Fireworks and Darkness

by Natalie Jane Prior

  Casimir took a deep breath. ‘I can swim.’

  ‘Swim!’ Ruth exclaimed, and then stopped. She and Joachim exchanged glances.

  Joachim shrugged. ‘He might be able to do it. Do you have any idea how far down the entrance is?’

  ‘Fifteen feet, perhaps. I’ve only seen it drained once and that was years ago.’ Ruth turned to Casimir. ‘Cas, it’s not just a matter of swimming. You’d have to dive, really dive, and find your way down by touch. Do you honestly think you can do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Casimir, with more certainty than he felt. He had learned to swim years before, following the far off summer when he had nearly drowned in the upper reaches of the Ling. After he’d hauled him out, Simeon had spent several months teaching him every time they came near water. In the end, he’d become quite good. It was a long time since he had practised, but he had been told that the skill was never forgotten.

  It was good enough for Joachim. ‘We’ll give it a try, then. Ruth, you know the way. You’ll have to take him.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m still technically under house arrest, but my father bribed them to call the guard off and he’s the only one who’d bother to stop me. Cas, I’ll have to get a rope. I’ll meet you in the hall in two minutes.’

  She turned and ran up the stairs. Casimir started to follow, but Joachim grabbed him by the shoulder.

  ‘Casimir,’ he said, ‘listen. This is dangerous. Circastes may still be in there. At the very least, he’ll be watching. If you get through to the cellar, be very careful. Try and talk some sense into Simeon if it seems appropriate. Otherwise, try and move the barrels away from the door. I’ll be here on the other side. If there’s any way humanly possible for me to get in, I’ll do it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Casimir, though he did not like his uncle’s use of the word ‘if’.

  ‘Good lad,’ said Joachim. He squeezed Casimir’s shoulder and gave him a little push towards the stairs.

  ‘Good luck.’

  Casimir retraced his steps to the house. He found Ruth waiting in the hall as promised. She had changed her slippers for thick leather boots and was wearing a drab, heavy coat over her house dress. A coil of rope was slung over her shoulder.

  ‘Are you ready? Casimir, I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  Ruth opened the front door and pushed him out into the rain. Next door, the palace was lit up like a display of fireworks, its black and yellow flags hanging waterlogged in the rain. Strains of music floated out and were damped by the continuing downpour; there were guards on sentry duty, but the worst of the traffic had cleared. The line of street lamps along the carriageway cast yellow reflections in the puddles. Ruth crossed the River Court and hurried down the water stairs. She was surprisingly fleet-footed and Casimir had to run to keep up with her.

  ‘Where is it?’ he panted.

  ‘Over there.’ Ruth pointed upriver. ‘See the water wheel under the bridge, between the first and second piers? The entrance is next to the first pier, the one on the embankment. Follow me and I’ll show you.’

  She climbed over the stone balustrade and jumped down onto the river embankment. Casimir followed her. Ahead of them, the water wheel streamed black with water, invested with a clanking life of its own. It supplied the palace and all the buildings along the River Court with running water, and was a favourite spot for suicides, since the wheel generally finished those who thought twice and tried to swim. Ruth picked her way over broken stonework into the shadow of the bridge. She turned and took the lantern from Casimir and shone it into a gap in the masonry.

  ‘There it is.’ She had to shout to make herself heard over the deafening clatter of the turning wheel. ‘It was built when they laid out the River Court. They still use it from time to time—in spring the cellars can fill up with water and they use it to pump them out.’

  Casimir followed the beam of light. Hard by the first pier and covered with a grating was a deep, dark well, perhaps three feet across and filled with dirty-looking water. At the sight of it, his heart sank. Had their situation been less desperate he would have given up there and then, but Ruth had already set down the lantern and her rope and was struggling with the grating. Casimir went to help her. The grating came away more easily than he had expected, but if anything, the well looked even more intimidating uncovered.

  Ruth uncoiled the rope and tied one end around her waist. For want of something better to do, Casimir took off Joachim’s topcoat and his boots and stockings. A fine spume hung in the air from the water wheel; it was deathly cold and settled in droplets on his skin. His bare feet slithered on the stonework. Ruth put her hand into an inner pocket and handed him a key.

  ‘Take off your coat and jacket.’ Ruth watched while he buttoned the key into his breeches’ pocket. ‘Can you do a running knot? Good. Loop this rope around your waist—that’s it, not too tight. When you’re safely through to the passage, jerk the rope twice. If you get into trouble, jerk it three times and I’ll try and haul you back. It’s not quite low tide, so the opening shouldn’t be more than about twelve feet down on the pier side of the shaft. Do you understand?’

  Casimir nodded, almost deafened by the rattle of the wheel. The water in the well was very black and its surface crawled with vibration. He sat down and dangled his feet over the edge. Then, not wishing to prolong his misery, he slipped in with a splash and a yelp of shock.

  ‘It’s freezing!’

  ‘Don’t waste time,’ said Ruth. ‘In this cold you’ll only have a few minutes before your muscles cramp. The sooner you find the opening, the sooner you can get out.’

  The fact that she was right didn’t make Casimir like her any the better for it. The water was so cold it hurt. He flipped head over heels and thrust off against the brickwork, trying to stay on the vertical as he dived down the shaft, but instead slamming almost immediately into the side. Casimir floundered, losing his bearings and most of his breath. He returned to the surface, gasped another lungful of wintry air and, with a renewed sense of the difficulties confronting him, tried again.

  The second dive was slightly more successful. This time, he splayed out his hands to touch the walls as he went down, and it was easier, though the sensation of going down through the thick black water was curiously unpleasant, as if he were a pen being plunged into an inkwell. The machinery reverberated in the enclosed space, setting up an unbearable pressure in his ears; this, and the numbing pain of simply being in the water blotted out almost all other sensation. Casimir had no idea how deep he had dived, but after several seconds he felt the blood pounding in his temples and realised he was starting to tire. For a few more seconds he struggled to go deeper, but there was no sign of any opening, and as his lungs strained with the effort of holding in his breath, he was gripped by a horrible vision of being stuck in the shaft and drowning upside down. With difficulty Casimir turned and struck upwards in a flurry of bubbles. His head broke through the surface of the water and the cold air slammed against his face.

  ‘No luck?’ shouted Ruth, over the noise of the machinery.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Try again.’

  On the third attempt, just before his air ran out, he found it.

  The opening was reasonably large, about the size of a small window, which he supposed for an inspection hatch was about right. Casimir tried to feel his way into the passage, but his hands encountered an unexpected obstruction. He ran his fingers carefully over it. A moment later his air ran out and he had to return to the surface.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ shouted Ruth when she saw him.

  ‘There’s bars on it! I can’t get through!’

  ‘Bars?’

  ‘There’s two of them. About an inch thick. I think it must be some sort of grating.’

  ‘Try and move it.’

  ‘I can’t.’ The thought of going back down the dark, freezing shaft and drowning, caught on the grating without any chance of escape, filled Casimir with terror. ‘It’s s
et into the stone and there’s a padlock. I’ll never be able to shift it.’

  ‘Then try the key. Or wriggle through the gap. If there’s only two bars there must be an opening in the middle of at least a foot. You’re not so big you can’t get through that. You have to try, Casimir. We’ve come this far. You’ve got to make the effort!’

  ‘I can’t! I’m too big. If I get stuck, I’ll drown, and who’s going to rescue me then?’ Casimir tried to hoist himself out of the water. Ruth grabbed hold of his shirt. For a moment they struggled on the edge of the shaft and then she pushed him back in so hard he knocked his elbow agonisingly on the stonework.

  ‘You coward! Get back down there! Your father’s about to kill himself and all you care about is yourself!’

  ‘That’s not true! Why don’t you do it, if you’re so brave?’

  ‘Because I can’t swim! If I could, I would. It’s like everything else, Casimir. Something goes wrong and you automatically blame me. Well, this time it’s not my fault. You thought of it, you damn well do it!’

  Black rage swelled up in Casimir. ‘God, I hate you,’ he shouted. ‘You’re a miserable bitch. I hate you more than anybody else in the entire world. I wish my father had never met you.’

  ‘And I wish I’d never met you. If you don’t go back down the shaft, Simeon will die. He’s your father, doesn’t that mean anything?’

  ‘Die? We’re all going to die, anyway. When that cellar explodes it will take out the entire River Court—’ Casimir stopped. How could he explain to her that there was a difference? All his life, he had lived with the dread of being caught in an explosion, but it was a fear he had come to terms with. It wasn’t the same as drowning helplessly, upside down, like a kitten in a bucket of water. And if he did get through, if he did find Simeon, what could he hope to achieve? With a sudden fatalistic clarity, Casimir realised that, whatever he did now, Simeon was going to die, that the dark tapestry of his father’s life had unravelled beyond hope of repair. Simeon’s story was like a firework display on the blackest of nights, the darkness punctuated with flashes of coruscating brilliance. Then, as soon as they had been glimpsed, they vanished, leaving only the rumbling aftershocks of the explosions, the shower of ash, the stench of gunpowder hanging in the rain.

  And now it had come down to this: two sodden figures, glaring at each other across a filthy puddle of water. In Simeon’s life, Casimir knew there had been so few flashes of light that it would be callous of him not to admit Ruth had been one of them. Yet he did not know what to say to her: this angry, difficult woman, who lacked all gentleness and tolerance, whom he disliked so much and yet, whom his father had loved. She had not answered his outburst, but her face was working now in the lamplight, a mix of anger, dislike, distress. Then he realised that the wetness on her cheeks was not raindrops, but tears. The unexpected weakness threw him off his guard.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it. I don’t hate you, really. I just said it to upset you.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m not crying because of what you said, Casimir. God knows, I’ve been called worse, more times than I can remember. No. If I’m crying, I suppose it’s because of all the might-have-beens. My life’s been full of them. I suppose this is just another.’ She looked away. ‘When I was your age I desperately didn’t want to die, either. I almost did. I had a baby and it nearly killed me. In the years since then, I’ve often wished it had. If he’d lived, my son would have been about the same age as you.’

  Casimir clung to the side of the shaft. The pain from the cold had subsided to a sinister ache and he could no longer feel his fingers where they gripped the stonework. He knew he was slowly freezing, being overcome by the icy water, but in the scheme of things it hardly seemed to matter. Ruth picked up the rope and started pulling it out of the water. Impulsively, Casimir shot out a hand and grabbed it.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Once more. I’ll try once more.’ Ruth started to protest, but Casimir knew that if he got out now, he would never get back in. He flipped backwards quickly, down into the water. This time, knowing where it was, he was able to dive straight to the opening.

  Casimir grasped the iron bars and pushed his head into the gap. It was, as Ruth had said, wider than he had initially thought, and though it would easily have stopped a grown man, or even a youth less wiry than himself, there was plenty of space for him to wriggle into. If he had been able to see it would have been comparatively easy; as it was, the darkness terrified as much as it thwarted him. Casimir’s shoulders jammed and his legs caught against the wall of the shaft. A few bubbles escaped from the sides of his mouth. It’s your fault, Ruth, if I drown, he thought, and then like a miracle his shoulders scraped in the opening and he was through.

  Casimir kicked out and started swimming as fast as he could. His head pounded from the effort of keeping the air in his lungs and his eyes flashed red. Bubbles burst from his mouth, and then he suddenly realised he was going upward, that he was trying to swim in shallow water, and that there was a gap between the water and the ceiling of the passage.

  ‘Thank God!’ Casimir’s head burst through the surface and he flopped over onto his back and floated, breathing in great rasping lungfuls of dank air. A dizzying sense of thankfulness flooded through his body. Then he tried to stand up. Immediately his legs gave way and he fell over. The effort of the swim had left him spent.

  The rope was still tied to his waist, and, remembering Ruth, he gave it two shaky tugs. They were answered by a sharp jerk at the other end, then the rope went slack. Casimir untied it and dropped it into the water. This time, when he tried to stand up, he was able to stagger a few steps before he fell. The water grew shallower and shallower and at last he splashed into a passage. Casimir waited a few moments longer to recover his breath, then started feeling his way along the passage wall.

  His clothes were heavy with water and he was deathly cold, but the passage was not as long as he had expected it to be. After a few minutes of fumbling his way in the darkness he found it starting to slope upwards, and then his hands encountered a door. There was no handle on it, just a keyhole. Casimir inserted the key Ruth had given him into the lock and turned it. The door was swollen and took several shoves before it gave so much as a finger-width; when it did open, the hinges were so stiff with rust they squealed like a churchyard gate. But for all the effect the noise had, Casimir might have saved himself the effort of trying to be quiet. He was in the right place, but nothing else in the cellar was as he’d expected.

  An orange light burned dimly in the middle of the room. Casimir could see a human figure hunched over it, so motionless it might have been a statue. Around the perimeter he could make out the shadowy outlines of powder barrels and firework boxes, the open mouths of the ordnance mortars arranged in an inward-pointing circle. Casimir took a step into the room. A box of fireworks thudded onto the floor from a precariously stacked bundle at his elbow; he jumped, but no one else stirred, and after a moment his fright abated enough for him to take a few more cautious steps forward.

  The floor was scattered with cracked and broken firework cases and felt gritty under his bare feet. Gunpowder had been strewn in deliberately regular patterns, spiralling out like a maze or mosaic from the light in the middle of the room; each trail divided, and divided again until there were dozens ringing the cellar in concentric circles. Around the walls these powder trails terminated in well-caulked kegs of gunpowder, boxes of fireworks, and fuses leading to the ordnance mortars, which had evidently been cleaned and loaded. Half a dozen powder kegs were stacked in front of the main door. In the middle of the room, huddled over a firepot with his face surrounded by a halo of tiny lights, sat Simeon.

  ‘Father?’

  Trembling, Casimir knelt and took his hand. It lay limply in his own; when he shook Simeon’s shoulder and touched his face, he did not even respond. Pieces of lighted slow match were knotted in his hair, burning like fireflies with a mingled smell of gunpowder and singed hair.
His eyes were vague and without recognition. Intellectually, Casimir had known to expect something of the sort. Nevertheless, he had not expected the expression on Simeon’s face to look so disturbingly like Ezekial Circastes’s when he had opened the door to him in Wren Alley.

  A single spark would be enough to set off the contents of the cellar. Casimir remembered what Joachim had said about moving matches and tinder from Simeon’s reach, and started inching the firepot away from him, carefully, for the pottery was burning hot and there were no pot tongs. Instantly, Simeon’s hand flashed out and grabbed his wrist.

  ‘Ow! Let go!’ Casimir tried to wrest himself free, but Simeon’s grip only tightened. With inhuman strength he started forcing Casimir’s hand up and back from the firepot, until Casimir felt as if every bone in his arm was about to break. Outside in the stairwell someone started banging on the door. Casimir heard Joachim’s voice calling out to him, demanding to know if he was there, and then the air moved silently behind and around him. A human hand came down briefly on his shoulder and a quiet voice said, ‘Stop.’

  At once, the dreadful pressure on Casimir’s wrist released. Wrung white, it dropped lifelessly to his lap. The hand lifted from his shoulder and a slight figure circled around between him and Simeon. All the hairs stood up on the back of Casimir’s neck as if a ghost had entered the room. But Circastes did not even look at him. Instead he sat down and gently took Simeon’s hand. Simeon whimpered, and, like a child, he laid his head on Circastes’s shoulder.

  The magician put his arms around him and drew him close. With great care, he brushed the burning pieces of slow match away from Simeon’s cheeks and started speaking in a language Casimir could not understand. The words were all elegant sibilances and rolling vowels, strung together with a cadence he had never heard in all his wide travels in Ostermark, not even among the sailors of every nation whom he had encountered in the great ports on the North Sea. Yet Simeon clearly understood, for from time to time he interjected in the same language, his voice so forlorn it pierced Casimir’s heart to hear it. He was listening to the language of his father’s childhood, the source of the accent that had always marked Simeon out as a foreigner though he claimed no country of his own, the source too, of the even slighter inflection, no more than an occasional catch, in Casimir’s own speech. He did not know what the two men were talking about, but he could guess, for tears were slowly coursing down his father’s cheeks. Then he saw that Circastes was crying, too. The magician’s face was grey and ravaged by fatigue and a dozen mingled emotions, too raw to be anything but genuine.