The Peacock Cloak

them jumped into the well. The last thing they heard was Graves yelling “No! Don’t!”

    After the first quarter-second or so, they didn’t experience themselves as falling. In fact they found they were already standing on smooth, solid ground. There had been no jolt or impact at all, but they were aware of a sharp change of temperature and light intensity, and a feeling that they had become slightly heavier. Wherever they were, it was much cooler than the dig at the Place of Wells, and it seemed to be night time, although, once their eyes had adapted, it was certainly not pitch dark.
    “Bloody hell!” said Pennyworth.
    They stood under a starry sky on a wide platform perhaps a hundred metres square, paved in chequerboard style in black and white marble. A colonnade ran round the edge, with an urn containing an olive tree in front of every third arch. Beyond, there was a sandy desert.
    The air was completely still, and the silence was absolute.
    They stood there for a few seconds, looking around themselves with open mouths. Then Shoe gave a low whistle and pointed at the sky.
    Shoe and Pennyworth weren’t big on moons, for the moon back in the city had been at best a pale smudge above the brash electric lights, and there were always brighter and more vivid things clamouring for attention all around. But one thing they did know about moons, and that was that there was only supposed to be one.
    And here… Well it was regrettable, but it couldn’t be avoided. Here there were three of the things shining down.
    Standing there side by side, their mouths gaping foolishly open, they both felt an icy shiver of almost superstitious terror. It was a deep and primitive fear, the animal dread of the inexplicable and the unknown. One moment on Earth, in an island in the middle of the ocean. The next moment: this.
    “Oh crap,” murmurred Pennyworth.
    “Yeah, I know,” said Shoe.
    “We’re on another planet, aren’t we?” Pennyworth whispered.
    Since Shoe didn’t reply, Pennyworth answered his own question, addressing himself to the three cold moons themselves.
    “We must be. Another bloody planet. What are we going to do?”
    The moons, of course, had nothing to say on this point. Their sole contribution to the story of the two thieves was to illuminate the scene and to provide incontrovertible evidence that this was not the planet Earth.
    And Shoe also said nothing. He sniffed, and spat, and then began to walk across the wide platform to the colonnade.
    “What are you doing Shoe?” moaned Pennyworth.
    Again Shoe declined to answer.
    “Talk about out of the frying pan,” Pennyworth complained as he hurried after his silent companion.
    He caught up with Shoe as he reached one of the archways. They looked out over the planet surface, turned and looked back at the artefact on which they stood, then looked out at the planet again. The chequered platform, strewn here and there with blown sand, was raised some three metres above the surrounding desert. A flight of marble stairs led down onto the surface, its lower steps buried in sand.
    And this was a proper desert. There are half-hearted deserts that have cacti growing in them, or shrubs, or tufts of yellow grass, or even small trees. But there were no features at all in this one but rocks and stones, each with an overlapping set of faint moon shadows.
    “We can’t cross that,” said Pennyworth
    “No,” said Shoe, finally breaking his silence. “And anyway, the whole place might be like that for all we know. You can’t cross something if it hasn’t got another side.”
    “We’ve had it, haven’t we?” groaned Pennyworth.
    Shoe shrugged and began to walk round the edge of the colonnade, noticing, now that they were close, that all the olive trees in their urns were dead. The twigs were grey and had long since lost their bark.
    Reaching the corner of the colonnade, they turned and continued along a second side of the platform, passing another flight of stairs that led down into the sand.
    “Maybe we should have listened to that guy,” said Pennyworth. “What’s his name? Graves.”
    “What?” said Shoe. “That drip? Nah. Never. Start doing what men like that tell you and you might as well be dead anyway.”
    They turned along the third side.
    “Hmm,” said Shoe.
    Like the other sides, this side had stairs going down from it, but they didn’t lead directly onto the ground but onto to a subsidiary stone floor, also paved in black and white