‘Keep steady,’ he said, his voice gruff. ‘Those shoes need treading in. Your feet are used to libraries.’ And she laughed, and determinedly did not look round again. Only Christopher saw Nighthand glance down at his left hand, and touch his right thumb to the palm, before he began the climb.

  They had been clambering upwards for at least an hour, perhaps two, when Christopher first noticed the marks cut into the rock. They came where the stone was smoothest: scratches, lines, curves and strikes. They looked like they had been gouged into the grey stone by a strong and confident claw. There could be no doubt about what it was.

  ‘Writing,’ he said to Mal.

  She ran her fingers over it. ‘I wish they’d taught me something useful at school, like Sphinx, instead of all that algebra.’

  At that moment, the first noise came on the wind. It was soft, barely audible, but it was there: the thrum of voices.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ said Christopher, and she turned to it, her mouth slightly open to hear better, and nodded.

  ‘It’s coming from round the side of the mountain,’ she said.

  ‘Follow!’ called Belhib. ‘Faster!’ They rounded an outcrop, moving on hands and feet – and stopped short.

  The mountain was alive with movement. Over the surface of the rock face, dropping between ridges, prowling up and down the slope with the effortless ease of vast ballerinas, lying with their faces turned to the sun and wind, were what looked, at a distance, like yellow-gold winged cats: cats that stood ten feet high.

  They walked closer, Belhib calling out in his own language as they came.

  ‘Are you telling them not to fear us?’ said Nighthand.

  ‘I am telling them not to eat you. It’s impossible for a human to hurt a sphinx.’

  Nighthand looked like he might be about to debate that, but Irian raised her eyebrows, and he fell silent.

  The sphinxes’ strength, Christopher saw, was dizzying: they leaped like coiled springs upwards over the rock, covering twenty feet at a bound. In the lee of a boulder, a circle of sphinxes was eating something meaty and unidentifiable, tearing at it with teeth as long as his fingers and twice as thick. They spoke to each other, in a brief guttural language. There was no sweetness in their faces. Christopher felt fear rise in him, and pushed it back.

  The peak came in sight; it formed the wide, blunt top of a ridge, huge and broad and windswept. Two of the largest and oldest sphinxes were at the summit, scratching with their vast forepaws into the rock face, writing.

  Christopher nudged Mal. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The whole mountainside!’

  Above their heads, as far as he could see, nearly every surface of glittering stone was written upon. Some of it was in the alphabet he knew, some of it in alphabets he had never seen, with pictures, or great hashed strokes of geometry.

  Irian too had seen. ‘I’d heard about this,’ she said. There was awe in her voice. ‘They move from mountain to mountain, etching their knowledge into the rock: histories, philosophies, songs, mathematics.’ She ran her hand along a diagram gouged into the stone: a planet, bifurcated. ‘They cut deep, so it will last a thousand years. When, after years, the whole mountain is written, they move to the next.’

  Christopher watched the two sphinxes carving into the mountain as they approached; the rock gave way to their claws with a high, grating sound. Both had tails that ended in a ball of thorns, and expressions of deepest concentration. Belhib, who was the size of a car, was clearly small, by the standards of sphinxes.

  With a final scramble, they reached the ridge. Birds circled overhead; the late-afternoon sun shone sideways into Christopher’s eyes. It was beautiful and strange enough to make you shake.

  ‘This is Naravirala,’ said Belhib. ‘She will give you your riddles.’

  And over the edge of the ridge, her fur rippling in the wind, came the largest sphinx they had yet seen.

  She was old; the fur around her mouth and ears was white. Her back was densely muscled, and her claws long and sharply pointed, and with her came a sense of overwhelming power. Her face was neither kind nor unkind; if a face could look like distilled knowledge, it would be this. She looked them over. The scrutiny was like being bitten: it made Christopher feel something had got into his skin.

  ‘I welcome you as guests,’ she said. Her voice, like Belhib’s, was tight, as if she prized words too much to waste any. ‘But you are also trespassers, until we know your purpose.’

  Irian stepped forward. She bowed, and touched two fingers to her heart. She introduced each person by name. ‘Our purpose, my lady, is that which you believe it to be.’

  Naravirala nodded. ‘Good. You know the old customs.’ Nighthand glanced towards Irian, surprised. ‘Always assume the sphinx knows. And in this case, I believe that I do. But first, the riddles.’

  FOUR RIDDLES

  Naravirala roared. The sound carried down the mountainside, and there was a rustling, a hiss and bubble of conversation, as two dozen sphinxes came loping back up it. They prowled around them, seemingly uninterested in the adult humans – their eyes were on Christopher and Mal. An unreadable expression came over the sphinx’s face as she prepared to ask the riddles.

  Naravirala turned to Nighthand.

  ‘First, the Berserker, with the strength of ten men and the courage of ten thousand. I am light as a feather, yet the strongest person can’t hold me for five minutes. What am I?’

  ‘I can think of nothing I could not hold for five minutes. A dragon, perhaps.’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  Nighthand looked across at Irian, who stood with her eyes on him, and then at Mal.

  He scowled. There was a tinge of red to his cheek. ‘I don’t know! I said, I can think of nothing. Tell me, if I forfeit, will all of you try to eat me, or just one?’

  Mal focused her eyes on him. She sucked her lips in, and puffed out her cheeks; she was turning red, her hands twisted together, her eyes wide.

  ‘Oh!’ and Nighthand gave a snort of angry relief. ‘I understand. Your breath.’

  Naravirala’s eyes flickered, but she only nodded. ‘Next, the scholar. What has words, but never speaks?’

  Irian looked straight at Naravirala. Barely above a whisper, she said, ‘A book.’

  Under his breath, Belhib muttered something that was not celebratory.

  Naravirala turned again. ‘Now the girl. For you, I ask the oldest of riddles. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?’

  Mal looked briefly panicked; and then a great relief crossed her face. ‘I know this! A person. Four legs is crawling, two legs is walking, and three legs is an old lady with a stick.’

  Belhib could be heard cracking his jaw in disgust.

  ‘And finally, boy from the Otherlands. You have been brave in a strange place; but you will have to be braver, before the end. Here is your riddle. There are two sisters. The first gives birth to the second, which in turn gives birth to the first. What are they?’

  Christopher wondered for one mad moment if the answer could be eyebrows. ‘Think,’ he whispered.

  Belhib smiled.

  ‘Is it … the sea and the land? No – that doesn’t work – wait! That’s not my answer!’

  The smile grew. Belhib was one hundred per cent dentistry. His teeth shone like daggers in the sloping sunlight.

  Sunlight. A thought kicked another thought into being. ‘I think … Is it the day and the night?’

  ‘It is.’ Naravirala dipped her head in salute, and around her all the other sphinxes followed suit. ‘You have passed our test. We will answer your question.’

  She straightened up. At her nose and mouth there was the hint of pleasure. ‘I will confess something to you. I hate riddles.’

  ‘Mother!’ said Belhib. An uneasy murmur reverberated around the mountain.

  ‘It is the truth. They bore me. I hate questions with just one answer.’

  ‘I feel the same,’ said Irian. ‘I hadn’t expected to find so much in common with a sphinx.’

  ‘For instance: consider the greatest riddle of all – what you should do with your one brief life? The answer is different for each person. There is no neat answer, though many have tried to offer one. There are no answers to being alive. There are only strong pieces of advice.’

  ‘Such as?’ said Irian. ‘The wisdom of a sphinx would be worth hearing.’

  The sphinx swept her eyes over them. ‘For example –’ and she looked at Christopher, at Mal – ‘stop expecting life to get easier. It never does; that is not where its goodness lies. Or –’ and she looked at Irian, at Nighthand – ‘do not wait for people to be faultless before you allow yourself to adore them. Adore them anyway. Such things are worth more than riddles.’ There was a murmur of dissent from the sphinxes behind her, and she flicked her tail in a quick whip of frustration, and they quietened. ‘But it is a sphinx’s duty and pact to ask riddles, so I keep the tradition.’

  ‘And too often, the riddles are solved. We have not eaten human for several years,’ said Belhib.

  ‘Enough.’ Naravirala turned a cutting look on her child; she whipped up her wings in warning, and beat them, huge feathered sails above her head. ‘Come. Humans. Let us dine.’

  ‘But we need to ask our question!’ said Mal. ‘It’s urgent! Eating will take forever.’

  ‘Are you not hungry?’

  Gelifen nipped Mal’s hand, and she said, ‘Yes, starving, but—’

  ‘I know what you’ve come to ask. It is the same question we have been asking ourselves. An hour will make no difference.’

  They dined in the lee of a standing stone on the mountain top, on hard little apples, and bird meat, with the most senior sphinxes. There were nine of them, varying in size from rhinoceros to elephant. The sphinxes’ table manners were non-existent. Christopher and Mal exchanged glances, and then followed suit, tearing with their hands and teeth at the meat. It was charred black in places, and tasted faintly of leather, but the day had left him ravenous; juice rolled down his chin.

  One of the sphinxes brought, in her mouth, a large stone bowl, and in it a heaping of purple, pear-shaped gourds; Gelifen made straight for them.

  ‘Pantherfruit!’ cried Mal. She threw one to Christopher. ‘I love these,’ she said. ‘But they go rotten very quickly once you pick them, so people make them into wine, or jam. I’ve never had them fresh.’

  The outer skin was tough – Mal spat hers out – but biting through to the flesh of it was astonishing. It was translucent, and tasted like red grape, only sweeter and deeper. He ate two so fast that juice ran down his wrists all the way to his elbows. Mal was similarly covered.

  ‘Why is it called pantherfruit?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it looks like a panther’s head. You know – they’re mythical – black, with claws – they run as fast as the wind? You must have heard of them.’

  ‘Panthers aren’t mythical.’

  She stared at him. ‘Yes they are! Huge cats, that outrun horses?’

  ‘They’re real! I’ve seen one, in a zoo. And they didn’t look particularly like fruit.’

  Naravirala spoke to them. ‘It’s true, Malum, that panthers exist.’

  Mal looked at her; but she did not argue with so many teeth.

  ‘Humans have always travelled between the Archipelago and the Continents,’ said Naravirala, ‘but still there is ignorance on both sides. People have always disbelieved travellers – particularly when they return, windswept and wild-eyed, and not quite in control of their tongues.’

  She flicked her gaze at Christopher. ‘There are many here in the Archipelago who believe that your story of Henry VIII is a metaphor, or a parable: a warning to little girls, not to get involved with kings. And your panthers, your hedgehogs, your giraffes, your swifts: they all sound just as improbable and mythic to Archipelagians as unicorns do to you.’ She rolled back her gums and bared her teeth. ‘You humans must take care that they do not become so in reality.’

  THE MAN WHO SAID NO

  At last, though, as the sun began to dip behind the mountain range to their left, Naravirala turned to the humans.

  ‘Tell me now. Tell me what you have come to ask.’

  Nighthand looked at Irian, but it was Mal who spoke. She did so carefully, and honestly. She told the sphinx the whole story, ending, ‘So we want to know – what has happened to the glimourie? Why are dragons attacking, and krakens leaving their waters?’

  The sphinx’s great eyes swept over the company.

  ‘The story is a hard one. It starts long ago.’

  Mal and Christopher sat next to each other, waiting. Gelifen stretched himself in Mal’s lap.

  ‘Do you know how the protection around the Archipelago was made?’

  Mal nodded, but Christopher shook his head.

  ‘It was three thousand years ago. The Immortal – a brave woman, known as Heletha of Antiok, made the decision to protect us from the relentless destruction caused by humankind. She chose to cut off the Archipelago from the rest of the world. She used the Glimourie Tree, from which the first magic grew – the strongest power there is, greater than that of any human or magical creature, power beyond all power – to place a barrier between the islands and the rest of the world. It allowed the magic to be concentrated here. Here it is thick enough in the soil and air for the creatures to thrive and live long, noble lives. We ourselves, we sphinxes, depend on it.

  ‘But, as the millennia passed by, it became clear there was a risk. Every few centuries, some charlatan, some crawling, vicious soul, would try to get close to the Glimourie Tree – to steal it, to take it for their own. To conjure the greatest magic, to command a power beyond human power.

  ‘It was a constant battle, to keep it safe.

  ‘So, many hundreds of years later, the Immortal – by that time, a man named Ahmed Telos, a slow-voiced, gentle man of great tenacity and care – built a maze around the tree. He went into the non-magical world – the Immortal has often travelled, to learn about the world in its entirety, and spent whole lives in the non-magical Continents – and found a single man of genius. He was a man of many parts: a scholar, an artist, an engineer, an architect, a man of peace and a man of war. His name was Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo, together with his cousin Enzo da Vinci, the finest stonemason in the world, were hailed as the greatest architects of their day; experts in the building of the most sophisticated fortifications and city walls. Leonardo drew up a master plan. He would, he said, build an impossible maze, a maze so complex that it could never be solved by those who did not know the way. The Glimourie Tree grows in a cavern, deep in the warmth of the earth; he cut the maze into the rock. He set it with traps, and tricks, and hidden perils. And safe at the heart of its deep mystery, the tree would flourish, forever safe and secure.

  ‘It was vital, therefore, that only the Immortal knew the way through the maze. So once it was built, the two men agreed to take a potion that would make them forget. It was made by a centaur – the centaurs alone know how to make potions of such power – and the two men took it, and forgot. Leonardo and Enzo returned to their homes, infinitely richer, remembering nothing of what they had done.

  ‘Since then, once in each lifetime, the Immortal enters the maze. They go to the tree. They tend to its roots. They make sure that it still thrives. And they take one infinitesimally small piece of bark, and eat it. Their skin will smell, very faintly, of the glimourie.’

  ‘Which is all very well,’ Nighthand burst in, ‘but this tells us nothing new! There is no Immortal. There hasn’t been for a hundred years. Nobody knows why.’

  Naravirala inclined her great, white-freckled head. ‘Perhaps very few humans know why. But some creatures do. We sphinxes take in news from everything – the ratatoskas, the stars, the naiads and dryads and nereids. Even the manticores.’

  Mal made a face of fear and disgust.

  ‘The manticores know a great deal,’ said Naravirala, ‘though they rarely choose to do anything helpful with their knowledge. And from these sources we have pieced together what happened, a hundred years ago. We have written it in the stone.

  ‘What happened was this:

  ‘At every death, the Immortal is reborn within moments. The baby is exhausting for its parents. All human babies are, of course, but the Immortal, as a baby, is exceptionally so: they say it laughs and weeps without pause, for the first three years.

  ‘One hundred years ago, the Immortal was born male, in the north of Lithia – he was a young man named Marik.’

  The wind was picking up. The sun had dropped below the mountain range, and it was growing suddenly, fiercely cold. Mal took off her coat, and draped it over both their laps. Christopher nodded in thanks.

  Naravirala went on, slow and clear and heavy-voiced: ‘As Marik grew to be an adult, he grew more and more furious at his fate; at what he was. He loathed the Immortal knowledge that had been laid on him. He loathed that he could forget nothing.

  ‘At last he reached a point when he could no longer bear it. He looked at the world. He saw its cruelty, and its sorrow, its bloodshed. He asked: Is it all, the Archipelago and the world beyond it – is it, the angry thing of the world, worth its own pain? Is humanity worth the pain it inflicts upon itself? His whole body revolted; his whole heart told him, No. He said: No. No to his memories, no to knowledge, no to the terrible responsibility that comes with knowledge.

  ‘So that was his great cry: No, to the world.

  ‘He told his family that he was renouncing his gift.

  ‘Everyone, of course, said that was not just mad but impossible. You cannot cease to be the Immortal.

  ‘But Marik was determined. He remembered the potion of forgetting that Leonardo and Enzo da Vinci had taken. He went to the centaurs – there is a herd on the Island of Antiok who pass the secret of the potion from son to daughter to son.

  ‘He paid them untold amounts of gold to make the potion: a potion stronger than any they had ever made. He put everything in order. There is a palace that an Immortal built six hundred years ago – the finest building in the Archipelago. Marik closed it up, locked the doors, and sent away the people. There was a boat – a dryad-wood schooner – and he hauled it out of the water and put it away.’

 

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