Songbird

1. Dislocation-3

A sudden blow across her lower back startled her awake. A second blow struck the same place. Light flared, hurting her eyes, and a voice cut through the clogged confusion of waking.

‘Move away from the door.’

Irenya winced at the blinding s***h of white. She felt hung-over. ‘David? Is that you?’

‘Move back!’ Not David. The shaft of light thinned to a sliver. As it widened once more, the edge of the door caught her across the thigh.

‘Away,’ said the voice. ‘Over there. Sit down.’ Light streamed in, revealing not the vast hostile space of the night, but a small room, bare except for an old wooden bucket in one corner. The walls were made of stone and festooned with fine cobwebs.

Afraid they would leave her in darkness again, she pulled herself upright in stiff obedience and limped to the wall. On a wide ledge lay the mattress and blanket. She settled herself on its lumpy comfort, shivering and aching all over. She needed to hold Mikey. Tears spilled over and ran down her face. She prayed David had called the police. They’d be asking questions, showing the checkout operator a photo, and fingerprinting the Corolla. David would be beside himself, what with the flu and Mikey to look after. He’ll call Natalie. She’ll help.

The youth from the previous night edged into the room, keys jangling. He groped along the wall, found a hook, and hung the lantern he was carrying. Behind him shuffled a young girl little more than a child, a bowl cradled in her arms. She stopped just inside the doorway and gaped at Irenya.

‘Meia’s mercy,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you was having a joke on me, Yashi. Instead she looks—’

‘Never mind what I said. Look to your duty,’ he cut in. ‘Set that down before you have us wading about in puddles.’

The girl remained motionless as if she hadn’t heard. Beneath a knee-length smock she wore a shift that brushed the tops of her laced boots. The upper corner of a large pocket had come loose, and the sleeves of her shift were gathered below the elbows revealing white, bony arms.

‘Sirani!’ Yashi rattled the keys at her, then dropped them into the pouch on his belt.

The girl roused herself and turned to him. ‘I think you all be wrong about her.’

He jerked his head in Irenya’s direction. The girl adjusted her grip on the bowl and resumed her shuffle, eyes fixed on the contents. ‘Well,’ added Sirani. ‘I think you all be jumping about like fat on Barrith’s griddle.’

‘And what would a country girl like you know?’ he said, sighing.

Preoccupied with settling the bowl on the stone ledge, the girl didn’t notice him follow the comment with a smile. Irenya had no idea what the exchange meant, but if the girl was referring to her, of course they were in the wrong. She couldn’t think beyond the physical discomfort of her aching head and blocked nose.

‘Water,’ she croaked.

‘This be for washing,’ said the girl, pointing thin fingers at the water. ‘But you can have a sip first if you want.’

As she lifted the bowl, Irenya noticed the girl’s hands were scarred. Irenya tried to steady the bowl, but her own hands were cold. She managed to gulp one mouthful before water slopped into her lap. The girl sighed an apology and Yashi grunted. Irenya dabbed at wet denim using a corner of the blanket. It looked as if she had wet herself. She clamped her teeth hard to keep her chin from quivering and concentrated on rubbing the denim. If their intention was to humiliate her, they had succeeded.

Another grunt from the man prodded Sirani to action. She produced a cloth, plunged it into the bowl now clutched in the crook of one arm, gave the cloth a brief squeeze, then proceeded to wipe Irenya’s face as if she were a child. The man looked on. Water dripped down Irenya’s cheeks, into her mouth and off her chin, wetting the crotch of her jeans even more.

She grabbed at the wet rag. ‘I’ll do it myself!’

Sirani stumbled backward and dropped the bowl. It struck the floor, sending shards of pottery across the cell. Yashi pulled the girl away and raised a fist. Irenya reeled between fear and fury, certain he would hit her.

Footsteps echoed down the passage and someone shouted. ‘Yashi? What is wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he called back, glaring at Irenya. ‘Dropped the water, is all.’

‘Hurry,’ yelled the voice. ‘We must go.’

Yashi gave an easy reply, but maintained his glare.

Irenya pressed her hands into her lap and her mouth twisted out of control. ‘Please. I’m really sorry. I just want to go home.’

The girl peered from behind his shoulder. ‘Sorry, Miss. Only meant to be helping.’ She stuffed the wet cloth back in her pocket. ‘No need to tidy your hair. So short!’

Irenya slipped to the floor and began retrieving broken pottery from the puddles.

‘Leave it,’ said Yashi.

She stood obediently, feverish and utterly miserable. In the passage three more men surrounded her. She started up the first flight of stairs flanked by her escort.

They walked along corridors now and again glimpsing patches of sky. The fresher air cleared her head. In every alcove and foyer there were paintings or plaques or large urns. Many of the floors were creamy marble, seamed with red and brown striations and inlaid with brass patterns of animals and birds. Tapestries, their colours threaded with what looked like gems, draped the walls. The place was beautiful. It intimidated her, made her furious. Someone had money. Someone who thought they could unlawfully deprive her of her freedom, keep her from her home, from David and her baby. When I’m out of here, I’ll bring the police straight round. And Harvey’s will know just what kind of neighbours they’re sharing that wall with.

They stepped into an arched colonnade. A cool breeze brushed her face and chilled the wet denim. She was standing at the edge of a large courtyard enclosed by two circular buildings and a series of walls. Rising above the slate rooftops were mountains, marching peak after peak and glowing in the early morning sun. Disbelief shredded every thought in her head. She could not possibly be next door to Harvey’s. Not any longer. A cold fear clamped her stomach.

‘Oh my god! Where the hell am I? What…’ The guards gripped her arms and urged her on. She squirmed free and faced Yashi. ‘Where are we? This isn’t Melbourne. Where am I?’

He laid a hand on her shoulder and pushed her forward.

She dropped to her knees and let out a long howl. ‘No, no, no-o-o. My baby, my baby. No-o-o-o.’

The guards grabbed her and tried to get her up. She lashed out with fists and feet, her cries rising to screams. They picked her up and in a small plain room they sat her on a chair. She slid to the floor, curled up, and wept.

She heard a man’s voice close to her ear. ‘Lady, listen to me. If you wish for answers then you must calm down. You are about to face the archprince, who will decide what must be done. You need to stop crying. You need to be polite. No harm will come to anyone here if they are truthful.’

Irenya looked up at the speaker. She remembered the face from the night before. The young man had called him Captain. ‘How…’ She hiccupped. ‘How… How far am I from Melbourne? I feel sick.’

Her thirst satisfied with a glass of fruity cordial and her face rinsed in cold water, she was ready. Four guards surrounded her and she was on her feet, her body feeling weightless and disconnected one minute, heavy as lead the next. She had to be dreaming, surely—one of those dreams so real it’s still there after waking, the emotional imprint burning its message in the darkness. Soon she would blink. She would make out the familiar bedroom curtains, too thin to completely block out the neighbour’s security light, and the squeezed air in her throat would move again. But there was no awakening and the nightmare rolled on.

They turned a corner and approached a pair of doors. Four liveried guards stood on duty. A handful of people, some of them children, stretched along one wall. A youth dressed in trousers too short for him babbled at her, saliva spitting from a protuberant tongue. A woman gently restrained him. Heads swivelled to stare at her. Irenya looked at the floor. She felt sick and dizzy.

From the dimness of the passage she stepped, blinking, into light and heard the doors close. At first she could not make out any detail and wondered if it was a chapel, or some kind of hall. Sunlight streamed through the windows opposite. She raised one hand and squinted into the haze. Everything appeared distant, as if she were looking through a telescope the wrong way. To her left stood more guards and a youth, his face haloed by a glowing mass of red curls. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, Irenya saw she was standing at the end of a long carpet and there were many people sitting with their backs to her.

In the light-saturated air at the far end of the carpet stood a huge bird of prey carved in wood, its legs forming the framework of a throne. A proud head reached into the higher spaces of a domed glass ceiling. Its wings stretched out to graceful pinions from a feathered chest, as if, in the next breathless moment, the creature would snap its earthbound mooring and fly through the roof, carrying with it the man who sat between its talons.

His elbows were resting on the arms of the chair, his fingers curled around the decorative knobs. His head was turned away and he had not yet seen her. She concentrated on the profile visible against the darker wood of the throne and had the impression of a strong nose and jaw. His clothes were dark, indeterminate in the drifty light, and his booted feet were placed square on the step of the throne. A silver helmet covered his head. He was speaking to a man who stood beside him, attentively stooped. Irenya recognised the second person as Lord Someone-or-other from the previous night. The two men were locked in quiet conference.

The angle of the man’s profile altered and Irenya knew he had seen her. He sat motionless for what felt like an eternity, holding her in a private, slantwise appraisal. Then he straightened and beckoned her with a single movement of his cupped fingers.

Heads turned in unison to look at her. Amid the stir and rustle, a murmuring surged to exclamation. Irenya stood transfixed. Chills chased across her skin and her heart pounded above a gathering nausea. The man waited, the creature towering protectively, possessively over him. Irenya stepped forward, but she still felt dizzy.

She didn’t remember falling, only the surprise as her body hit the floor. The carpet beneath her cheek smelled reassuringly of dust. Time spun out and the silence lengthened. The nausea retreated. She raised her head and saw a man standing at her side, a stocky man with bushy eyebrows, but even as she looked at him, he nodded once toward the throne and returned to his place. Through her discomfort, she realised he had intended to help her but had been ordered away.

She regained her feet and advanced, step by step, toward the throne. Sweat dampened her forehead and she knew her face was sickly white. When she reached the fringed end of the long carpet, she stopped, conscious of a sharp embarrassment—as well as the humiliation of fainting, the crotch of her jeans was wet and the fashionable new haircut made her neck feel naked. She stared at the floor. A loud voice startled her.

‘I am Lord Gedric, commander to the archprince, Elaaron irIlketh, before whom you stand. If you have reason to be here, let us hear it now.’

Irenya licked her dry lips. Several words of complaint came to her, but when she opened her mouth her voice emerged as a squeak. She bent her head again. A shaft of sunlight, a finger of misty gold, lit the rose-brown streaks in the marble floor. Her head cleared and the dizziness eased. She took a long shaky breath and returned the cool stare of the man on the throne.

‘I am Irenya O’Neil,’ she said, ‘and I want to go home.’

He did not respond. The helmet he wore was shaped low over his forehead. A gemstone set in the centre gleamed like a glass eye. The curved sides of the helmet covered his ears and came to a point on each cheekbone, fitting so closely it appeared to her that the flesh of his face had been welded to the helmet. His third eye stared at her, vigilant and unblinking. He sat at ease, scrutinising her while she waited, her head floating in the dazed air and time counted by the shifting dust burned to white in the sunlight.

The bird watched—ruby eyes below neat, slanted ears. The huge beak curved to an armoured hook, blackened with age. The line of the wings flowed in a smooth curve from pinions to folded haunches and furred back feet. A long, tufted tail wrapped around the base of the throne. Not a bird—a griffin.

Mi-i-ghty creature proud and fierce, ri-i-se again the clouds to pierce

Trap’d forever in—

‘Do not expect to gain your freedom so easily.’ Lord Gedric’s voice sliced through her drift of memory. ‘You used a mirror to enter this land, in the very heart of the realm, the archprince’s citadel. You are accountable.’

Irenya heard the catch in her voice. ‘I want to go home. Please.’

‘You are an intruder.’

‘Then you should call the police. I don’t even know where I am, for heaven’s sake.’

The odd, down-turned corner of his mouth pulled into an odder configuration. A scar ran from his cheek to his mouth and ended in a knot of tissue, a welt that set his features in a permanent sneer. His chin lifted. Before he could reply, another voice answered her, a voice that carried without the cut of Gedric’s.

‘This is the realm of Dar Orien,’ said the man on the throne. ‘Why are you here?’

Irenya felt herself swaying between emotions. His voice invited trust, a slow beat of wings that calmed her panic and subdued her anger. She was a teacher and a musician, and she knew about voices; no one with a voice like that could be unreasonable. She looked from him to the mountains and back again.

‘I was looking for the supermarket car park,’ she told him. ‘You know Harvey’s Nite Mart? Well—’ She plunged on, unable to stop the stream of words. The last thing that made any sense to her was running down the concrete ramp outside Harvey’s, her hands glued to the trolley. ‘The ramp isn’t really steep but for some reason the trolley… I don’t know… It went out of control.’ Dar—what did he call the place? ‘I wasn’t feeling well. Then I fell, or maybe I fainted, must have hit my head, but when I came to, I was lying on the landing. By the big mirror. Except it didn’t look like a mirror at first.’

There was no response to her confiding rush. His silence left her stranded. She chewed at the inside of her cheek and tipped her head at the view beyond the windows. ‘This can’t be Melbourne.’

She continued half to herself. ‘Maybe I did hit my head and all this is hallucination.’ She glanced up at the man sitting between the griffin’s feet, and a peculiar thought occurred to her. Was he passenger or prey? ‘I just wish I could wake up.’

‘Irenya O’Neil, let me assure you, I am no illusion.’

Unsure of what to say next, Irenya looked at the wet patch on her jeans, wanting to explain, but it seemed rude to speak of it, as if her untidy appearance was entirely her doing.

‘I need to get home. I have a baby,’ slipped out. Her chin quivered. She clasped her hands together and held them over the wet patch. She looked up when he spoke.

‘What have you to say of your power to travel through mirrors?’ he asked.

A sudden heat flushed her skin. The question was silly. Was it a private joke at her expense? She needed to sit. How could he sit there and watch her swaying on her feet?

‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last.

‘You used a mirror to pass from your world into Dar Orien,’ he said. ‘Travelling through a mirror is a feat that would require great power.’

She sucked in a lungful of air and let it out carefully so as not to disturb her fragile sense of balance. He was sitting there, still as stone in the white-gold haze, his headpiece gleaming, and all the time the griffin watched her with predatory eyes. Something was wrong. There was a gap in her memory. She was certain it all started in the building next door to Harvey’s. But the mountains… She tried again.

‘I don’t understand. I don’t know this place or those mountains. I haven’t hurt anyone or stolen anything. I just want to go home. Please, I need to go home.’

He leaned forward and the white gem on his forehead splintered into blue as if the stone possessed a heart of sapphire. It looked even more like an eye. He fastened her with a deep blue gaze.

‘You have come from another world. That much is clear. You crossed the barrier and you are answerable.’ He sat back. ‘There is only one way you could have come through the mirror—by the use of power. You must be Gifted.’

Irenya shook her head slowly, side to side, kept shaking it, and all the time his eyes held hers. She saw again the concrete ramp and the fluorescent brightness of the supermarket doorway, not reflections but tangible things in the black void. Her terrified run down the ramp had ended on his staircase. What happened between Harvey’s doorway and the stair landing was a mystery, yet his mirror had given her proof of the connection.

‘Irenya O’Neil, have you nothing else to say?’

She put her fingertips to her head to hold it still, pressed hard to make her brain stop spinning. She swallowed. ‘Sorry. I need to go home now.’

His features set into decisive lines, but it was Gedric who spoke. ‘Your presence here is a grave threat to us all. You may be a spy. We have good reason to be cautious. We do not know why you are here or what might follow you through the mirror.’

Two guards materialised at her side and caught her arms. She tried to pull free. ‘Let go, please.’ But the guards were already marching her out.

On either side, the people were on their feet, staring at her as she passed. One face stood out for a moment, the man with the bushy eyebrows who had earlier moved to help her. His brown-gold eyes were wide open, and in his concern, Irenya saw a reflection of her own fear.

In the cell, the guards left her some light, a sliver of white beneath the door. When she stopped crying, she curled up on the shelf that served as a bed and kept her eyes fixed on the strip of light, her hope and her doom.

She tried to concentrate, recall the sequence of events. The panic attack had stopped on the ramp. Then there was the black hole, right in front of her. What happened after that was a blank. Would the black hole still be there? Was it ever there? Or was she lying in a hospital bed hallucinating? The beginning… go back to the beginning… She went back to the beginning, several times, but fear cut through every attempt at reason. Black holes don’t appear in brick walls. But her grandmother’s voice floated out of the darkness. “They do indeed, dearie, and I should know.”

Her head ached and her stomach churned. A prolonged and uncomfortable gurgle issued from deep in her belly. The strip of light beneath the door shook and splintered when she looked at it for too long. Her thoughts came in fragments, spinning back and forth. All her theories slipped away, leaving yet more questions. Who were these people in their strange clothes? And the mountains: was it New Zealand? The sick drop in her stomach told her she must have been drugged. That’s how they’d moved her. But why? An experiment? Ransom? No one would consider her of value, a thirty-one-year-old teacher with no money. Go back to the beginning.

The whole thing was a gigantic misunderstanding. Soon she would be home. David might even laugh about it and the answer to her predicament would be so obvious she’d wonder why it hadn’t occurred to her immediately. She had told them the truth, so no harm would come to her. She lay very still, her toes curled tight. The urge to throw up competed with a growing turbulence in her abdomen. Could she find the bucket quickly if she needed? The relentless circuitry of her brain failed. She buried her face in the fusty blanket and cried like a child.

Noise jerked her out of restless dozing. It took several seconds to recognise the din. Many feet, marching. They passed by, the rhythm out of step with her pulse.

She could grovel, fall on her knees and beg for mercy. My baby needs me.

The beginning… go back to the beginning. Think it through. But her thoughts were frozen somewhere on the borders of a nightmare.