Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  That task done, he goes to the old barrow behind the church, part excavated by Bole in search of Saxon gold. Wooden staves hold up the earthen ceiling. His visit to the mixing-point all those years ago will now be put to the test. The old priest’s words chime in his head: Live on, to resist when they return.

  In his anxiety, he has made one mistake: he has left behind his working papers and, worse, his copy of De Observatione Naturae.

  But it’s too late now. There is no going back.

  1571. Rotherweird Manor.

  The disappearance of Fortemain and the pidgeboy drain the Eleusians of vitality, creating a vacuum which fills with rage against Fortemain’s perceived allies. The Seers’ terrible punishment follows within the week: an eelman torn to pieces by carnivorous fish and a lovely woman imprisoned in the body of a giant spider.

  Their absence creates another vacuum, but Wynter has prepared for the creeping tide of doubt – indeed, he exploits it, spinning a new narrative around his death and rebirth. There will be a second age of the Eleusians.

  He plots their remaining time with Bole. ‘It is a question of journeys, Calx – four, to be precise: the pidgeboy’s flight to London, the message’s onward route to Oxenbridge, the gathering of a company – that means men, horses, weapons and provisions – and the return to Rotherweird. We will see out the year at least, which is a mercy, with so much to do.’

  Bole loves Wynter, his rescuer and mentor, but he has his own pride too and he watches, listens, notes, absorbs, cross-refers and, above all, learns. That he must slave to master complexities his charges consider simple drives him all the harder. ‘Charges’ is how he sees them, but to them he is nothing more than a servant. His corpulence, waddling gait and grey complexion have always attracted mockery; now they call him the Potamus.

  He would change his appearance in the mixing-point: Hercules Bole, Achilles Bole. He and Wynter have been working privately with the mixing-point for months now, spending hours moving the stones to ever more extreme positions. In their last experiment, an owl and a mouse shared the cage, only for it to swing out of the mixing-point with no owl but two mice. One was dead, but the other could see in the dark and had turned hunter.

  The stones can do anything. He and Wynter have decided: he will soon be Potamus the shapeshifter.

  One of the young women stands apart from the snideness of the others. ‘Potamus means “we drink”, Mr Bole, and I’d take it as a compliment. You imbibe knowledge, which is the wherewithal for everything.’

  She says Potamus with a roly-poly playfulness, and pats him in unexpected places. He nurses a stunted, unexpressed love for her.

  One night he is working late on Fortemain’s papers when Wynter joins him. ‘Fortemain was studying landscape and rock, here and in the other place – but why?’ he asks.

  Wynter taps De Observatione Naturae. ‘Read this. Study Lost Acre and our valley. I have unlocked their mystery, Calx. There is a way.’

  1572. The Manor House garden.

  Summer’s lease has not quite expired; it is the calm before the storm. Two young women are reclining, their backs against the trunk of a spreading beech, basking in dappled shade. Euclid is open in one lap, Robert Recorde’s The Whetstone of Witte in the other. Bees amble among the early ivy flowers smothering a nearby wall, their nectar in demand now triter blooms have come and

  gone.

  Neither woman has conventional good looks; the one is plain and slim, the other’s heavy features do not quite cohere – but look again. In both, the eyes and set of the mouth declare intelligence and determination in abundance.

  The slighter breaks the silence, asking, ‘Have you decided what name you will choose?’

  ‘Estella, Estella Scry.’ She savours the word.

  ‘A scry and not a seer?’ giggles her companion. Estella: out of the star. Perhaps she intends a reminder of her rejection by Fortemain; once loved, now loathed. Wordplay is always popular with the Eleusians.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Nona – plain Nona.’

  Scry does not like the name. It is slippery: anon backwards, short for ‘no name’. She seeks reassurance. ‘You will be loyal to me, won’t you? Always? Whatever awaits us?’

  ‘All ways,’ replies Nona with a smile.

  ‘Where is Mel?’ Scry asks suddenly, and Nona smiles again.

  ‘In the other place with the Master,’ she purrs, as good as saying that she is better informed.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Nona shrugs.

  ‘You’ve been talking to the Potamus, haven’t you? You really shouldn’t. He’s vile, fleshy . . .’ She suppresses her true reason for loathing Bole. He is closer to Wynter than any of them.

  ‘Clever Potamus,’ replies Nona provocatively, ‘part-of-the-plan Potamus.’

  Scry declines the bait but cannot suppress her curiosity. ‘What are they doing to Mel? Why take her alone to the other place?’ she asks.

  Nona dodges the question, saying only, ‘We go tomorrow – our turn in the other place. How exciting is that!’

  Silence descends. Tomorrow the mixing-point will give them immortality – but what else? Does Nona know more about the future than she? What does ‘part-of-the-plan Potamus’ signify? Scry snaps off a daisy and plucks the petals as she thinks of Wynter and his ordeal to come. She wants to be the agent of his resurrection. In her mind she calls each white tear.

  He loves me the most, he loves her the most, he loves the Potamus the most . . .

  1572. The Island Field.

  The dawn sky holds promise, the clouds high and thin, as Wynter, Bole and Mel make their way to the other place. Wynter calls a halt at the southern edge of the Island Field.

  ‘You are the last of my men and the first of my women,’ says Wynter, laying a hand on Mel’s neck. ‘You are my builder and architect. We will have a city of light and a city of dark, Olympus and Hades, and you will open the way to both.’

  ‘I’ve never placed one brick upon another,’ she replies.

  ‘Would I be so primitive?’

  ‘And when you return?’

  ‘You’ll be there, in the full bloom of youth.’ His intonation scares her; it implies a price to be paid. His right hand still rests on the nape of her neck. ‘To live on,’ he continues, ‘you must die a little – although not as much as me.’

  *

  She does not step from the cage but falls and rolls. It is the very moment of death, less a breath than a rattle of stones in a jar. She cannot stand or crawl: every cell is disfigured, all memory lost, her mind utter darkness. She cannot muster a scream, just manages a mew of pain. The slope tumbles her down to the stream, limbs too knotted and stiff to slow or grip, but as her ragdoll head lolls from side to side, one image is retained: two men, one tall, one squat, above her beside a spreading tree.

  Water flows over wrinkled cheeks and into her ears, but the stream’s abstraction – neither kind nor cruel, it would flow no differently for a stone – kick-starts a will to survive. Her heart flutters into a beat, and she is racked by another agonising breath, but this time the rattle is inaudibly gentler, one step removed from the moment of death.

  Fight, fight, fight.

  She summons a name: Mel, beautiful Mel, the woman of honey, and a first memory. The men had smiled at her agonised descent, satisfaction at a job well done.

  They are her torturers.

  Fight, yes, but fight and avenge . . .

  *

  Wynter pats Bole on the shoulder. After tomorrow’s work, all will be done: the labours of the mixing-point complete in the first Age of the Eleusians; the Seers punished; the women transformed – and Bole no longer what he appears to be.

  *

  The vigil for the second and last Age will shortly begin. There only remains a suitable parting.

  1572. Rotherweird Manor. A
Last Supper.

  Twelve disciples would have been orthodox for this last meeting of his Order of Chivalry, but four are missing: the Seers, dear Mel sacrificed for the greater good and Fortemain vanished as intended. Yet to have four each side of him at the refectory table in the Great Hall of Rotherweird Manor bestows a pleasing symmetry. They face the door, backs to the fireplace, as if the Green Knight of Arthurian legend were poised to enter.

  Wynter rejects a proposal that marionettes should fill the empty spaces. ‘Our own events define us,’ he says firmly. ‘We rework – we do not imitate.’

  He eyes his disciples and servant. Of the nine, only four have the gift of near-immortality: Slickstone, Bole and the two women. He, Wynter, must take a different, darker road. The others are disposable in the greater cause of building his legend, not that they know it. He holds their lives in the palm of the hand, a true trait of divinity, the making of martyrs.

  The familiars, when not secured in their dark outhouse, are tethered to the wrist like falcons, for all are winged, but tonight they are free to roam. They peer down from the hammer-beam roof like living gargoyles.

  Cellars and larders have been scoured for the best. Swan and peacock, seasoned with pepper and ginger, follow pike stuffed with oysters; to end, blaunderelles swimming in honey and damson marmalade. They drink weak ale; Wynter is holding back the luxury of wine till last.

  The plates are cleared, and the servants with them; most head upstairs to care for the children roaming the corridors. Whether the Eleusians’ offspring remain in Rotherweird after the fall, whether they inherit the gifts of their parents – indeed, whether they survive at all – is in Fortune’s gift, not his.

  He rises and waits for true silence. Even the half-humans in the rafters catch the expectancy.

  ‘You have all admired my astrolabe,’ he begins, ‘which can fix planetary positions yet to come.’

  Sir Henry’s astrolabe, in fact, notes Calx Bole, but to the winner the spoils.

  The candles at the ends of the table have been extinguished. Wynter’s gaunt face monopolises the light. ‘But it is a mere toy compared to the clock we have fashioned for our return: an invisible clock which sets events in motion far into the future.’

  We have fashioned? We? Scry’s eyes dart around the table. She reads puzzlement of various shades; only Nona and the Potamus are inscrutable. That afternoon she and Nona had entered the mixing-point, one after the other, emerging ostensibly unscathed despite their strange companions, as Wynter assured them they would. She trusts him more than ever – but does Wynter trust her? And if not, whom?

  Wynter continues, ‘Yes, my children, now we leave the stage to ordinary men for a century or four, but my clock will continue to turn. A new Rotherweird will rise and we shall be there to claim it.’

  He slips into myth, talking of afterlife and the underworld, of Theseus trapped in the chair of oblivion and his release by Hercules, of Aeneas founding Rome after surviving the world of the dead. He mentions the road to Emmaus – the stranger recognised, the divine returned to walk among the ordinary. And he prophesies his own death in the mixing-point, soon and unavoidable, and his resurrection.

  When Wynter talks this way, science yields to a mystical belief in him.

  He ends with a sacramental theme. ‘We shall preserve a memento: a phial of each Eleusian’s blood, that most distinctive of liquids.’

  As arranged, Bole circulates with a tray of tiny phials and a sharp knife.

  *

  That night Wynter visits Nona and Scry in Scry’s bedroom. They look, as expected, quite unchanged.

  He fills in details. ‘Oxenbridge will return, and I will be disappeared in the mixing-point,’ he explains. Both women touch his gown, trying not to show their distress. ‘It is such a pretty form of justice that Oxenbridge will not be able to resist it,’ he tells them, adding, ‘but you must use your ingenuity and buy clemency.’

  ‘Master—’ whimpers Scry, but Nona hushes her.

  ‘We will,’ Nona says.

  ‘Here is the month and year of my return.’ He hands them a scrap of parchment: it is centuries ahead.

  ‘What else can we do?’ asks Scry, trying to be practical and necessary.

  ‘Prepare me willing servants.’

  ‘There must be more to do than that.’ She is desperate to serve.

  ‘A particular enemy should be killed on the day of my return, otherwise his presence might sully it.’

  ‘Fortemain lives?’ they cry together; no other enemy could so exercise their master.

  ‘I trust so,’ he says enigmatically. ‘Much turns on it.’

  Scry has caught the Potamus studying Fortemain’s old papers, to which he has added a most peculiar title, and she has seen Wynter with them too, so they must hold a great secret.

  He kisses them each on the cheek, but Scry is troubled, for he has given Nona no task and she has not asked for one. Is Wynter’s return her privileged assignment? A seed of resentment germinates.

  ‘Sleep well,’ says Nona, before leaving for her own room.

  Much later, in the early hours, she hears that familiar double tread, the heavy and the soft: Wynter and Bole, and then a single whisper, Wynter’s whisper.

  ‘Tell her about the fastness near the time.’

  Tell whom, what, and when, and why—

  The whispers rise and fall, dropping other catchwords she can barely hear.

  ‘He is buried deep . . .’

  ‘. . . will open the way . . .’

  ‘. . . be brave, join me . . .’

  Wynter likes to test them – so must she join these fragments to understand the whole? Is Nona at her own door opposite thinking likewise?

  The double tread descends the stairs and, lifting the hem of her nightshift, she follows, to find Bole and Wynter bent over two maps, one of the Rotherweird Valley and one of the other place. She steps back as Bole’s familiar pads around the balcony towards her, teeth clenched and ribs aglow. She retreats, but now she knows: the Potamus loathes her as she does him. She must guard her back in the centuries to come.

  1572. London.

  Dawn, and birds small and large mob him – it is to be expected with his freakishness – but it does not last. He rolls, swerves, dives and stalls, switching from talons hidden to talons up. His quicksilver mind makes a virtue of his lopsidedness: a learning curve in every sense.

  Below him, the snaking Thames widens and boats multiply; the surrounding green and brown retreats before a sprawling city. These alluvial mudflats were once his home, where he scuttled and probed for meagre pickings. Smoke plumes rise, stiff as vertical strings in the tranquil summer air.

  Keep to the river, Fortemain had said, and you cannot miss it. He had drawn the configuration of the towers and the rivergate, even marking the window of the message’s recommended recipient: the Tower’s Master of Ravens. Fortemain’s sketch has the exactness of a childhood memory.

  The pidgeboy begins his downwards glide.

  ‘Keep to the river, Fortemain had said, and you cannot miss it . . .’

  NOVEMBER:

  FIRST WEEK

  1

  Of Sewage and Psephology

  Rotherweird’s Parliament Chamber conveyed mixed messages. Rows of opposed benches set either side of a wide aisle implied robust debate between rival parties. A long table with modern chairs on a raised dais implied government by committee. A single throne, festooned in lions and birds, at one end of the table told the current truth: Snorkel controlled government, and any committee which mattered.

  Meetings of the Sewage Sub-Committee – sewage disposal being a scientific subject – always attracted a sprinkling of observers. Each motion was open to the floor with public debate guillotined at ten minutes.

  The Sewage Sub-Committee processed in with Snorkel at the head, and in his wake the
Committee chairman, then Gorhambury, clasping the General Committee Regulations as an altar boy would the Bible, followed by the six ordinary members. Last in trotted Madge Brown, the Assistant Head Librarian and Committee Secretary.

  Snorkel scanned the benches, noting with dismay the presence of lowlifes from the disgraceful Bolitho funeral – Boris Polk, the absurd Oblong and the impudent Valourhand (her ‘Snorky Porky’ retort at Sir Veronal Slickstone’s party still rankled). None of them had previously shown interest in waste disposal. Roc had been seen sniffing around the Hoy Book Fair with that perennial troublemaker Godfery Fanguin, but at least he had not shown up.

  More inexplicably, the Keeper of the Clock was in attendance, and the Master of the Apothecaries, with a young minion on either side. Apothecaries never attended municipal meetings. And most disturbing of all, Estella Scry sat at the back. His forecasted sunny day was clouding over.

  ‘Our nineteenth-century pipework is ailing,’ droned the chairman. ‘Saltware drains are turning porous; cast-iron pipes are corroding, and the recent subsidence by the churchyard wall confirms the need for urgent action—’

  The chairman stumbled as every head turned, transfixed by an apparition, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be . . .

  Snorkel sighed.

  Swamped in an oversized coat, one shoulder higher than the other, neck swathed in a scarf and bent forward like a duck, Fanguin shuffled in, supporting himself on a tall silver stick. From under the scarf emerged a vacuum hose and with his coat whirring like an electric egg-timer, Fanguin sprayed a plume of orange dust along the ledge between wall and ceiling.

  ‘Security!’ bellowed Snorkel.

  ‘Seconded!’ Fanguin bellowed back. ‘I’ve a theft to report!’

  The dust exposed a ghostly shape on a high ledge, the fragments of contour not yet recognisable. Fanguin’s stick extended, sprouting rungs and feet; a device fashioned by Boris in his teenage years.