The Murdstone Trilogy

by Mal Peet

  The voice spoke and the hand wrote at exactly the same pace, but Philip knew that they did not belong to the same person. The voice was ancient, and cracked all the way to the heart. The hand that guided the racing pen was not old. It showed no wrinkles, veins, scars or hair. The skin was light with a texture like coarse soap. The fingers were longish, narrow, with pale blue nails. The writing was in a language he didn’t know, but understood perfectly. It consisted mainly of flowing diagonal strokes alternating with patterns of dots – never more than five – inside either circles or rhomboids. The ink continued to form itself into characters after the pen had moved on.

  But blind I am, and needs must I dictate this to my only surviving Clerk, Pocket. He is a Greme, from the clan of Matriarch Wellfair, and, though stubborn like all his kind, has learned the Books and has fair mastery of Inkage. We shall begin, as the Law demands, with the Incantatory Preface in the Old Language. Venx Bilhatta, Venx lux Bilhatta, carpen hos …

  A pig’s arse to the Incantatory Preface.

  This second voice cut in so brusquely that Philip was almost pitched headfirst out of dreamland. It was both light and hoarse, like the voice of a child suffering from mild laryngitis. At the same moment, the penmanship changed: the flowing diagonals became fast slashes, the elaborate circles and rhomboids were reduced to quick wedges, dashes and curls. The ink writhed on the paper, trying to keep up.

  The poor old darkler will never know what I’m writing anyturn. Long as he hears nibscratch he’ll just keep droning on. All Doom and Gloom it’ll be. Which is square enough, the fluking state we’re in. The fluking state he’s in. Beard-ends full of bits from the floor, and a clump of bleddy moss growing under his lip. His hatstrings dangle in his posset when I can get him to feed, and when I tell him so he just sighs and shakes his head like a fly-naggled goat. He arsebleats like there’s no tomorrow, never mind my sensitive Greme nosehole. Sometimes he’ll sleep two days or more at a stretch, only waking to use his foulpot (which I have to empty, and me a Full Clerk). When he’s awake, it’s gripe and bleddy groan about being stuck here in what he calls ‘Subterranean Exile’ living like a tunnel-fumbler. Comes natural to me, of course. And when I urge him on to cheerfulness, he gets the growls on and tells me I have to learn the Higher Resignation and accept that the Powers have changed their allegiance. And when I say a pig’s arse to all that he’ll put an Ache on me, which I hate, and call me a stubborn Greme like all Gremes. Well, maybe I am and maybe we are.

  The pen raced on; behind it the inkage jostled itself into position.

  Maybe that’s why there’s still some of us left. He blames hisself, is what it is. Broods on Ifs like they were eggs. If he had expunged Morl from the College when he whiffed what he was up to. If he had entrusted Cadrel with the Four Devices of the Amulet. If he’d twigged the shapeshifter Mellwax. Iffing hisself round in a circle till he meets hisself coming back. Does no bleddy good. Ifs is thorns, as my old Dame used to say.

  So if I let him tell it we’ll never get to the end. He’ll be all Digressions Major and Digressions Minor and Reversed buggering Rhetoric and Footnotes and Pendicles like in the Ledgers and we’ll never get at the meat of the matter. And it’s maybe we don’t have time enough. Morl’s Swelts are everywhere, even here in Farrin. I’ve clocked them overhead, and I can’t be sure the Library Seal will hold, not if they call in bleddy occulators. Listen to him. Still mumbling away in the Old Language. That Preface goes on for seventeen bleddy sheets. Why bother, I asked him, once. I got an Ache for my pains.

  The pen paused and the ink caught up, but the voice continued; and in the depths of his coma Philip understood that it was addressing him.

  Now then. What you need is a Layout. Can’t know what happens less you know where you is, as the old Greme saying goes. We’ll project.

  Had Philip been awake, he’d have screamed. He seemed to rise, as if in a rocket-propelled transparent elevator, through rock strata and thick veins of earth, past the mouths of labyrinthine tunnels and burrows, past boulder-grasping roots of mighty trees. Pocket’s voice came with him.

  This is a Greme trick. Even Pellus can’t do this. It naggles him, though he’s too hoity to admit it. Right, here we be.

  Philip experienced a silent bursting forth, and then he passed through a band of glow and came to rest hovering above a vast, impossibly beautiful landscape. It was lit by gently shifting beams of multi-coloured light, as though the sun shone through slowly-rotating filters. For a dreadful moment, he thought he might be having a religious experience.

  The Realm, Pocket said matter-of-factly. Or, as we are supposed to call it nowadays, the bleddy Thraldom of Morl.

  It began to scroll towards Philip and pass slowly and silently beneath him. Farrin was a high plateau of conical hummocks and copses of trees that cast orange shadows. It was webbed with tracks, although there was no obvious sign of dwelling places, merely scatterings of jumbled stone. The walls of the plateau dropped away, shrinking into long ridges of rock like the spinal plates of buried reptiles. These stretched into a harsh desert where blue-shadowed dunes were continuously transformed by winds that Philip could not feel.

  A range of mountains came into view, rearing up almost vertically from the sands and sweeping in a great arc towards a dark sea far off to Philip’s right. These crags were grey, but where their surfaces had been broken by collapse or quarrying they showed interiors of buttery yellow. The higher peaks were lightly dusted with what looked like snow, although it was white for only brief periods of time. Among the far foothills, light danced on the surface of a lake; close to its far shore a black castellated island cast a green shadow on the water.

  The clerk’s voice spoke, and his hand wrote, the names of all that rolled below them. Philip knew, with a dreamer’s certainty, that every word was being inscribed indelibly on his memory, hard-wired to his brain. He felt consumed by an insatiable happiness.

  His eyes tracked the course of a river; silver, then milky blue, then turquoise. It enfolded three walled cities before it vanished, beyond a mighty cataract, into what seemed a limitless forest. But this too passed, and a rich undulating plain appeared, patchworked with fields and meadows, woodlands and thatched hamlets and greens where children might have played but did not.

  Some immeasurable time later, a darkness appeared in the approaching distance, spanning the horizon. At first, Philip thought that the clerk’s Greme magic had rolled the world into nightfall; then as it drew nearer, he realized that he was looking at a vast, black, flat-bellied cloud. It cast onto the land below it a shadow that was an utter absence of light.

  The Thule of Morl, Pocket’s voice announced. This is as far as we go. We don’t know the Layout beyond here any more.

  The slow unfurling of the world stopped.

  Peering ahead, Philip now saw that a mesh of perfectly straight roads spread from the darkness out onto the plain. Along it and across it columns of what looked, from his height, like termites moved steadily and unceasingly. There were many fires, but the termites passed heedless through them.

  Swelts, the Greme’s voice said, and the word lowered the temperature of the dream.

  The Realm now reversed its scrolling, and the Thule receded. Philip had not been aware of any loss of altitude, but they were closer to the surface now. He saw details that he had not seen earlier. On the plain, there were smudges where whole villages had been extinguished as if by a gigantic and filthy thumb. The forest was scarred by furrows of toppled trees. Of the three walled cities, two were derelict, their towers topless, their ramparts broached. Where the mountains plunged into the sea, he saw in isolated coves the blackened ribs and spines of burned boats. The jumbled stones on the surface of Farrin were wrecked townships, perhaps razed by some spasm that had rocked the plateau.

  Someone spoke from the far distance, and Philip recognized the voice as his own.

  ‘What happened?’

  Instantly he turned liquid and was syphoned downwards. When he was himself
again the world had gone. He somehow knew that he was back in a subterranean chamber. The old cracked voice was still mumbling gibberish. Pocket was talking eighteen to the dozen and the pen was flying across the paper and the ink was again desperately chasing the words. The story that they recounted Philip saw unfold.

  He saw the fierce grim ritual in which the bewitched Bradnor Lux rejected and cast out his infant son, Cadrel. He saw the casket containing the Amulet of Eneydos withdrawn from the Throne Room, carried aloft between two ranks of a thousand black candles.

  He witnessed Cadrel’s exiled childhood among the moth farmers of the Furthest Hills.

  He watched the shapeshifter, Trover Mellwax, in the form of a giant mucilaginous toad, steal the Amulet from the Guardians who lay stunned by his narcotic breath.

  He saw the blond youth Morl Morlbrand arrive at the College of Thaumaturgy and stand gazing at the inscriptions above the ancient doors.

  He watched a caravan of tall, long-necked animals, their heads hooded against the whirling sand, cross the Shand’r Ga Desert under a mantle of stars. Glowing tent-like structures swayed on their backs. Somewhere in the night, dogs barked.

  He watched, helplessly, the brutish slaughter in the Furthest Hills.

  He saw young Cadrel’s wanderings, watched him cross the sun-freckled floor of the mapless forest. He saw the youth’s slow awakening under the tutelage of Orberry Volenap, his winning of the Lost Sword of Cwydd Harel.

  He watched Bradnor Lux carried aboard the black-draped barge and depart on his last journey accompanied by keening Shades.

  He saw Morl again, no longer young, clad in the green and silver necromantick cloak. Turning towards him, his eyes remote as a fish’s, set deep in a bone-hard face. The mouth moving out of phase with the words: Give it to me! Give it to me!

  Philip’s mortal body groaned aloud in its sleep when the Megrum uncoiled its endless length from its spiral cave, eeling towards him and spilling toxic drool from its multiple banks of teeth.

  He saw star-crossed love take root and ripen; he watched Cadrel take beautiful Mesmira, half-sister to Morl, in his arms.

  He watched a rising blood-red sun slowly illuminate the impatient host of Morl’s battle-hungry Swelts, their war-axes and serrated javelins raised to greet the dawn. He saw Cadrel and GarBellon the Sage survey the enemy from a vertiginous jut of rock, GarBellon’s white beard restless in the morn-breeze.

  He saw a screen of blank and perfect blue.

  He watched it for several long moments, perhaps hoping that it was some kind of intermission or commercial break. He noticed that little dark specks swam in the blue; then, in a rush of comprehension, realized that they were birds and that he was staring at his own world’s sky. He felt his weight return and knew that he sat on grass with his back against a stone, awake.

  He suffered a momentary though unbearable sense of loss, as if he had died while fully conscious. Apart from that, he felt fine. There was a roll-up between his fingers, which, eventually, he lit.

  5

  Occasionally, in his writing, Philip Murdstone made use of dreams as a narrative device, or to suggest that rather dim characters led richly articulate lives when they were unconscious.

  The fact was, though, that Philip himself did not dream; or if he did – and he had been assured that everybody did – his dreams never survived, could never be recalled. He awoke every day a blank page or perhaps palimpsest. He was secretly ashamed of this, thinking it a sort of disability.

  Once, when he was still teaching English as a Foreign Language in Hove, a dating agency had matched him with a woman whose name was (or perhaps wasn’t) Sonya. He had taken her to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where she’d proved adept with chopsticks. Sonya had spent the better part of the evening vividly recounting her dreams, which were long, elaborate, and drenched in suppressed eroticism. He’d had trouble keeping his end up, and had resorted to inventing the kind of thing he thought she might like to hear. He had not done very well; he simply wasn’t much good at imagining the poetic non-sequiturs that dreams, it seemed, consisted of. Which is probably why his editors were always trying to trim them from his stories, and why he never saw Sonya again. (A year later, he learned that she had abandoned social work and gone off to be a pole-dancer in Lapland. Or was it a lap-dancer in Poland? He couldn’t remember which, nor – despite eating a deal of grilled cheese at bedtime – had he been able to dream of her in either role.)

  So he was peculiarly ill-equipped for understanding what had happened to him up on the moor. Back in his dusky parlour, he fumbled at the experience like an ape looking for the edible parts of a digital camera.

  For one thing, he couldn’t have reached the Wringers much before four thirty. He’d then dreamed, experienced, whatever, an incredibly detailed epic spanning something like twenty years. When he’d woken up and looked at his watch it had told him that it was four thirty-five. Then there was the fact that, despite Denis’s evil ale, he’d felt as fresh as a daisy. Still did, actually. Sort of spring-cleaned.

  But what kept him immobile in his armchair was that the dream was still there. And not in his ordinary memory, either. The slightest shift in his concentration – nothing more than turning his eyeballs to the side, really – brought it up in perfect sequence and bright detail. The voice, the pictures, the alien but comprehensible writing, all seemed to have taken up residence in a district of his mind that he had never visited before. A district he hadn’t known was there. He remembered understanding, in the dream, that this was happening, but that awareness was itself part of the dream, so, therefore … This line of thought petered out.

  He looked at the dream again. It was as easy as clicking on a mouse. There was the speeding hand and coursing inkage of Pocket Wellfair. His light husky voice. Click. Gone. Click. Back again.

  Christ.

  Was it possible, Philip wondered, to become fully schizophrenic in less than five minutes while taking an innocent nap on a May afternoon? If so, it seemed deeply unfair. Surely there should be some warning, a bit of a build-up: the odd voice from inside the bathroom cabinet, a brief glimpse of an archangel in Tesco, that sort of thing.

  Yet he didn’t feel mad. Far from it. He knew who and where he was, although, come to think of it, he couldn’t remember how he’d got from the Wringers back to his house. But he knew, for example, that the things at the ends of his legs were his feet, and that if he chose to waggle them they would waggle. There they went. He knew that if he wanted to he could go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea and not get lost. So he did.

  Then the thought struck him that Pocket and Morl and the rest of them might not be in his head if he were absorbed in something else, so he took his cup across the lane, stood it on one of the gateposts, rolled a cigarette and tried to lose himself in the familiar but ever-changing vista.

  Sheep Nose Tor was still edged with gold, but Beige Willie was aubergine now. From the dell a sheep began to bleat, then changed its mind. Tardy rooks drifted across the evening sky that was now a nameless blue hung with gauzy swags of amber cloud. Philip sipped tea, inhaled sweet smoke; then, cautiously, let his mind slip sideways. Click.

  Oh shit, Swelts! Hell’s teeth, what ugly bastards! Click. Come on, click, click!

  Gone. God!

  His forehead seeped dew. His fear was as physical as the need to pee. He went back to the cottage.

  Halfway through emptying his bladder he understood.

  He conjured up Minerva’s purple paradigm of the fantasy novel and laid it, like a transparency, over his unsought-for vision.

  The two matched. Up to a point. The point at which the dream, call it that, had simply stopped, incomplete. It was all there, though: the exiled prince, the quest, the amulet, the greybeards; all the old hokum that featured in those dire tomes downstairs. Except that Pocket Wellfair’s tale had a sort of, well, authenticity. The word was both absurd and absolutely appropriate.

  He zipped up and flushed, stood immobile listening to the
cistern reluctantly refilling itself. Then, not really wanting to, feeling in fact an eerie absence of self-will, he went to his study, the mean little room that Mr Gammon had called the Guest Bedroom.

  He sat down on his B&Q orthopaedic office chair. The enormousness – and, for that matter, the enormity – of what he was about to do paralysed him. Eventually, however, he turned on the desk lamp and his PC. He settled the wayward cursor onto the Word icon. When the terrifying white page came up he hesitated briefly, then pressed Ctrl B and Ctrl I and typed:

  Dark Entropy

  By Philip Murdstone

  He wrote without pause for nine hours, then fell asleep where he sat. When he awoke he went downstairs and drank a glass of water. He smoked a cigarette. It did not strike him as odd that he felt no hunger. He returned to his computer and stabbed the space-bar to relight it. (His first PC had had an animated screensaver thing: increasingly complex, multi-coloured pipework, like psychedelic plumbing. He’d watched it for long periods of time. It was peaceful, in a rather hectic way. He missed it. Why had it gone?)

  When the text reappeared he carried on and did not cease writing for a further six and a half hours.

  It was more or less a simple process of transcription. Pocket Wellfair’s script swarmed up from the bottom of the screen and Philip’s flying fingers turned it into English, line by line. A lifelong peer-and-peck typist, he was at first profoundly surprised that he could touch-type using all eight fingers and both thumbs. When Pocket’s upscrolling words left him uncertain, he merely clicked his brain-mouse and described the images that unreeled for him. He did not pause or tut when clichés appeared on the screen. He did not stumble over the outlandish names or pointless apostrophes. It seemed to him that when his fingers faltered the text ran ahead and led them on. There was none of the finicky editing that was a large part of his normal writing process. Not that he was aware of any of this, or anything else. He had forgotten who he was.