Alan picked up the cylinder of ivory off the mossy ground, then unrolled it into a small, rectangular plaque. He gazed, bewildered, at what turned out to be carvings and hieroglyphs that looked exceedingly old.
‘What is it?’
‘A blessed promise – sacred to our people. It was carved long ago from the tooth of a god, a fire-breather who sailed the wind.’
Alan let Ainé and Qwenqwo see the unrolled plaque. None of them could read the hieroglyphs but all could readily see the winged shape that occupied the central area of the sheaved panel.
‘It looks like a dragon.’
The young Garg bowed, intoning a name, singing rather than speaking it aloud: “Qwenuncqweqwatenzian-Phaetentiatzen.” Great god – ruler of air and water. One who is venerated above all by the Eyrie People.’
Alan looked from the Kyra to Qwenqwo, as if hoping one or other of them could enlighten him. But neither did. ‘Tell me about Kate – Greeneyes! It was you, the Gargs, who took her prisoner.’
‘The Great Witch ordered us to do so. We did not know the importance of Greeneyes – she with hair of flame. We brought her here, to the Tower of Bones. We bear the responsibility of her capture, of her becoming a prisoner of the Great Witch. Only now, when she has broken free of the Witch’s Tower, do we understand her purpose.’
‘You’re sure about this? You’re really talking about Kate?’
‘Truly, she had fled the Tower. The Witch is hunting for her, with all of her wraiths and wolves.’
‘Do you know where she is? Can you take me to her?’
‘I know not where she is. Only that she has escaped and now she greens the wasted lands. Such power does she bear, she has challenged the Great Witch in her Tower of Bones.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why do you think the Gargs do not attack you? Why will you not listen to me? Am I not here to help you?’
Alan looked from Qwenqwo to Ainé in bewilderment. ‘How far are we from the Tower of Bones?’
‘One day, perhaps two, as I might travel. But you cannot enter the valley of the Tower from this place. Go there unprepared and you will surely be destroyed.’
‘But I have to confront the Witch – that’s why I’m here.’
‘I have come here to help you.’
Alan shook his head. How could he trust a Garg?
‘There is no time. The wolves are combing every sanctuary and crevice. If they find Greeneyes, they will killhhh her.’
‘Then what are we to do?’
‘My father, King Zelnesakkk, has been summoned by the Momu. Greeneyes is under the protection of the Cill, who conceal her whereabouts from the Witch. The Momu has wisdom-that-was from ancient times. She calls for a meeting with my father. I must take you there – to the meeting of the Momu and the King, in the City of the Ancients.’
Alan’s heartbeat had risen into his throat. The air in his lungs had thickened so he could hardly breathe.
‘This meeting – Kate will be there?’
‘Greeneyes is the purpose of the meeting. The Cill and the Gargs, once allies, have long been mortal enemies. Only Greeneyes – she who restores life to the tormented lands – makes possible such a reconciliation.’
‘You’re telling me you’ll take me to meet Kate?’
Iyezzz reared to his full height and averted his head to an awkward angle, retracting his eyelids, with that eye-protruding gesture, but this time it appeared more a parody of honour rather than anything else.
‘I will lead you there.’
Resurrection
You think you understand pain and then you are made to think again. Physical pain, the pain of a blow – that was easy. Psychological pain was worse. To be cast down into a dark basement as a child, to be made to withstand the cold and the dark, was more hurtful than a blow. Still it was bearable. But spiritual pain, the pain that came from non-being – the pain of being excluded from the real world – that was unbearable. Yet you had no choice other than to bear it. Spiritual pain was what Mark Grimstone had been struggling with. That unbearable pain was what he had been forced to come to terms with, and through understanding to try to overcome, but in spite of every effort on his part it triumphed.
I want to be whole again. I want to live in this world – any world.
The other voice said: Be, then!
What you say is mere words.
No, my love, words are a part of being.
In his frustration he wanted to put his face into his hands and weep. But he had neither face nor hands to weep into.
Shit!
Fight back against it!
I don’t know how to.
I believe in you.
Easy to say!
I am Nantosueta – Queen of Ossierel.
I know who you are. But I’m beginning to think that you too are just words – words I’m conjuring up inside my head.
I’m real. You are not alone.
But was it true?
He recalled climbing to the top of the Rath on Ossierel, entering the ruined buildings at the very summit. It had been Kate who had sensed the true meaning of the final chamber with the stellate window. Kate had climbed up to the window and held her crystal against it, causing images to take life within the sparkle of light. That was when Mark had first seen her, fallen in love with her, the dark-haired girl who laughed as she pirouetted among the slender trunks of sapling trees. She had seemed so full of life – of gaiety – as she danced forward to take his hand.
Nan!
Then, as now, powerful feelings coursed through him.
Whether he was dead or not he was capable of feeling. He was altogether capable of rage, despair. Maybe he should be able to find strength in that, but it was incredibly hard to do so. There was a sense, a hope, that something might come from those feelings, if only he knew how to bring it about. He was prepared to try anything. But the problem was, nothing worked.
I’ve been reduced to nothing. And yet I can kid myself that I really exist. One thing’s for sure – if I exist it’s in a place that’s the opposite of reality. What if I’m a non-being in a world of nowhere?
He couldn’t stop himself from asking the vile question that had haunted him since Ossierel: Nan! Don’t you wonder if we’re both dead?
If so, what then is death?
What do you mean?
Are we not holding a conversation?
Maybe the dead can talk to one another?
My question remains. What then is the difference between life and death?
He thought about that. Maybe there’s no absolute difference? Maybe there’s existence beyond life? Maybe non-being is a kind of bloody punishment?
Only the irony is that there is no blood to shed!
He laughed – or at least he imagined he laughed, in his mind. He felt angry. Didn’t that mean that he could feel as well as think? Shit – what did he know? He was just kidding himself with wishful thinking.
So it was that things went round and round in Mark’s mind. The lessons of Dromenon were very hard lessons and it had taken him quite a while to learn them. He still thought himself dead. He had experienced the moment of death when he was subsumed by the Third Power. Yet Nan didn’t agree. Maybe she was right. How could he still think as clearly as this if he were dead? For your mind to think your brain had to be alive. Or at least so he always had believed. How could his mind function if his brain was dead? Thinking like this was driving him out of his mind – whatever mind he had to relinquish. And yet he seemed perfectly able to think. I think – therefore I am! The French philosopher, Descartes, had said that. Well, here I am, thinking some pretty crazy thoughts. So I am – I exist. And existence was another word for being alive. But of course this just took him back to the circular argument about words and being.
What if you’re right, Nan? Where do we go from here?
First there is faith. You discover a way to believe. And then you think through the next step from belief to confirmation.
It sounded like some religious mantra. But still he thought about her words. Somehow – logically – he wanted to believe her. He so desperately wanted to be alive. Even if he was a bit flaky on faith he so wanted to move in the direction of confirmation. How could he find substance out of the nothing that was his existence, out of the world he now inhabited – a no-place in which there was no solid form, no sense of time or of substance – a great empty nothingness?
Hey – I’m so glad you’re here with me. I don’t think I could bear it alone.
I was compelled to bear it alone for a very long time.
Only two thousand years!
Yours is a cruel wit.
But you like me for it.
Hmmm!
But though he joked about it, it was comforting to him just to know that Nan was with him, sharing the nothingness. And the strange thing was that he had sensed her from time to time, a feeling of something beyond words, like the feathery touch of a butterfly’s wings against his skin. Two thousand years of solitary confinement in the white nothingness! He didn’t know how she had remained sane. There was great strength in her. Great courage – a will of iron. Just like Qwenqwo thought he had a heart of iron. He thought about what she had said …
Faith first – then confirmation.
And the strangest thing, the most extraordinary thing, was the fact that an idea had just come into his head. An idea that was probably daft. It was a very simple idea once he had time to think it through.
The whiteness was a blank page on which he must construct his own world, the materialisation of his ideas – a world he must assemble, piece by piece, using nothing more than the power of his imagination.
It seemed utterly insane. But still he thought about it. And the next step – an idea that came and went, but kept on popping up in his desperate mind – was to imagine that he was standing on a beach of fine, white sand. It hardly seemed anything clever or difficult to imagine. But once he got the hang of it, he clung to it. Then he began to add to it, step by step. He could easily imagine himself standing on that beach, turning about himself, observing the fine white sand disappearing into the distance. That was the first construction – the beginning of his brave new world. And now he found he could let it go and yet find his way back to it without a problem. He could make it appear or disappear at his whim.
Like a dream, he thought.
Only this was a perfectly controllable dream.
Then he dreamed some more. He imagined how it would feel to stand there in the middle of the white beach. He felt the sandiness under his feet. He took a few steps, walking along the beach and, looking back, he saw the trail of his own footprints appear. He had imagined the footprints into being. From then on, with every step, his footprints automatically came into being behind him.
A step at a time, he thought, triumphantly.
Now he had to explain it to Nan. To explain that she had to do the same. She had to imagine herself standing on, and then walking over, the same white sandy beach.
She did so. What now?
I’m going to imagine you here, beside me, on the beach.
How will you do this?
I’ll remember you, how you looked when I first met you.
He imagined her in his mind, and then he dreamed her into being. Nantosueta, the girl-queen of Ossierel. He had no difficulty in dreaming her up because he remembered her with a perfect clarity. And immediately she was there, standing beside him exactly as he remembered her, dressed in a white linen gown and sandals, her chocolatebrown eyes, her hair a gleaming cataract of blue-black, vivacious, playful – lovely.
Now, he said, you have to remember me too. You have to feel the beach under your feet. And then you have to see me here, standing beside you.
I see you.
I want us to walk, together, over the white sand.
Almost immediately, as if the thought excited her as much as it did him, they were together, a shared imagination, their figures side by side, trailing two pairs of footprints, Nan’s smaller than his own … And then, as if equally playful, they were running together, spinning around in gleeful circles, Nan’s footprints clearly visible in the white sand in their wake, entwining with his own.
Are we real?
Her voice sounded slightly breathless, but still uncertain.
We’re as real as we can imagine.
Nan – the image he held of her in his mind – began to probe his image more closely in her memory. He helped her: I’m touching the skin of your face, your left cheek, with my right hand – the back of my fingers.
She reached up as if to discover his hand against her face. I … I almost feel your touch. Mark, I almost feel you!
I’ve had another thought. How we could make it more real.
Tell me!
Our oracula – we should be able to link them together. We should be able to read one another’s thoughts even as we think them.
If only it were possible.
It has to be possible. We did it once – at Ossierel. When you brought us into some kind of mental, and physical, union.
Her face had turned to look into his own. He gazed down into her brown eyes, knowing that she must be looking back up into his blue eyes – and deeper, much deeper, into his mind. He felt it happen, as she must be feeling it. Their minds were coming together again, in the deepest, most intimate, consummation. He should be frightened. In real life, when it actually happened, he had been dying. At the same time his heart had been beating too fast, thready and pattering, missing beats … And now he felt his heart doing exactly that again. He felt his head go light, his mouth go dry.
Next to her loveliness he felt angular and awkward. She was soft and rounded, delicate, vulnerable, the opposite of how he saw himself. She was gazing up at him, her brown eyes filling up with tears.
Nan, he murmured, as if savouring her name on his tongue.
We just have to imagine it – whatever we want to happen.
And through the union of the oracula we make it so, together.
He was wearing his black leather jacket over the clumsy Olhyiu furs. She sniffed at his leather jacket, as if savouring the smell of it. What do the girls of my age wear in your world – the girls who are free of mind and spirit?
Wow! Now there’s a question.
He took Kate as his example. Blue jeans, trainers, a turquoise pullover. Can you see what I am seeing?
Within moments she was wearing Kate’s clothes.
It feels strange – such alien clothes – yet they look so comfortable! Do you like the appearance of such pantaloons on me?
He chuckled. We call them jeans. And besides – you weren’t so bad wearing the skin-hugging gown.
Wicked boy!
I wish!
They laughed in unison.
Then she ran through the sand and he ran after her. Their tracks followed them, without either of them having to think about it. When he caught her, he imagined hugging her, causing her to overbalance, so they tumbled down onto the sand.
He kissed her, gently, on the lips. A present, fit for a queen!
Her voice was suspicious. What is it?
I give you the ocean.
They gazed, enraptured, out at the sea, at the thundering of breakers against the white sand, feeling the incoming breeze on their faces, smelling the brine in their nostrils.
Their imaginations were working together in a creative symbiosis. She whispered, against his shoulder: It’s so lovely. Could this possibly become real?
It’s as real as we imagine it to be.
I want it to be real. To feel you close, against me.
I want that too.
But we’re not here. We cannot be.
He saw the desperation, the need for him, in her eyes. She whispered her longing: If only our imaginations were but powerful enough.
If only.
In his mind he squeezed her tight as they gazed out into the ocean.
Snakoil Kawkaw had been out and abou
t. He was returning with interesting news. But for the moment he kept it to himself, watching the Preceptress in her daily veneration of the sigil. Although he knew little about the inner workings of the Tyrant’s religious cult, he knew enough to know that Preceptresses were exceedingly rare among the Tyrant’s followers. He also knew that they were considered even more malicious and dangerous than Preceptors. And that made his position here tenuous, to say the least. She would think nothing of slicing a blade through his throat while he slept. And even in a straight fight, knife for knife, he wouldn’t bet on his own survival against that dagger with the twisted blade and the Tyrant’s sigil aglitter in the hilt. What momentous service, he wondered, could she have performed for such a demanding master to be elevated to the rank of fanatical spiritual adviser? When he had been bold enough to ask her what happened to the real soup ladler, she had gazed down lovingly, touched the sharp tip of the poisoned blade. ‘Craves their blood, don’t you, my lovely!’
He decided it was time he made himself seem useful. ‘At last, formidable lady, we have intelligence.’
Her red-veined eyes shook themselves free of their obsequious veneration to fix on his.
‘This army, which we are bound to subvert, will not be following their masters and mistresses into the swamps.’
‘What nonsense is this?’
‘A message has been conveyed, through what agency, I don’t know or care – perhaps the wind from the Kyra’s own backside – but conveyed it was. Her forces, gathered here in their tens of thousands, are playacting at following the expeditionary force. They have no intention of advancing through the swamplands.’
‘But the expeditionary band, even with the brat and his oraculum, wouldn’t dare to confront the Witch on their own!’
‘Why knows what folly they are capable of.’
‘The brat alone, even with his power, would hardly be a match for Olc. And there is more – a rising power – that would scatter a hundred thousand of the witch-warriors, aye, and ten times more.’
‘What power is that?’
‘A power that is not for your hairy ears, bear-man!’
Spit rose in his throat at the insult. But he was prudent enough to hide it. ‘I but serve. Yet none can deceive a deceiver. Certainly not Siam the Stupid and his fish-gutters. And it is evident from my spying that there is a deception in the air.’
The Tower of Bones Page 29