Anglien and the barrier

Anglia is the land where Engle and Drúir live. It lies hidden from the ordinary world, which is what the book calls the world Chris grew up in.

The way in

There are thirty-seven crossings between the ordinary world and Anglia. The Council keeps watch over all of them, there is a keeper at each one, and every one of them lies by something from ancient times. Ahra speaks of the great crossings, where you cross together with many others, and he was meant to use one himself. Chris’s crossing is close to his home: Borgsted Banke, a high bank behind a deep ditch in the woods south of Løverodde, right out by the Little Belt. A round tower once stood on top of it.

Haltora’s letter asks him to be there when the light goes, and to walk into the water. Up on the bank an old woman in a bathrobe sits by a small fire. She checks the ticket and reads Chris’s letter, and all she wants to hear is a name. She says the light is going now. The chapter is named after her: the Keeper. People from the ordinary world walk straight past her. Without his letter Chris would only have seen bracken, because the letter is his pass.

Then Chris and Ahra walk down to the beach and into the Little Belt in their clothes. When the water reaches your chest, you aren’t to swim but to let go. Chris hears a sound as if something huge were splitting, feels the pressure in his ears and tastes copper and salt. Then he is standing in the Fonté Hall, waist-deep in water, in a basin of black stone under a high vault with blue torches. There are several basins, and those who are good enough can keep the water out and climb up dry. At the far end a tunnel leads to a canal with quays, where iron signs show names such as Tés Aváir, Nordmark, Solkysten and Déynáir. From there a narrow black ship with no mast and no oars sails through fog to the island where the school stands.

The barrier

A barrier lies between the two worlds. It was put in place when the Time of War ended. The war lasted twenty-seven years and cost more Engle and Drúir their lives than the three hundred years before it had done. Ahra thinks the barrier was laid about 275 years ago.

The language

The language spoken in Anglia is Anglîsh. Chris has never seen the script, but he understands both the speech and the signs as soon as he has come up out of the water.

The barrier works the other way too. When someone from Anglia crosses into the ordinary world, it teaches them the language as it was spoken when the barrier was laid. That is why Ahra says “De” to Chris on the bathing jetty and talks like a book, and why his grandmother’s phrasebook was not new either. When Ahra’s brother Maka was on the other side, he called a fifty-year-old shopkeeper “maiden”.