The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  A wall of rain ran at them, falling drops and fizzing splashes. Water fell from the sky into the boat and rain landing on the sea beside it splashed up, so even more water found its way in. Taryn looked around for something with which to bail, and resorted to her cupped hands. The rain pounded through every layer of her clothes. The linens clung to her back and sides, heavy and clammy. She kept her head down and was careful of what she was doing, of each scoop into the sloshing water in the bottom of the boat. As much water as she could hold, as fast as she could manage. Her hair hung in her field of vision, curling tendrils stretched almost straight, not just wet, but channelling water.

  The boat hit the beach before Taryn saw the island. She struggled out and helped Shift rock it back and forth until it tipped far enough to empty itself. It was too heavy for just the two of them to turn over. They would have to let it fill again. They struggled to drag it up the beach, and while its stern was still in the water Taryn shouted at Shift to give up. ‘After this you can use your glove to get us somewhere dry. We don’t need the boat.’

  He looked at her, then at the boat. She saw that he was reluctant to leave it. He’d thrown some interfering men into a wilderness miles away but had inhibitions about losing a communal boat. Would he ever be free of his habit of following sidhe rules?

  They hurried up the beach and onto a staircase. It was flanked by stone stanchions. An ancient vine had been trained to grow through loops at the top of each stanchion. Taryn used the vine rail to climb, her hand finding a grip in bare places where fresh shoots of its golden-leafed foliage had been pruned back. The angle of each step was crammed with fallen leaves. In the path’s shadiest bends there were only small spots where they could place their feet, among black mould and tiny, oily-looking toadstools.

  The stairs became a tunnel under trees. Sometimes the vines and branches grew low and they had to duck their heads. They climbed blind, the downpour reaching them as soft drips and dribbles, the exposed forest above deafeningly loud.

  They reached the intersection where the steps met a path that curved out of sight in either direction, tending uphill. It was wider than the steps, but similarly narrowed by encroaching trees, the elephantine roots of a vast ficus, and some tree with pendant aerial roots, like a collection of giant-sized yard brooms. A single-file track of paving was visible between drifts of black leaf mulch. Everything was wet and gloomy.

  Shift took the right-hand path. Sometimes it crossed drains that flowed from open channels of squared stone, passed under the path, and continued as natural streams. But after they had been winding uphill for another fifteen minutes the water was confined in channels above and below the path, and when Taryn followed one gushing stream with her eyes she saw that it flowed under the walls of a building hidden in the trees below them. A building with blind walls. A tomb.

  This was strange. Were the tombs only shelters for show, and did it not matter if they weren’t weathertight and water ran under their walls?

  They looped their way around the island, always climbing. As the path ascended it improved. The uneven blocks buried in leaf litter became level flagstones with mats of kikuyu between them. The rain fell quieter here.

  Soon they were passing rows of tombs. These weren’t built close together, right on the path, as mausoleums in the cemeteries Taryn was most familiar with were: Highgate’s tiny Georgian terraces, Montparnasse’s fin-de-siècle streets in miniature. Instead each tomb had a space the same size as itself between it and its neighbour. Each was set back from the path, towered over by trees but elevated on well-groomed stone footings that kept back the tree roots. The branches were trained away from the tombs. The tombs seemed designed to minimise the sound of the rain. Their tiled roofs of clean copper were steeply pitched. They had guttering, but no downpipes. Instead there were rain chains. Taryn had seen rain chains on old buildings in Japan. The water flowed down the chains with no splatter or gurgling, only a gentle trickling.

  Shift turned back to Taryn and set a finger to his lips. He made the gesture of zipping, locking, and casting away the key.

  She nodded and tried to stop her teeth from chattering.

  Shift turned off the path and approached a tomb. He stepped onto its pedestal porch and put his hand up—Taryn supposed to knock. But he only wiped his fingers along the top hinge of the door then checked his fingertips. Taryn saw the rainwater beading on the oil on his skin.

  He drew her close and put his mouth against her ear. ‘You’re a second set of eyes and ears,’ he said.

  Taryn nodded. She thought of her visits to the oncologist with her mother. Once Beatrice was dead there was only her to do it. She would take notes so that however overwhelmed her mother was by information she’d have an account to consider later and help her make decisions.

  Shift pushed the door. It didn’t have a lock or latch, was only hung in such a way that its own weight held it shut.

  The door opened inwards. Shift went inside, drawing Taryn after him. He set her at one side of the door and closed it again.

  The grey light diminished. They stood still and let their eyes adjust. There were vents in several places up under the eaves of the roof. Horizontal slats of filigreed stonework through which an aqueous light gleamed and wavered. The room was dry. Taryn could hear water running under it, muffled by stone. Then she saw the coping of a covered well. Fixed to its wall was a golden cup on a silver chain.

  A small stone bench stood against the wall opposite the vents that let in the light. On the bench was a pile of neatly folded fine linen. Lemon yellow, pale blue, pure white and bone white—Neve’s colours.

  The room was swept clean. It had thick walls, and the sound of the storm came in, muffled and faint. There was a platform at the back of the room. It was the height and size of a bed, not a bier. There was a woman on the bed. Or, she was lying suspended maybe three centimetres from the scrubbed sandstone platform, on nothing at all. Taryn peered and saw the bubble tea texture of the air. The woman, curled up facing the wall, was lying on a mattress of mendings. She occupied half the mattress; the rest was covered by her hair. It trailed upwards from her head and lay piled above her in heaped waves the colour and lustre of a creamy pearl.

  Shift crept towards the bed. He knelt and bent his head. He cupped his hands and after a time began to spit into them. He spat until they were full, then emptied what he held onto the bed. He kept it up for a long time, until his lips were pale and his arms had begun to shake.

  Taryn moved her weight from foot to foot. She wished she could sit down, but she didn’t even dare lean on the wall. She continued to shiver.

  The woman on the bed stirred. She slowly rolled face up and straightened her legs. Shift drew back, careful not to come into contact with her.

  The woman’s body was wasted, but she was smooth-skinned and youthful. The branching blue veins in the hollows of her temples were clearly visible. Her bony arms were softly threaded blue. Her eyes were clear and her eyelashes were glossy and black. She looked like a very young person who has been deathly ill and is convalescing. Except for her improbable doll-like mass of hair, which was too sleek to seem slept on. But when she did sit up Taryn saw the dead leaves caught in the hair at her nape, and how it was a little ropey and tangled there—felted and faded.

  The woman held herself upright, straight-backed. The crumpled but clean collar of her dress slipped from one bony shoulder, revealing a round bone with the gleam of clean gristle, though it was taut skin over gristle. She put out her hand. It hovered, seeming to summon Shift closer. Her eyes were dreamy and bright black. They were fixed not on him but the glove. When he came close she wrapped her hand around it. The tomb filled with a thick fur of power, as if an invisible animal had slipped through its walls and was turning and turning, treading down the silence, and making a nest for itself.

  The woman was of course his grandmother, the Gatemaker. And when the sidhe said one of them was ‘in their tomb’ they hadn’t meant dead. They meant retired,
permanently sequestered, visited and served by friends and family, who moved deliberately, hushed, while tending the tombs, inside and out. Friends and family who plumped the mattress with mendings and brought fresh clothes.

  There was nothing else in the room. This woman was sustaining herself on water alone, and had been for over two hundred years. Taryn wondered how long it took for a sidhe to devolve into a skin-covered skeleton with a brain. If they slept until they stopped waking. If all efforts never to disturb them became redundant. If finally they wouldn’t rouse even for a lightning strike at the door of their tomb.

  The grandmother and grandson sat unmoving; Shift hunched, his body making a space for her hand so that she didn’t touch him, her straight-backed and musing on the glove. Then she looked up at Shift, gave him a weak, tremulous smile, and whispered, ‘Shahen.’

  ‘No. It’s Shift.’ He answered her in English and she simply took his lead and spoke English too. ‘You look like Shahen.’

  ‘Yes, I look Syrian. It’s recently caused me a bit of bother.’

  She blinked and passed her arm over her face as if wiping off dust. Taryn looked for signs of grime, but the Gatemaker’s sleeve was clean.

  The Gatemaker’s gaze returned to the glove. ‘Adhan’s,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, my mother’s,’ Shift answered. Then, very casual and careful, ‘Did you make one for my father too?’

  ‘I did,’ said the Gatemaker. ‘It never reached him. It was left with his body, and the baby, and lost.’

  ‘I was the baby,’ Shift said.

  ‘No. The other baby. Neve’s,’ said the Gatemaker.

  Shift grimaced. Taryn recognised the expression as the one people got when their eyes teared up so suddenly and violently it caused them pain. He turned to the wall. His jaw clenched and trembled and the tears splashed onto the end of his grandmother’s bed, from which they were coaxed away by the fastidious mendings, until they spilled and made dark splashes on the limestone wall of the platform. He didn’t attempt to say anything further, and she didn’t seem to expect him to, or to be at all conscious of the effect her words had had on him. She stayed where she was, and continued to admire her own handiwork, with no sign of alarm, or regret, or anticipation, or longing. After a stretch of minutes she dropped the glove. She kept her hand in the air and seemed to call some intention into it from very far away; not from inside her present self, but perhaps her past self. She cupped his cheek and said, deliberate, but without feeling, ‘That baby, Emesa, was Shahen’s grandchild, but not mine.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You are mine,’ she added. She removed her hand, sighed like a breeze stirring dead leaves, and lay down.

  Shift got up and came back to Taryn. He quietly opened the door, let her through it, followed her and pulled it closed.

  Taryn trailed after him back the way they’d come. She let him collect himself.

  But he didn’t. He continued to cry, liberally and unselfconsciously—though very quiet. He was still weeping when they reached the beach. He sat on the sand above their boat, gripped his hair and wept with a tumult of feeling, of which sorrow and exhaustion were only a part. Taryn sat beside him and gradually shuffled nearer until she was pressed against him. Her teeth chattered. They were both soaked through but that join of warmth kept her from hypothermia.

  It continued to rain on them, big drops that made pockmarks in the sand and turned the glossy sea matte. It rained harder. The world boiled around them.

  Finally Taryn got up. She shouted, ‘We can’t just sit in the rain.’ She shook him, trying to get him up too. She grabbed one of his hands and put it on the glove. ‘Get us out of here,’ she pleaded.

  He pulled the glove off over his head, taking some hair with it. He tried to put it on and she had to get behind him and clamp his arm under hers to hold it still while she fought with the cold gold claws, its ties, and chain, and pin. His hand was icy, hers numb and clumsy.

  She tied a last knot and let go of his arm. His head was down, his face dripping. The rain was so hard it was carving channels in the sand. Pebbles and sticks were being washed out of the forest and were floating and rolling in the water rushing down the beach. Sand was piling up against the stern of the boat.

  ‘Shift!’ Taryn shouted.

  His hand wavered up and the somewhere else roared towards them; Taryn saw the rain bend and be swallowed. Gravity altered. There was a moment of darkness as the force that held them met another force and pulled them. Taryn thought she might be crushed or torn apart. Shift had passed them from gate to gate, without a pause.

  They were standing on icy rocks in clouds of thick white steam through which soft, even whiter snowflakes drifted down. Taryn smelled sulphur and the spice of alpine thorn trees. They were on the flagstone staircase beside one of the hot pools at Forsha Springs.

  Taryn crept to the water and slipped one foot in. It was cold. Or her nerves were so confused they expected to get colder. She sat down and gradually slipped her legs into the pool. It was snowing on her head and shoulders. But the water was hot.

  She lowered herself into the pool. Once she could trust her limbs to move in a coordinated way she pushed off from her side and floated to the other to make room for Shift. He followed her. He was quaking with cold and emotion and was so clumsy that he slipped and fell in. He surfaced gasping, his skin flushed red. He wiped his hair out of his eyes and Taryn heard the glove grate against his teeth.

  They both settled, her with only her head out of the water. They stared at each other. Taryn shivered until it seemed she’d shaken the wakefulness out of her body. She fell asleep and possibly avoided drowning only because, at some point, Shift crossed the pool and wrapped his arm under hers to hold her up. He had more to recover from, but recovered first. When she did wake up, she found it had stopped snowing. He was gazing into the mist. His eyelids were a little red and swollen, but his eyes were clear, and he was thinking.

  He was thinking, and it was like feeling a gate move. Or a hundred gates, like gears in a great clock. He was very still, and Taryn could sense it: the powerful intention, a plan forming inside him.

  28

  Call and Response

  Three days later Taryn found herself she didn’t know where, in the grimly busy company of Shift and Petrus Alamire.

  Shift came and went, fetching things from Petrus’s several lists—arcane objects and ingredients for potions. This was human magic, magic as Taryn had always understood it, with procedures, things done in the proper order, simmered but not boiled, a pinch of this and that, and words whispered at a confiding closeness to a copper pot, its contents tan in colour with globs of purplish oil. The smells were astonishing and the sense of concentration intense, but Taryn, idle now, kept thinking she was watching a performance. It had none of the directness of a Hand forming under Shift’s hands, the air plump and solid and full of animation; or the gates moving like monsters further inside or outside the real. This looked like knowledge. It looked like an art, a practice, something humans did.

  Earlier, Taryn had been asked to plait a lock of her own hair. Once she’d plaited it, Shift cut it several centimetres from her scalp. It was a substantial piece, and Taryn hated to think what her highly opinionated hairdresser would have to say when she next went in. She’d made the plait tight and neat. Shift gave it back to her and had her trim any loose strands with a pair of tiny silver scissors Petrus had among his equipment. Then, after threading it with a number of beads made of soft white gold—each one bright, but with the soft patina of wear—Shift crimped its ends with wire made of the same. He attached a hook to one end of the plait and an eye to the other, and tried it on himself, looping it double around his wrist. It was a little loose but that seemed to satisfy him.

  When Taryn asked him what it was for, he handed her a pen and some creamy parchment paper and told her to write a note to her father. ‘Tell him you’re off the grid again. You made this for him and would he please wear it to bring both of you good
luck.’

  Taryn wrote what Shift asked. Then he folded the plait into her note and made a package of it, using sealing wax.

  ‘Does the gold do anything magical?’ Taryn asked.

  ‘It’s a sweetener,’ Shift said. ‘I’m sure your father will wear it, given everything you’ve been through lately. But we want to make it as attractive as we can.’ Then, ‘Where can I find him?’

  The fantasy TV series had recommenced shooting, so her father could be found on the shores of Lake Bled, at a villa he shared with several other cast members. Taryn had visited the previous summer and was able to give directions—all the way to Basil Cornick’s room. She asked, ‘Who will you give your hair to?’

  Petrus laughed. ‘His hair is everywhere. It’s in his apparel—his hair, his wool, his skin. His bone buttons.’

  Taryn glanced at the brownish bugle bead at the neck of Shift’s stretched and sloppy jersey. She shuddered.

  ‘No one in their right mind would try to use his hair in magic,’ Petrus said. He handed Shift another long list of materials, including an item that made Shift grimace with distaste and reluctance. But he didn’t object, just left, walking off along the curved margin of the low wood they were camped near, a wood which had over it a mist that hadn’t moved the whole time they’d been there.

  The air pressure seemed to alter again, as it kept doing, and Taryn was overcome by dizziness. Petrus told her to lie down. She didn’t want to. She’d be vulnerable. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. She knew he wouldn’t hurt her. Not before she’d done what she was meant to do. But she didn’t like him—his dry dispassionate manner, his oiled hair and ornate clothes.