Forgotten Planet

‘They changed clothes,’ said Rass. ‘This is the queen.’

He had one hand knotted in the loose cloth at the shoulder of her washer-woman’s robe, and his companion Miftah, like him a ruddy half-ifrit, pointed a spear at her throat. She did not look at either of them, but glared furiously straight ahead at the man who was her true captor.

‘You dyed your hair,’ said this man. He was tall, and lighter-skinned than the barbarians he led, and only an indefinable knowingness in his face hinted that he was far older than the well-preserved forty he appeared. ‘But your eyes would have given you away soon enough.’ The queen’s were pale eyes of a colour somewhere between blue and grey, quite unlike the brown eyes of most men. They were the eyes of a northerner; or of one of the royal house of Calormen.

The disguised queen spat at the barbarian leader.

‘Oh, my queen,’ the barbarian leader laughed. ‘Is that any way to greet your brother?’

‘You killed my father,’ said Queen Mara. ‘You are no brother of mine.’

‘It was in battle I killed him,’ said Gerald. ‘If it was not a fair fight, it was not because I was the one a head taller than him.’ He showed no sign of his proverbial ill-temper, smiling down at the enraged face of his half-sister with exultant triumph. ‘Nor was I the one who descended on his camp before dawn, hoping to find him unawares. He should not have come looking for trouble, if he did not want to find it.’

Queen Mara ignored Gerald’s words. ‘I was not running away,’ she raged, twisting furiously in the grip of Rass. Like Gerald, she was fitter and smoother-faced than befitted her age, and it was whispered that she had inherited strange magic from her sorceress mother. ‘Lord Yevin is coming from the sea. When his army gets here, your ruffians will be driven from the city. You will all die in torments.’

‘And you will have a third husband, will you, my sister?’ said Gerald calmly.

‘I am not your sister,’ snarled Queen Mara. ‘I will see you roasting alive on a fire, son of Tash.’

‘Yes, I am the Son of Tash,’ said Gerald, letting iron creep into his voice. ‘He is inexorable, irresistible, and he will live forever.’

‘May you also live forever, Lord Gerald,’ Rass added enthusiastically, and Miftah hurriedly echoed his prayer.

‘You will not live another week, you unwashed savage,’ growled the Queen, her eyes bright with hatred. She tried to lunge towards Gerald, and Rass grabbed her other shoulder, while Miftah took a step forward so that his spear pressed against her chest.

‘I am master of Calormen now,’ said Gerald. ‘Yevin will never be King in Balan. There will be no more kings in Balan. I will rule, and those who come after me will be of my blood, and this will be Tash-Balan, the city of Tash.’

From a distant corner of the palace there came the sound of a wall collapsing, and then the raucous victory cries of Gerald’s men. Further away, somewhere in the city, rose the inhuman wails of a woman who has just discovered something too horrible for words.

‘You are mad,’ said the Queen. ‘Your so-called father is nothing but a wild beast, and your army of scoundrels will melt away when Yevin gets here. I will see the fingers of your sword arm pulled out, one by one. I will see your ears cropped and your balls crushed-‘

‘See, will you?’ said Gerald, his calm words now dripping with venom. ‘You will not see anything, dear sister.’

‘I am not afraid to die,’ lied Queen Mara. ‘I will be avenged, and you will suffer.’

Gerald nodded to Rass, and he gripped the queen’s arms tightly behind her back. Miftah kept the spear pressed against her chest. Gerald took a step closer, oblivious to the queen’s insults, and barked a laugh.

‘If I am ever tortured, my queen, you will not see it.’

‘No!’ cried the Queen, struggling against her captors like a true child of the royal house of Calormen, but Gerald had a swift hand and a good eye despite his years. Like he might have taken two birds on the wing with two arrows in succession, his dagger darted lightly in at the Queen’s face and turned her pale eyes into pools of dark blood.

Queen Mara did not cry out. She bit her lip until it ran red, and her breathing grew ragged, but she did not cry out. ‘I will still be avenged,’ she said with controlled pride, her face awash with gore. ‘You will not live to enjoy your victory.’

‘Bandage her wounds,’ said Gerald. ‘At the far end of the garden outside this hall you will find a door to an old wine cellar: put her there, and watch over her. I will speak with her in the morning.’

‘Yes, Lord Gerald,’ cried Rass and Miftah with enthusiasm. ‘May you live forever, Lord Gerald’.

***

October 1^st, 1983

Mrs Susan Bowles

Crampton House

Beaconsfield, Bucks

 

Dear Mrs Bowles,

I am sorry to tell you that my grandmother recently passed away and cannot answer your letter herself. I do not know if she ever intended to answer you, but I do not think that she would be upset with me for writing to you now she is gone since you went to all the trouble. Since it has been more than a year since you wrote I am sure you cannot be holding out much hope for a reply so maybe this will be a pleasant surprise.

My grandmother chose not to reply to your letter for reasons of her own, but I can assure you that your letter affected her deeply, and she was the one who told me off when I did not take it seriously. (As you may or may not know, my grandmother was blind from birth. In the past few years I have been the one who has read her letters for her and to whom she dictated her replies).

I will answer your last question first. You said you were interested in the particulars of my grandmother’s life: where she came from, what she did, what she thought about things.

My grandmother Josephine Westcott was a remarkable woman. She was born in a country town a little north of Perth in 1897. Her parents I think were both born in England but had met in Western Australia. She had one sister, Geraldine, who was four or five years older than her. When my grandmother was about 13 years old her mother and sister were killed in a carriage accident. I cannot imagine how terrible this must have been for her though from what you wrote in your letter I know you know only too well.

She could not live by herself so was sent back to England to live with her father, who had deserted the family some years before. He was the kind of unsuccessful speculator of the kind that were very common here around the turn of the century. At any rate, my grandmother did not get on with him at all, and soon showed herself to be extraordinarily stubborn and strong-willed in escaping his authority. There was no possible way she could live independently; but what she could do was persuade a man much better off than her father to marry her at a scandalously young age. My grandmother – a penniless girl from the colonies, and completely blind – contracted a marriage with a man twenty-five years her elder, a Major Milton. He appears to have been very much in love with her and to have refused her nothing. He was killed in WWI, leaving my grandmother a comfortably well-off widow at the age of 21. I am afraid I really know very little about these years of my grandmother’s life. Would you believe that my mother was thirty years old before she learned that my grandmother had been married before?

Around 1920 my grandmother returned alone to Perth, very self-assured and old for her years, where she married a solicitor – Allen Westcott, my grandfather. My uncle Edward was born in 1921, my uncle Louis in 1924, and my mother in 1930. My mother says she thinks my grandparents’ marriage was happy enough, although it was always very clear that my grandmother was boss of the family. She was a stern mother, my mother says, and they never really got on. She did not approve of my father, for instance, and there was a complete break between her and my mother for some years over him. (I am sad to say that my grandmother was correct.  I don’t approve of my father either). I always got along well with my grandmother, though God knows she was stern enough with me at times as well. She did not like to have anyone see her sad, or out of control, and it was good that she was spared the worst indignities of old age – she stayed healthy and independent right up until the end, when she died unexpectedly in her sleep. I had expected her to go on and on and to celebrate her hundredth birthday.

As to her opinions, she was outwardly conventional, and my mother was brought up an Anglican. At heart though, I think she followed the convention of Josephine Westcott, and nothing else.  I can still see her telling me what she told me when she caught me doing something foolish because my friends suggested it when I was about eight years old: “I don’t care what anybody else thinks, Clare- if everyone thinks it’s wrong and you know it’s right, that doesn’t matter. But this is something you know is wrong. You make the decisions you know are right, and stick to them.”

She told me once that all our religion and science were no better than trying to fit the ocean in a teacup. “The universe is too big and complicated for us to understand. The best that we can do is live in it.” That was in a very rare philosophical moment when she had had a few too many glasses of port, the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. He died in 1957, shortly before I was born, and shortly before he was due to retire.

About the time my mother was born my grandfather had the house built where my grandmother lived the rest of her life.  She never liked to travel far, but while my grandfather lived they went on very regular trips into the country, a day or so’s drive distant, where she could smell the gum trees and feel the emptiness. After he died she stayed in the house that was really too big for her with my uncle Louis (he never married and died a few years ago) and then alone. She loved the birds in the garden, and sitting listening to the distant sound of the sea and the closer sounds of traffic, and having uncle Louis or myself read to her. I don’t know that she was happy – she had lost too many people close to her – but she was never openly unhappy and never once complained.

Now, to your first questions, about places called “Calormen” and “Tashbaan”. My grandmother just went quiet when I read you asking if she had ever been to those places, and if she was willing to tell you of the time she spent there. As I said before she told me off for making fun of these questions. I could not find those places in the atlas, though I suppose they are somewhere in the Middle East? From what I know of my grandmother’s life she only ever made the two trips to England and back when she was quite young. (Though she was always rather mysterious about that period of her life).

I probably would not be writing this letter if I had not heard her mention ‘Calormen’ several times since she received your letter – as if it had wakened memories that had long been sleeping. I cannot remember her ever mentioning it at all before.

For instance, I brought her some pistachio fudge earlier this year, and she said, ‘This is a very Calormen sort of food.’ I think she said it to herself when she thought I had already left the room. Another time a few months ago she said of a leather bottle in a Turkish style that my friend Robert had brought back from holiday that it was ‘the kind of thing they had in Calormen’. More recently than that I heard her reciting a poem to herself – I am afraid I cannot remember any of the words – and when I asked her about it she said it was a gazelle song from Calormen. But she did not tell me anything more about that place.

As for ‘Tashbaan’, I never heard her say that name, but I did on one occasion not long before she died hear her say the word ‘Tash’. This was the only time I ever saw my grandmother cry. I heard a noise and went to see if anything was the matter, and when I put on the lights she was holding the leather bottle. ‘Poor Tash,’ she was saying. ‘Poor dear Tash.’ I put my arms around her and asked what was wrong, thinking she might have had news somehow that one of her friends had died. (She did have quite a few friends who wrote her, though none who were particularly close and I could not recall any named Natasha). I can’t remember exactly what she said, and I asked her who Tash was. Then she said something very strange.

‘I have buried three husbands,’ my grandmother said. ‘I should have been true to the first.’

I said I did not understand, which I still don’t, and she said she was sorry to bother me with her problems, and not to mind her foolish chatter, and asked me when I was going to get married by way of changing the subject. ‘Did you really have three  husbands?’ I asked her, not expecting her to answer me. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Four husbands. Two here, and two there. Poor Tash.’ I asked her where there was, but she sent me to get her some tea, and when I came back she was quite in control of herself and would not return to the subject no matter what. I would have thought only that my poor grandmother was starting to confuse things she had heard in stories with what was real, if it were not that this seemed to have been brought on by the bottle she said was like a Calormen thing, and she spoke of Tash which was like the other name you mentioned in your letter. So I think, strange as it may seem, that my grandmother did know of these places you asked her about, and that before she met my father her life was stranger than we ever imagined.

So little information must be frustrating for you, and I am sorry my grandmother could not reply to you herself. But I thought you should know that the names you mentioned did have some meaning to her, even if we will never know what it was.

I wish you all the best, and I am curious to know more about these places. If you felt able to tell me what you know about them I would be most grateful.

Yours Sincerely,

Clare Fenoli

***

Tash strode away south with great strides. He did not need to walk; he could be where he wanted to be instantly by magic. Over long ages the magic he had once eaten had eaten him, had grown within him and beyond him like the germ at the heart of a seed grows into a tree, and he saw and heard with things that were not eyes or ears, and felt the world about him as if he were a thousand independent wandering Tashes. Magic suffused him, had changed every atom of his body.

But he remembered – yes, he remembered. And when he remembered, sometimes he liked to walk like a mortal, and go through the world as a mortal would go through it. There was a fear in the world as he walked that was not just a fear of him. The birds were hushed, and the very clattering of the streams sounded muted; he could feel the trees cringing as he went by. A greyness was spreading through everything: colour and life were leaking from the world. The birds knew the end was coming. The deer that fled at his approach knew the end was coming.

‘But they do not know how near,’ he said to himself. ‘They do not know how near.’

Tash remembered this world as he had first seen it, from the top of the wall of the hidden garden. The wall Aslan had destroyed. It had seemed so beautiful and new then, so full of hope and potential. But there was nothing here. No joy, no light, no peace, no respite from pain. No certainty of anything but that fate would shape things to a cruel end. No love. There had been love once; but that had been ages of the world ago, and the Tash who had loved was as dead as if he were dry bones in a forgotten tomb.

Tash paid no attention to the man in his arms. He had long since ceased struggling and screaming and had fallen limp. He was ephemeral, of no consequence, and he was a fool. He had thought that there was nothing more than what he could see and touch with his own hands.

‘And there is so much more,’ said Tash. ‘So very much more.’

A cold wind blew, almost a gale, and the tops of the trees began to bend. This was the wind that would not cease, Tash knew. Soon the earth would tremble, like it had trembled once before, and it would not stop until all the dwellings of his worshippers were cast down, Tash knew. And then the world would be swept clean.

‘I go, as commanded, as ever, to my appointed place,’ said Tash.

The wind grew stronger. A young squirrel called out in terror, seeking its mother. Tash walked to the hole in the world with one final step that was a thousand leagues. This place had always seemed dead, here in the depths of the desert, a circle of standing stones in the centre of which a hole in space and time now pulsed. The void slid away from Tash’s immortal senses as it had once slid away from his mortal ones – it was white, it was black, and it was loud, it was silent.

It had seemed dead, but it had not been a dead place. Tash could feel the life in the spiny desert plants, in the beetles and scorpions that crouched in the sand. There were footprints on the edge of the circle, beginning to blow away in the wind. Footprints of a gazelle. They would all be gone soon, and this place would be truly dead.

Tash did not think then of his long ages of dominion, of the empires that had worshipped him or the tyrants who had called him ancestor. He did not think of all the blood that had been shed in his name, and of how he had been lifted up to a little less than a God. He thought instead of a frightened girl who had sought comfort in his arms, and a rash promise made in an evil magician’s castle.

‘Josie,’ he said.

Then he stepped through into the void, and took his lawful prey back to his own place, his own world, where a palace of bone floated on a lifeless sunless sea.

This story set out to tell you about Tash and Josie and their story together. I had intended to go on to tell you how they came into each other’s stories afterward, when they were mostly only memories of Josie and memories of Tash to each other, but what happened afterward is mostly sad, and as bitter as soap, and there is a great deal of it. And if you have read anything before about Narnia you will also have a good idea of how it ends up, when all is said and done. So I will skip ahead to the end of Josie’s time in Calormen in two big steps, one, two, as if I were wearing seven league boots; and if there is anything more that needs to be said I can always come back and tell you about it some other time.

Tash was not there at the battle that last night. He was more than ten leagues distant from his army, in rocky hills south of the place that would one day be called Azim Balda, walking alone. A few times a year he would set out by himself, for the presence of others grew burdensome to him, and his temper short. Rather than grow angry, and kill someone he would regret killing later, it was his habit to leave his followers to look after themselves and spend a few long days and nights hunting in empty places, until his anger ebbed. Tonight red Tarva, Lord of Victory, was high in the sky, and a mere trickle of muddy water ran sluggishly over the rocks where a merry stream flowed in more pleasant seasons. Tash’s skin itched with a fierce intensity, as it had when he had first come to this world, for he had not stopped to wet it, but had followed the spoor of the white stag since just after dawn of the day before.  He was close now: he could smell that it was weary. It would still give him a fight worth the trouble, more than any of the lesser beasts of prey in this part of the country, but it was growing too tired to run.

‘Very soon,’ he said to himself, and in that moment he felt almost happy.

The men who had gathered around Tash numbered in the hundreds now, and they were more than a mere band of raiders: they were the nucleus of a people, with their own customs and their own jargon. They went into battle calling Tash’s name, whether they had been robbers before, or fishermen, or half-ifrit children disowned by their fathers to beg on the streets.

After the fight at the circle of trees, Tash had wandered by himself in the wilderness for some years before he made up his mind to get Gerald back. He had needed allies at first to free Gerald, surrounded as his son was by so many thousands of men and beasts of Calormen: so he had gathered allies. First had been the brigand he had caught on the edge of the desert. This man had known Tash, for he was one of the band who had once captured Josie; and for this Tash had been going to tear out his bowels. But he had begged for mercy. ‘Great Tash,’ he said, ‘Glorious Tash,’ he had said. ‘Spare me, and I will serve you.’ His name was Lomar, and he had served Tash as he had promised, until the night three years ago when he had been killed in battle with King Margis’ men.

Yes, Tash had gathered the first of his followers himself: but he had not had to seek them out for a long time. Men had sought him out, ever since his first raid on Balan. Those who returned alive from that raid boasted of his strength, of how he could tell what his enemies would do before they did it, of how the spears of the king’s men had broken against his chest and left no mark, of how he had torn the vizier Jardil open from throat to groin with one swipe of his arm. They heard, too, tales of how it had been he, and not King Margis nor his witch, who had defeated the sorceror of Telmar and restored the power of speech to the beasts there; and they heard the tale of how he alone had defied the Lion. While there were many dwellers on the marches of Calormen who had always bridled at the presumption of the Kings at Balan, the name of Aslan was honoured in all those lands, and it might be wondered that defying him would bring any glory to Tash: but those who gathered under his banner resented Aslan for the same reason that Tash and Josie had. He was the one who allowed their lives to be miserable, or worse, made the rules that forced them into misery. He was a God who intervened in his creation: but not to help them, never to help them, for they were some of the many thousands of nameless sufferers whose names are recorded in no chronicles of Narnia. The followers of Tash were broken men and women of many kinds, though mostly human. Some thirsted for justice, and some did not care. There were good men among them, and vile ones. Tash had not meant to gather an army and a people on the wild marches of Calormen. They had built up around him like mud on boots, drawn by the power that they felt in him, and now they moved on inexorably whether he willed it or not, driven by the inscrutable logic of crowds. They had Gerald to lead them now, and Keziah, and Zarduk, and needed him only to cry out ‘Tash! Tash!’ when he came to them, and clang their weapons together to make a noise in his honour.

The white stag had gone this way, Tash was certain, up this narrow path to the summit of the stony hill, and there was no sign that it had come down.  With great impatient strides, Tash forged up after it. Then he stopped, for he was not alone. Stretched out on a rock, half his height again above the level of Tash’s eyes, lay the Lion. It could not have been mistaken for any mere lion: it was Aslan, who had spoken with Tash in the lost dream-like chamber where the Books of Tash had been kept.

‘What do you want?’ asked Tash, with an uncertainty that would have disappointed those of his followers who eagerly recounted tales of how he had defied omnipotence.

‘Nothing,’ said Aslan.

‘Then you should go away,’ said Tash. ‘It is over between us.’

‘This is my world,’ said Aslan, in a voice that might have sounded petulant if it had not been so deep and resonant and filled with divine power and compassion. ‘Everything that is in it is part of my lawful charge. It will not be over between us, Tash, until the sea is poured away and the sky is rolled up like a carpet. Even then it will not be over between us.’

Tash thought with horror of the long empty years ahead of him, and said nothing. He held his shoulders high and turned his head slightly to gaze into the face of the lion.

‘I am sending her back to her own world,’ said Aslan.

‘It is no concern of mine,’ said Tash.

‘I cannot send you back to your own world,’ said Aslan. ‘The world you knew is ended. But I have allotted it to you, and arranged it so that one day when your power has grown enough that you can endure there, you can find you way back, if you wish.’

‘Why do you play these games with us?’ said Tash. ‘Why bring us into this world and torture us? You are as bad as the Overlord.’

Aslan did not take any offence at this comparison, but looked at Tash with soft dark eyes. They glistened in a strange way in the dim starlight.

‘You are only one thread in a picture woven of many other threads,’ said Aslan. ‘Prince Margis is one such thread, and Josephine Furness, and Fleetpaw who you slew in Telmar. Could you see the picture, you could see the wisdom and the beauty of it: but it is not given to anyone to see the whole picture at this time, except for my Father and I; not while the worlds endure.’

‘That is no proper answer at all,’ growled Tash. ‘It is just playing games with words.’

‘Is it?’ Aslan asked Tash, and his voice was greater than the voice he had before, far greater, brighter than suns and heavier, with infinities of space and time behind it.

‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of this world? Tell me, Tash, if you understand. Do you know who fixed the dimensions of this world, or who measured it? The nature of the stones it sits upon? Who set them in place, while the morning stars sang together, and the spirits of the void shouted for joy in words that were not yet words?’

‘Do you know who set bonds on the sea when it gushed forth from the womb of its mother? Do you know her name? Where you there when I made clouds as garments for the sea, and set a border of breaking waves around its fierceness, and peopled it with men for which this speech will never have names? Can you say to the sea: this far you may come, and no further, and will it heed your command?’

‘Have you commanded the day to show itself? Have you sung forth the dawn? Have you called out the beams of the sun, so that they make bare the secret places of the world? Have you brought to light the hidden wickedness of men and beasts? Or the hidden sources of the sea? Have you walked in the deep places where no light comes, or on the heights where the sky is black at midday? ‘

‘Can you part the gates of death, Tash? Can you see beyond the gates of that-not-yet-made? Have you counted out the worlds as numberless as drops of rain in a storm, and the stones in their riverbeds? Tell me, if you say my talk of a pattern is only playing games with words. Which is the path that leads to the place where light lives, and which leads to the home of darkness? Can you guide all creatures to their homes, and call them by their true names? For before light was, or darkness was, I am.’

The great voice of the Lion thundered down on Tash, and it seemed to him that these words as the Lion spoke them were being spoken at countless times and in countless places, to countless people like him and unlike him, but at the same time they were words only spoken once; they were words bound to no one time and place, which had their being in eternity. Not Frank, nor Helen, not Digory and Polly, nor the Queen Jadis herself, ever heard Aslan speak in that voice: it was a voice that would not be heard in Narnia again for thousands of years.

‘I know I am useless,’ said Tash. ‘You are not the first to tell me that. Before you I am nothing. And of course I do not understand the things you understand, and cannot do the things that you can do. But you have brought me here, and set me on this path, the one I read about in that book. There is nothing inside me but dust now. There was a kind of fire in me: but nothing is left now but ashes. I submit. I have submitted.’

Tash had it in him still to defy omnipotence, as his followers said, and he did not bow his head or let his arms droop, even as he said these words.

‘Your story will go on for a long time,’ said Aslan, and Tash was quite certain that the glistening in the Lion’s eyes was tears. ‘Your thread will not be cut.’

‘I made my choice,’ said Tash. ‘And now I will play my part in your game. What else can I do?’ He stared unblinking into the face of the one who had sung the stars into being.

A cloud passed over Tarva, and there was a clattering of hooves that let Tash know the white stag had caught the scent of the Lion. Ten leagues to the northeast, King Margis gave the order to attack Tash’s camp.

Tash could not understand why the leaders of the beasts had attacked so fiercely, instead of just letting those who wanted to eat the magic food eat it: people always seemed to want to interfere with what other people were doing, whether they were thalarka or humans or talking animals or gods. Tash did not ask Josie why she had decided that they must leave, nor did he try to argue her out of it. It had been clear all along that what Jardil had said was true: that the place of Josie and Gerald was with the other humans. It was also true that it would be much harder for the three of them to live alone in Telmar from now on, after their actions had stirred the beasts of the Vale to such violence. Leaving  was a wise thing to do: this was a precise statement of indisputable fact. But he hated it. Telmar had become his home: the only true home he had ever had. Here Josie was his, and Gerald was his too: but outside they would slip away from him, further and further, and he would be left with no one. This too he knew to be a precise statement of indisputable fact. He did not know whether it would be swiftly or slowly, but he knew it was coming, as sure as a break in the clouds would close again.

‘We have to go, Tash,’ said Josie later that night, clutching one of his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

No, he wanted to say. No, never, we must stay here. But he did not say anything.

‘I am so sorry about Blackbriar,’ said Josie.

‘It was not meant to be like this,’ said Tash.

‘I’m afraid it was,’ said Josie, and began to cry. Tash wrapped his arms around her.

‘Don’t worry, my Josie,’ said Tash. ‘It will be alright. You are my Josie, Lady Josie of Telmar, whatever happens.’

Josie silently drew close to Tash, and pressed her cheek against his chest, and in a little while they joined together as wife and husband for the last time.

They buried Eyit in the morning, in the garden where Tash had been a statue, in the very place where the panther or leopard or whatever it was had stood frozen in stone for so many years. Next to him they buried Longface, the boar who had died in the battle fighting on the side of Aslan. The sow-women picked flowers until the bushes were quite bare, and strewed them over both graves like a blanket.

‘We will never forget those who died so that we might speak,’ said Primrose, the sow-woman who had done most of the talking for the pigs since their transformation.

The rest of the day was spent in making preparations. Josie put away all the things of the men of Telmar that they could not take with them, to stop them as much as possible from being ruined by the weather. ‘Though I don’t suppose it matters, if no one comes back her for years and years and years,’ she said. Many of the more precious things she had taken down into the secret chamber. There the magic was beginning to fade: she could tell at once.

‘It is not going all at once, but it is going,’ she said. ‘Can you feel it, Tash?’

‘A lot,’ said Tash. The bubble of preserving magic left long ago by Aslan had done what it was needed for, and now it was trickling away, swift enough for him to feel the current of its passing.

‘What will we do with the apples?’ Josie asked Tash, for only the two of them were there in the secret room. But she still spoke in a soft voice, hardly more than a whisper.  ‘Shall we leave them here, or take them with us?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tash. ‘If we take them, someone will find out about it in the end.’

‘Yes,’ said Josie. ‘Who knows what will happen? There may be other sorcerors who want them. But they may be gone before then – we could help other people with them.’

‘But not very many,’ pointed out Tash. There were only two of the apples left, not enough to bring more than a handful of injured or sick people back from the brink. ‘How would we pick?’

‘Well, if Gerald was hurt,’ said Josie.

‘Of course.’ But they both knew that the apple would not let Gerald live forever, since he had not come into the world from another. One day he would grow old and withered and die, and they would still go on and on, if nothing happened to them. But both of them tried rather a lot not to think too much about the future.

‘Would it make Gerald strong and healthy, if we gave it to him now?’ asked Tash. ‘When he is not sick?’

‘I think so,’ said Josie. ‘I could feel it work on me, even though I was not injured.’

‘Maybe we should do that,’ said Tash.

‘Maybe,’ said Josie, and they stood silently together for a long time in the cool of the secret room, listening to the silence. ‘I will take them,’ said Josie at last. ‘I don’t think they will stay fresh very much longer, now that the magic is fading. So they will just rot away down there. Don’t worry, dear Tash, I will watch over them carefully.’

***

The next morning, when the transformed beasts of Telmar had regained their proper forms, and were talking beasts of Telmar, they raised a cairn over the place where Blackbriar was buried and set out from the Vale of Telmar. Prince Margis and his four men; Josie and Tash and Gerald; and the talking beasts: Mirilitha and Ofrak, the dogs Cinder and Larkwail, and the five pigs: Primrose, Cabbageheart, Hyacinth and Oakenfoot together, with the ruddy one, Loudrain, walking as near to Josie as he dared. They were all on foot (or hoof, or wing), with the men leading their horses, on the carpet of dry leaves beneath the ancient dark cypresses. The Calormenes, men and beasts, were only too glad to leave: and for Gerald it was simply a grand adventure. But for the others, the leavetaking was tinged with bitterness.

‘You will miss the forest, too,’ said Primrose to Tash. She snuffled behind him at the back of the party, without the fear that the other talking beasts of Telmar showed when Tash drew near.

‘Yes,’ said Tash. ‘I have been happy here. That is the way to my fishing hole, over there.’

‘We call that Agate’s pond,’ said Primrose. ‘Agate was a sow who lived in my grandmother’s time. She liked to wander off from the others, and sun herself by the water there.’

‘Josie is fond of fish,’ said Tash. He looked ahead, and felt an anger that he tried hard to quash. He had handed Gerald to his mother before he dropped back to the end of the party; and so he could not really protest now that Josie had passed the boy on to Prince Margis. Now Gerald was riding on the royal shoulders with great cheerfulness.

‘We cannot catch fish,’ said Primrose unnecessarily. ‘And the ones we find dead are not nice to eat.’

‘Yes,’ said Tash, without really listening, still looking at his son riding on the Prince’s shoulders.

‘I am sure there are many good things beyond the valley,’ said Primrose wistfully after a moment.

‘Yes,’ said Tash. He remembered the last journey he had made along this path, and the feel of his talons cutting through flesh; the taste of the apple of living forever, and the sour smell of desperate hopelessness that had clung to Josie for so long a time after they returned. ‘All the places that lie beyond that I have seen are very nice.’

As for Josie, she too was sunk in dark thoughts for as long as they walked under the cypresses. She had given up fighting, she felt. Instead of willfully trying to do things her own way, and resenting the injustice of all that had happened to her, she had resolved to carry through with what Aslan had proposed for her to do. She felt mostly a horrible guilt that everything might have turned out better for everyone, if she had done what Aslan had wanted her and Tash to do in the first place. Then Blackbriar might be alive, and the others who had died might be alive, and-

‘What’s done is done, silly girl,’ she told herself. ‘You can’t very well wish that Gerald wasn’t there,’ she thought, smiling at the thought of the laughing boy despite her dark thoughts. Yet – she still did wish that Gerald wasn’t there, with a small part of herself that was the same as the small part of Tash that had thought of biting through Prince Margis’ throat.

Josie went on in this way feeling guilty and miserable until she could smell the fragrant woods that lay beyond the Vale of Telmar, and feel the warm breeze from the south. Then it was as if she had walked out of a dark room into the sunlight; she felt happier than she had for a long time, and not in the least guilty or miserable. I have learned that these are the times when it is most important to be very careful and think through what you are doing, or you are liable to make terrible mistakes.

‘I am so happy that you have come with us,’ said Mirilitha to Josie. ‘The gazelles will be so happy to see you, though you were with them such a little time.’

‘I will be happy to see them, too,’ said Josie. ‘I would love to hear them sing again, all together.’

And memories of when the world had been unexpected and beautiful and new flooded back to her, and it was as if the world was like that all over again.

During this journey Loudrain did not walk close beside Josie all the time, but scouted about her as if he alone could guard her from danger. He ran ahead to check the path for places where her feet might trip, and took care to be standing there when she got to those places; and he darted into the bushes to either side, sniffing out the spoor of any beasts that might be troublesome.  The other pigs studiously ignored him.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ Josie told her self-appointed new protector. ‘You will tire yourself out.’

Loudrain snorted in a way that would have been very obnoxious indeed if he had been a man, instead of a talking boar. ‘I want to do what I can,’ he explained, looking as crestfallen as it is possible for a pig to look. ‘But I will do what you say, Lady Josie.’

‘It’s alright,’ she told Loudrain, reaching out to pat him. ‘You can go ahead. But if you do get tired, you must stop and walk alongside us.’

Josie and Tash hardly spoke two words to one another that morning; but neither did they speak with Prince Margis and the other men, walking along speaking only with the talking animals.  Down the tumbled slope they went into the valleys below, which were not so thickly shadowed over with cypresses, and they came now and again through sunny meadows thronging with flowers. The new air made Josie feel alive, but every step also made her feel like she was becoming someone else: each step further from Telmar made her less Josie, Mistress of Telmar, and more somebody else, and she did not know who that person was. In one of the meadows they stopped to eat a meal, and Gerald excitedly explored the strange new place. Mirilitha trotted along beside him, having assigned herself the job of his nanny for the duration, while Tash hung further back, guarding him from afar.

‘Mother! Feel this!’ cried Gerald, running up to her with a flower he had found. Josie felt the soft petals of the flower, and pressed it to her face. ‘That is not a kind we had in Telmar,’ she told him. ‘It smells a little like something I remember, from when I was a little girl, but I can’t remember the name.’ It had been in the very first garden she could remember, before they moved out to Moora, and she moved through her fragmentary pieces of memory of that time with wonder and trepidation.  These flowers had not been blooming before, the last time she had been here.

‘Shall I get more?’ asked Gerald.

‘Yes please, my dear,’ said Josie. A few minutes later found her sitting with a lap full of flowers, feeling unaccountably happy.

Tash looked at her from the edge of the meadow – she was sitting alone in a patch of sunlight in the middle of it – and thought of how much he could not bear to be parted from her, and familar seethings of lust and magic stirred in his blood. If he had been a man, he would have seen how Prince Margis looked at her as well, and he would have narrowed his eyes and resolved to stick close to Josie, and keep Prince Margis at bay: but he was a strange creature from another world, the last of his kind, and he had no great skill at reading the faces of men and women.

‘Lord Tash,’ called Jardil, from the edge of the meadow where the men of Calormen were sitting together. ‘Will you have something to eat?’ He held aloft a loaf of what Tash recognised as his own bread, the bread that Josie had made in the castle of Telmar.

‘No,’ he said, and something dark moved inside him, like a cloud blocking out the stars.

***

At sunset they came to a place above a bend in a stream, where a great tree falling over some winters ago had made a clearing. The edges of this were tangled with briars and wild roses, and damp underfoot, but a broad sandy space in the middle was clear, and here they made their camp.

‘We should sleep apart,’ Josie said, when Tash came up to her in the gloom. ‘Not far apart, but.’ Tash let his arms droop a little, and bowed his head a little – not in the same way he had been used to do when he was young and useless – and they set their bedrolls a little distant separate, with Gerald between them.

The Calormenes spoke together cheerfully enough – for they were going home – and treated Josie still as Mistress of Telmar, bringing her whatever she wanted as if she were a high-born lady of Calormen. The beasts did the same, as if they were her servants; and especially they watched over Gerald, and sought to amuse him, and cheer him up when he grew tired and cranky.

So Tash found himself useless again, but in a way he had never been useless before: he was useless because there was nothing for him to do.

A long time after the camp had fallen silent, Tash could hear Josie lying on the other side of Gerald, breathing as if she were awake. He had become very good at telling whether she was awake or not in the time they had been together. Besides Josie and himself, Tash was certain that only Ofrak was awake; but the bird had no need to sit by the fire and warm his hands. He was high in the trees, or above the trees, now here and now there, a finer guard by night than any human could ever be. Tash shuffled out of his blankets and over to Josie’s side, staying hunched over instead of standing all the way up, half-crawling like he was some kind of six-legged creature. He could not have said why he walked this way, any more than he could have explained why he suddenly needed to talk to Josie. He plucked at Josie’s shoulder through her blanket, and she rolled over to face him.

‘What is it, Tash?’ she asked. He could hear the distance in her voice, the brittleness that had been growing by slow degrees ever since they had turned their back on Blackbriar long ago and headed back to Telmar – the brittleness that had grown so much more swiftly since Ofrak had batted at their window, that was now like a shell hiding Josie from him.

‘I don’t know,’ said Tash.

‘We can’t talk here,’ said Josie softly. ‘Let’s- let’s go for a walk.’ She held out a hand and Tash helped her to her feet, and they walked slowly hand in hand to an edge of the clearing and then a little further, into the maze of briars beyond, trying to be as silent as possible. The night insects helped: they were loud, much louder than they ever were in Telmar, and the chatter of the stream over the stones in the ravine below helped too. They were not far from the camp, but these noises meant they could do anything short of shout without waking the others. Josie’s hand trembled in Tash’s hand as they walked along, and it seemd to Tash as if her heart was beating much too swiftly, like the heart of some frightened small animal.

Under the thickets the leaf mould had a thick decayed odour, which mingled with the scent of the wild roses. And the moon was full: so to Tash the whole scene was as if painted in silver paint.

Josie let go of Tash and took a half step away from him, moving slowly and carefully so as not to catch herself on the briars.

‘I’m so sorry, dear Tash,’ said Josie.

‘What have you done?’ asked Tash. He was angry – still angry – but not at Josie. He was angry at everything else that was spoiling this world, where for a time things had been going so well for him.

‘Things I shouldn’t have done,’ said Josie. ‘Things we shouldn’t have done, Tash. I always knew it was wrong. But I did it anyways. It wasn’t fair on you, because you didn’t understand – you couldn’t. You aren’t a man, you don’t come from my world. But I did understand, and I shouldn’t – I shouldn’t.’

She spoke these disconnected fragments quickly and clearly and if she were trying not to cry, as if she were making a report to a policeman.

‘We can’t be betrothed, Tash. We can’t be married. It’s not right.’

Tash looked at Josie’s face, dry in the moonlight, the sadness in it making it more like the face of poor dead Nera, and he thought how much he loved her.

‘We are married,’ said Tash, slowly. ‘It is done.’

Josie shook her head violently. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We aren’t really. It is not allowed.’

‘Maybe it is not allowed on your world,’ said Tash, still slowly and calmly. ‘But you said once, maybe in this one-‘

Josie cut him off.  ‘Bother what I said. I was wrong. I was very wrong. Very, very wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. I wanted you, so I did it, knowing I shouldn’t. It was unfair to you.’

‘I wanted you to,’ said Tash.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Josie, raising her voice a little for the first time.

‘I know,’ said Tash. And he would have let his arms droop and bowed his head, even a few days before, but he had been growing brittle inside at the same time as Josie had been growing brittle outside, and he stood up straight.

‘You don’t know,’ said Josie, and the bitterness in her voice was like the dark spaces between the stars. She began to make her way further on through the thicket, parallel to the stream; away from the camp, not towards it.

‘Why should it not be allowed?’ growled Tash, following her. ‘Who said it should be forbidden?’

Then he saw the Lion. It was washing its paws on the other side of the stream.

‘No,’ he cried, and forged ahead of Josie, crashing heedlessly through the bushes and sending stones flying from under his feet. ‘Don’t take her away! Don’t!’

‘What are you doing?’ called Josie, who had nearly been knocked over as Tash ran by. ‘Tash! Tash!’

Tash did not heed her, but crashed on down the slope, until he fell more than stepped into the stream. His foot slipped on a stone, and he crashed over sideways into the cold water.

He raised his head. The lion was standing on a rock in the middle of the stream, looking down at him. Josie was still calling him; but her voice was faint and it was impossible to tell what she was saying, as if she was much further away than she could possibly be. It was as if he had fallen into a well of silence.

The Lion said no word to Tash, but he did not have to. His meaning was clearer than any words Tash had ever heard. Follow me, his face was saying. This is not your story anymore, the Lion was saying. But there is still time to chose the way I wish you to chose, to take the path without Josie in which you are a forgotten hero. Cross the stream, and leave Josie forever, and follow me. Tash knew all this in an instant, looking up at the face of Aslan, and in an instant he rejected it.

‘No,’ said Tash. ‘Why should you decide?’ He picked himself out of the water. The magic of the apple burned bright in his bones- the apple stolen, but not by him; the apple given him by Josie- and he was angry; angrier than he had ever been before. He launched himself at the Lion with an inarticulate howl of rage.

Aslan batted Tash aside with a single great velvetted paw, and set him sprawling over the pebbled bed of the stream again. When  Tash stood up Aslan was gone, and the sounds of the forest had come flooding back.

***

Josie did not know how she could have done anything else. It was hard on Tash. She had become a cruel woman, she knew, and whichever way she turned she burned with guilt. She believed what she had said to Tash, that she had done wrong before, but she also knew that she was doing wrong now. There is no perfect path through life, she thought , bitter at the unfairness of it. There was no broad road of flowers and cool breezes that you could safely walk along without hurting anyone. All choices were bad: some were just worse than others.

Josie held on tight to Gerald – Gerald, who had been distraught at the noise and the sudden disappearance of his parents, and was snuffling softly into her shoulder. She rocked him back and forth. ‘No, the bad dogs and the bad pigs have not come back,’ she said. ‘It’s alright. It’s alright, Gerry.’ And she kept on rocking him back and forth and telling him lies while Prince Margis and his men returned with Tash, and while Tash had a snarling one-sided quarrel with the Prince.

‘Why did you run off like that?’ Josie asked Tash when he approached, smelling of cold wet feathers.  She could feel the closeness of him as he loomed over her, like the wall of the secret garden in Telmar. Gerald sniffed, and sniffed again, and had time to gulp a breath of air before sniffing again, all the while looking up at the creature he called father.

‘The lion,’ said Tash. ‘I saw the lion. This is his doing.’

‘Maybe,’ said Josie. That is what the people who belong in this world would certainly say, she said to herself. Everything that happens here happens because Aslan wills it to.

‘I saw him,’ said Tash. ‘He wants me to go away.’

She should not have picked tonight to tell Tash, she told herself. She should have waited longer, until a better time. But was any time better than any other? It had all become so tangled and uncomfortable.

‘You don’t have to go away,’ said Josie. But her voice did not sound very convincing to her own ears. Tash did not seem to notice.

‘Can I have Gerald?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think you have quite calmed down,’ said Josie. But Gerald stretched out his arms and wriggled and said ‘Daddy.’

‘In a little while,’ said Josie, sharply.

‘Daddy!’ called the boy, and wriggled in Josie’s arms with a great wriggling.

‘Bother the child,’ grumbled Josie. ‘Here, then. But stay close.’

‘Yes, Josie,’ said Tash. His voice was again infuriatingly obedient, and she passed the boy up to him.

‘Stay close,’ said Josie again. ‘And he has to go back to sleep, so don’t get him all excited.’

‘Yes, my Josie,’ said Tash, and took Gerald- still moistly snuffling through the last of his unhappiness –away toward the other side of the campfire.

Josie made her way back to her sleeping place, slow and careful so as not to trip or get lost in the unfamiliar surroundings. She was almost there when she heard someone following her.

‘Prince Margis?’ she said, without turning around.

‘Lady Josie.’ He took a few steps nearerer, and she could smell him clearly. Fresh sweat from the sudden scramble down the ravine after Tash’s cries, but mostly the old sweat that clung to his clothes after the day’s walk, and the perfumed oil that he had taken to wearing in Telmar to replace the stock he had exhausted during his journey. It was one that reminded Josie of Zardeenah, rather than Yustus.

‘I am fine,’ she told him. ‘We were just speaking.’

‘I am glad to hear it, my Lady,’ said Margis, stepping closer to Josie. ‘He said he saw the Lion.’

‘I did not hear anything,’ said Josie. ‘If he was there, he was very quiet. And he did not stick around to say anything. I expect it was a lion, rather than the Lion.’

‘I have never heard of one so far north,’ said Margis. ‘But perhaps.’ He paused a little while, and Josie could hear leaves crunching under his feet as he shifted them about. ‘It pains me to see you upset, my Lady. Is there any that I can do?’

‘No,’ said Josie. ‘Nothing that will help. My problem is of my own making, and it is up to me to sort it out.’

‘You are weeping,’ said Margis softly. He reached out a hand and dabbed away a tear from Josie’s cheek. Once again, as had happened when they were at the stream, and before, at the banquetting hall, something like an electric shock ran through Josie.  The ancient magic stirred in her blood; and the yet more ancient magic, that goes back to the primordial slime a billion years before men.

‘I will be alright,’ she said. ‘I should not cry. I am stronger than that.’

‘You are strong indeed,’ said Margis. He tooked her hand between his two hands and held it close to his chest, and she did not pull away. Big long-fingered hands he had, leathery without being over-calloused, and her hand was folded completely away inside them. ‘You will do great things in Calormen, Josie. You have done great things already in this world; but you have only just begun.’

Tash and Prince Margis walked in silence for long minutes through the forest, listening for any change in the texture of sounds of the vale by night. The sounds made by their companions had died away, and amid the calls of the night birds and the wind in the cypresses, the sounds made by other beasts were faint and infrequent. Tash thought the beasts that had fought them were keeping their distance: but he had no way of knowing how long they would stay cowed.  For all he knew, they might decide on another rash attack at any moment. It was not like they were mere mindless beasts. Their doings were as inscrutable to Tash as the doings of any other thinking beings.

A small part of Tash told him how easy it would be to be rid of Prince Margis forever. He could slay him here, in the deeps of the forest, where his body would never be found, and say that the beasts had come upon them: then the men would leave. He pushed the thoughts aside. What would Josie think of him, if he were to do such a thing?

Prince Margis walked behind Tash, taking three quick steps for every two strides of the thalarka.

‘Can you think of any good reason Blackbriar would go this way, Lord Tash?’ he asked in a soft voice. Like Tash, he had judged that their enemies were giving them a wide berth for the moment.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Tash. ‘It would be a good place to hide for an animal her size. But I don’t know why she would hide, instead of joining us.’

The Hollow was up against the hills on the western side of the Vale of Telmar, opposite the castle, a place where a few acres of ground had given way and fallen into a cave underground some time in the distant past. It was a tumbled mass of stones each as big as a deer or a house, overgrown with brambles, and lying everywhere at least a Tash-length below the level of the surrounding countryside. Tash and Josie had only been there a few times, because it had an evil feel to it, and the smell of the stagnant water that pooled beneath the stones in some places was foul from animals that had fallen into it and died. The Hollow had been the place where the masters of Telmar who were gone and not mourned had thrown their rubbish: broken plates and spoiled mutton and mangled husks of juiced fruit, and also the bodies of the children they killed in their efforts to live forever.  That was where the bones of Nera lay, though Tash did not know it.

‘Maybe there is a hermit pig, or a hermit dog, who dwells out here, who was not part of the pack, and she thought they might come to the feast,’ suggested Margis. ‘But then, if they did not join her, why would she not come back? I am worried for her.’

Tash did not know what to feel. He was being swept along by events greater than he was, as he had been since his adventure began. The magic burned in his bones, brighter and stronger than ever before since the battle at the feast, and while he still blamed Blackbriar for stirring up all this trouble, the more sensible part of him felt that she was just as much a victim blown hither and tither by Aslan’s schemes as he was.

‘I am worried for her, too,’ he said, and found as he said it that he meant it. He walked on a little more swiftly, so that Prince Margis had to break into a jog to keep up with him.

The wind was coming from the west, so Tash smelled the blood first, even before the sky opened up before them. He loped forward the last few dozen paces to the edge of the hollow. The sky above them was cloudless, and blazed with stars. Red Tarva, Lord of Victory, was high in the sky, shining down on them like the eye of the Overlord. On a flat stone a little larger than Tash, poised at the edge of the hollow, lay the body of a dog. Tash knew who it was while it was still nothing more than a pool of dark shadow. She had been torn open from throat to groin, like Tash had torn the boar, and her entrails were spread out across the stone in a horrible bloody mass. Her head was turned upward, lifeless eyes looking upward.

‘No!’ howled Tash. He thought the same thing he had thought when he first saw the broken body of Nera. ‘This is not how it is supposed to be,’ he said. ‘This is not what should have happened.’

‘Indeed not,’ said Prince Margis grimly. He knelt down by the side of Blackbriar’s body, and murmured a blessing. ‘The Lion’s peace go with you, dear friend.’

‘What peace?’ said Tash. ‘She trusted him. She came here to do what he said.’ He cast his head back and forth, looking across the tumbled landscape of the Hollow and back into the forest, hoping to see some enemy that he could tear into pieces. But there was no-one.

‘She has been dead at least an hour,’ said Prince Margis, straightening up. ‘Her killers are long gone. Maybe we have slain them already.’

‘It is not fair,’ said Tash. ‘She trusted the Lion.’

‘No,’ said Prince Margis. ‘It is not fair. But very little is. She came back to Telmar to do a good thing, and she has done it. Poor Onyx. Poor Blackbriar.’ He shook his head. ‘We cannot help her. We should return.’ He looked out over the maze that was the Hollow, to the dark mass of hills beyond. ‘I wonder why she came here.’

‘She looks like she has been sacrificed,’ said Tash. He was still angry, but his loud initial rage was subsiding into a deeper bitterness. ‘Sacrificed, to the greater glory of the Lion.’

‘He is not a tame Lion,’ said Prince Margis. ‘But no, I don’t think it is that.’ Decisively, he put the death of Blackbriar behind him, as he had put the death of Eyit behind him earlier that evening. ‘Let us look around; perhaps there is some clue here to what happened.’

There were pawprints aplenty, where the ground was not stone, or covered with dry leaves – enough for a dozen dogs – but neither Tash nor Prince Margis could read any story in them. After a few minutes of fruitless searching in the darkness it was obvious that there was nothing they could learn.

‘We should not leave her,’ said Prince Margis. He gathered up the broken ruin that had been Blackbriar in his arms. Clad in the golden magical armour that Aslan had left for him, he began slowly walking back to the castle, Tash now walking a pace behind him.

‘We cannot let Gerald see her,’ said Tash. ‘He is fond of her.’

‘Of course,’ said Prince Margis.

Prince Margis bore the body of Blackbriar back to the feasting glade, and Tash tore a hole in the earth for it, and afterwards turned a heavy table on top of it.

‘We can build a cairn over her later,’ said Prince Margis.

***

Josie was standing waiting for them at the top of the stairs, with one hand on Mirilitha’s back, and Ofrak perched on her shoulder, like a figure of a goddess on a coin. Her face was set and without expression. The wardrobes and chests of the Sorceror had been ransacked for clothes to fit the beasts who were men until morning, and the sow-woman stood now on one side of Josie, and the red-bearded boar man on the other side, with the others ranged awkwardly behind her.

‘Blackbriar is dead,’ said Josie, before Prince Margis or Tash had a chance to say anything.

‘Yes,’ said Tash. ‘I fear so,’ said Prince Margis at the same time.

‘Cinder admitted it,’ said Josie.

‘Did she kill her?’ asked Tash. He looked at the tear-streaked faces of the beasts, trying to tell which one was the dog-woman who had spoken to Josie after the battle.

‘No.’ Josie shook her head. ‘It was the last part of the magic. The beasts of Telmar could only be restored if one of them sacrificed themselves for the others. Let themselves be killed. So Blackbriar let herself be killed.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘We did not want her to go,’ said the dark-haired woman who was Cinder, timidly. ‘We told her she did not have to. But she said we did not understand, and that it was the deep magic from the dawn of time. She said Aslan told her.’

‘I still do not understand,’ said the man by Cinder’s side.

‘Of course not,’ said Tash, looking angrily through them. ‘No one can understand. It is all madness. They are all the same, the Overlords of worlds.’

‘We cannot know what the Lion knows,’ said Prince Margis mildly. ‘Perhaps he saw that this was the only way, and all others were worse. It is a sad business,’ he continued. ‘We have lost good men and beasts tonight. But we have – if it is the will of the Emperor over the Sea – restored these men- these beasts- of Telmar.’ He nodded to the gathered men and women who had been pigs and dogs. ‘And it is the doing of Blackbriar. We should honour her memory, and the memory of the others who have fallen.’

‘It is all of your doing,’ said the sow-woman, going down on her knees before the Prince. ‘We do not deserve it.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Prince Margis, lifting her back to her feet. ‘But many times I have been done a kindness I did not deserve, so it is just that I repay the favour.’

‘We should slay them all,’ said Tash. ‘All the beasts who did this, so none remain.’

‘No,’ said Josie. ‘They are not all evil. Some are led astray: and some are too young, or too old. And all are the kindred of these,’ she waved to indicate the beasts around her.

‘What will happen to them, then?’ said Tash.

The owl, usually reticent to speak in the presence of humans, piped up first. ‘They will sink deeper and deeper into being mere beasts, now that the ones who remembered the stories of what they were are gone,’ said Ofrak. ‘Until they are truly no different from any other dumb beast.’ He bowed his head.

‘And what about them?’ said Tash, gesturing to the newly-restored talking beasts. ‘When they are beasts again, how will they live among their families who hate them?’

‘They will come with us,’ said Prince Margis, with a regal solemnity that even Tash could feel, and that instilled all the talking beasts with awe. ‘To Calormen.’

‘Yes,’ said Josie, nodding in agreement. ‘To Calormen.’

‘Then we are going?’ Tash asked.

Josie laid a hand on one of his arms. ‘I think we must, dear Tash. Dearest Tash.’

‘If you have a moment, Lord Tash, might I seek your advice on a few matters?’ asked Jardil.

‘My advice?’ asked Tash, stirred out of his gloomy thoughts. Josie was still away with Prince, and Tash felt uneasy. He would feel uneasy until she was back in his sight again.

‘Yes, Lord Tash,’ said Jardil. His piercing eyes and air of weathered resilience reminded Tash uncomfortably of the renegade thalarka who had driven him from his own world.

‘I suppose so,’ said Tash. He reminded himself that he was Lord Tash, and should act more grandly towards these men. ‘I mean, yes, Jardil of Calormen.’

‘Perhaps we might walk outside?’ suggested Jardil.

They did not walk in the garden where Tash had been a statue for so many years, but in another courtyard, paved in some places and planted in others, where Tash and Josie often let Gerald play. The plants that grew there were without thorns, white flowers with soft fleshy leaves that grew like harmless knives point-upwards from the ground, and frail bushes that draped themselves over the walls and pavement, halfway to being vines. It was also a courtyard surrounded by walls, rather than dropping away in a precipice at one side.

Tash put the boy down to play in a place where he had made a mazy arrangement of bits of broken masonry a few days before Ofrak arrived. Gerald immediately set about improving on his work, leaving the two grown-ups to their boring conversation.

‘What do you want my advice on?’ asked Tash.

The Calormene looked up at him, with the same crafty glint in his eyes that Tash remembered from the priests of his own world.

‘I thought, Lord Tash, that you might be able to render advice in this particular matter, because you have come here from another world – a world I cannot imagine – and everything here must have seemed very strange to you.  For you see, it concerns one who has been taken from one place and put into another, a place which is nearly as different from the first as one world must be from another.’

‘Yes?’ said Tash, puzzled.

‘Lord Tash, some months before we left Balan my Prince was hunting in the desert that lies to the north of the city – a long day’s ride north, where there are no dwellings of men or talking beasts, only endless fields of sand to be seen as far the eye can see in every direction: except perhaps to the north the distant blue mountains of Archenland. There my Prince found one of the great eagles of the desert lying injured. They are magnificent creatures, these eagles; not speaking beasts, but as near as one can approach in terms of intelligence, and the virtues peculiar to thinking beings. One such as Blackbriar is, but without her art of making herself understood. The wing of this eagle was broken, and it was dying of thirst on the sands, and my Prince’s heart was moved to pity. He took the eagle back to Balan with us and saw that it was nursed back to health. It took some time to regain its strength, for it had taken a grievous hurt, but it is a strong-willed creature, and when we left it could fly a little ways in the gardens of the palace. Now, the Prince is very fond of it, and would keep it in the palace, for it is a splendid creature, and biddable to his will. The eagle, for its part, though it cannot speak, it grateful to the Prince, and is happy to do whatever he wishes, to please him.’

Tash still wondered where Jardil was going with this, and crooked his head to listen more attentively when the man paused for emphasis.

‘Now, my thinking, Lord Tash, is that it would be better for the eagle to return to the desert, for until it does so it will never regain the strength it once had, that it needs to soar high in the blue skies of the desert; it will grow flabby and weak in the palace gardens, and what is worse, that it will resent my Prince at the same time that it is grateful, and stay only out of duty, while inside its spirit grows sour. What do you advise, Lord Tash?’

‘I do not know why you would ask me this,’ said Tash. ‘I do not know anything about birds, just because I have feathers. You would be better off asking Ofrak.’

Jardil made a mildly dismissive gesture. ‘Ofrak is in the Prince’s service, and does not have the conviction that a man can have – or you have, my Lord Tash – to let him tell the Prince what he does not want to hear.’

‘Then,’ said Tash, still rather puzzled. ‘I would let the bird do what it wants. If it wants to stay with the Prince because it is grateful, let it stay with the Prince; and if it wants to go back to the desert, let it do that.’

‘Wise advice,’ said Jardil. ‘But it is not a speaking beast; we cannot just ask it what it wants. And, like Ofrak, it feels indebted to the Sons of Frank, and will seek to do what it thinks will please us, rather than what it truly desires; or what is truly best for it.’

Tash was silent then for a long time, watching Gerald with his pieces of stone, while it became quite clear what Jardil was really getting at.

‘You are playing games with me,’ he told Jardil. ‘This is not about an eagle. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’

‘I am sorry to cause any offence, Lord Tash.’ Jardil bowed deeply before the feathered monster from another world. ‘I think it is important that you ponder this question.’

‘I have done all my pondering,’ growled Tash. Gerald turned to watch in wide-eyed alarm, startled by the anger in his voice.

‘It is understandable that you should be angry, Lord Tash,’ said Jardil smoothly. ‘I do not mean to cause you offence.’

‘Good,’ said Tash.

‘Just remember this,’ continued Jardil, speaking slowly and carefully, like a man who was well aware of how easily Tash could tear out his throat. ‘Like the eagle, Lady Josie will never be what is in her power to be if she stays in this place. She will never fly to the heights that she could reach. It is clear, to look at her, that she is already pining, like a bird in a cage, for the skies.  Even if she does not know it herself.’

Tash loomed over Jardil and snarled at him. ‘Aslan is trying to pull us apart. And you – men- want to to take Josie away to the world of men. But we need to be together.’

‘Life is cruel,’ admitted Jardil. He held out his hands in a gesture of patience and sweet reason. ‘You are alone on this world, the one of your kind; but the Lady Josie is not. Gerald,’ he nodded to the boy, who was still watching curiously. ‘He is not. Is it fair for them to live out their lives here?’

Tash could feel the magic in his bones, bright and seething. He had a horrifying feeling of how long living out his life might be, long years without Josie stretching on and on to forever. She would stay too, if she stayed in this world. But Aslan had said they were to be separated. And what of Gerald? A thought he had pushed deep down and tried to forget, that he and Josie had often thought but never spoken of, came to him. Gerald was of this world, not of another world. The apples would not allow him to live forever. Tash glowered at Jardil without moving.

‘Daddy, what’s going on?’ asked Gerald.

‘’Nothing,’ said Tash. ‘Nothing.’

Jardil bowed again, very politely. ‘Thank you for hearing me out, Lord Tash.’ He turned and left Tash and the bow alone in the courtyard.

Gerald watched his back until it disappeared, still intrigued by the Calormene’s long beard. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ he asked.

‘She’ll be back soon,’ said Tash. ‘She’s down by the stream. You were there when she left,’ he added, chiding the boy gently.

‘Are we going to go away with the owl and the gazelle and the men?’ asked Gerald.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Tash. But he felt the cold tickle of honesty at his neck, like the iron of a knife, and said one more word to the boy. ‘Maybe’.

***

It was the warmest night it had been thus far that year, and moths gathered in the hall in numbers, casting wild shadows on the walls. Outside, the skreeting of a more voluble race of night insects could be heard whenever there was a lull in the conversation. They had gathered again around the long table in the great hall – men and beasts and thalarka, all who dwelled at that time in the ruins of Telmar. The suits of armour had been brought up entire and stood against the wall at the far end of the room, lined up behind Prince Margis and Lady Josie. Jardil sat to the left of the prince, while Tash sat to the right of Lady Josie. Josie had wanted to sit Blackbriar between her and Margis, in the place of honour, but she had not been persuadable, and sat beyond Gerald on the far side of Tash. Gerald had gotten over his initial fear of the woman Blackbriar, and now found her tremendous fun: he had spent most of the afternoon telling her everything about his life in the castle.

‘Is there anything more that needs to be done among the beasts of Telmar before we can set out the feast, Blackbriar?’

Prince Margis spoke to the woman who had until recently been his dog, without any sense of awkwardness, having adapted to the changed circumstances with the man of action’s nimble refusal to think too deeply about things.

‘I have only a little thing to do, my Prince,’ said Blackbriar. ‘It should not delay the preparing of things.’ She spoke very formally and without a trace of the doggish mannerisms that had been so pronounced the first time she had taken on human shape; she too had adapted swiftly. ‘I can go out and speak to the ones I have to speak to tomorrow, when I am a dog again, and be done long before dusk.’

‘We can plan the feast for tomorrow evening, then,’ said Prince Margis. ‘Lady Josie?’

‘If you like,’ said Josie. Her mood had gone up and then down in the few hours since she had returned from her walk with the Prince. She had been cheerful and gracious, unable to keep herself from laughing out loud; but then her own worries had seized her, and the dark and sullen mood Tash had fallen into made it worse, and through dinner she had been a quiet and scowling thing, lost in her own gloomy thoughts.

‘I am sure we will succeed, with Aslan’s help,’ said Prince Margis, smiling broadly.

‘Let us drink to the morrow,’ suggested Jardil. Eyit filled the cups that were empty with some of the sorceror’s wine.

‘To the restoration of the beasts of Telmar, in the Lion’s name,’ he said.

‘The restoration of the beasts of Telmar, in the Lion’s name,’ they all repeated, and the ones with hands lifted their cups and drank.

‘Will you allow me to propose a toast, my Prince?’ offered Ofrak, rather stiffly.

‘Of course,’ said Margis.

‘Thank you. I suggest, then, that we drink to the good health of our gracious hostess, the Lady Josie, without whom our quest would have been in vain.’ He made an owl’s bow to Josie, a very neat and tidy and courteous gesture.

‘The Lady Josie,’ they repeated, and drank again.

Now, the thing about these meals where many people sit around large tables and make toasts and try to be on their best behaviour is that very little interesting is said; even if people are on only halfway good behaviour, like Josie and Tash on this occasion, they are likely to hold their tongues and try to put on a brave face. So little will be lost be skipping ahead to later that night, when Josie was helping Blackbriar get ready for bed. Tash was in anothe rroom, keeping Gerald (who had had too many sweets) occupied as a first step toward eventually getting him to sleep.

Josie helped Blackbriar set up a bed that would be suitable for laying down in as a woman and waking up in as a dog.

‘He had a message for you, Lady Josie,’ said Blackbriar. ‘The Lion, Aslan.’

‘I thought he might,’ said Josie. ‘What does he want to say to me?’

‘He says he will speak to you himself one day,’ Blackbriar sounded uncomfortable, and less in control of her doggish nature.’ He did not tell me your story, because he says that nobody is told any story but their own: but he says he thinks of you always, and to tell you that he understands you better than you know.’

Josie flew into a temper.

‘I don’t believe a word of it. He doesn’t understand me at all. How can he? He is an all-powerful magical lion. Where was he when – when Nera was killed? Or the Prince’s brother was killed? Or when Zardeenah’s sisters were sold off as slaves? Why doesn’t he stop these things from happening? He saves some people, and lets other people die, and some people can sail through life without having to do anything, but other people he puts impossible burdens on and asks to do impossible things. How can he understand me?’

Josie could almost hear Blackbriar cringing away from her voice, like a dog that has been hit with a shoe for making a mess on the rug.

‘I am sorry- sorry to be insolent, Lady Josie,’ said the woman who had been a dog reproachfully. ‘But I don’t think you should talk about Aslan like that.’

Josie felt sorry for Blackbriar, but was still being swept away by a river of righteous rage. She did her best to calm down and not upset her further, without much success.

‘Oh- I am sorry, Blackbriar,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to make you miserable. I will do what Aslan wants me to this time. I will. But not because I want to. Only because I am caught in a trap where I have to do this to help your people. He can boss me around if he likes, and let horrible things happen to me- make horrible things happen to me, for all I know. But I’m not going to let him pretend he understands me.’

Blackbriar was making odd snuffling noises, and it took Josie a moment to realise that she was crying, in a half-woman half-dog kind of way.

‘Oh, Blackbriar,’ she said again, feeling her way over to her. ‘I’m sorry- please don’t cry.’  She put her arms around her, and she flinched, the held herself still. ‘I’m sorry. I really am. I promise not to say such things, since they hurt you.’

‘Lady Josie,’ said Blackbriar, and sniffed, and sniffed again.

‘Blackbriar,’ said Josie.

‘Aslan says,’ she went on between snuffles, ‘that what is going to happen- to remember that it isn’t your fault.’

Josie choked back a violent urge to say that of course it wasn’t her fault, it was Aslan’s fault, and only hugged Blackbriar tighter.

‘That’s alright,’ she said after a moment.

This seemed to reassure Blackbriar, and her snuffles got quieter and further between. She wiped her face on her shoulder.

‘Did Aslan say something bad was going to happen?’ asked Josie, trying to be gentle, but unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

‘That- that is not part of your story,’ said Blackbriar.

‘If you say so,’ said Josie. ‘I think we are all in the same story together, whether we like it or not.’

‘I promise I will explain later, Lady Josie,’ said Blackbriar. ‘If I possibly can. I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry, Blackbriar,’ said Josie. ‘If you’re not supposed to tell me, you’re not supposed to tell me.’

Josie felt trapped and powerless like she had so many times before in her life, tangled up in a plot arranged by powers immeasurably greater than she was. It was as if she were a fish out of water, floundering for breath. She angrily told herself not to feel like that. She was not a blind girl that nobody wanted anymore. She was the Mistress of Telmar. She had a son; she had a husband. She was supposed to be someone in this world, she was supposed to be playing a part in a glorious heroic quest. But the world was still closed in around her like a narrow box, and she could not think of any way out of it.

‘I will explain if I can,’ promised Blackbriar again. ‘I will make everything freshly-scented.’

‘Freshly-scented is a very nice way to put it,’ said Josie, giving the woman’s shoulders a squeeze. ‘We would say ‘clear’, usually.’