Part 24 (1/2)

'If they ain't blocked too,' said Dido. 'Well, it's not much of a place, with the Aurocs, and so cold, and the air so thin.' And memories of Queen Ginevra and her awful end, she thought. 'Maybe the folk had all better go and live in Lyonesse. Things are better there.'

'Artaius is certainly going to have his work cut out for the first few years,' Bran observed. 'He won't have too much time to grieve for Ginevra.'

'Now you don't have a steward,' Dido said to Captain Hughes. 'I'll do the job, if you like. I daresay I could manage; I used to help Mr Holy a lot. I know where things are.'

'Certainly not!' Captain Hughes replied disapprovingly. 'You? A young lady? A pa.s.senger? That would be wholly unsuitable! No, no, I have already arranged for Brandywinde there to undertake the job; he wishes to be repatriated, he can work his pa.s.sage.'

'But what about his hands?'

'It seems they are on the mend.'

And indeed, Mr Brandywinde was sitting in the middle of a circle of interested auditors, waving his fingers about. 'Feeling began to come back into them just like that,' he was saying, 'as soon as the queen rushed through that door. Oh what respite from pain, what legerdemain, when one's fingers can do up one's b.u.t.tons again! What a spasm of joy through my happy heart gambols, when a tremor of feeling returns to my fambles!'

Captain Hughes, in a corner, was busy writing up his log.

'a.s.sistance was rendered to the Ruler of New c.u.mbria to reclaim the stolen lake Arianrod. The matter has been satisfactorily concluded. The water is now back in its original site, and the treaty of alliance between Great Britain and New c.u.mbria has been re-ratified .. .'

'Jeeminy,' said Mr Multiple, hanging out of the window. 'Will you look at that ice?'

A high white rampart was moving across the stony plain, rubbing out cactus and sigse trees as if they were mustard-and-cress. But the little train dashed past just in time, within a hundred yards of the approaching glacier, and rattled down the steep descent by the Severn river and its seven majestic waterfalls.

Mr Multiple had had the forethoughtfulness to provide himself with a bagful of plantains, bananas and chirimoya, which he kindly shared with Dido.

'You won't suddenly turn out to be King Somebody, Mr Mully?' Dido asked him apprehensively, munching on a plantain; and he a.s.sured her that he would not.

'Didn't I tell you that it would all come right in the end?' Bran said, sitting down beside them.

'Not for poor Queen Ginevra, it didn't.'

'She had had her own way for thirteen hundred years. That is long enough.'

'And what'll happen to Elen?'

'She will marry Artaius later on. And they will have three children called Llyr, Penardun and Lud Hudibras.'

'Devil take it, I have left my Floater behind!' suddenly exclaimed Captain Hughes, looking up from his writing. But he added, 'Never mind, I will design an improved one when I am back on board the Thrush.'

'Would you like me to tell you a story?' asked Bran, noticing that Dido's expression was rather sad.

'Yes. Thanks, mister. I'd like that. Just a minute, though; I want to see them again before that big wall of ice gets in the way and blocks them off.'

She wriggled her way back to the window and hung out of it, looking her last at the thirteen great volcanoes, saying goodbye to them in her mind: Ambage and Arrabe, Ertayne and Elamye, Arryke, Damask, Damyake, Pounce, Pampoyle, Garesse, Caley, Calabe and Catelonde.

JOAN AIKEN, who died in 2004, came from a

family of writers: she was the daughter of the

American poet, Conrad Aiken; her sister,

Jane Aiken Hodge, is also a novelist.

Joan Aiken wrote over a hundred