shall be worn to shadows.”
“Black shadows with red eyes?” Shona said. “Lucky you. Just what Mr Chesney ordered.”
Derk felt a rush of gratitude to Shona. When the time came, he would make the human half of the mermaid daughter from Shona’s cells. It would ensure excellence.
“And do you know,” Shona said, “those lazy boys haven’t done a thing today unless I nagged them. Elda’s just as bad. I haven’t had time to practise. Every time I tried, a new pigeon arrived. The messages are all over your desk. Dad, you ought to breed pigeons that can speak. It would be much easier.”
“That’s quite an idea, Derk said, “but it’s not something I can think of just now. I shall have to go and see Querida tomorrow. There were two important things she said she’d do for me and I haven’t had a word from her since she left here.”
“Perhaps she hurt herself, translocating away in such a hurry,” Shona suggested.
“Barnabas says she got back all right,” said Derk. “Her healer told him she’s as well as can be expected. But I can’t afford to wait much longer, so I shall have to go and disturb her.”
In fact, it was days later that Derk set off to see Querida. The messages Shona had put on his desk kept him and Beauty busy for most of a week. When he finally set off, he was determined that Querida should not set eyes on Beauty. He had seen the way she had looked at Pretty, even in shock and pain, and he was not having her claim Beauty for the University. He left Beauty grazing in a field about five miles away from University City, which was as far as he could translocate himself. He wished he had
