Fearless (Mirrorworld) - By Cornelia Funke Page 0,31
across the frothy waves as though she could will the coast to appear. Jacob’s dislike for ships was almost as big as the Goyl’s, but Fox was standing on the swaying planks as if she’d been born on them. She was the daughter of a fisherman; she’d told Jacob at least that much about her roots. Fox was even more reluctant to speak about the past than he was. All he knew was that she’d been born in a village in northern Lotharaine, that her father had died shortly after her birth, that her mother had married again, and that she had three stepbrothers.
The chalk cliffs that finally emerged from the grey waves on the fourth day were the exact equivalent of those in Jacob’s world, except that there were seven Kings and one Queen looking out from Albion’s white cliffs. Each of the effigies was big enough to be seen for miles on a clear day. The salty air gnawed at the faces as relentlessly as exhaust fumes attacked statues in the other world. The face of the current King was covered by scaffolds, on which a dozen stonemasons were busily freshening up the moustache that had earned him his nickname: the Walrus.
Fox eyed Albion’s coast like enemy territory. In theatres there, shape-shifters were forced onstage to shift into donkeys or dogs while audiences howled along. And in its green hills, foxes were hunted with such abandon that Jacob had made her promise not to wear her fur on the island.
Albion. Chanute claimed there used to be more magical creatures there than in Austry and Lotharaine combined. Now, however, factories were shooting up from Albion’s soggy meadows even faster than in Schwanstein. As Jacob steered his horse past the waiting carts on the ferry docks, he looked up at the surrounding hills and imagined he could already see the cities that were sprouting all over them on the other side of the mirror. For now, however, those hills were still covered with the enchanted forests that had always explained his own heart to him so much better than the streets and parks where he and Will had grown up. Jacob had often wondered whether his father had felt the same – whether it was the wildness of this world that had beguiled him, or just the fact that here he could pass off the inventions of another world as his own.
They took one of the less travelled roads leading northwest. It wound past fields and meadows that let you forget that Thumblings and Stilts were now as rare in Albion as Hobs, the Albian version of Heinzel, or the scaly-skinned waterhorses that only a few years earlier could still be seen grazing on the banks of every river. Albion’s last Gold-Raven now stared out of a glass cabinet in a museum; the only Unicorns left were the ones on the regal crest; and in Londra, the ancient capital, Albion was now building palaces to celebrate the new magic: science and engineering. But Jacob was headed for another town.
Pendragon lay less than forty miles inland. It had nearly as many towers as Londra and was so old that its age was the subject of endless debate. Pendragon was also home to Albion’s most famous university. The town’s centre was marked by a big stone, polished to a sheen by the touch of countless hands. Even Fox briefly reined in her horse to touch it before riding on. This was the stone from which Arthur Pendragon supposedly had pulled a magic sword and had – long before Guismond’s time – made himself King of Albion. In this world, there was no King shrouded in a web of truth and myth so thick as Arthur was. The story went that he’d been born to a Fairy and that his father had been an Alderelf, one of the legendary immortals who later made enemies of the Fairies and were destroyed by them so thoroughly that there was no trace of them to be found. Arthur had not just named the town Pendragon; he’d also endowed the famous university himself and had imbued its foundations with so much magic that the old walls still glowed bright enough to render any street lighting unnecessary.
The buildings stood behind the same wrought-iron fence that had surrounded them for centuries, like the remnants of an enchanted city. The gate was closed at sunset. Fox listened into the night before she swung herself over. The guards patrolling the grounds