by Manda Scott
In one of his more lucid moments, he thought he heard mellifluous Spanish spoken in two voices, which was, of course, impossible. But it was there again when next he surfaced. With an effort, he organized his thoughts and made connection with all four of his limbs and finally, regretfully, with his ribs and then his head. Raising himself half to sitting, he opened his eyes.
‘Ah. Señor Owen awakens. And not before time.’
It was not Fernandez de Aguilar who spoke; thirty years of close company had woven that voice to his soul so that he knew it better than his own. Against the protestations of his body, Owen opened his eyes and made his head turn towards the source of speech.
He was in a large, comfortable farmhouse kitchen, with flagstones upon the floor and a vast stone-built inglenook fireplace currently burning what appeared to be an entire oak tree in sizeable logs. The room was radiantly warm. Seated at a long oak table of aching newness was Fernandez de Aguilar in manifestly less pain than he had been since the injury to his leg. Beside him sat a figure robed appropriately in black. I have a cousin, recently bereaved …
That one rose now, and came over to where Owen lay on a truckle bed before the fire.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I live alone but for my widowed father and England in this weather is not a place where honest men choose to travel. I took you for brigands, come for what little silver we have saved. Had not your friend shouted in Spanish, I might have done you more damage. You have his exhaustion to thank for the wholeness of your limbs; had he not been tired and fevered almost to insanity, he would have manufactured a shout in English and I fear it would have been the end of you.’
Owen stared, dizzily, trying to make sense of an upturned world. The face on which he made such an effort to focus was sage and well weathered, broad at brow and cheek, narrowing to an oval chin of commendable firmness above a slender neck. The eyes were a dense steel grey and catlike, teasing and savage together. The lips were perfect, and framed about by deeply etched lines of laughter that put their maker on the wrong side of forty, but cheerfully so.
The overall effect was of a fierce, intelligent face, framed about by hair the same colour and curl and sprinkling of not-quite-grey as Barnabas Tythe’s. It was this, then, that identified the speaker incontrovertibly as Tythe’s cousin, child of his mother’s sister, whose father had been geomancer to the abbots of Glastonbury before the reformation.
Which begged the sizeable question of why Tythe had omitted to mention that his cousin was a woman, or that she was quite astonishingly handsome, or that Fernandez de Aguilar, who had spent his entire adult life happily disregarding the comforts of the fairer sex, might suddenly – if with perfect reason – become infatuated with her.
Or perhaps not quite so suddenly. Owen said, ‘How long have I been asleep?’
De Aguilar said, ‘Not long. It is evening of the day we arrived. Martha has spoken to her father. He knows that we are fugitives from Walsingham’s pursuivants and that there is a risk in our being here. He has insisted that we must stay and, moreover, has asked to see the blue stone. We waited until you were awake to show him.’
Martha … We … The greatest change was not in de Aguilar’s language, although that was great enough, but in the texture of his voice, which had become soft and rich and rolling, like malmsey drunk at the sea’s edge of a summer’s evening.
It should not have hurt so. There had, after all, been thirty years of Najakmul, and not once had her importance to Owen come between himself and the Spaniard whose life he had saved.
Even so …
‘May I know to whom I am speaking?’ Owen sat up too fast, and closed his eyes against the pain in his head.
There was a perceptible pause from his right. He fancied that the woman had asked a silent question of de Aguilar with her steel-grey eyes, and the man had answered with a nod.
The voice which had spun such silken Spanish said, ‘My apologies, sir. I am Martha Huntley, daughter to Edward Wainwright who sits yet by the fire and wife to Sir William Huntley, who died aboard ship this summer defending England from the enemy.’
Owen opened his eyes. The woman stood just out of arm’s reach, watching him. He wished himself less vulnerable. He said, ‘And you speak Spanish like a native. Did that set you apart from your neighbours when the Armada threatened?’
She was very like Najakmul; her eyes flared with a new fire. ‘My neighbours know that I am not a traitor, but fully loyal to Queen and country. My family fled to Spain in my youth when Queen Elizabeth first came to the throne. I was young, my mother was not of robust health and they feared that the burnings would start again except that they would be of Catholics this time, not Protestants.’
‘You came back because you were wrong?’
She turned her hands outwards in a way that she could have learned from de Aguilar, but had most likely known since childhood. ‘We were English in Spain, which was not a safe thing. There, we would have been traitors, at least in our hearts. The Queen had shown by her actions that she was serious in her intent not to carve windows into men’s souls. My father missed the land he had grown with and my mother wished to die here. She was granted that wish.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Owen said. ‘With your mother and husband both dead, you are doubly bereaved.’
The frankness of her gaze acknowledged his courtesy and yet denied the need for it. ‘My mother died many years ago. I am more concerned now that my father is also fast approaching his final communion with his Maker. He remains tied to this life because he will not leave me as a woman alone, forced to marry to keep my good name and my home.’
Owen switched his gaze from her to de Aguilar and back again. Artlessly, he asked, ‘Do you fear his imminent death?’
She flushed, but did not lower her gaze. ‘I do, but for other grounds than those you think. He holds to life for a second reason: he has had dreams of a certain stone which he must see before he dies, of blue crystal sapphire, fashioned in the shape of an unfleshed man’s head.’
Owen did not answer at once, but waited for the stone to speak to him – and waited in vain, for it was unaccountably silent. From the moment they had left Cambridge – actually, from the moment they left New Spain – it had been leading Owen and de Aguilar to this place. At each point on their journey, its song had been a constant presence, stronger when they took the propitious turn at any given crossroads, weaker when they did not. At the killing of Maplethorpe, it had fairly hollered its appreciation, and in its connection to Barnabas Tythe, to prompt him to send them here, it had excelled itself. To find it silent now left the world a poorer place.
Risking the knifing pain in his head, Owen turned to search the room.
From his left, de Aguilar said, ‘Cedric, your bags are here.’
For thirty years, Fernandez de Aguilar had divined whatever Owen wanted before any need to ask. Yet again, he was there at his side, holding the saddle packs, a sober flounce of oak-brown velvet and gold. His long, lean face was no longer blue with cold and pain, but warily alive; the creases etched by the sun of New Spain were lit with laughter and a new hope even as his eyes spoke complex silent messages of apology and insecurity and reassurance. He wanted Owen to know that nothing had changed, that the widow Martha Huntley was not going to come between them, but that the sun had risen in his life in a new way and he craved the freedom to enjoy it.
Patiently, as to a child, Owen said, ‘Fernandez, you are a Spaniard. England is at war with Spain. The first time you open your mouth as your true self, you’re a dead man.’
The Spaniard grinned. ‘But I am already a dead man; my body has been found and burned. If you and I are to be safe from Walsingham’s pursuivants then it must be that Fernandez de Aguilar no longer exists. If I can be made to have light hair, not dark, and a new, more patriotic reason for having lost my arm, I could be another man and nobody could prove I was not.’
‘You would leave behind all that you were?’
‘I would – no – I must
. But not yet. I am still the man whose life you saved. I am bound to you yet, and will fulfil my duty.’
Something unkind grabbed at Owen’s gut. ‘I had thought it more than a duty.’
‘It is.’ De Aguilar’s one hand held his shoulder. Black Spanish eyes sought his and held them. ‘Truly, it is. I love you as much as I have loved any man. But I would have sons to live after me. And not only that …’
In thirty years, de Aguilar had never been lost for words. The novelty of it eased the moment even while the rest of him proclaimed a peace newly found that was beyond language.
More gently than before, Owen said, ‘Then let us bring the blue heart-stone into the light of the fire and perhaps we can find why it has fallen silent.’
The stone was asleep, or it seemed so to Owen. It felt heavy and limp in his hand as he drew it out of the saddle bags, like a fireside cat that has fallen drowsy in the heat and wakes with reluctance.
Presently, when it did not, in fact, wake, he came to believe it was exhausted. He had thought it immortal, immune to the aches and ills of men, but as he held it by the vast oak-log fire in Martha Huntley’s farmhouse and spoke to it in his head as he had done these past few decades, he felt the numbness of true fatigue, the sluggish glue-eyed return to the world of men. Its song then was a slender thread of sound, spun out from the aeons of space wherein it had found shelter.
He had never considered himself the stone’s master, capable of summoning it against its will. It lay passive between his hands, so that the firelight barely leaked through it and the colour that came out was more amber than blue.
‘I’m sorry,’ Owen said to the thread that wove in his head, ‘there is one who would meet you. I must interfere with your repose.’
‘Thank you.’ The voice came aloud, in response to a thought he had spoken only inwardly. Owen turned, too swiftly, and slowed, for the pain in his head.
The fire had hidden Edward Wainwright. He sat so close that it seemed the flames must consume him ere ever they were done with the oak. He sat in his armchair, swaddled in fine-woven blankets, an animated skeleton, barely clinging on to life. His veins showed blue and knotted through the paper thinness of his skin. His tendons stood out like pulleys so that Barnabas Tythe could have held an anatomy master class on his just-breathing body and never had need of dissection. His eyes were filled with cataracts and swollen conjunctiva with crusting pus at the inferior canthus where his daughter had not seen fit to wipe it away, or had chosen not to so invade him, for it did no harm, Owen thought, and its leaving gave him some dignity.
He was stronger than he appeared. He reached out to grasp Owen’s wrist and the clawed fingers were strong as a snake that wraps its prey to crush it. ‘Have I your permission to look at your jewel?’
‘Of course.’ The stone said nothing different, gave no warning. Owen set it down, nestling it on the bony knees deep in the wrap of the yellow blanket. ‘You may hold it if you wish.’
There was a moment’s hiatus when the old man simply looked. His face was a study in awe, as a child who is given the gift of his heart after long years of disappointment.
The skull was facing him, the empty eye sockets turned up to face the deep pits of his own gaze. It was contained still, sleepily inhaling the light from the fire and even more sleepily sending it out. Slowly, in wonder, Edward Wainwright’s hands closed around its smoothly perfect temples.
At the moment of their meeting, the stone wept, or so it seemed to Owen; in the quiet of the firelight, he felt such a melting as he had never known from it.
Certainly, the old man was weeping. Sparse tears made tracks of living gold down his cheeks, as if all the fluids of his life were saved for this.
None the less, his eyes were dry when eventually he raised them to Owen again. ‘There is a place in this land that was fashioned to hold this stone, and must do so in the end times. Do you know where it is?’
Owen felt his heart stop, and then start again, erratically. ‘I have dreamed of this place every night for the past thirty years, but I have never been there, and do not know where it is. I have been sent to England to find it.’
‘Then my last year has not been wasted.’ A warmth lit Wainwright’s face, easing the weight of age. ‘For my daughter’s joy and for your arrival have I waited, and today both are fulfilled. And yet our quest is not so simple, for we who walk the old, straight tracks were never told which of the five places we guard was the one that mattered most. Could you draw for me the place of your dream?’
Like a flood tide, racing, the blood flowed too fast in Owen’s veins. ‘If you furnish pen and paper, I can try.’
At her father’s direction, Martha took a candle upstairs and presently returned with a goose quill and black ink and a sheet of good, flat paper, which held the ink perfectly.
‘I use it for casting maps of the stars,’ Edward Wainwright said. ‘If I live to morning, I will take the time and place of your birth and create your own.’
Out of politeness, Owen thanked him, and did not say that he could cast his own chart, and had done so too many times to count.
He sat by the fire with a wooden tray inverted as a resting-board on his knee. By the dancing orange light, with his eyes half closed, he sketched out the place he had first seen in the smoke dreams of the jungle over three decades previously.
He talked as he drew. ‘The place is shrouded by mist; when I first come to it, all I can see are the half-shapes of beech trees all along one side. And yet the moon gazes upon it, a week before full, so that the shadows of the standing stones are crisp.’
‘There are stones, then? Will you describe them to me?’
‘I cannot be certain.’ In the process of drawing, Owen found the gaps where the dream was not clear. On the paper already were vague outlines of the beech trees, and the beginnings of a circle of stones that carried its own magic without his having to make it happen, but not the detail Edward Wainwright required.
Owen tilted the board to gain better light. ‘As I approach, I come to a row of four upright stones, each one taller than a man, and, at the base, twice as broad, pointed at their upper ends. They surround a long, low mound, bowl-like in its shaping, and there are lower, rounder stones before it. The mound itself is made of stone covered with earth and turf that hides a tunnel at its heart. It has lintel stones, squared at the edges and ends so that they fit together as a joiner fits timber to make a door frame.’ He scratched his chin with the feathered end of the quill. ‘Shamingly, I cannot count the stones in the circle. I try, but each time the number is different.’
From the far side of the inglenook, Edward Wainwright said, ‘There is no shame in that. No one can ever count the stones in the old circles; they are not made for eyes such as ours. In your dream, do you enter the grave mound?’
Owen lifted his head. ‘It is a grave? I had thought it might be; there were bones of men and horses in its heart. In each dream, I do indeed go into the tunnel. It is completely dark, and yet I can see as if it were day; thus have sleep and the blue stone changed my sight.’
He began another sketch, this time of the interior of the mound. ‘The grave is long and narrow, except for two blind arms to either side just within the entrance, so that if one were to look on it from above, it would be shaped a little like a short-armed cross. The niche made for the heart-stone is at the far end, within the wall. I have never seen it clearly, but believe it to be exactly of a size and depth to bring the heart-stone to bear on the earth’s surface, while encased in the hewn rock of the mound.’
He finished his sketch, both of the mound from the outside, and of the inside, and labelled the niche with an arrow and a short phrase. Turning the board, he showed his sketch to Edward Wainwright. ‘I would not hasten your death by any measure, but if this helps you to fulfil your life, it will be well done.’
‘It is well done.’ Wainwright’s eyes were alight with a new life. He looked beyond Owen to where Martha Huntley sat. ‘For this we have
lived, you and I. Now is the time of revealing.’
Wordless, Martha left the Spaniard and took her candle to the great fireplace within which oak logs each as thick as a man’s thigh gave off a fierce heat.
To dismantle such a fire took some skill, such as might come of practice. Presently, when the logs were pushed aside, Martha swept her skirts tight around her ankles and, kneeling near the back of the fire, performed a minor miracle, pushing her hand through the thick stone hearth to a cavity beneath. Owen took his own candle closer, and by its light found that it was not so much a miracle as a sleight of hand; a single stone in the midst of the hearth was balanced about a mid-pin, so that, when pushed, one side slotted inwards while the other rolled outwards, leaving a gap such as a man’s arm might fit through.
From the hollow space thus hidden, Martha brought out a bundle of vellum scrolls, rolled and tied with braided horsehair. She carried them as if they were the leg bones of a long-dead saint, like to crumble to dust at any moment. Kneeling, she laid them with reverence on her father’s knee.
He sorted through them with the feathered end of the quill pen, lifted one, and held it out to Owen.
‘Would you do me the honour of opening this?’
‘May I do so safely? It looks too old to be handled by such as I.’
‘It was made for such as you. If it crumbles as you touch it, still it will have served its use. But best if you treat it kindly and can leave it for those who come after.’
Owen held his breath, and did not know until afterwards that he had done so. With unsteady fingers, he untied the binding and unrolled the parchment. It was softer than he had imagined, and did not split along the cracks, but eased out into a single sheet the length of his forearm and the height of his hand upon which was sketched, in thin, faded charcoal, a landscape.
It was Fernandez de Aguilar, leaning over his shoulder, who understood first.
‘It is the same place … Cedric, this is your dream!’