The Islands of Chaldea. Diana Wynne Jones
pieces of hair blowing from her neatly plaited head. “Nonsense!” she said, and turned away.
“I tell you it is!” boomed the Captain. “And turning the sky purple. Look, woman!” He pointed with a vast arm and, sure enough, the bits of sky I could see were a strange, hazy lilac colour.
Aunt Beck said, “Nonsense, man. The barrier is doing it.” She picked up one of the bags and began punching and pounding it to turn it inside out.
“I have never seen the sky this colour,” Seamus Hamish declared. “And you must take at least this plaid down. My steersman can’t see his road for it.”
“Aileen,” said Aunt Beck, “take the plaid and peg it somewhere else.”
I did as I was bid. The only other place I could find was a rope on the front of the ship. I got Ogo to help me because the wind was now so fierce that I couldn’t hold the plaid on my own. We left it flying out from the prow like a strange flag and went back to find Aunt Beck had turned all the bags inside out and was strapping them to the rowing boat to air. The ship’s cook was looming over her.
“And if you didn’t take my basin, who did?” he was saying.
Ogo and I exchanged guilty looks. Ogo had fetched the basin for Ivar and I had dropped it into the sea.
Aunt Beck shrugged. “None of my doing, man. The Prince of Kinross was unwell in the night. The bowl is now unfit to cook with.”
The cook turned and glared at Ivar, who was leaning against one of the masts with his hair blowing, looking very fit and rosy. He stared back at the cook in a most princely way. “My apologies,” he said loftily.
“Then I must mix my dough some other way, I suppose,” the cook said grumpily. And he went away muttering, “Always bad luck to sail with a witch. The curse of Lone on you all!”
Aunt Beck didn’t seem to hear, which was lucky. Nothing enrages her more than being called a witch. She simply got up and went below to tidy her hair.
“What is the curse of Lone?” Ogo asked me anxiously as we stood among the flapping garments. They were flapping more and more as the wind rose. The ship was pitching and waves were hissing against the deck.
I had never heard of the curse, but Ivar said, “Obvious. It means that you disappear like the Land of Lone did.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth when there was a grinding and a jolting from underneath, followed by a crunching from somewhere up at the front. The ship tilted sideways and seemed to stop moving. Above the noise of several huge waves washing across the deck, I could hear Seamus Hamish screaming curses at the steersman and the steersman bawling back.
“You slithering, blind ass’s rear end! Look what you did!”
“How is a man to steer with that woman’s washing in his face? All I could see was her drawers flapping!”
“I wish you hadn’t said that about the curse,” I shouted at Ivar. “I think we’ve run into the barrier.”
“It was the cook made the curse, not me!” he yelled back. He was hanging on to the mast. Ogo and I clutched at the rowing boat. We all had seawater swilling around our ankles.
But we had not run into the barrier. When Aunt Beck shot back on deck, still pinning her plait up around her head, she said, “Ah, I thought as much from the colour of the sea. We’re into a piece of the lost land here.”
As the Dominie had so often told us, there was a line of reefs and rocks in the sea between Logra and Skarr that were all that remained of the Land of Lone after it broke up and sank in the earthquake. The Dominie had sailed out to see it for himself when he was young, and he said that there was ample proof that it had once been inhabited. He had found broken crockery and pieces of fine carving lodged among the rocks. Sailors told him that some of the longer skerries even had remains of buildings on them. Ogo was always very impressed by this.
“The Dominie told us all about it,” he said excitedly to Aunt Beck. “He found a carved comb and most of a fine vase. Can we go and look, do you think?”
“Oh, shut up! Who cares?” Ivar said.
“But I always wondered—” Ogo started again.
By this time, Seamus Hamish was bawling for us all to climb off on to the rocks to lighten the ship, so that he could get us afloat again and see what the damage was. The poor ship was grinding back and forth, back and forth, which sounded very dangerous, and sailors were already ducking under the clotheslines with boxes and bundles of cargo, to lower them carefully overboard. Some of them stopped and helped us down too. Ogo was so eager that he jumped down by himself in a great floundering leap.
“And the sea all around the lost land is always brown with its earth,” I heard him saying, while the cook was passing me down into someone’s big tattooed arms.
Ivar of course could not be outdone by Ogo. He leapt by himself too, and landed with a clatter and twisted his ankle and complained about it for the next hour. And Aunt Beck went down as she had come aboard, peacefully riding another sailor.
“There will be no damage,” she said to me as she was carried past me. “Can they not trust me to protect the ship I sail in?”
Her sailor dumped her up beyond the rocks in a very expressive ‘no comment’ way. I ambled along to where she was and found that the place we had run into was really quite a large island, sandy and rocky and desolate under the queer, hazy lilac sky. There was a bit of cliff ahead about as tall as Ogo and, above that, there seemed to be some trees.
“Can we explore?” Ogo was asking eagerly. “How long do we have?”
“I’ll see,” said Aunt Beck.
I looked back at the poor ship as Aunt Beck called over to the Captain. There it was, lying sideways and grinding, grinding, between two prongs of rock, and hung all over with coloured clothing. Very undignified. Seamus Hamish was busy getting the sails in, but he yelled back that we could have an hour. And he told the cook and another sailor to go with us.
“I shall stay here,” Ivar said. “My ankle really hurts.”
We left him sitting on a rock surrounded in yellow sea foam while we made for the cliffs. I was quite as eager as Ogo was. The Dominie had said that the earthquake had happened over a thousand years ago and, as far as I knew, I had never seen anywhere that old. Aunt Beck was, as always, demure and restrained, but she seemed to me to be springing up the cliff as eagerly as any of us. It was one of the easiest climbs I have ever made, although I must confess that my good dress suffered a little on the way.
Halfway up, Ogo said, “Hey! What’s this?” and picked up something that looked like a big broken saucepan lid. It seemed to be made of very old black leather. We all gathered on a crumbly ledge to examine it. You could still see that there had been patterns stamped on it.
Aunt Beck had just taken the thing to hold the patterns to the light, when Ivar came scrambling limpingly up beside us.
“Ogo,” he said. “You’re supposed to be my servant. You’re supposed to stay with me. You know I’ve hurt my ankle. What are you doing going off and picking up rubbishy old shields for?”
“It was a shield, I think,” Aunt Beck said, turning the thing around. She has beautifully-shaped, artistic fingers. I am always impressed when she handles things. “These patterns—” she began.
“Throw it away,” said Ivar.
“No, don’t,” said the cook. “I can sell it on Bernica. They like old things there.”
“These