Free Maddigan's Fantasia by Margaret Mahy Page A

Fantasia and among them, blinking and grinning, were the two men she had glimpsed only an hour earlier: Ozul and Maska.
    And there in the very centre of the group was someone Garland remembered from other journeys. A giant figure was confronting them, towering above everyone else … partly because of the rocks that seemed to be rising up under her, hoisting her towards the sky, and partly because she really wasso very tall. Ida! Great Ida! The chieftainess of the gorge tribe. She was shouting at Yves and Maddie in her curious voice … deep and echoing, as if the gorge itself were speaking through her.
    ‘Give them to us! Give them back to their father!’
    Garland heard twin voices, almost in chorus, speaking softly behind her.
    ‘Oh no!’ they whispered briefly, and then she heard their footsteps. Garland did not turn to look behind her. She knew the boys were sneaking away, and that merely looking back at them might betray them.
    ‘We haven’t known them long,’ Maddie was saying. ‘But we’ve taken them into the Fantasia. We have to be true to our own.’
    ‘Maddie,’ said Yves in a low voice. ‘We’ve only had them with us about a day. We don’t know anything about them … and their families do have rights …’
    ‘Well, where
is
their mother?’ asked Maddie. ‘Where’s their father? Because you can’t tell me those two men out there are anybody’s fathers …’
    ‘They belong to us,’ Garland called, interrupting Maddie, and saw Yves’s shoulders stiffen, while Maddie turned to look back over her shoulder in astonishment. ‘I know,’ Garland cried again. ‘I know I didn’t want them … but we
did
take them on, didn’t we? You voted them in, and so now we’ve got to be true to them.’
    ‘Listen,’ Maddie said, shouting back to Ida now, ‘we have to talk this over. We have to parley. That’s our custom. And if we decide – if we decide not to hand the boys over we’ll just go back again … take the long path over the hills.’
    ‘No going back!’ said Ida, pointing upwards with a curiously triumphant gesture. Maddie, Yves, Garland – perhaps the whole Fantasia – looked up and saw with horror, there amongthe trees and ferns that lined the walls of the gorge, some of Ida’s men, standing beside rocks and boulders, levers in their hands. As the Fantasia looked upwards, some of those men suddenly sprang into action, leaning and straining, and among the ferns a great mossy boulder shifted unwillingly, then jumped away, crashing down, breaking branches and smashing small trees, as it rolled towards them.
    ‘Watch out!’ Maddie screamed, though there was nothing the Fantasia could do to protect itself. But the boulder missed them, shattering itself on other stones on the bottom of the gorge. Sharp fragments sprang into the air, chinking and pattering sharply against the windscreen of Maddie’s van.
    ‘Talk in! Talk out! Talk up and down or left and right!’ yelled Ida. Her huge song echoed out over the Fantasia vans and horses, seeming to vanish into the gorge behind them, before it came booming back again, swollen with its own echoes. ‘But don’t talk long! And then, after all your talk, do what we’re telling you to do. We’ve been paid to get those boys back to their family, and when we’ve been paid to do something we do it. So give us those boys, and you’ll pass on by safely.’
    There was a rippling movement as the Fantasia people scrambled down from their vans, trampling the ferns and mosses as they crammed themselves into that narrow space on one side of the gorge.
    It was a parley of a sort, but not an ordered one. Everyone began shouting at once. Listening to the voices as well as she could Garland could tell that some people were now keen to pass the boys over. Others shouted that Maddie was right. The Fantasia had to be true to its own. Garland found that, since the morning, her own ideas were changing.
Blast!
she thought.
Can’t I even rely on myself any