Wyntertide

by Caldecott, Andrew

  At the door to each booth, a municipal worker announced Boris’ allocation, his only attempt at subliminal canvassing. ‘That’ll be light stones for Miss Roc, dark stones for Mr Strimmer and brown speckled stones for Mr Snorkel.’

  The teachers came between classes, Guildsmen in relays so their shops were always minded. The self-important came late; the Apothecaries in groups of twenty. For the first time in years, the Town Crier’s bell fell silent, an obscure clause in the Regulations not missed by Gorhambury.

  The three candidates sat at tables in the lee of Doom’s Tocsin in the order of their Parliament Chamber speeches. Orelia attracted occasional well-wishers; Strimmer sat flanked by Apothecaries; while Committee members and placemen afforded Snorkel a permanent audience to whom Bendigo Sly dispensed sloe gin from a trio of cut-glass decanters.

  Gorhambury, one eye on his pocket watch, spent equal time exchanging pleasantries with the three tables. A good parent has no discernible favourites. In his habitual overcoat, three-piece suit, blue-black monochrome tie, and shoelaces tied with perfect fairness in four identical loops, he appeared untouched by his new office. Yet Orelia sensed change. Nature’s perfect administrator might be the orthodox view, but Gorhambury had ridden unexpected turbulence with dignity and firmness. His face had loosened around the cheekbones; the gauntness was now more imposing than downcast.

  Orelia grudgingly admired Strimmer for his unflinching disdain. He held a Rubik’s nonagon, which he solved, dismantled and solved again: Give intellect its chance.

  ‘They’ve had bad news,’ Sly crowed to his master, who glanced across at Orelia and chuckled at her breathtaking naïveté, engaging in a tête-a-tête with a drunken failure yards from the ballot box.

  ‘One escaped south,’ whispered Fanguin. ‘The wood looks like a hall of mirrors smashed by a hooligan. I found these.’ He showed Orelia the boot-spikes. Casting the narrative between Valourhand and Salt was hardly difficult. ‘He was brave. He left his cover and ran back. I’m so sorry.’

  Orelia recalled the single syllable of comfort Salt had offered her on Mrs Banter’s death: Quick. It had been that, at least.

  She glanced across as Everthorne sauntered into the Oasis tent, emerging with a small wave, but nothing more. Was he being discreet, or did he not care? He disappeared north up the Golden Mean, sketchbook under one arm and backpack slung across his shoulder; heading back to his boat, no doubt.

  The centre cannot hold. She felt threatened by disintegration, her face shaping into Everthorne’s second sketch, an ugly puzzlement, wrong-footed at every turn. She could have declined to sign Madge Brown’s declaration form: a dignified exit, if only she had taken it . . .

  Fanguin had anticipated this, Orelia being the daughter he had never had. ‘My first artistic purchase,’ he said, placing before her a tiny stone figure with a telltale EV carved on its base. ‘I’ve been saving it.’

  Ember Vine had refashioned St Christopher as a woman, an adverse flood surging past her thighs, wading stick in hand, a child on her back. Despite the strain on muscle and face, its message was unequivocal: she and her precious cargo would achieve landfall. Hope at the bottom of the box; determination gets you through. Fanguin wrapped her fingers round it and left.

  *

  Oblong too came early. ‘Virtue sits next to the venal and the vile,’ he said.

  ‘Who wants to be virtuous?’ Orelia replied, in no mood for compliments, but she quickly thawed. ‘My copy of Straighten the Rope is missing,’ she whispered. ‘If you get to the mixing-point, be careful – very careful.’

  ‘It’s time I cut loose without a chaperone,’ replied Oblong, like an adolescent off to his first nightclub.

  ‘I do mean it,’ she said. ‘Very, very careful.’

  ‘I thought you might like to see this,’ replied Oblong, handing Orelia a copy of the Rotherweird Chronicle’s electoral edition.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she said.

  ‘The back, not the front.’

  She turned the newspaper over to find Shapeshifter’s Winter Solstice crossword solution. She quickly found the clue which had baffled her on the evening of Bolitho’s funeral: Actualité stitched up (4). The answer could be ‘news’, or equally, ‘sewn’, which, on Bole’s past form, suggested a hidden third answer. In the event, it was ‘news’.

  ‘Thanks, this might be important.’

  Oblong smiled nervously.

  ‘Best of British, if I’m allowed to say that here.’

  ‘You are and you may.’ She gave him a peck on the cheek, and he ambled off.

  She peered at the letters and an idea came. She consulted Gorhambury on his next visit to her table. ‘Didn’t Valourhand’s suit malfunction at Bolitho’s funeral?’

  ‘She ended up by the Pool of Mixed Intentions – where the river goes underground. Everyone else landed safely, and to the inch.’

  ‘What’s the name of that earthwork in the marsh?’

  ‘The Tower of the Winds. Polk flew the Artefacts Committee there one year in a prototype flying machine. The mound is completely sealed. Typical Boris, we only just made it back.’ Gorhambury consulted his pocket watch. ‘Sorry, Miss Roc, that’s your three minutes. We can’t have Mr Snorkel feeling left out, can we?’

  The Tower of the Winds – S, E, W, N or N, E, W, S – the points of the compass and Bole’s third hidden answer? Was that his final tease, his news?

  Jones came last, earning a titter from Snorkel’s camp and a smirk from Strimmer’s: the Roc party of fanatical PE.

  Orelia came straight to the point. ‘Oblong is going to Lost Acre alone with his sphere. He needs protection.’

  His answer was direct and surprising. ‘Mr Oblong will be fine; he’s learning fast. But please take your skates to the Island Field and keep a weather eye on your old friend, Jones.’ The athlete paused. ‘Never commit until you see the whites of their eyes.’

  And all the while, The Thingamajig floated above, gathering and digesting the will of the people.

  *

  Marmion Finch, the only disenfranchised citizen in town, took advantage of the emptying of The Understairs to slip into the derelict building he had visited with Oblong. The mysterious carver, flitting in and out of Rotherweird’s history, held the key.

  Provisioned for a lengthy journey, he dropped through the cavity in the floor, secured the end of an outsize ball of luminous string to a beam and set off into the gloom, tube-light in one hand, the gently rotating metal spool in the other, away from the blocked tunnel.

  Unravel, he muttered to himself, unravel.

  His sojourn underground had sharpened the senses, but his one mechanical aid, a compass, quickly failed, the hand twitching and spinning in all directions. After an hour, avoiding duplication and marking dead ends with lengths of red wool, he reached a wider passage which ended in a generous chamber. Spent fragments of wood and shavings littered the floor. Further investigation revealed wooden nails, a wooden roof tile and a large half-carved head marred by a deep split to the forehead – but no tools, no workbench and no sign of food or drink. A workplace once, but no longer, Finch concluded.

  Three roads now beckoned – but which to take?

  His quandary brought Oblong to mind. He liked the outsider for his hapless integrity and engagement with history. Pray God he had properly equipped himself.

  Finch chose the middle way, not as a symbol of moderation, but for its fresher air.

  18

  The Rotating Sphere

  A morning for backpacks: his vote cast, Oblong followed the shore of the river southwards. The Island Field would soon host the declaration and leaving any later would attract undue attention. He ate his packed lunch warily on the edge of the meadow, well away from the tile.

  Surveying the expanse of white, he resolved to read the game, all moving pieces and their players, including the ice-dragon, wh
ose presence he had overlooked when accepting the errand from Finch. Would it be waiting by the tile again? Salt had never encountered it; the moleman had never mentioned it and nor had Ferensen. The odds favoured him – and hopefully he could escape back through the tile in time if the beast were there.

  Transportation of the observatory struck him as a harmless, even worthwhile, ambition with no risk of collateral damage with everyone gathered on the Island Field.

  Above, two building anvil clouds threatened the noon sunshine. Incarnations of Snorkel and Strimmer, he thought as he strode to the white tile. Broken ferns and twigs indicated another recent visitor, but Oblong, in crusading mood, did not notice.

  Lost Acre greeted him as a friend: the ground hard, the frost, as in the carol, deep and crisp. Dabs of cumulus sat in a still blue sky: no ice-dragon and no sign of other opposition. In the stillness of deep winter, strange chrysalides hung on the taller grasses, and a nearby burrow showed no sign of activity. Lost Acre’s creatures must hibernate too. Orion’s Lantern shone low above the forest; an occasional streamer arcing up, only to fall like a shooting star.

  He soon saw the tree alone in the meadowland, branches spread wide. He identified the mixing-point, a fish-back slippery patch of sky, just as Ferensen and Salt had described it. He sat down in a comfortable niche among the roots as stress, relief and exercise in warm clothes overwhelmed him. His eyes drifted closed, opened, drifted, fought to stay open, and closed. He slept.

  *

  Oblong awoke to a double footfall landing right beside him and his head jerked up to meet a quizzical smile in a pretty oval face – the young woman he and Valourhand had met in The Journeyman’s Gist on Lazarus Night, working Euler’s theorem with the fisherman mechanical and a name too unusual to forget. She carried a satchel over her shoulder.

  ‘Pomeny Tighe?’

  ‘Just so,’ replied Tighe. A failing sun gilded her face.

  In that fluid state between sleep and waking, Oblong found himself shuffling letters.

  ‘Your name is an anagram of eight,’ he stammered, wishing to impress.

  ‘I am the eighth. I am the architect. I open the way.’ She spoke these nonsensical words as if summoning a fading memory that she did not herself understand.

  ‘Why call you Pomeny?’

  Her face loosened.

  She wants to share, thought Oblong.

  ‘I was Mel.’

  Oblong clambered to his feet, alert now. Mel – Mel Pomeny— ‘Melpomene, the Greek muse of tragedy,’ he cried immodestly, only to hesitate. Tragedy – so why was she here? How did she know this place?

  ‘I died here,’ she said before the question could be asked, her smile fading, ‘all but. One tall, one squat: the men stood here and here.’ She positioned herself, seeking exactness, her head turned down to the stream below. ‘They watched me roll; they relished my agony.’

  ‘They put you in there?’ He pointed up at the mixing-point, the obvious conclusion, and she grimaced, still looking down at the stream. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘When I was about as old as I am now. But I didn't look like this then. Growing backwards changes your appearance, Mr Oblong.’

  He recalled the third woman’s shield in The Dark Devices, an old crone with builder’s mallet and key in hand. I am the architect. I open the way. But what way could she open? To where? The tall man and the squat man centuries ago had to be Wynter and Bole.

  From her satchel, she produced a sphere, much larger than his, but similarly constructed of multi-coloured pieces. She placed it on the palm of her hand and with the gentlest flick, it spun – the same energy too.

  ‘Who told you – this time, this place, this sphere?’ When she failed to respond, he said urgently, ‘You’re being exploited, Miss Tighe. I know who the men were – I know what they’re like, what they’re capable of.’

  She looked incredulous. ‘A cure, they say – and they could not say that, unless they knew my condition. It’s mine, mine to use, only me.’

  The sentence echoed her childish possessiveness with the mechanical and the truth dawned: Wynter and Bole had brought her to the mixing-point, somehow spinning her to the last breath, conferring immortality, but reversing for her the march of time. They must have set the moment when her condition would reach its crisis, threatening loss of memory, passion, mind; shrinkage to childhood and beyond to tabula rasa. Her condition, and the election, whose timing they had also set, would bring her back.

  ‘But they’re the same, Miss Tighe. The men who put you in there also constructed your sphere.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Because . . .’ But he had no idea why. It was like talking a would-be suicide off a ledge. He had to engage. ‘I have a sphere too. It’s constructed from local rock.’

  She darted behind the tree and clambered up a rope hidden on the other side, hauling it up after her, too quick for him to intervene.

  He pointed to Orion’s Lantern and did what he could to distract her. ‘That’s a comet, but it’s only visible here. We inhabit parallel worlds, which connect somehow.’

  The sun’s disc closed on the tangled crown of the forest. Tighe kicked off her shoes and edged along the bough to the hoist. There was no cage, but she did not need one. ‘Pray for me, Mr Historian,’ she said, before leaping onto the rope and swinging forward and back, once, twice, before disappearing into the mixing-point clutching her sphere.

  Oblong called her name, silence. Disconsolate, he hurled Fortemain’s sphere in after her – at three in the afternoon to the minute.

  Then the ground shook.

  19

  Tremor

  At the twelfth stroke of the great bell, the voting booths closed. Boris disconnected the pipes, returned the unused ballot-balls to the charabanc and sealed the baskets. The Thingamajig, high in the sky, floated beyond the reach of all chicanery.

  Boris turned to Miss Trimble. ‘Now is the moment.’ He clasped her hand.

  ‘What do I do?’ she asked.

  ‘You leave my hand where it is.’

  She glanced down and understood: they would make the most public declaration possible. ‘Oh, Boris.’ She kissed him on the cheek and they set off, hand in hand.

  The Journeyman’s Gist reverberated to the tinkle of guineas on wood and the din of betting: the result, the turnout, the winning margin, the length of the winner’s acceptance speech; every permutation and combination.

  Orelia, sitting alone on the parapet of the South Bridge, pecked at her homemade sandwich. She felt besieged by polar opposites: Salt’s death and Everthorne’s disinterest. Where the hell was he? Why not wait for her? If ever she needed him . . . Yet Salt’s shade proved the stronger, hauling her back. She had gone it alone with him on Midsummer Day, heading into the worm-hole to face the unknown. In his memory, she must do the same at the Winter Solstice. Sod Everthorne. Be methodical, look, analyse. She took strength from Vine’s small carving.

  Sunlight bathed the scene, but on opposing horizons two single clouds gathered in size and deepened in colour. A fickle breeze spun frost-devils along the frozen river. She could not see or hear a single bird. She thought of the two monks, picking their way into the valley. She, like them, faced a millennial moment with stakes beyond high, a true tipping-point. She felt a kinship. They had fashioned a church; she must preserve its values.

  A hubbub behind broke her chain of thought: The Thingamajig was heading towards her down the Golden Mean, a jostling populace following its shadow. In the lead walked Boris Polk, hand in hand with Miss Trimble. Schoolchildren pointed and tittered, but not for long; both were popular, and the alliance enhanced the prospects of attending future test-flights.

  Orelia was also pleased; she had admired the porter’s pluck in the Great Equinox Race, a sight to cheer.

  Close behind strode the matronly Estella Scry, with M
aster Thomes struggling to keep pace. Apothecaries appeared at intervals in ordered ranks, adopting an unnatural trot, each holding a silver stick. Orelia found their step and formal grouping both absurd and sinister, an organised pack loose among individuals. Strimmer sauntered along nearby, wearing an expression of wry amusement.

  Once freed from the constriction of the bridge, everyone from the old and infirm to babies in arms spread out on the Island Field, around and below The Thingamajig, an ‘I was there’ moment. The candidates stood apart with Gorhambury before a trestle table bearing the Mayoral chain of office on a plump purple cushion with an open box beside it, poised to receive its lesser relative, In loco parentis, when Gorhambury’s duties were done.

  ‘How does she declare?’ asked Miss Trimble.

  ‘Smoke,’ replied Boris, ‘white, brown or black – but the electoral districts show first on the underside, anti-clockwise from the southeast. The top glows too, one band for each candidate in their allotted colour. It won’t be long now.’

  Heads turned skywards, but not only drawn by The Thingamajig. The two clouds, roiling with inner life, were closing; only a light ribbon of sky remained between them. Flakes of sleet scurried down from the north, accompanied by growls of thunder. Surrounded by the frozen river and its tributary, the Island Field had turned forbiddingly bleak. Boris reassured the candidates that the machine’s inner skin had an insulated lining. In the gloom tiny pinpoints of coloured light, each a vote, illuminated the Scholastic quarter in the map on the machine’s hull. Telescopes craned. The three columns on the machine’s chimney also began to rise, with black ahead.

  ‘Town and gown,’ whispered Sly in Snorkel’s ear, ‘ever the same – no worry.’