Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones [71]
The ruins were two sides of a broken archway. There was a slab of stone which must have fallen from the top of the arch lying nearby at the foot of the tree. There was no other sign of a gate.
“I think this is it,” said Cat. He felt very sad to be leaving.
“I think it is too,” Janet agreed in an awed, muffled voice. “I feel a bit miserable to be going, as a matter of fact. How do we go?”
“I’m going to try sprinkling a pinch of dragons’ blood in the archway,” said Cat.
He fumbled out the crucible wrapped in his handkerchief from his pocket. He smelled the strong smell of the dragons’ blood and knew he was doing wrong. It was wrong to bring this harmful stuff into a place that was so strongly magic in such a different way.
But, since he did not know what else to do, Cat carefully took a pinch of the smelly brown powder between the finger and thumb of his right hand, wrapped the crucible away again with his left hand, and then, carefully and guiltily, sprinkled the powder between the pillars of broken stone.
The air between the pillars quivered like air that is hot. The piece of sunny meadow they could see beyond grew misty, then milky pale, then dark. The darkness cleared slowly, away into the corners of the space, and they found they could see into a huge room. There seemed acres of it. All of it was covered in a carpet of a rather ugly playing-card sort of design in red, blue, and yellow. The room was full of people. They reminded Cat of playing cards too, because they were dressed in stiff, bulky clothes in flat, bright colors. They were all trailing about, this way and that, looking important and agitated. The air between them and the garden was still quivering and, somehow, Cat knew they would not be able to get into the huge room.
“This is not right,” said Janet. “Where is it?”
Cat was just about to say that he did not know either, when he saw Gwendolen. She was being carried by, quite near, on a sort of bed with handholds. The eight men carrying it all wore bulky golden uniforms. The bed was gold, with gold hangings and gold cushions. Gwendolen was dressed in even bulkier clothes than the rest, that were white and gold, and her hair was done up into a high golden headdress which may have been a crown. From the way she was behaving, she was certainly a queen. She nodded to some of the important people and they leaped eagerly to the side of her bed and listened with feverish intelligence to what she was saying. She waved to some others, and they ran to do things. She made a sign at another person and he fell on his knees, begging for mercy. He was still begging when other people dragged him away. Gwendolen smiled as if this amused her. By this time, the golden bed was right beside the archway, and the space was a turmoil of people racing to do what Gwendolen wanted.
And Gwendolen saw Cat and Janet. Cat knew she did, from the expression of surprise and faint annoyance on her face. Maybe she worked some magic of her own, or maybe the magic in the dragons’ blood was simply used up. Whatever it was, the broken archway turned dark again, then milky, then to mist; and finally, there was nothing but meadow again between the pillars, and the air had stopped shimmering.
“That was Gwendolen,” Cat said.
“I thought it was,” Janet said unappreciatively. “She’ll get fat if she has herself carried about like that all the time.”
“She was enjoying herself,” Cat said wistfully.
“I could see that,” said Janet. “But how do we find my world?”
Cat was not at all sure. “Shall we try going around to the other side of the arch?”
“Seems reasonable,” Janet agreed. She started to walk around the pillars, and stopped. “We’d better get it right this time, Cat. You can only afford