The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  She let go of his arm. ‘Of course you’ve thought it through,’ she said, resentful. ‘Of course you’re going to get Jacob.’

  ‘I thought you’d want me to get Jacob.’ He sounded surprised. ‘You waited at the hospital for days to see him. Don’t you want him?’

  Taryn pressed her lips together firmly. That was not a question she was going to answer.

  Shift took the glove from her and dropped it onto his right hand, then looked at it, disconcerted. It was balanced on the dressing like a too-small hat on a too-big head. He stripped the dressing off, then fastened the glove over his bruised and swollen hand. He clipped the pin and chain closed, and wrapped the thong around his wrist. Then he stepped away from Taryn and stretched out the gloved hand.

  Taryn felt the vertiginous lurch and soundless roaring as the gate arrived. It was the third time she’d felt that, the other times were outside the Bibliothèque Méjanes, and when Neve put her through Hell’s Gate into that quiet spot in Hyde Park several weeks ago. Neve had stood straight and made a ceremonious gesture, like someone performing magic. Shift looked the same as he did when he was plucking fruit from a tree. Then he dropped his hand, took a few steps forward and disappeared. Taryn felt the gate wheel away again—Hell’s Gate—probably reverting to its fixed point, like the dial on an old-fashioned phone revolving on a spring.

  Taryn shouldered Shift’s bedroll as well as her own and went downriver. She found a stretch of water sheltered from the current by the landing and a shingle spit. The water was sparkling, and several other people were swimming. Taryn took off her clothes and walked into the water, which was fresh, but not cold. She swam and rinsed herself and sat in the shallows. She even had a conversation, with a middle-aged man whose face was stippled by white scars—it looked as if someone had been chipping away at him with a chisel. He spoke in sparse formal French, with much more fluent dialect mixed into it, and a little English. Enough for Taryn to tell him that she came from London and was a writer of books. And for him to tell her that when he was last on Earth he was a poilu—an infantryman—and before that a cobbler. He originally came from a village in Brittany. They managed that little, then sat companionably, the water hissing as it lapped against the thick mat of hair on his chest. She tried some of her sidhe on him and he taught her a little more, all of it related to the river, upstream and downstream, boat and sail, voyage and current.

  The sun left the water. Everyone got out and picked up their clothes and followed the sunlight higher up the water meadow. They stood and dried in the air. No midges or mosquitoes came to molest them.

  Taryn put on her sweaty garments and joined the soldier at his fire, where there were several more Frenchmen, and two joyful Vietnamese teenagers who were making everyone pool their food for as much of a feast as they could muster. Taryn contributed her walnuts and fresh apricots. Someone came around with a crock full of a powerful juniper-flavoured clear spirit. The crock still had scabs of fresh dirt on its sides, as someone had only just dug it up. It was clearly a piece of human provisioning, because none of the sidhe at the fires near Taryn’s accepted any.

  Everyone at her fire ate and drank, and got a little inebriated. They sang for a bit, and then tried to get Taryn to tell them, in her poor French, how the world fared. Was it possible yet to be poor and live decently? Were young men still sent to die in wars made by old men? Were the meek still waiting to inherit the Earth, as Scripture promised, though generations of them were already under the ground, and a grave isn’t an inheritance?

  Not really, Taryn said of the first. Yes, of course, of the second. And of the third, no. It’s not like that. They made us believe we’re weaklings if we can’t do everything for ourselves by ourselves. We all say, ‘So, I’ve failed,’ when mostly we’ve been failed. They made us afraid of one another, but of themselves they say, ‘There is no “they.”’

  Taryn’s French didn’t let her down. These were simple things to express. The people around the fire all looked at her sadly, and nodded sagely. She stared at their human faces, painted by the firelight, and thought how those they loved and served would eventually sell them into perpetual misery. She wanted to tell them to run away. What were they going to say of themselves when their souls were marched through Hell’s Gate and their bodies were buried no doubt with flowers and music and fine ceremony? Were they going to say, ‘So, I’ve failed. Such and such a lady or gentleman no longer loves me, and has laid me by’? Taryn understood that her existence was only of use or not of use to her society. She was a consumer contributing to economic growth, which was an unquestioned good. To exist, she must spend her life spending. But these people were going to be sold to buy more time for time-rich, heartless people. They were going to be literally damned by association, never mind the original state of their souls. Heaven would not intervene as it did in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, because, for a start, none of these people was a countess. They were the numberless others of history, counted only by the Tithe. They were marks in a ledger. Taryn wanted to say, ‘I’m a consumer and a client, and you’re property. We have value, but it has nothing to do with who we are.’

  But she didn’t say it. Because what good would it do when a true understanding of what was in store for them couldn’t save them from any of it?

  25

  Taken Lightly

  Jacob, in the pit of his last dose of painkiller, lay looking at the sky. It seemed the sides of the pit were sinking towards him, and it was as if he and the arriving light together welled up out of that pit, a fluid made of a combination of his consciousness and his pain, and a dawn sky, scarcely blue, with soft gold clouds.

  He was lying in a flattened clearing in a meadow, on a mounded bed of sleek and greenish hay. The ground around his bed was carefully swept, the strokes of the broom most evident around the stone walls of the campfire. The smoking coals were uncovered and topped with fresh kindling. The sticks had recently caught, and were crackling and blackening.

  Jacob’s bed was hard but something firm braced his lumbar region. A belt that braced his back, but without any corresponding stricture on his abdomen. The brace was firm, warm, but somehow not fully solid.

  He attempted to get up. He bent his legs and tilted his hip off the mound of grass. He swung his opposite arm over so he’d roll onto his knees. The pressure and heat in the small of his back increased. It felt almost as if four branching hands had spread their fingers up under his kidneys and down between his buttocks. Hands with improbably long fingers braced his tailbone and branched around his rectum.

  Pain lanced down his right leg. It was his right sciatic nerve that was compressed. The doctors had told him that. As the pain arrived the heat and pressure moved out across his right buttock and hip. His thigh was gripped and held. There was a kind of current in the touch, an electric tickle. The pain began to relent. It was squeezed and buzzed away.

  Jacob got himself upright and limped over to a tree and leaned on it. He stared at the fire, the hay, the doeskin blanket, and a grimy white cotton sheet that he recognised as belonging to the hospital he had been in when last awake, a London hospital specialising in spinal injuries.

  The standing grass rustled and a fox appeared. It was carrying a bird, the fan of wings masking its muzzle. It trotted out onto the flattened grass of the clearing and looked at Jacob. It didn’t hesitate, but went to the fire and dropped the bird, which turned out to be two birds—fat quail. The fox sat back on its haunches and licked its paws to wash its face. It groomed the blood from its muzzle and chest, then met Jacob’s eye and gave a small black-lipped smile.

  Jacob set his hands behind him and dug his fingernails into the tree trunk.

  The fox did not turn into a man. It wasn’t a television or movie version of shifting, of CGI morphing an image of an animal into the image of a man. Instead the fox became a small cloud of matter, dense and rosy, the colour of sunlight shining through a baby’s ear. The cloud thinned, grew in volume, as if its particles were divid
ing. Again it gathered morning light into itself and then made Shift—Shift, in his homespun and home-knit clothes.

  The fox had been sitting on its haunches; Shift was cross-legged. He reached for one quail, drew it into his lap and began plucking it.

  ‘I think I remember you arriving at the hospital,’ Jacob said. He had a dreamlike recollection of Shift clambering over the bottom board of the bed, where the chart hung, and the motor of the pressure-relieving mattress. Shift had stood wobbling on the wheezing, constantly adjusting mattress, his arms out for balance, one hand bare, the other gleaming rose gold.

  Jacob looked about and saw the glove hanging like a Christmas ornament in the branches of the tree he was leaning against. ‘Aren’t you afraid someone will take it?’

  Shift looked where Jacob was looking and shook his head. ‘It was made for my mother. Her sister Neve can use it. Her son can use it. And no one else.’

  ‘I mean for the value of the gold?’

  ‘Gold isn’t for hoarding here. It’s for tools. That glove is already a tool. No one would think to refashion it.’

  ‘You put it in an oak at Princes Gate Magna.’

  ‘Momentarily.’

  ‘Momentarily unless something happened to you.’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t go around thinking like that. You don’t think like that.’

  ‘I floss my teeth,’ Jacob said. He didn’t court danger; danger was just part of the deal of his life. Otherwise he was as careful as the next careful person, and he’d never had time for this wafty put-the-priceless-object-in-a-tree, or sneaky pretend-to-be-crippled stuff.

  Shift said, ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Do I have to explain dental floss?’

  ‘I’m not sure what it is, though I seem to remember Jack Reacher making a tripwire with some. A strong line, easily obtainable in a standard grocery store. Something for cleaning the gaps between teeth, I believe.’

  ‘So you do know.’

  ‘Only when I think it through. So—what do I need to know about dental floss?’

  ‘I use it to look after my teeth because I’ll need my teeth for the duration of my life. You presumably will need the Gatemaker’s glove for the duration of yours.’

  ‘It does represent the freedom to go almost anywhere.’

  ‘Which is why I’m surprised Neve gave it up.’

  ‘Neve doesn’t want to go anywhere. She doesn’t want much at all.’

  ‘Lucky her.’

  ‘She eats. Her eyes tolerate the light. She doesn’t walk away from quarrels, dogfights, dance music being too loud. But she’s not all that interested in anything.’

  Jacob was now lost.

  ‘So,’ Shift said, which sounded like a final word and a powerful conjunction that might be followed by a reasoned argument. But he only put down the denuded quail, its still-feathered head lolling, and picked up the second.

  Jacob realised his back had stopped hurting. He stayed where he was, as motionless as possible, and watched Shift finish plucking the second bird. Once it was featherless Shift fished in the felted bag he’d left by the fire while he was off in fox. He produced a stone knife with a rippled translucent blade. He used it to gut the quail, then to cut the twigs off some stakes. He pushed the stakes through the quail and propped them up over the flames to roast. After a time the morning filled with the sound of softly snapping kindling and the juice and grease from the birds dripping onto the coals.

  Jacob asked what the thing was that had him in its grip, and Shift said, ‘A hand. Or rather two of them. Like mendings, but stronger and more sustained. They’re being guided by your muscles. They’ll warm them, press out a spasm, and firm up if you start to tire. You can stop trying to protect your back. Let the hands be vigilant for you.’

  ‘So I might sit to eat?’

  Jacob hadn’t sat in weeks. He couldn’t imagine it. Then he saw that there wasn’t anything to sit on but the ground.

  In her quick sketch of the nomadic, hunter-gatherer but highly cultivated and accommodating sidhe, Taryn had mentioned caches of cooking equipment, comfortable encampments, stores of firewood, wild gardens, and landscaped walks down to the water. Shift and he must be well off the beaten path.

  ‘Or maybe I’ll stay standing.’ Jacob gestured at the bare ground.

  ‘There aren’t any stopping places at Hell’s Gate,’ Shift said, and pointed towards the rising sun. ‘It’s just over there.’

  ‘The gate is on the main thoroughfare?’

  ‘The Horse Road. No one stops at the gate because of the graves. They’re all around us.’

  Jacob looked about for signs but saw only the meadow covered in wildflowers and large but widely scattered trees.

  ‘The newest grave is nearly a century old. The ground dips, but time and vegetation plump it out again.’

  Jacob was determined not to ask whose graves they were. Besides, Shift had gone on to give an account of his short visit to Hell.

  After a time Shift brought the quail—charred on its outside and still taut and pink by its bones. Jacob took a few bites, and his brain woke up enough to let him know that the graves must be for the bodies of the human beings whose souls were offered to Hell at the time of the Tithe. Taryn had been here; she’d sent photos, and he had seen what she saw—a long tract of grassland and mountains, another paradisiacal place. The apricot-coloured birds and tree with bright green leaves. The stone pillars and smoky demon. No sign of graves. But Taryn wouldn’t have thought of mass graves. Mass graves were an idea that came more readily to Jacob.

  ‘I brought my gate to your hospital bed as soon as I discovered where you were. I even brought it up to the level of your bed so I could take the end of your sheet and drag you directly to this fireside. I had the fire built already. You passed out when I pulled you through. I removed all your cannulas. I made my hands and set them on you, rolled you onto the bed I’d made, and covered you with the sheet that came with you. I wanted a quiet place to get my hands on you. And for the ceremonial moment.’ Shift was looking at Jacob steadily, sombrely.

  ‘What ceremonial moment?’

  ‘Which has passed,’ Shift said. ‘I have no idea what the state of your soul was, or what it would be if I’d left you to live out your life. This way I can guarantee a good four hundred years before I’m too young to defend you.’

  Jacob looked at his still ferociously steaming quail. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘I just got Took.’

  26

  Quarry House

  There was time, so the party went by the river. The boat carried eight comfortably, with four sleeping in the cabin below the waterline. The cabin had no windows—glass seemed unknown, or simply unused, in the Sidh. The doors down to it were open in the daytime, and at night Taryn would light the single gimbal-mounted oil lamp. The other four bedded down on deck, among cushions piled in an open-sided shelter. Jacob spent most of his time there, day and night, flat on his back, or sometimes propped up enough to watch the land slipping by.

  They travelled as part of a flotilla. Most of the boats would moor in the same harbour each night. Sites established at tributary streams, or where a road joined the river. Each site a node of the food forest that followed all roads and waterways, thickening or thinning according to the quality of the soil, irrigation and drainage, the orientation to the sun, and frequency of use. The food forests along the Senisteingh thickened wherever a bend in the river created a large stretch of calm water.

  But there were many other places where one or two vessels might moor, like the deep water beside a tree whose trunk was worn smooth by ropes—somewhere boats had tied up for years, boats whose passengers wouldn’t want to join a thronged harbour campsite. Their boat, heading for the customary nightly harbour, often passed barges moored at these quiet spots. At dusk, their curtained palanquins floated, dreamy and pale, in their clouds of spice-scented smoke. On their boat a hush would fall. Nobody would hail the barge, and all boat board activities would be suspended until it had pass
ed out of sight.

  The harbours never held all the same vessels. Some dropped behind or got ahead. Their boat caught up with those Taryn had watched set off from the harbour where the Horse Road first met the Senisteingh, during the time she was alone, the two days she waited for Jane and her companions, and then four more for Shift and Jacob.

  None of the boats used their sails. Theirs had no form of propulsion, only a tiller, and a couple of oars, the first usually managed by one of the three sturdy women who had arrived with Jane and Kernow—Susan, Henriette and Blanche—and the second scarcely used.

  In the tricky stretches Shift and Henriette took turns at the tiller, Shift sometimes getting Taryn to stand at it with him. He’d point out signs of submerged snags or shingle banks and, after several sessions, posted her on the bow to give him a bit more warning about the river’s obstacles. Taryn didn’t offer any diagnosis of the conditions she was on the lookout for, just called out ‘Over there!’ and turned to check that he was looking where she pointed. It gave her something to do apart from watch the passing landscape and wonder at what she saw.

  The river flowed through forested hills, rich soil covered in oak, elms, ash, cherry, apple, peach, pear, plum, quince and medlar. Poorer soils on bluffs above the river were covered in hazels. And now and then there were chasms of limestone pillars covered in blackberry and passionfruit.

  They passed steep dry hills of olives and acacias, and the river hurried through gorges of different character—some with tall cataracts of tributary rivers, some with no vegetation, only great falls of broken rock. The river in those places flowed pale and murky with a strong cable of current at its centre and wicked whirlpools where it touched the cliffs. Shift and Henriette would steer together, leaning into or away from the tiller, using the oars to hold the boat steady.

  Further downstream the flotilla converged into a slow-moving mass. The Senisteingh broadened. A path appeared on both banks and went alongside the river for miles. People took the opportunity to get out and walk, because it was easy to keep their boat in view. Taryn gathered berries, and watched the other vessels, the tall figures with bright hair and faces that glowed with health, and their human companions, often also lovely, and at ease in a deep, complacent way that made them like the sidhe, only not nearly as packed with unused moment and energy.