on to one of the ropes, and sang, lovely clean notes and strange words. It was a tune I knew from Skarr. It made your heart lift, that song, but it did nothing for the balloon. We came so low that the wicker boat began pitching and tossing like a real boat. Foamy water swirled up through the chinks.
“Everyone sing!” Rees gasped, still pumping. “Come on! All of you!”
He began to sing too, in gasps, the same song. Finn, Ivar and Ogo joined in, in jerks. Finn knew one set of words, Ivar and Ogo another, and they all roared them out regardless, song of Skarr muddled with words of Bernica. Green Greet flapped down on to Finn’s heaving shoulders and seemed to be croaking out the song too.
I looked down and met Plug-Ugly’s wide accusing eyes. He thought I should sing too. “But you must know I can’t sing!” I wailed.
He went on looking, the way only a cat can.
“All right,” I said. “All right!” And I did the only thing I could think of, which was to intone the ‘Hymn of the Wise Women’. The words of it had never made sense to me. Aunt Beck had once confessed that she couldn’t understand them either. But I boomed them out.
“I am the salmon leaping the fall,
I am the thunder of the bull that gores,”
I boomed, all on one note.
“Ha galla ferrin magonellanebry!” Riannan’s sweet voice carolled.
“The sun spearing the lake is me,” I boomed grimly on.
“I am the note of the bird.”
“And let the soft rain fall on me!” Finn roared, pumping.
“We men of Skarr shall triumph all the way!” Ivar and Ogo yelled, pumping too.
“Verily the cunning of the cat is in me,” I persevered.
“Ha galla fenin hiraya delbar,” Rees sang along with Riannan.
We must have sounded like the maddest choir ever assembled. I looked across at Aunt Beck and found she was chanting our Hymn too. She seemed not to notice she was being showered with spray as she did so.
“And the power of running is mine to claim,
The fire is in me that gives the dragon wings
And this I will use when the purpose merits,
When the light needs to lance to the target
And the growth comes with the turn of the year …”
I had got so far when I noticed Riannan pointing upwards, looking amazed as she sang. I looked up too and was so astonished that I nearly forgot to go on chanting. Beyond the large patchwork curve of the balloon I could see a great red wing beating, and if I leant backwards I had just a glimpse of a long whisking lizard tail. Blodred. That’s Blodred! I thought. She’s grown huge. She’s helping!
But it was an absolute rule that you did not stop chanting the Hymn once you had started, so I went on to:
“When the moon changes from full to crescent …”
And, as I chanted on, I saw Rees pause in his song – though not in his pumping – to point upwards too. I think he said something like, “I knew Blodred was special!” But the Hymn was not finished, so I went grimly on.
“I am the moon and the changes of the moon.
Indeed, I am all things changing and living
And burn like a spark in the mind’s eye.”
As I chanted, I imagined seeing Blodred above us on top of the balloon, clutching the many-coloured fabric with her lizardly hands and working her webbed wings to take us along. Rees had been wrong to say they were not really wings, I thought. They were wings. And I thought the sea might be getting a little further away.
But the others were still singing. And Aunt Beck, instead of stopping at the end of the Hymn, simply went back to the beginning again.
“I am the salmon leaping the fall …”
I hurriedly joined in. We went through the whole Hymn twice more before we were somehow hauling ourselves into the sky again and no longer being drenched with sea spray. Almost without our realising it, we were up into dazzling sun. Out of the dazzle I could see a grey-blue misty hump. We were nearly at Logra, it seemed. And we were going higher and higher yet.
“Right, everyone,” Rees said. “Stop now. Phew!” He sat down on the wickerwork with a crunch.
And – I am fairly sure – we went on upwards. My ears felt strange.
“Going deaf,” Aunt Beck announced. “Ears cracking.”
“Not really,” Riannan said soothingly. “This happens on high mountains too. Your ears pop.”
Now I could see a whole golden curve of landscape on the horizon. If I looked up, I could see a red slice of Blodred’s left wing, flapping us steadily onwards. Looking forward again, I could pick out a line of white foam where the barrier must be, although the barrier was of course invisible.
“What do we do,” I said, “if the barrier turns out to be a dome over Logra and we can’t get through?”
“Then we’ll land on top of it and wait for evening,” Rees said, “when the wind turns the other way. We’ll just have to hope it doesn’t blow us back to some part of Gallis where the priests can see us. We’d be in real trouble then.”
“Would the priests really object to the balloon?” Ivar asked. “Gronn struck me as a very easy-going man.”
Finn chuckled a little. “Then you don’t know priests, lad.”
“The very least that would happen,” Rees said, “was that we would all be put in prison for years, while they decided exactly how unholy we’ve been.”
To my surprise, this seemed to register with Aunt Beck. “Now he tells us!” she said.
Rees looked a little rueful. “I wanted you all to come,” he said.
“And we have,” I said. It surprises me now that even then I didn’t realise what little planning we had done and how we all seemed to think it was going to be easy once we got to Logra. Everyone was staring forward at the steadily growing curve of land. It was coming up fast, but I still couldn’t tell if the barrier covered it or not.
Soon we were above the white line of surf. It was obvious the breakers were huge. The wind must have been really strong. There was a gap of calm sea, and then we were rushing across what ought to have been land. But it was a marshy mix of mud and water. I thought I saw submerged houses and then a straggling of tents where the people from the houses seemed to be camping out.
“You know,” Rees said, “it looks as if the barrier has made the rivers back up into floods.”
We had no time to consider this. A great wind suddenly sprang up. It hit me in the back like a hard hand and I know I yelped. Finn grabbed Green Greet to him by the tips of his one hand. Then we were riding with the wind, speeding over swollen rivers and lakes with trees standing out of them; then over inundated fields, winding roads, villages and a small town. I saw Blodred’s wing retreat to the top of the balloon. Shortly, she came sliding down a rope to Rees’s shoulder, a small lizard again. And still we hurtled on.
Logra is enormous. It is by far the largest of the islands. We rushed across it, over field after field, village after town, for a good hour to judge by the steadily climbing sun, and the other coast of it was still not in sight. At first, I thought the place was even flatter than Bernica, but we drifted lower as we went and then I could see that there were plenty of hills and valleys, just lower than I was used to and all seeming splendidly fertile. Now we could see people on the roads, riding horses or walking. Most of them were looking up at us and pointing. Others ran out of houses to look and point too.