Law of the Wolf Tower: The Claidi Journals Book 1, Tanith Lee [pocket ebook reader .TXT] 📗

Something INCREDIBLE. Something unthought of and impossible – has occurred.

I have to organize my mind, which feels as if it’s whirling about, and my heart is bird-flying and flapping around inside me. I keep laughing out loud.

I’m not in our room. I’ve climbed up to another place. I’m sitting here, but inside me everything is jumping and spinning. How can I start to tell you?

Let me go back, back to the morning, and begin again.

EXCITEMENT BY AIR

The Garden stretches for many miles in all directions, away from the House.

We walked slowly down the green, closely-cut lawns, Pattoo, Daisy and I. And then down lots of mossy steps, with mossy statues standing by them.

The Gardeners keep everything perfect, and the slaves attend to all the cunning mechanisms that keep the Garden watered and nourished. The Garden is even kept warm, when the weather turns cold, by a system of underground furnaces and hot-water pipes, quite like those used in the House.

Aside from maintenance, the Garden is also very artistic, to please the royalty. Here and there, areas may even look a little overgrown, or there might be a pavilion a bit ruined. But the overgrowings are always carefully clipped to just the right amount of wildness, and the ruin will be clean and gleaming, with ivy trained up on wires. Even decay is planned here, and controlled.

The House, which is the centre of the Garden, showed from the steps, every time we took a left turn. I’ll describe it quickly. It’s a terraced building, with columns, white and pink, and with sloping roofs scaled in dark green and gold.

Above, through the leaves, the sky was that breath-taking blue that sings. The sort of sky that makes you feel something astonishing and marvellous is about to happen – only it never does.

‘Oh, come on, come on,’ panted Pattoo. She’s always nervous. She likes to please. Which is sensible really. She’s seldom beaten.

But Daisy snapped, ‘I can’t go any faster. I’ve already spilled some of this filthy stuff. Do you think they’ll notice?’ She added to me.

‘Umm.’

Perhaps they wouldn’t. There are twenty or so Ritual oils that have to be brought to any special planting in the Garden, each of them highly scented and sticky.

Daisy’s flagon of oil was noticeably low, and besides you could see the mark on her dress where most of it had gone.

(We were wearing melon green today, to tone with Jade Leaf’s deeper green dress. And our hair was powdered paler green. The ladies generally insist their maids complement their own choice of colours. An order arrives before every function. The dresses too weren’t comfortable. For the past month or so the fashion has been for stiff-bodiced, ankle-length silk tubes, which is all right in a way if you’re not big, though Pattoo is rather. But when it comes to walking, you have to take mincing little tiny steps, or you a) rip the dress, or b) fall over flat.)

Pattoo and I scrubbed Daisy’s dress-tube with our decorative gauze scarves. This made things worse.

‘Stand behind us,’ I said. ‘She may not see.’

But Jade Leaf almost certainly would.

We teetered on.

The sun was hot, but beautiful fragrances throbbed from the flowers. Sculpted woods and thickets poured down towards the river, which sparkled.

It’s a lovely place, to be honest. I mean, it is to look at. And for royal people I’m sure it’s lovely altogether.

At the bottom of the mossy steps, the lion house runs behind gilded bars. The lion house is large, complicated-looking, and their whole enclosure is enormous. But the House lions are normally on view. They seem to put themselves where they can be admired. They play and sleep and sun themselves, and are very peaceful. Sometimes they’re even brought out on a jewelled lead, and royal ladies and gentlemen walk about with them, and feed them sweets.

The lions seem contented, like the House hippopotami, and all the other animals here. They never have to hunt or fight, everything’s given them. They’re even groomed by slaves. But every year there are less. They can’t even be bothered to have families.

I used to wonder, when I was a child, if these creatures missed something? Of course they do.

Another terrace went down in steps of marble, and there were fountains, and pools with golden fish, and lilies.

Then, the Rose Walk.

The smell is astounding, it makes you dizzy. Roses rise on every side, in arches and tiers and cushiony banks. They’re every shade of red and purple, yellow and white.

Wicked thorns like claws scratched at us as we wended through, and Daisy almost spilled the rest of her oil.

In the centre of the Rose Walk is a big oval of grass, and a statue of a rose, carved out of some shiny stone.

This is where the Two Thousandth Rose was to be viewed before planting.

It was apparently a very startling and special rose. One is always bred by the Gardeners for this Ritual, which takes place every three years.

You may wonder how there was ever room for a new rose in this dense chaos of roses. But obviously other roses die, or are weeded out mercilessly when the princes and princesses get irritated with them.

Not that many of the royalty had come to the Ritual, (a lesser one). It was a hot day, even though the sun had been up less than an hour.

We went and took our stations behind Lady J. No maids are allowed to arrive until this moment, and others were coming in from all sides of the Rose Walk, but Lady J seemed to think we were late.

‘Why are you always dawdling?’ she snapped. We bowed our heads looking properly ashamed. Daisy edged in close behind me to hide the spill-stain. ‘You’re moronic,’ decided LJL.

She has a pointy face, rouged all rosy, and now her hair was powdered a kind of cabbage colour.

Her mouth sneered over her sharp little teeth.

‘You deserve a slap,’ she said