Читать книгу The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three - Jan Siegel - Страница 6

‘Define the Irish Question between 1800 and 1917,’ Nathan read aloud.

‘If we knew the question,’ his mother said, ‘we might be able to work out the answer.’

‘I don’t think that’ll satisfy Mr Selkirk,’ Nathan sighed. He pushed his history essay aside and replaced it with a plate of buttered toast with honey and cinnamon, a recipe of his uncle’s. The honey had oozed just the right distance through the toast and he bit into it with enthusiasm, if a little absent-mindedly.

His mother noted his abstraction and knew or guessed the reason, but was prudent enough to say nothing. He was fifteen now, too old to press for confidences. She only hoped, if there was trouble, he would tell her in the end. The summer had been long and uneventful, a summer of normal teenage preoccupations: success (and failure) at cricket, doing homework, not doing homework, friends, fads, hormonal angst. They had managed a trip to Italy, looking at palaces and pictures in Florence and then staying with Nathan’s classmate Ned Gable and his family in a villa in Umbria. Annie had feared they would never afford their share of the rental but somehow Uncle Barty had found the money, though he wouldn’t accompany them. These days, he rarely left the old manor at Thornyhill, deep in the woods.

Yet he wasn’t really a stay-at-home sort of person. He had told Annie once that he was born in Byzantium before the fall of the Roman Empire, which, she worked out, made him about fifteen hundred years old. He called himself Bartlemy Goodman, though it was probably not his name. She might have thought him mad or unusually eccentric if she hadn’t known him so well and seen what he could do, when the occasion demanded it. He had taken her in on a cold lonely night long ago when she was pursued by invisible enemies, becoming an uncle to both her and Nathan; and as her son grew up into strange adventures, Bartlemy had been their councillor and support. But there had been no adventure this summer, and now autumn was failing, and the wind blew from the north, plucking the last ragged leaves from the tree-tops, and Nathan was restless with the feeling of deeds undone, and worlds to be saved, and time slipping away.

Soon, Annie thought, he’ll start sleeping badly, and there was a tiny squeeze of fear at her heart which she could not suppress.

I sleep too deeply, Nathan thought, and I dream too little and too lightly. The portal was closed, the connection broken: he could no longer roam the multiverse in his head, following trails he could not see on a quest he did not understand. He had dreamed his way through other worlds – the ghost city of Carboneck in Wilderslee, and the skytowers of Arkatron on Eos, where the Grandir, supreme ruler of a dying cosmos, sought for the Great Spell that would be the salvation of his people. Nathan had retrieved the cup and the sword to bind the magic, and now only the crown was wanting – the crown and the sacrifice and the words of power, whatever they might be. But there had been no dreams for nearly a year, and the pleasures of cricket and the problems of history were not enough to fill his life.

‘How’s Hazel?’ his mother asked, helping herself to a piece of his toast. ‘I haven’t seen her lately.’

Hazel was Nathan’s closest friend: they had grown up almost as brother and sister, though getting on rather better than most brothers and sisters. Adolescence had brought friction, but had never driven them apart.

‘You know Hazel.’ Nathan spoke around munching. ‘She didn’t exactly like her mum’s old boyfriend, but I think she approved of him. She doesn’t approve of the new one at all.’

‘Because he’s so young?’

‘Mm.’

Annie smiled. ‘Well, all I can say is good for Lily. I think Franco’s very sweet.’

‘He’s Italian,’ Nathan objected.

‘How insular! Besides, you didn’t mind the Italians last summer.’

‘That was in Italy!’

‘Supposing I got myself a toyboy,’ Annie said. ‘How would you feel about that?’

‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ Diverted from thoughts of other worlds, Nathan looked really alarmed.

‘Maybe.’

‘Look, you know, if there’s someone, it’s cool with me – as long as he’s nice, and really cares about you – but … well, I’d rather have a stepfather than an elder brother!’

‘Nicely put,’ Annie said. ‘Still, I doubt the situation will arise.’

Nathan couldn’t ever recall her having a proper boyfriend, even though several men had been interested. He said: ‘You must have loved dad very much.’ Daniel Ward had died before he was born, killed in a car crash when he fell asleep at the wheel.

‘Very much,’ she said. Only he wasn’t your dad … Your father was a stranger who waited beyond the Gate of Death, waited for my love and longing to open the unopenable door, and when I would have given all that I had for all I had lost he took me, body and soul. He seeded my womb and sealed up my memory, and until you grew up so unlike Daniel – until I found the courage to unclose the old scar in my mind – I never knew the betrayal and rape that was hidden there.

But she loved Nathan, conceived in treachery, child of an unknown being from an unknown world, so she kept her secret. She saw his father’s legacy in the mysteries that surrounded him, but she told herself, over and over, that he did not need to know. One day, perhaps, but not yet. Not yet.

That night, Nathan went to bed thinking of the Irish Question, and dreamed of the sea.

At Thornyhill Manor, Hazel Bagot was having a lesson in witchcraft.

‘But I don’t want to be a witch,’ she protested.

‘Good,’ said Bartlemy. ‘That’s the way to start. Now, you need to learn what not to do. Otherwise you could bumble about like you did last year, conjuring dangerous spirits and letting them get out of control. Someone might get hurt. It nearly happened once, you know that; you don’t want it to happen again. The Gift is in your blood; you need to know how not to use it.’

‘Why couldn’t we have done it in the summer, when the evenings were still light?’ Hazel said. She was wishing she had stayed at home, watching Neighbours and annoying Franco.

‘Dark for dark magic,’ Bartlemy said. ‘In summer, magic is all sparkle and fun, and the spirits come to us dressed in their best, scattering smiles and flowers. In the winter, you get down to the bone, and the true nature of things is revealed.’

Hazel said no more, remembering how she had summoned Lilliat, Spirit of Flowers, to win her the love of a boy at school, and how Lilliat had turned into Nenufar the water-demon, and nearly drowned her rival.

Bartlemy gave her tea and biscuits and she sat for a while eating, insensibly reassured. Bartlemy made the best biscuits in the world, biscuits whose effect was almost magical, though he insisted there was no spell involved, just good cooking. Anyone who ate those biscuits felt immediately at home, even if they didn’t want to, comforted if they needed comfort, relaxed if they needed to relax. Long ago another cook had tried to steal one for analysis, hoping to work out the ingredients, but he had eaten it before he got it home, and the urge to commit the crime had vanished.

‘I don’t want to be like my great-grandmother,’ Hazel explained at last. ‘She lived for two hundred years, until she didn’t care about anyone but herself, and she’d curdled inside like sour milk. I don’t think I want to live on when my friends are dead; it would be so lonely. And I don’t want to be mean and bitter like her.’

‘Then learn from her mistakes,’ Bartlemy said equably. ‘You won’t be mean and bitter, unless you choose to be. I will teach you what you need to know, for your safety and others, but how you use the knowledge – if you use it – is up to you. Tonight, I think we will make the spellfire. That will do for a start.’

He showed her how to seal the chimney and light the fire-crystals, which cracked and hissed, shooting out sparks that bored into the carpet. Then he threw on a powder which smothered the flames, and the room grew smoky, and Hazel’s eyes watered from the sting of it. Presently, Bartlemy told her to speak certain words in Atlantean, the language of spell-craft, and the vapour seemed to draw together, hovering in a cloud above the hearth, and then the heart of the cloud opened up into a picture.

To her astonishment Hazel saw her mother with Franco, climbing the stairs to the bedroom, laughing and hurried. She was embarrassed, and looked away. ‘Remember, the magic responds to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Magic is always personal. The pictures may have meaning for you, or they may not – sometimes, their purport won’t become clear till long after – but it is something in your thought, in your mind, which engenders them. You are the magnet: they are the spell-fragments which are drawn to you. What do you see now?’ ‘The past,’ Hazel said.

‘At least, I think so.’

She saw the Grimthorn Grail surrounded with a greenish nimbus: the snake-spirals round the rim seemed to move, and a man with a dark alien face was gazing into it, speaking words she couldn’t hear. In the background stood a woman with black hair bound up in a white veil or scarf, the ends of which hung down behind her in fluted creases. Her features, too, were somehow alien – her eyes too large, the proportions of her face elusively wrong – yet she was the most beautiful woman Hazel had ever seen. She held a tall yellow candle, and either they were indoors or the night was windless, because the flame burned absolutely still. Then Hazel saw the same man lifting a sword – the Traitor’s Sword, which Nathan had brought back from Wilderslee – and there was a dim figure sprawled in front of him, on a kind of table or altar, and when the sword fell blood jetted up, and as the woman proffered the cup to catch it red spattered on the cloth that bound her hair. Both man and woman drank from the cup, and she lifted a crown from the thing on the ground, and put it on his head – a misshapen crown of twisted metal spikes – and lightning stabbed up from the crown, splitting the sky in half. For an instant Hazel glimpsed a symbol drawn in lightning, something she recognised, though she couldn’t think from where: an arc bisected by a straight line, enclosed within a circle. Then the vision went dark, and she heard a voice crying out in an unknown language, words that seemed full of anguish or regret.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked Bartlemy, but he shook his head.

‘This is Nathan’s story,’ she said, ‘not mine,’ but her smoke-reddened eyes were wide, fixed on the changing images, and she no longer looked away.

‘Keep in mind,’ he pointed out, ‘the pictures are relevant, but there may be no logic to them, and no chronology.’

Now, they were looking at a river – a slow lazy river, dimpled with sunlight, with the occasional overhanging willow, and little eddies scooping out pools under the bank which vanished in a mudslide. A tidal river with hazardous currents beneath its dimpled surface, and lurking weeds that could entangle flailing limbs, and rafts of floating rubbish wedged here and there, hiding among the debris a child’s shoe, a water-logged teddy bear, an upturned hand. The River Clyde, which flowed through the village of Ede down the valley to the sea – the river where Effie Carlow, Hazel’s great-grandmother, had been found drowned, though Hazel knew she had never left the attic of their house. She heard the voice of the spirit called the Child, chanting an old doggerel, though the smoke-scene showed only the stream.

‘Cloud on the sunset,

Wave on the tide,

Death from the deep sea

Swims up the Glyde.’

And suddenly Hazel found herself wondering whose hand she had seen among the flotsam – whether it was her great-grandmother or some more recent victim, someone yet to be discovered …

A boat moved up the river, surely too large a boat for such a narrow waterway. It was all white, with white sails and a white-painted mast and a white prow without name or identification, and it looked faintly insubstantial, almost like a ghost ship. A woman stood in the bows, wrapped in a long white cloak pulled tight around her body, with a drooping hood covering both hair and face. The picture shifted, until Hazel thought she should be able to glimpse a profile – the tip of a nose, the jut of a chin – but under the hood there was only darkness. The boat drifted on, fading into mist, and then there was just a swan, wings half furled, floating on the water. Hazel had always hated swans, ever since one attacked her as a child; she thought they had mean little eyes.

She said: ‘That was her, wasn’t it?’

Bartlemy said: ‘Perhaps. But remember: to come, she must be called. Nenufar is a spirit; there are laws she cannot evade. Have you called her?’

‘Of course not!’

The vision dimmed, dissolving into smoke, and at a signal from Bartlemy she unblocked the flue. Gradually the air cleared, and she saw the fire-crystals had burned away, and the room was ordinary again. An old room with heavy wooden beams, diamond-paned windows, lamplight soft as candle-glow on the shabby Persian rugs and worn furniture. And in the middle Bartlemy, fat and placid and silver-haired, with eyes as blue as the sky. There were more biscuits, but Hazel didn’t take one, not yet, though his dog sat looking hopefully at her – a huge shaggy dog of questionable ancestry, known as Hoover, whose age was as indeterminate as his master’s. Suddenly, it seemed to Hazel that the world was complex and baffling beyond her understanding, and magic and reality were no longer separate but part of the same puzzle, tiny fragments of a jigsaw so vast and intricate that its billion billion pieces could never be fitted together, not though she had a hundred lifetimes. Her thought was too small, and infinity was too big, and she felt crushed into littleness by its immensity, its multiplicity, by the endless changing patterns of Chaos. Bartlemy asked her: ‘What troubles you?’ and she tried to explain, groping for the words to express her diminishment, her confusion, her fear.

Bartlemy smiled faintly. ‘We all feel that way sometimes,’ he said, ‘if we have the gift of perception. Embrace your doubts: if there is such a thing as wisdom, they are part of it. I’ve had my doubts for more than a thousand years. Actually, I’ve always believed that the answer to everything must really be very simple.’ And he added, unconsciously echoing Annie on Irish history: ‘The problem is finding out the question.’

‘So Riverside House is sold at last,’ Annie said to Lily Bagot in the deli. No one had lived in Riverside House since the tragedy, though rumours of new tenants had circulated from time to time, only to fade as another sale fell through. ‘Do you know when they’re moving in?’

‘They’re already there,’ Lily said. ‘Came down last week. Some family from London.’ All the newcomers in the village were from London these days, big-city types in search of a rural paradise, bringing with them their big-city lifestyle and their big-city needs – and their big-city income. ‘I daresay they’ll be coming into the bookshop soon.’

Annie managed a second-hand bookshop, owned by Bartlemy; she and Nathan lived in the adjacent house.

‘I hope so,’ she said. She couldn’t help being a little curious. She had been so closely involved in the events at Riverside, two years ago now. She wondered what kind of people would buy a house with such a well-publicised history of disaster.

A few days later, she found out.

A woman came in to browse among the books, a woman with a frizz of dark hair and a thin body that grew wide around the hips, dressed in antique shoulder-pads, hand-printed scarves, carved jewellery from the remoter parts of Asia. She studied the shelves for a while, enthused over an early edition of Mrs Henry Wood, then seemed to make up her mind, and pounced.

‘You’re Annie Ward, aren’t you? I know: I asked around. I’m Ursula Rayburn. We’ve just moved in to the oast house down by the river. Of course, I expect you’ve heard, haven’t you? – gossip travels so fast in a village. Such an intimate little community – I can’t wait to get to know everyone. Although Islington is really just a village enclosed in a city … Anyway, I’ve been dying to meet you. I hope you don’t mind me introducing myself like this.’

‘Not at all …’

‘You see, I did my homework. I know you’re the one who found the body …’

Slightly at a loss, Annie said: ‘Yes.’

‘Was it awful? I gather she was there for months, slowly decaying, while her husband lived on in the house with his mistress, who was pretending to be her. I suppose he’s in an asylum now … and they never caught the mistress, did they? I expect it was all her idea. Mind you, I don’t really see the necessity – I mean, everyone gets divorced these days, it’s as normal as eating your dinner. I’ve had two and Donny’s had one and the kids are totally well adjusted. They say more parents mean more presents at Christmas and birthdays! Are you divorced?’

‘Widowed,’ Annie said.

‘Oh dear. And then to have to go through all that … you poor child. You must have been in therapy for months. Bereavement and then post-traumatic stress …’

‘My husband died fifteen years ago,’ Annie said. She and Daniel hadn’t been married, but she’d taken his name anyway. ‘And I don’t have post-traumatic stress.’

‘But … you did find the corpse, didn’t you? You found Rianna Sardou?’

‘Oh, that.’ Annie was unable to resist lapsing into nonchalance. ‘Of course, it was rather unpleasant, but …’

‘Unpleasant? I heard she was lying in the bed, little more than a skeleton, with her hair all spread out – it goes on growing, doesn’t it? – and—’

‘In a village,’ Annie said serenely, ‘you learn to take these things in your stride. Part of the great cycle of life and death, you know. I expect it’s much the same in Islington.’

‘Well …’ Disconcerted by Annie’s composure, Ursula’s gush of words ran down. ‘Not – not exactly …’

Annie took pity on her. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

While the contents of the cafetiére were brewing, Ursula Rayburn filled in the details of her extended family. Her two exes, plus new wife/girlfriend/offspring, all on very good terms – ‘We wanted a big place where everyone could come and stay’ – and Donny’s ex and mother, ‘frightfully bitter, even after four years – they bossed him around all the time, and now they’re like two cats without a kitten.’ There were five resident children, all Ursula’s by previous fathers: Jude, Liberty, Michael, Romany and Gawain.

‘Michael?’ Annie queried, before she could stop herself.

‘His father insisted,’ Ursula explained, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘His first name is Xavier – I always called him that when he was little – but now he’s a teenager he’s gone so peculiar, he won’t answer to anything but Michael. Or Micky, which is almost worse. And the psycho’s name was Michael, wasn’t it? I told him – I said it’s ill-omened – but he refuses to go back to Xavier, no matter what I say.’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Annie said. ‘Lots of people are called Michael, and they don’t go around committing murders.’

‘Of course not. But in this house, with the atmosphere …’

‘Frankly,’ Annie said, ‘I never thought it had any. It’s an old building, but the renovations made it so bland inside, all shiny new paint and unused furniture. Rianna was dead, her husband was so busy pretending to be normal his personality never made any impact, and the – the mistress was hardly ever there. I’m sure, with so many of you, you’ll find it easy to change the feel of the place.’

‘Oh, but you can’t wipe out the past,’ Ursula said. ‘I don’t believe in the kind of ghosts that come with clanking chains, naturally, but there are vibrations. I won’t use the tower room till it’s been purified – I’ve got crystals hanging there now – and Melisande wouldn’t even go through the door. She’s my cat, pedigree Burmese, so sensitive. I know it’s a cliché but animals do feel things, don’t they? They’re so much more telepathic than people.’

Annie said something noncommittal and dispensed the coffee.

‘They never found out her name, did they?’ Ursula went on. ‘The mistress, I mean.’

Nenufar, Annie thought. Nenufar the water-spirit, the primitive goddess from the dark of the sea …

‘No,’ she said.

‘Strange, that. Nowadays they seem to have files on everyone – d’you know the police keep your personal details even if you were just caught smoking dope twenty years ago? It’s an abuse of human rights. I’m a member of the campaign for civil liberties, of course … But it’s curious they couldn’t even find a name for her. Names are so significant, don’t you think? We’re not going to stay with Riverside House. It’s really a bit ordinary. I thought Rivendell, but that’s been done to death lately. Perhaps Hesperides … there are apple trees in the garden.’

‘Dundrownin’?’ Annie hazarded. She wondered if she had overstepped the mark, but after a tiny pause Ursula burst out laughing.

‘Still, Rianna didn’t drown, did she?’ she resumed. ‘It was some old woman who drowned.’

Annie couldn’t recall if they’d been able to prove how Rianna died, but she knew.

‘You have to be careful of the river,’ she said. ‘It’s not deep, but there are treacherous currents.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Ursula said. ‘I hoped the children would be able to play there – I had this mental picture before we came: rustic bliss, swimming in the river, maybe a boat. There’s a mooring place, but everybody says boating’s a bit chancy unless you’ve got experience.’

‘Why did you buy the house?’ Annie said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking. Since you know its history …’

‘It was cheap,’ Ursula said candidly, ‘and it doesn’t need work. Just re-painting – like you said, it’s white all through, very boring. We’ve been looking to move out of London for a while. And I thought the murders would give it character …’

Annie opened her mouth and shut it again, saying nothing.

‘Actually, there is a bit of a problem,’ Ursula continued. ‘Do you know a good plumber? The surveyor didn’t pick up on it – he said everything was fine – but we keep getting leaks from somewhere. There was a puddle – really a puddle – in the living room only the other day. I don’t know where it came from. No, of course it wasn’t the cat – it was water, not pee. I said to Donny, if the surveyor missed something major, we’ll sue. Anyway, I need a plumber to come and check the pipes.’

‘Yellow Pages?’ Annie suggested.

‘Isn’t there – you know – a little man in the village? One of the natives who’s brilliant and inexpensive and does all the jobs round here?’

‘There’s Kevin Bellews,’ Annie said. ‘He’s brilliant but he charges the earth. He only works for City ex-pats – none of the locals can afford him any more. Besides, he’s always on the golf course near Crowford.’

‘The country isn’t what it used to be,’ Ursula mourned. ‘What happened to – to rural innocence, and all those nice dumb yokels in stories?’

‘They got smart,’ Annie said.

It was only after Ursula had gone that she found herself growing uneasy. There was never anything wrong with the plumbing at Riverside House before, she thought. Leaks … leaks meant water.

Water…?

‘Jude’s at uni,’ Hazel volunteered. ‘He’s at least twenty. The next two are at the Tertiary College up the road from Crowford Comp; Micky’s seventeen, Liberty’s sixteen. George fancies her, but she wouldn’t look at him: she’s far too grown up. The point is, they’re none of them our age, so nobody can expect us to be friends with them.’

‘Ageist,’ Nathan said. ‘What about the younger ones?’

‘They’re just kids.’ Hazel was dismissive. ‘They’re still at primary school. They’ve got a different surname – Macaire – it sounds Scottish but I think their dad must be black. They’ve both got dark skin and fuzzy hair.’ Mixed-race children were still an innovation in Ede, though the villagers had finally got used to Nathan, with his Asiatic colouring and exotic features.

‘Coming to think of it, Mum said the little girl was adorable,’ Nathan commented, tolerant of maternal sentiment. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to be so hostile.’ Hazel, he knew, was using the old-fashioned village mentality to shield her own space and the people she didn’t want to share. ‘We should try to be friendly, at least to the two at Tertiary. I can handle the age gap. They’re our neighbours, after all.’

‘I suppose you fancy Liberty too?’ Hazel said.

‘I haven’t seen her. Is she pretty?’

Hazel shrugged. ‘Ask George.’ George Fawn had formed part of a threesome with them when they were younger, though they saw less of him now. ‘She’s thin – long legs – tight jeans. She has this don’t-care attitude, like she’s way above anyone else. Probably ’cos they come from London. London people always think they’re so cool.’

‘Maybe you’ll live in London one day,’ Nathan remarked.

‘You might; I won’t. I’m not clever enough.’

‘You don’t have to be clever—’

‘You know what I mean!’ Hazel flashed. ‘To live in London you need a good job, and to get a good job you need to pass exams, and everyone knows I’m going to eff up my GCSEs. So don’t talk to me about living in London, okay?’

‘I thought Uncle Barty was helping you with school work and … stuff?’

‘Sometimes,’ Hazel said. ‘When I can be bothered.’

‘Bother!’ Nathan gave her a dig with his foot, almost a kick. Best friend’s privilege. He didn’t say: Do you want to be stupid? because he knew that in a way she did, being stupid was her protest in the face of the world, her little rebellion against education and convention, her insurance against any expectations he or others might have of her. I’ll do nothing, I’ll go nowhere, I’ll be no one. I’m stupid. That’s that. He wanted to tell her it was childish but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. ‘What about the witching?’ he asked. ‘Have you done any of that?’

She hunched a shoulder, tugging her hair over her face in a gesture she had still to outgrow. ‘You know I don’t like it.’

‘You tried it yourself last year,’ he pointed out, brutally. ‘You made a complete mess of it, too. Ellen Carver nearly got killed and so did I. Uncle Barty said—’

‘All right, all right, I’m learning it.’ She pushed her hair back again, and some of the sullenness left her face. ‘He taught me how to make the spellfire the other night.’

‘Wow … What did you see?’

‘Smoke,’ Hazel said.

‘Just smoke?’

‘Pictures,’ Hazel conceded. ‘Smoke-pictures. The past, the future – it’s all mixed up and you can’t tell which is which, and Uncle Barty says there are so many possible futures, you don’t know if any of it’s true, so what’s the point of looking? Magic is all shadows and lies: you can’t trust it. Anyway, I saw scenes from your life, not mine – the Grail, and some kind of sacrifice, and people from another world.’

‘Our lives run together,’ Nathan said. ‘But … you’re not supposed to see other worlds in the smoke. The magic can’t look beyond the Gate. Uncle Barty’s always told me that. Are you sure—?’

‘I’m not sure of anything,’ Hazel said irritably, ‘except that I’m hungry.’ They were in her bedroom, and her private store of crisps had run out. ‘D’you think your mum would have anything to eat?’

They went round to Annie’s, and although Nathan pressed her, Hazel wouldn’t be any more specific about what she’d seen.

Annie supplied them with cereal bars (‘I don’t like those,’ Hazel muttered. ‘They’re too healthy.’) and the information that the Rayburns were having a Christmas party the following month, holding open house for anyone from the village.

‘They’re not the Rayburns,’ Hazel said, nitpicking. ‘I told Nathan, the two little ones are Macaires, and the husband’s something else too. Coleman, I think.’

‘Donny Collier,’ Annie said. ‘Boyfriend or husband. Let’s keep it simple – just call them the Rayburns. Go with the majority. Anyway, it looks like they’re planning a pretty lavish do. At least half the village disapproves of them, but I bet they’ll all go.’

Hazel was surprised into a laugh.

‘Stay for dinner,’ Annie went on. ‘It’s cauliflower cheese.’

‘That’s healthy too,’ Hazel quibbled.

‘Are you sure there’s enough?’ Nathan said. ‘I’m not going short – that’s my favourite.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Hazel.

Annie allowed herself a secret smile.

Once in a while Bartlemy had visitors not from the village, strangers whom few saw come or go and fewer still remembered. The man who hurried through the November dusk that year was one such, a tall, stooping figure as thin as a scarecrow, in a voluminous coat and hood that had seen better days, probably two or three centuries ago. Under the hood he had wispy hair and a wispy beard and a face criss-crossed with so many lines there was barely room for them all, but his eyes amidst all their wrinkles were very bright, and green as spring. A dog accompanied him, a wild-looking dog like a great she-wolf, who trotted at his heel and stopped when he stopped, without collar or lead or word of command. She never barked or panted, following him as silently as his own shadow. The man came striding along the lane through the woods on that chill winter’s evening, too late to have got off a local bus, too far from the train, and the dead leaves stirred behind him, as if something waked and watched.

There was a patter of pursuing feet on the empty road. Neither man nor dog looked back, though the hackles rose on the beast’s nape and her ears lay flat against her skull. When Bartlemy opened the door, the visitor said: ‘They are out there. I fear I am not welcome.’

‘You’re always welcome here,’ Bartlemy said, ‘though I could wish you would change that coat.’

‘It has travelled far with me,’ the visitor retorted. ‘It smells of the open road and open sky.’

‘Not quite how I would have put it,’ said Bartlemy. ‘Take it off for once and sit down.’

‘I expect,’ said the visitor, ‘you were just making tea.’

‘I am always just making tea,’ Bartlemy admitted.

In the living room, the two dogs surveyed each other, acknowledging past acquaintance, exchanged a sniff, and lay down on opposite sides of the fire. The wolf-like dog was big, with a wolf’s elegance and poise, but Hoover was bigger, shaggier, shambling, somehow more doggy. They both knew she would have deferred to him if he had made an issue of it, so he didn’t.

‘What brings you to my quiet corner of the world?’ Bartlemy inquired over the tea-tray.

‘I heard it was not so quiet of late,’ said the stranger.

‘You heard … from whom?’

‘I am not too much an outcast to read the newspapers,’ the man said. ‘There was the reappearance of the Grimthorn Grail – a few murders – an arrest but not, I believe, a complete solution. These are matters of interest to people like us.’

‘Indeed,’ said Bartlemy, ‘but that was two years ago. Why come now?’

‘It’s a long walk from the north. I no longer have the power to put wings on my feet.’

‘Your power may be worn out,’ Bartlemy responded, ‘but you can still move swifter than any of us, at need. Don’t fence with me, Ragginbone. You’ve always claimed to be a Watcher: what have you seen?’

‘I saw a peacock with a fiery tail,’ Ragginbone quoted. ‘I saw a blazing comet drop down hail. I saw a cloud … There have been omens and portents, some too strange to be easily read. There is a pattern in the stars pointing to a time of great significance, but whether good or evil is unclear. And more than that, there are whispers among the werefolk, tales of a Gate that will open at last, a loophole in the Ultimate Laws – a chance to snatch at power unguessed. No one knows quite when, or where – or how – but I heard you named, as a guardian, or an obstacle.’

‘Who—?’

‘I cannot be sure. They were voices in a crowd, on a dark street, and it was not a place where I wished to linger. There are many streets in the city, some darker than others, and not all those who use them are as human as they look.’

Ragginbone was not obviously a man of the city, even without his coat, but Bartlemy knew better than to categorise him.

‘Your wanderings take you to strange places,’ he said.

‘There are strange places round every corner, if you walk on the dark side,’ Ragginbone said. ‘Belief creates its own kingdoms, even in this world. As the legends change so do the pathways, but the shadows linger as long as memory, and the shadow-dwellers are always there. Some of them may be coming your way, or so rumour has it. Some may be already here.’

‘Nenufar,’ said Bartlemy.

‘The name I heard was Nephthys, but it is the same. She is old, and cold, and forever angry. Once, men sought to soften her with worship, but she could not be softened, not she. Now, she has been sailed and chartered, polluted and abused, netted and dragged and mined, and the tale of her grievances is the lullabye she sings to the storm. What she may hope for, should the Gate open for her, I do not know, but the drowning of all humanity is in her dearest dream.’

‘You’re well informed,’ said Bartlemy. It was almost a question.

‘I have heard her in the scream of the wind, in the roar of the waves,’ Ragginbone said. It was not an answer. ‘And there are those who flee from her, bringing word of her wrath.’

‘The word on the street,’ Bartlemy concluded. ‘Have you come to offer help?’

‘I have no help,’ the other said. ‘My spells have all gone stale. I came to warn you – and to wish you well.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bartlemy. ‘I need all the wellwishing I can get. Or rather, Nathan does.’

‘Who’s Nathan?’

‘I think,’ said Bartlemy, ‘he’s the key.’

‘I have experience of keys,’ said Ragginbone. ‘Perhaps I should have said, what is he?’

‘A boy. A relatively normal boy, insofar as anyone is normal. Intelligent, resourceful, courageous – but a teenager.’

‘He’ll grow out of that,’ said Ragginbone. ‘Is he Gifted?’

‘Not in the accepted sense. The power of the Lodestone on which Atlantis was founded has never touched his genes. But he has … ability. To be precise, the ability to move between worlds. There is a portal in his mind – he passes it in dreams – in extreme cases, his sleeping form disappears altogether, materialising in another universe. He seems to have little or no control over the phenomenon, but I suspect that someone else may be controlling him – guiding him – even protecting him. Someone from beyond the Gate. He has dreamed of a dying world, of a few survivors on the last planet, one stop from extinction. The ruler there is trying to perform a Great Spell. Plainly, Nathan has a vital part to play, presumably as a gatherer of certain objects. He has already retrieved the Grail, as you have heard, also a sword.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said Ragginbone, after a pause. For him, this was strong language. ‘Great Spells are perilous, and may be millennia in the preparation. Are you sure?’

‘The necessary elements are there. The feminine principle, the masculine principle, the circle that binds. A cup, a sword, a crown. The crown appears to have been mislaid, but no doubt it will turn up in time. Whenever that time may be.’

‘A cup … The Grimthom Grail?’

Bartlemy nodded. ‘I have been wondering,’ he said – changing the subject, or so it seemed, but Ragginbone knew better – ‘about a theory of yours. The Gift, as we know, is not native to the human race: the Stone of Power in Atlantis warped those who lived in its vicinity, giving them the talents their descendants still possess. Longevity, spellpower, the various madnesses that they engender. You have always maintained that the Stone itself was the essence of another universe – a universe with a high level of magic – accidentally catapulted into our own. Supposing, instead, it was just a part of another universe – an entire galaxy, for example – and its presence in our world was no accident …?’

‘In infinity and eternity,’ Ragginbone said, ‘all things are possible. What are you suggesting?’

‘Perhaps our universe was chosen – as a refuge or an escape route – many ages ago, at least in our Time. The Gift may have been given so that certain individuals could perform their part: Josevius Grimling-Thorn, called Grimthorn, who accepted the Grail, and myself, as Nathan’s protector when he was a baby. My role has been very minor; nonetheless …’

Ragginbone was frowning. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said abruptly.

‘It was merely a hypothesis,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I was looking for a pattern in Chaos, but—’

‘You misunderstand me. The theory is viable. That’s what I don’t like.’

‘You mean—’

‘I was thinking of the classics,’ Ragginbone said. ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’

‘I fear Greeks bearing gifts. A reference to the Trojan Horse, a gift whose acceptance by the Trojans led to the downfall of their city.’

‘Exactly,’ Ragginbone said.

It rained heavily that night. In the visitor’s bedroom under the eaves the roof leaked, though it had never leaked before. Ragginbone woke, or dreamed he woke, and saw the steady drip-drip from the ceiling, and the water spreading in a puddle on the floorboards. Presently, a hand emerged – a white cold hand with bluish nails, like the hand of someone who has drowned – and groped round the edge of the puddle, seeking for purchase. The wolf-dog approached and growled her soundless growl, snapping at the crawling fingers, and the hand withdrew, slipping back into the water. The puddle shrank and vanished. The dripping stopped.

‘No spirit can enter here uninvited,’ Bartlemy said in the morning. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream?’

‘The time is out of joint,’ Ragginbone said. ‘The old spells are unravelling; even the Ultimate Laws may no longer hold. The future casts more than a shadow. Whatever is coming, it may change everything.’

‘Keep in touch,’ Bartlemy adjured, seeing his visitor to the door.

‘I will,’ promised Ragginbone. He did not say how. He strode off under a drizzling sky with the she-wolf at his heels, and Bartlemy returned to the sanctum of his living room, looking more troubled than he had done in a long, long while.

Another visitor came to Thornyhill Manor that week, but he came to the back door and would have been seen by no one, unless they had weresight. He was barely four feet high and bristled with tufts of hair and beard, sprouting in all directions as if the designer of his physiognomy had never quite sorted out which was which. His clothing was equally haphazard, rags of leather, Hessian, oilcloth tacked together more or less at random, covering his anatomy but unable to produce a recognisable garment. But the most noticeable thing about him was his smell – the stale, indescribable smell of someone who has slept in a foxhole for a hundred years and thinks bathing is bad for your health.

Bartlemy seemed oblivious to it. He made food for his guest, rather strange food, with ingredients from a jar that sat on an obscure little shelf in the corner of the kitchen all by itself. His cooking gave off the usual aroma of herbs and spices and general deliciousness, but Hoover sniffed suspiciously at a morsel that fell to the floor, and let it lie. While his guest was eating Bartlemy poured two tankards of something home-brewed and flavoured with honey and sat back, waiting with his customary patience.

The dwarf made appreciative noises as he cleared his plate.

‘Ye can chafe up a mean dishy o’ fatworms,’ he remarked in an accent whose origins were lost in the mists of time, ‘e’en though they were no fresh. Howsomedever …’

‘You didn’t come to talk of cooking, I imagine,’ Bartlemy supplied.

‘Nay. Nay, I didna, but there’s no saying I wouldna rather talk o’ food and drink and the guid things in life, instead o’ the dark time to come. Ye’ll be knowing it, I daresay. Ye’re one who would read the signs and listen to the whisperings. The Magister, he used to say to me: There’ll be one day, one hour – one hour o’ magic and destiny – one hour to change the world. I didna care for that, ye ken. The world changes, all the time, but slow, slow. What kind o’ change can ye be having in a wee hour? It canna be anything guid, not to be coming that quick. Aye, and the Magister’s face would light when he spoke of it, wi’ the light o’ greed and madness, though he were niver mad. He didna have that excuse.’

Some time in the Dark Ages the dwarf had worked for Josevius Grimthorn, scion of the ancient Thorn family – once owners of Thornyhill – and a sorcerer rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil. What he had gained from the transaction no one knew, but he was said to have lived nearly seven hundred years and died in a fire in his own satanic chapel, leaving the Grimthorn Grail to the guardianship of his descendants. That guardianship, like the manor, had passed to Bartlemy. The dwarf had fallen out with his master and been imprisoned for centuries in a subterranean chamber in the Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel inadvertently released him. The lingering dread of his old master’s activities still remained with him.

His name, when he remembered it, was Login Nambrok.

‘Did he tell you exactly when this hour is due?’ Bartlemy asked.

The dwarf heaved his shoulders in a shrug bigger than his whole body. ‘He said I would feel it,’ he offered, ‘i’ the marrow o’ my bones. I’m no siccar there’s much marrow left – my bones are auld and dry – but there’s an ache in me like a warning o’ foul weather to come. And there are other signs than my auld bones. The sma’ creatures i’ the wood, they’re leaving – aye, or scurrying round and round like they dinna ken where to go. And there’s birds flying south wi’ tidings o’ darkness in the north, and birds flying north wi’ rumours o’ trouble in the south, and so it goes on. There’s times I think the wind itself has a voice, and it’s whispering among the leaves, but mebbe that’s a’ fancy. And there’s them – the invisible ones – they’d gather down by the chapel ruin, under the leaves, muttering together in the auld tongue, though I doot they understood the words – muttering and muttering the charms that magicked them. But lately …’ He broke off with something like a shudder.

Bartlemy looked a question.

‘There was a hare I’d been following,’ Nambrok said. ‘I’d fancied him for my dinner, and I’d been stalking him a while, quiet as a tree spider, and he went that way. They saw him. Time was, they wouldn’t have troubled any beast, but they saw him and chased him, down the valley and up the valley, chased him till he couldna run further, and then they were on him and crowding in his head, and now the puir creature is madder ‘n March, and bites his own kind, and snarls like a dog when ye come near him. That’s no honest end for a beastie. And ye canna eat a creature that’s been so enspelled. There’ve been others, too … and one day it’ll be man, not beast. It’ll be some chiel walking in the woods, or a dog that sets on his master. There’s no reason to it – nothing to guard – no threat – but …’

‘They’re out of control,’ Bartlemy concluded. And he repeated, more to himself than his companion: ‘The old spells are unravelling. Things are beginning to fall apart …’

‘Aye,’ said the dwarf, ‘and there’s little ye can be doing aboot it, or so I’m thinking.’

‘Maybe,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But we can try.’

Above Nathan’s house a single star shone. The night was misty and the sky obscured, but that one star shone brightly, a steady pinpoint of light looking down on the bookshop, while Nathan sat on the edge of the rooflight, looking up. When the dreams were most intense – when half his life seemed to happen in worlds whose reality was still unproven – he would climb up to the roof and gaze at the star, and that kept him sane. Winter and summer, its position never altered. It had been there now for two years and more, a star that did not twinkle or move along the set pathways of the heavens – a star that could not be seen beyond the borders of Ede – fixed in its place like a lamp to guide him home. His star.

He went to bed, reaching in his mind for the portal that would once more let him through, and dreamed of the star.

It hung in a chamber of darkness at the top of a tower a mile high. Light streamed outwards from its heart but seemed to go nowhere and illuminate nothing, absorbed into the gloom around it. Other stars were suspended round the periphery of the room, pale globes emitting a similar radiance, but it was his star at the centre, turning slowly on its own axis, a crystalline eye of intercosmic space. A lens on another world. Here, his world was the otherworld, the alien country. This was Arkatron on Eos, a city at the end of Time. In this room with no visible walls or floor a ruler thousands of years old – a ruler who had held a whole universe under his sway – gazed beyond the Gate to find a refuge for the last of his people, a way of escape from the Contamination that had eaten the numberless galaxies of his realm. By day, his subjects went robed and masked against the poisonous sun; by night, they slept uneasily, anticipating the End. But in this chamber it was always night. Nathan’s thought floated in the darkness, waiting. Presently, the Grandir came.

If he had a name, no one knew it. Other Grandirs had come and gone, leaving their names behind them, but he was last, and nameless. In a universe with a high level of magic, to know someone’s name is to have power over him: the power of summons, even of Command, if the summoner is strong enough. Like knowing the Prime Minister’s mobile number, Nathan reflected, smiling to himself in thought. I bet he doesn’t give that to just anybody. But the Grandir didn’t tell his name even to his nearest and dearest – if he had them – not even to his bridesister Halmé, Halmé the childless, whose beauty was a legend among her people, though few had ever looked on her face. She went unmasked only in private chambers, for the eyes of a privileged few. As for the Grandir, Nathan had seen his face naked just once, in a dream that plucked him from danger, and the memory of it still made him shiver, though he wasn’t sure why.

The Grandir wore a mask now, a white mask with perfect sculpted features, lips slightly parted to allow for speech, eye-slots covered with bulbs of black glass. He was tall even for a tall race, and his protective clothing either padded or emphasised the great width of his shoulders and the mass of what must be a muscular torso. A cowl concealed both head and hair; gauntlets were on his hands. In the gloom of the chamber Nathan could distinguish few details, but he knew the costume from many times before. He watched with the eyes of his dream as the Grandir moved among the star-globes, not touching them yet somehow controlling their rotation. It was strange to be intangible where he had once been solid, invisible where he had once been seen. He wanted to say something, but knew he would have no voice.

Every so often, a picture was projected onto the ceiling from one of the globes, a glimpse into another world. Nathan saw a castle which looked familiar – not really a castle, more a house with castle trimmings – and with a sudden shock he recognised Carboneck, where he had found the Traitor’s Sword. There were people crowding outside, in a city which had once been empty, people with bright happy faces, and a girl came out onto the steps, arm-in-arm with a young man, a girl with a lot of hair falling in many waves almost to her waist. She wore a crown of white flowers like tiny stars and a white dress which glittered with gems or embroidery. Nell, Nathan thought with a sudden stab in his heart. Nell in her wedding gown … Princess Nellwyn, who had been his friend and ally in the alien kingdom of Wilderslee, when he’d drawn the sword it was forbidden to touch, the sword possessed by a malevolent spirit and endorsed by legend … He’d kissed her in the Deepwoods under the many-coloured trees – but that was ages ago, more than a year, in a dream long faded. And in her time many years must have passed, and her face was lit with love, and Carboneck of the shadows had put out all the flags and was garlanded for a party …

Another picture, another place. A world of sea – the world of Nathan’s latest dream – a world he had visited, though only briefly, once or twice before. ‘Widewater,’ said the Grandir as if to himself, and though he spoke softly his voice was a shock, breaking the silence of that high chamber. A voice like the rasp of iron on velvet, like the whisper of thunder, like the caress of fire. ‘The realm of Nefanu the mer-goddess, who hates all things that breathe the air. But there is always land under the sea, under the blue deeps and the green shallows. One day the mountains will lift up their heads, and touch the clouds once more.’

The star-globe could not see beneath the waves, but the image showed several marine animals leaping and diving in a glitter of spray – seals? No: dolphins or porpoises. But there was one among them who looked different, a mercreature with arms which glowed like pearl and a purple tail, flying higher than the others, almost as if she would take wing. And when the school had moved on she remained, head above water, dark hair uncoiling like smoke in the wave-pattern, gazing up into the sunlight, up at a star she could not see. Denaero? Nathan wondered, but the vision was too far off to tell.

Then Widewater vanished, and now it was his star upside down on the ceiling. His world. The patchwork of roofs and gardens that was Ede, little streets and twittens and paths, the meadows stretching down to the river. The mooring at Riverside House, with an inflatable tied up there, and children jumping on and off – presumably the Rayburns – under the casual supervision of their mother. One little girl – a brown-skinned elf with nubbly plaits – slithered down the bank and fell in, disappearing immediately under the water. No one noticed. Nathan wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t be heard in the dream, let alone beyond. For what seemed like an age the river-surface remained unbroken. Then her head bobbed up again, mouth open in a wail, as though she had been thrust up from below, and her family were snatching at her, too many rescuers tangling with each other in their haste, and she was plucked out of the water, onto the bank, and hugged and fussed over and dried.

The picture blinked out, and Nathan was just a thought in the dark. The Grandir was standing close to him, a huge physical presence where he had none – Nathan could hear the murmur of his breath through the mask, sense the steady motor of his pulse which seemed to make the air vibrate. And suddenly Nathan felt the Grandir was aware of him, listening for his thought, reaching out with more-than-human senses for the ghost that hovered somewhere near, unseen but not unknown. An inexplicable panic flooded his spirit, violent as nausea, and the dream spun away, and he was pitched back into wakefulness on the heaving mattress of his own bed.

Gradually, the mattress stabilised and Nathan subsided into normal sleep. There were no more dream-journeys to other worlds, but he was haunted by images of Princess Nell in her wedding dress, running and running through an endless network of corridors, while he tried in vain to follow. Her laughter woke him in the morning, fading into music as the alarm went off and his radio started to play.