He said: ‘Well?’
‘It’s worse,’ answered the rider. ‘Dru didn’t want you to know. He’s afraid Souza will be cut off.’
‘It must be. There is no choice.’ The man’s tone was cool, all trace of feeling carefully extracted. ‘We will cut off the whole of Maali, from Ingorut to Khadesh.’
‘An entire continent?’ The horror in the rider’s voice was imperfectly suppressed.
‘Yes.’ The white mask expressed neither apology nor regret. ‘The contamination will spread beyond Souza in months, perhaps weeks. We have to act now. Our Time is running out.’ And again, with peculiar emphasis: ‘All of Time is running out.’
‘Is there any hope?’ asked the rider.
Behind the mask, Nathan imagined the man smiled. ‘Hope is a chimera,’ he said. ‘I do not clutch at chimerae. I made my plans long, long ago. There is no hope, but there are plans. We will hold to them. Now eat, and rest. You have flown far. Is your xaurian tired?’
‘No, sir. He is strong.’
‘Good. I will summon you later. You will go with the Fifth Phalanx to Maali. You know the coast.’
The rider made a brief bow, and withdrew.
The white-masked man moved one hand in a strange gesture, murmuring a word Nathan could not hear. An image appeared in front of him, life-size, three-dimensional, evidently made of light. It wore a purple cowl and a mask patterned with whorls and lines.
‘Souza is contaminated,’ said the white mask, briefly. ‘Instigate cut-off for Maali.’
‘The whole of Maali?’ said the purple cowl, evidently shocked. His voice crackled, like someone telephoning on a bad line.
‘Of course. Send the Fifth Phalanx and one of the senior practors. Raymor will go with them. He knows the terrain.’
Purple cowl hesitated, as if considering a protest, but refrained. Then he too bowed, vanishing at a gesture from his master.
The man walked towards the window again, resuming his contemplation of the city. Nathan saw him from close up, his chin sunken, the white shapely features gleaming in the daylight, the black bulge of the eye-screens revealing nothing. But behind the mask he sensed a mind at work, an inscrutable intelligence, vast and complex, and focused on a single path of thought, a plan, a goal – whatever that goal might be. Nathan had never before imagined such a mind – a mind so powerful that he could feel it thinking, he could sense the surge and flicker of suppressed emotion, the dreadful urgency beneath the calm of absolute control. Its proximity frightened him and he tried to draw away, pushing at the dream until it began to break up, and he was plunged into a long dark tunnel of fading sensation. He lost himself in sleep, but when he woke at last the dream was still with him, clear as truth, and the memory of it didn’t grow dim.
It was perhaps a fortnight before he returned there. He knew it was the same world, the same dream, though the environment had changed. He was with a rider again, possibly Raymor, though now there were many of them, flying in successive V-formations of thirteen, the infrequent wing-beats of the xaurians almost exactly in unison. Below, the dull glitter of sunlight moved over a huge expanse of sea, stretching from horizon to horizon. He could see the ripple effect of endless waves, and here and there a dimpling of white as breakers clashed in a volcano of spray. Soon, a strip of coast appeared, rushing towards them, growing swiftly. He saw grey cliffs falling sheer to the sea, and beyond an uneven plateau, treeless and bleak.
The phalanx swung left and began to follow the shoreline. On the foremost xaurian he noticed there was a second figure seated behind the rider, dressed in red. What he was doing Nathan didn’t know, but his hand moved in a series of intricate gestures, and the air on their shoreward side thickened into a haze, like a veil dividing them from the land. The cliffs were barely visible now, plunging downwards to a broad inlet spanned by many bridges and surrounded by a sprawling port. There seemed to be boats on the water, and occasional skimmers wheeling insect-like above. One veered round and came towards them, but the veil grew denser even as it approached, and when it hit the barrier sparks ran along its sides, igniting into flame, and it spiralled down into the ocean like a dying firework. The red figure went on with its ritual: Nathan was close enough now to hear the murmur of a chant. Glancing to seaward, he glimpsed another boat, far outside the barrier. Two xaurians broke away from the outer wing and headed towards it. Nathan couldn’t see clearly what happened, but there was a spurt of fire on the boat, and then it had vanished, and the waves rolled on unbroken.
He didn’t like the dream now, for all the exhilaration of the flight. He felt as if merely by watching, by being there, he had become a part of it, a mute participant in some terrible misdeed. He tried to pull himself away from the phalanx, and found his thought was falling, dropping like a stone towards the sea. And then his dive slowed to a glide, brushing the wave-crests, just above the place where the ship had gone down. There was someone in the water, presumably the last of the crew: he saw the grey hood bobbing up and down. The person had no lifebelt, no inflatable jacket; he wouldn’t last long. The xaurian riders, knowing that, had left him to his fate. Even though the drowning man had no visible face Nathan felt his terror, and the need to help grew inside him, strong as rage, until he thought he would burst with it. He drifted lower, reaching out, feeling the slap of cold water on his skin, seizing the flailing hands with a grip that caught and held. Then they were jerked out of the dream with a violence that made Nathan’s stomach turn, landing painfully on a beach of stones. A beach at night, with breakers crumbling on the shingle, and upflung sheets of foam, luminous in the darkness. Nathan released the clasping hands and sensed himself withdrawing, sliding backwards into oblivion. The dormitory bell roused him, hours or minutes later. He sat up, conscious of discomfort, and found the sleeves of his pyjamas were damp.
That Saturday there was a rugby match against another school. Nathan scored two tries, helping the Ffylde Abbey team to victory, and went home late and on a high. He had been planning to tell Bartlemy about the dreams but somehow, when it came to it, he distrusted his own imagination, and was not yet ready to expose himself to anyone’s disbelief. But on Sunday he could see Hazel, and confiding in her was second nature to him. (Not George, he decided, without asking himself why. Just Hazel.) In the morning, he and Annie sat over a late breakfast, listening to the local news on the radio. A projected housing development, a missing person, the risk of flooding in the area. ‘A man discovered three days ago on the beach at Pevensey Bay is believed to be an illegal immigrant. He was dressed in waterproof clothing which covered him from head to foot, suggesting he may have swum in from a boat. He speaks no English and so far his nationality has not been established. Police think it unlikely he was alone and are asking local residents to be on the lookout.’
Annie noticed Nathan had stopped eating his cornflakes. ‘Are you all right?’ she inquired.
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ He resumed his breakfast, but with less enthusiasm. After a minute, he asked: ‘What will they do with him? Will they – will they put him in prison?’
‘The illegal immigrant? I suppose so. Until they work out who he is, and whether to grant him asylum.’
‘But … that’s wrong. He’s alone. He’s desperate. We should help him.’
Annie was touched by his concern. ‘Yes, we should,’ she said. ‘The trouble is, people are afraid. They’re afraid of strangers, of anybody different. They think immigrants will take their jobs or their homes, even though there aren’t that many of them, and newcomers create jobs as well as doing them. But fear makes people stupid, and sometimes cruel.’
‘Could I go and see