The feed-barn roof had been caved in for Taryn’s entire childhood, the mildew-spotted tarpaulin covering the hole needing readjustment after every storm.
‘He’d write to the British Museum and not get an answer, and between times the thing slipped his mind. It wasn’t as if curators were coming from London and waving admonishing fingers at him.’
‘What happened to it?’
Addy paused and put down her brush. She wiped her hands and stepped back to examine the effects of the latest plant. ‘There were quite a few things your grandad packed up himself. With personal notes. Everything intended for his bookmen friends. The books or items they’d admired, or that he thought they’d like. And there were one or two large crated consignments of books, like his whole set of Gibbon. The Firestarter would have gone among those, probably.’
‘And those aren’t on the record of sales, because they weren’t sold.’
‘That’s right, they were gifts. The packages were all addressed and ready to go. He made sure of that. All I had to do was ship them.’
‘How many packages, more or less?’
‘At least a dozen. Your grandfather had warm friendships with bookmen all around Britain.’ Addy picked up her palette and knelt on the floor to resume painting.
‘But, Ma, if the Firestarter wasn’t Grandad’s to sell, it wasn’t his to give away either.’
‘That’s true,’ Addy mused. ‘But I don’t remember shipping anything to the British Museum.’
There was a long silence. A moth flew in the window and began to circle the chimney of the lamp. Taryn stared at it, mesmerised. There was something novel about this very ordinary apparition.
‘Also, he hated it,’ Addy said. ‘It’s rather strange to think about it now. How uncomfortable he was about having the care of that box. I suppose I didn’t think too much about that at the time, because he seemed to be so good at putting it out of his mind.’
Taryn tore her eyes away from the circling moth and stared at her mother’s back. ‘Would he have given something he hated to any of his friends?’
‘No,’ Addy said. ‘That doesn’t seem likely.’
The moth found its way into the chimney and disappeared with a hiss in a wisp of black smoke. The flame flared and wavered and showed up more moths fluttering around the room. It was as if the shadows had clotted.
Taryn’s mother laughed. It made Taryn jump. ‘He might have given it to someone he didn’t like,’ Addy said. ‘Do you remember that detestable fellow in Tintern who was always trying to buy your grandfather’s treasures? Dad used to say: “That man is like a bloody seagull at a beach picnic.”’ Addy put on a deep, plummy voice to imitate the detestable fellow. ‘“You’re keeping them all out of circulation, James!” The man was harmless really, and if he hadn’t been practically on our doorstep Dad probably would have had a perfectly cordial relationship with him. It was a case of familiarity breeding contempt.’
Taryn did remember now how her grandfather disliked the antiquarian in Tintern. She said, ‘Do you think Grandad gave the Firestarter to that man?’
‘Ross Belkin,’ Addy said. ‘Esquire. I don’t know, Taryn. But your grandfather didn’t like either of them—Belkin or the Firestarter.’
Taryn wanted to move. To make some gesture. To get up and embrace her mother. But she stayed slumped and watched the night come inside in fluttering fragments. After a while, something else came into the room. She had been able to smell the wet, but now she could smell foliage and flowers.
Her mother noticed. The hand holding the brush sank slowly until its bristles were dabbing the floorboards. ‘The things you remember,’ Addy said, in a tone of soft wonder. Then she got up, went to the window, and leaned out. She stayed that way, her body quite still, her head swivelling slowly this way and that. When she turned back to the room her face was glowing with joy. She came to Taryn and hoisted her to her feet. She dragged her to the door and down the stairs.
Halfway down—galvanised by the shame of having her small, ill mother supporting her—Taryn’s toes and heels found the steps. Her ankles and knees locked, then their hinges began to work, and she was walking.
At the foot of the stairs Addy released Taryn and hurried out into the courtyard. Taryn followed her into a damp night garden.
A small singing frog on the tree by the door stopped chirping and shuffled around the far side of the trunk. The walls were dripping with vines. There was a fur of moss on the large stone, thickest and greenest around the pool of water in the hollow on its top. There were soft herbs underfoot, and flowers everywhere. Something was humming in a high corner on the far wall, in the shelter of the lintel above the gate. Taryn knew where Shift had got the bees, but couldn’t think how he’d managed to restore them to life. She didn’t know how the vines were so thick, or the trees so tall, or how the frogspawn had hatched into tadpoles then grown to frogs overnight. The seeds and spawn had been dormant. But the bees had been dead. How could they be alive?
Shift was standing in the middle of it all, completely naked, his dark skin slick and shining with rain, his hair plastered to his head and shoulders.
Addy wandered enchanted around the garden. She glanced at Shift. ‘It’ll have to rain often enough to keep this alive.’
‘It will.’
‘How? How?’ Taryn demanded. ‘What is this? Is this a reward?’ She was so astonished it felt like fury—as if the miracle were something she had to fight.
‘I think it might one day be a gate,’ he said. ‘Given time. And other things even time can’t provide.’
‘We don’t have time,’ Taryn said.
‘I don’t,’ he agreed. ‘But let’s just see.’
‘It’ll do nicely just as a garden,’ Addy said. Then, ‘Thank you.’
Shift smiled at her, then said to Taryn. ‘Do we have any leads on the Firestarter?’
‘The Firestarter wasn’t Grandad’s to sell, and he wouldn’t encumber anyone he liked with it, since he hated it, so he might’ve sent it to someone he really didn’t like. The man who still runs the Antiquarian Bookshop in Tintern qualifies.’
‘But why do you want that thing?’ Addy said, puzzled. ‘No one ever seemed to want it.’
‘It’s mine,’ Shift said. ‘I’m going to sell it.’
‘Are you from the British Museum?’ Addy said, pointedly looking him up and down. Then she added, ‘It’s so hard to tell with people here where they’re from and whether they are respectable.’
‘Ma!’ Taryn said, amused and embarrassed.
‘But dear, he clearly doesn’t belong here.’
Taryn went to her mother and hugged her. ‘No. And we have to go.’
‘Everyone is going to want to come and look at my garden.’
‘Give them seeds or cuttings and send them off,’ Shift said. ‘Tell them the Little God of the Marshlands says they should grow their own gardens.’
‘That’s good,’ Addy said. ‘People here respect gods.’
They left at dawn, just as the browsing bees were crawling out of their hive, resting on its doorstep and tapping their feelers. Shift pulled the wicker gate shut behind them. He picked Taryn up and walked towards the river—a vague downhill.
Two streets away from Taryn’s mother’s house there was no sign that it had rained—and perhaps it hadn’t rained anywhere but in that street.
30
Neve’s Story
Visible beyond the few trees around the gate were the thick bamboo poles and pennants Taryn had seen at the Moot. The poles were now painted white, and flying streamers in the colours of the ladies and gentlemen—as it seemed everyone but Taryn had learned to call them.
Petrus hung back at Hell’s Gate. He was being passed along to the Human Colony through the relay of gates that swivelled to meet one another: Princes, Hell’s, Senisteingh Mouth. He remained by the gate to wait for his ride, but also to avoid what surrounded each snapping banner.
The grave mounds were already covered in wi
ldflowers, not cut, but growing. The same flowers Taryn had admired when she was last in this grassland. She had thought nothing of the flowers heaped to the horizon so that the view was coloured all the way to the sunlit slopes of faraway hills. The flank of that range was now mauve with some sun-loving, late summer plant. Against the soft colour the white poles and streamers burned.
Shift stopped walking. Taryn turned back, and tried, as she kept trying, with variable success, to read his face, his body. Shift had found Neve among the mounds. It was Neve he aimed to speak to. They’d interrupted Petrus’s homecoming to seek her here—administering the aftermath of the Tithe. Taryn had lost track of time and so had forgotten that the Tithe was why Neve might be sought here.
Shift continued walking; Taryn fell in behind him.
The graves grouped around Neve’s colours numbered around thirty. They were beside a bigger grouping, a hundred or more, under Shift’s colours. Taryn saw Jane, Henriette, Susan and several other women sitting, apart from one another, at the heads of a handful of those mounds.
Taryn saw what had happened. She grabbed Shift’s arm. ‘Don’t kill her,’ she said.
He glanced at her, his eyes calm and pacific. This wasn’t enough of a refutation of murderous intent for Taryn, and she kept hold of his arm again until they were among the graves and she couldn’t walk beside him without putting her feet places she shouldn’t.
Jane ran at Shift. She was howling. She beat her fists on his chest. He put his arms up to block her blows, but didn’t evade her or catch her hands.
‘Where were you?’ Jane shouted. ‘Why didn’t you protect us? Why didn’t you believe your aunt when she said they meant to use us to make up their numbers?’
Neve came over to them and Jane, in her rage, turned and attacked her too.
Furrows streaked through the meadow to Neve’s feet, parting the grass and even uprooting some of the flowers, as half a dozen invisible Hands rushed to her aid. These knots of twisted air fastened onto Jane’s arms and ankles and hauled her off.
Neve said to Jane, ‘Be careful. You have your life.’
‘What do I care? I’m not like you, heartless and self-centred and able to stomach mass murder.’ Jane turned back to Shift, her face polished by tears. ‘Your aunt came to our island and asked us to choose who would go.’
‘So that you could keep your leaders and more productive members,’ Neve said. ‘Or whom you most loved, which is the usual form.’
‘We refused to choose,’ Jane said. ‘Then, when they came to take us, some of us volunteered to go instead.’
‘We didn’t take anyone who made that offer,’ Neve said, as if explaining a reasonable and possibly even admirable act.
‘They wouldn’t let us accompany the people they took. They sank our barge. Those who were able swam across the lake to follow on foot. Of course they had horses. We only reached the gate just in time to help bury the bodies of our friends.’
There were thousands upon thousands of fresh graves. The older mounds—further from the gate—had lower profiles and fewer flowers. The new ones were high and freshly planted, with flower seeds coaxed into full, flourishing life by some kind of sidhe magic, perhaps the same kind that had raised Addy Cornick’s courtyard garden.
Jane’s friends had joined her, their faces tearstained and tight with fury. They faced Shift, and put their backs to Neve.
Neve shrugged and walked off.
Shift called out after her, ‘It’s you I’m here to see.’
‘Make your peace with your women,’ Neve called back.
Shift touched Jane’s arm. Jane jerked it away. He looked at her levelly, then followed Neve.
‘Sorry,’ Taryn said to Jane. ‘I was always getting lost. It was me who kept him away so long.’
There was some truth in this, but essentially Taryn was lying for Shift, to make peace.
Jane shook her head. ‘He’s putting us behind him. In preparation for his Shiftback. He’s put your friend Jacob from his mind. And one day soon he’ll do the same to you.’
‘Sorry,’ Taryn said again, and hurried after Shift.
She caught up in time to hear Neve telling him that her remaining people loved her too much to carry on in that way. ‘They mourn with dignity and composure and without violent reproaches. I don’t know why you don’t make more effort to manage your people properly.’
‘Never mind about that,’ Shift said.
This got Neve’s attention. She gave him a wary, assessing look. ‘Oh, come on!’ She was suddenly impatient. ‘You’re all talk. So start talking. Tell me off so that I can explain why handing over a hundred of your women is better for you than my withdrawing my patronage. Because, believe me, if one thing or the other didn’t happen, you’d be in danger.’
‘Let us walk out from among these graves,’ Shift said. He led the way and Neve and Taryn followed. The graves were so close together that they had to go single file. Picking her way through them reminded Taryn of a game she and Bea would play on flagstone paths and plazas, walking on the cracks instead of avoiding them, which was the traditional game of ‘Step on a crack and marry a rat’. Bea had walked a zigzag tightrope across various public spaces, shouting, ‘Bring on the rats!’—her little sister bumbling after her.
‘Bring on the rats,’ Taryn muttered to herself until they were through the patchwork of blooming grave mounds and out onto the meadow proper, where the flowers were thinner, no doubt hundreds of windblown generations from plants first propagated by these gracefully mourning murderers.
Shift led them to a shade tree near a ring of fire-blackened stones. Neve folded her legs under her and floated gracefully to the ground like a ballerina. Taryn found a seat a little farther off and discovered that the rumpled dirt under her was a large piece of fabric. She got up again, carried it downwind and shook the dirt off it. It was a formerly white waffle cotton blanket, stamped St Stephens Hospital. Taryn folded it, carried it back to her spot and used it as a cushion.
‘Taryn Cornick of the Northovers,’ Neve said, finally acknowledging Taryn in her usual formal manner.
‘Valravn. Hero of understanding,’ Shift said. This apparently was the title Taryn had earned, and Shift was informing his aunt.
‘Neve, daughter of the last Gatemaker, and last of the nine queens,’ Taryn attempted. She was sure there was more, and that she hadn’t got the phrasing right.
Neve inclined her head graciously.
Shift said, ‘Neve. I need you to tell me the story you haven’t told me.’
‘It is my understanding that the stories you have people keep for you are meant to remind you of yourself, your acts, your errors, your losses and gains. My story might only help you to understand me, your mother and your grandmother. It isn’t really about you.’
‘Please tell it,’ he said, ‘even if it pains you.’
‘It’s very late in your life for this,’ Neve said.
‘This is something I should already know.’
Neve sighed. ‘You were always a problem,’ she said. ‘Blameless, and a problem.’
He nodded.
‘I’ll be brief,’ Neve said.
‘The Gatemaker was never grasping about love. Her one unshakeable desire was to replace herself for her people. When she was a child there were still some of them alive, the exiles, the settlers, the people who carved the hub, a world between other worlds, out of territory stolen from those worlds, and tied together by gates. Not only had the exiles made every gate, but some of them even carried personal gates, a defensive weapon as much as anything else. That knowledge hadn’t wholly disappeared. But it was never like the learning of a magician, like the mastery of a Petrus Alamire or a forgetful Merlin. It was innate, experiential, like your shifting.
‘A body can teach another body how things work, but only sometimes. No one can watch a gate made. There’s nothing to see. The exiles had many years of life left and, having made a home for their people, they didn’t see the necessity of p
assing on the mastery they had never enjoyed, since they had earned it fighting for their lives. They’d lost loved ones and given things up. They’d made terrible decisions for a better future. They were the parents who wanted their children and grandchildren to have easier lives. In order to do that, they’d had to accept harsh conditions. There were terms to the exile. The Land of the Pact is called that not because of the Tithe, as many assume, but because of those conditions.
‘Everything the exiles were allowed to take with them to use—water and microbes, seeds, eggs, animals, rhizomes—everything they needed to make the Sidh had been altered so that while it could multiply, the sidhe could not. The flourishing world would put limits on sidhe lives; not their duration, but their ability to reproduce. Anyone of our kind, or enough like our kind—like humans—would flourish in the Sidh, but the longer they lived, drinking the water, eating the fruit, the less able to reproduce they’d become. That was the bargain the exiles made to be able to leave and make a new place to live. They’d accepted those terms and counted themselves lucky. For their descendants, it was different. It defied the imagination. The imagination of our bodies. When you are young and you love someone, you often think the feeling will translate into a child. And of course, at first, there were children. My mother was the granddaughter of an exile, and I am my mother’s child. My mother’s expectations were met. But very few of her generation had children, even those who tried to have children with humans.
‘My much younger half-human sister was my mother’s only other child. I was childless, so Adhan served also as my child. My sister, and a child I helped to raise.
‘Your grandmother had tried to make a gatemaker of me. She had carried me in utero through every gate, and spent time inside the gates, which is not an easy thing to do. You spent several hours in that watery place inside Princes Gate, learning the trapped dragons, before setting them free. You don’t remember it, but Kernow can remind you of what you told him about surviving inside a gate.’
‘Princes Gate was water to water then,’ Shift said. ‘I can be amphibious, but not at the same time as learning how to be a dragon. Kernow knows the story, but my body remembers.’
The Absolute Book Page 48