Impossible Dreamers

Chapter 26 (degtwi-deg): Invasion

All Seren-ilians slept badly in the weeks after the flying machine took off with Piacho and Selentaya inside. It was hard for anyone to concentrate on everyday tasks, though people still needed to make food, gather herbs, and do all the things that were necessary to carry on living as well as possible. The Counsel of the Wise met several times, and decided that Liana and Herago who would have to repeat their showing ceremony, as their presentation was unfinished. Herago was particularly unhappy about this, and made his unhappiness clear. 'I can't show the Impossibles again,' he told Liana, 'the whole point is that it had to be a surprise.'

After he said this, Herago looked at Liana's face, and realised that she had much worse things to worry about. 'I'm sorry, Liana,' he said. 'I'm sure Trentaya and the others will come back soon.'

'Yes. Yes, they will,' Liana replied.

And then, just a week after Trentaya and her party had set off to cross the mountain, as people woke from their worried sleep, they were puzzled and alarmed by a sound they had never heard before. A humming sound. Humming is usually quiet, but this humming grew louder than the rumbles of Greblara when it was at its most active.

The sky was dark with many black spots in the air above Seren-ila. Twilfty? Or more? As they came closer, and could be seen more clearly, they took on the form of enormous metal machines. Machines that could fly. They circled overhead, slowly getting lower, until they could each be seen very clearly. One by one they landed in neat lines and rows in the Seren Middle Meadow.

The neat rows, the ordered arrangement, the idea of everything in a place that had been decided in advance by somebody who was in charge of things – this was something new in Seren-ila.

The world had changed.

People gathered near the Seren Middle Meadow, curious about what was happening, and fearful about what was going to happen. They watched as the doors of the flying machines all opened at the same time. From each machine there emerged figures.

The men were big. Very big. The smallest of them was taller than the tallest Seren-ilian. Each carried objects that were unfamiliar to the crowd. Hard, shiny tools. Sticks and tubes of metal. Hoops of wood and hard materials that they had never seen before. The figures walked, all together in lines. They marched, starting with the same foot, and obeying shouted commands from a man wearing slightly different clothes, and carrying more tools, at the head of each group.

Nobody in Seren-ila moved in this mechanical way, in blocks and in straight lines. Seren-ilians were proud of their dancing abilities, and knew how to move in time to music, responding to the movements of others to make a beautiful display, but this sort of movement was something quite different.

The blocks of men with their weapons spread themselves out over Seren-ila. They seemed to know exactly where they were going, even though they had never been in this land before. If Seren-ilians got in their way, they shouted 'move'. Some of the words they spoke were not familiar to Seren-ilians, but they needed no translation.

So it was that the Barty 'Guardians' took control of Seren-ila, its lands, its things and its people. The word 'guardian' existed in the Seren language too. It meant somebody who looked after things, or looked after people. If these Guardians were looking after anything, it was not the people of Seren-ila.

It was as if Seren-ila had disappeared. Before long, the place that had been Seren-ila became 'Grabble-land', or 'the Eastern Dependency'.

The Guardians brought with them fabric and sticks, which could be put together to make flimsy shelters. These were a bit like the foldable habitations that Falera had invented, but they were less ingenious and less comfortable. If people thought that the Bartyronians would live in these dwellings, or 'tents' as they were called, they were wrong. The Bartyronians came into every Seren habitation and told the people living there that they now had to move out. The Great Hall became their headquarters. All the beautiful Seren dwellings were now the 'property' of somebody called Tyro, who lived in Great Bartyronis, and who had never seen anything of Seren-ila. This Tyro was now also the 'owner' of everything in Seren-ila, and of all its people, goods, animals and plants. Tyro also, apparently, owned everything under the ground in Seren-ila – rocks, liquid, gases that the people of that land had never seen. Even the air that people breathed belonged to Tyro. Nobody knew what he was going to do with these things, but he owned them anyway. These were ideas that made no sense at all to the people of Seren-ila.