Chapter Eleven Mount Damāvand #2
“Bind me to Jordan College,” Malcolm said carefully.
They flew on. Malcolm could smell something different in the air, something cold and clean, possibly snow.
The night was just at that point when the darkness was full of little momentary swirling points of slightly-less-darkness, not even anything like the first gray of dawn, but perhaps the closest we come to seeing individual photons.
The dark was leaching out of the sky; above them, a thousand brilliant points of starlight were being absorbed into the greater background luminosity of the dawn.
Malcolm let his mind spread out beyond his senses, and he heard Pan whisper, or thought he did, and he thought he answered, but he had no idea what either of them said.
In his semi-dream state he saw a bird high above them: a white bird with sharply angled wings, maybe an Arctic tern, a great traveler on its annual migration.
Then, with a suddenness that was almost audible, the first rays of the sun struck them. They were flying directly towards it, and in the dazzle Malcolm felt as if he were actually inside one of his auroras, as he called them, the spangled ring grown sky-sized and all-enveloping.
The gryphon’s wings stopped beating, and the regular, tireless up-and-forward muscular thrust stilled to a level glide.
Malcolm lifted himself up a little and looked out and down to a wild landscape of mountains and jagged ridges and dark valleys, snow-covered, still in the shadow of night; but as he looked, the sun climbed higher and touched the very topmost peaks, so they blazed like a hundred fires.
From somewhere close in the sky another gryphon cried, a scream that was nearly a roar, and was answered by several others from further away; and then Prince Keshvād himself uttered a scream that was louder and longer than all the rest, shaking his body so powerfully that Malcolm’s hands instinctively gripped the great feathers, and clung even tighter as the gryphon tilted slightly to the left.
“Look!” said Pan. He slipped out of Malcolm’s coat and stood upright, staring ahead past the gryphon’s head, his face brilliant in the sun.
Directly ahead of them a mountain reared higher than all the rest, entirely covered in snow, majestic and sharp-peaked and symmetrical.
Around them in the dawn sky the other gryphons were making their way towards it with them, like a squadron of great ships, an armada, borne on the wind towards the palace of Shahrnavāz.
—
The battery in the little anbaric truck was fully charged: good for a hundred miles on a decent road, Alice thought. Whether they could make it to a decent road was another matter. Bashing along a footpath in the woods, forcing its way past bushes and through streams, was taking up a lot of energy.
From time to time she stopped, and she and Ben listened hard for the sounds of any pursuit, but heard nothing and moved on.
“We’ll have to leave it before long,” said Ben.
“Dunno about ‘before long.’ Best to get as far as the battery’ll take us.”
“Yeah, but it’s not as if we’re going to be very hard to follow. There’s only one path, and we’re on it. And they’ll know where the path leads. They could be waiting at the end for us to turn up.”
“Hmm,” she said. “What d’you suggest, then?”
“Leave it on the path to block it, then…”
She stopped the truck. She’d heard something. He turned his head to catch what it was.
“Voices,” she whispered. “Two men. Up ahead.”
He could hear them too.
“Out,” she whispered. “Over that way, quick.”
She indicated left, where the undergrowth was thick.
Leaving the key in the ignition, she slipped out of the cab and moved as quietly as she could into the bushes until she was just out of sight of the truck, and then lay down, pulling a low branch across in front of her.
Beside her Ben lay down too, and they kept perfectly still while the voices approached.
“Hey, what’s that truck doing there?”
“The key’s still in it. Look.”
“What’s in the back?”
“Spade, rake…bucket, bag of gravel…”
“Mending potholes. Why’d they leave it here?”
“Maybe someone nicked it.”
Alice heard the truck door opening.
“Well…” said the first voice. “What d’you reckon?”
“Can’t leave it here. Blocking the path, innit?”
“Might as well…Go on, jump in.”
More door noises, some scraping of branches, a startled laugh as the little truck lurched forward, the sound of wheels moving away on rough ground, and then silence again.
“Now what?” said Ben.
“Now we find a road and beg a lift.”
Alice crawled fastidiously from the bushes and brushed herself down. Ben was sniffing the air and listening hard.
“That way,” he said, indicating a direction left of the path.
“How far?”
“Twenty minutes if we don’t stop.”
“Not much to stop for. Come on, then.”
And thirty-five minutes later, they were in a van heading for Oxford.
—
A palace for the queen of creatures who could fly would not squat heavily on the ground, even when that ground was fifteen thousand feet in the sky.
Terraces, colonnades, arches, ledges, balconies, bridges, beacon platforms, dizzying cliff-like rock faces studded with graceful caverns, broad elegant walkways, spires and pinnacles both natural and artificial, all grew like an icy immensity of ancient coral over the peak of the mountain.
As Prince Keshvād wheeled and turned in the sky before landing, Malcolm could see the extent of the gryphons’ achievement, and two details caught his eye: firstly, every structure was functional, none merely decorative; and secondly, nowhere, in the whole massive complexity towering into the thin air above every other mountain in the range, was there a single guardrail or protective wall.
It was not built for creatures who feared heights.
And it was busy. Work was going on. Gryphons, and other flying creatures too, were coming and going like bees, whether carrying things or not Malcolm couldn’t tell; a section of the mountain was being hollowed out, or so it seemed, with the sound of massive hammers beating, though there was nothing to see behind an immense buttress of snow and ice and rock that led down for thousands of feet from the summit.
Other gryphons, wearing plumes of scarlet on their eagle heads, leapt off the palace ledges and soared up high towards the incoming flight, screaming a welcome that sounded like a challenge.
Yet more formed themselves into ranks on the broadest terrace on the eastern side of the mountain, in the full blaze of the rising sun, and stood fierce and still.
Down towards them Prince Keshvād glided, and then beat his mighty wings inwards to slow his flight, and extended his lion forepaws to meet the ground.
Malcolm clung firmly to the lion fur on the gryphon’s back as they landed, and with Pan holding on to his coat, he raised himself stiffly as the prince came to a halt.
“Remember,” Pan whispered, “be gold.”
Malcolm’s hip was burning with pain, but he managed to step down to the rocky floor without stumbling.
The first thing he did then was to move around to face the prince, and then bow as low as he could, hoping the gesture would convey the proper degree of respect and appreciation.
The gryphon’s face wasn’t formed to express any human feeling; Malcolm had to hope that the stiff, impassive ferocity glaring back at him would understand his courtesy.
It was rather like trying to communicate with a coat of arms. Then the gryphon prince bowed his head in response.
And there was Gulya herself, shaking with fatigue, but eager to explain and mediate.
“Pantalaimon, Mr. Malcolm, the official who is coming out of the mountain now is the vizier to Her Majesty. You address him as ‘Your Honor.’ He will escort you at once to the Throne Room, where the Queen will—”
Pan said, “Wait. Too fast. We are not prisoners, nor are we supplicants to be told what to do.”
The vizier, a silver-feathered gryphon with the bearing of a dignified councillor of state, had come close enough to hear.
He stood nearby and listened as Pan continued.
Malcolm was impressed by the little daemon’s effrontery, but the gryphons were all gazing at him and not at Pan, as the morning sun shone full in his face.
Pan went on, “We are honored guests from the realms of gold. Before we meet the Queen we must have time to clean ourselves and rest from the rigors of the journey. We are hungry and thirsty. Once we are refreshed we shall be glad to bring our greetings in person to Her Majesty.”
The vizier bowed his head. “There is a suite of rooms prepared for you,” he said.
“We do have traffic with the human world, and ambassadors from every realm of any importance are received here. You are most welcome to all the comforts and necessities we can provide. May we know, to begin with, how we are to address you?”
“My name is Malcolm. That will do. My companion and adviser is Pan.”
The vizier inclined his head, and turned to lead the way into the mountain. Gulya hurried to walk alongside Pan, and they both followed Malcolm.
It wasn’t possible to see how the gryphons, with their lion claws, could have carved these tunnels or excavated the great caverns they led to. Malcolm was eager to know—he was eager to ask a thousand questions—but the grave and solemn vizier didn’t seem the right person to ask.