Rotherweird

by Andrew Caldecott

  On through the woods they go. Malise cannot imagine what the baskets are for, what destiny awaits the creatures inside. After some way he is blindfolded.

  When the strip of cloth is removed, they are in a bowl beneath a ring of trees. A square white tablet is set in the ground. A pile of small cages stands nearby, which Wynter leaves to Bole to carry.

  ‘Gateway,’ he says, gesturing to his servant, as if inviting a lady to lead off a dance.

  Bole stands on the tile and disappears with the cages, and Malise follows without argument. A sense of dislocation is superseded by a strange new world. Bole, a dagger suddenly in hand, crouches, so Malise follows suit. The grass feels alien. A bee with the carapace of a beetle scissors into the air, warbling like a bird. Wynter arrives, and he too crouches, before blowing on a wooden whistle. They wait, heads in the grass. Only the puffs of white cumulus could be called normal, but nothing prepares Malise for the creature that rises from four legs to two in front of him.

  ‘Sum Ferox,’ says the creature.

  He sees the weasel in the man (who could not?) and understands the Latin, but something deeper stirs: a kinship. Malise, the precocious analyst, tries to articulate this attraction. He likes the predatory perfection, how the creature’s constituent parts marry so exactly, and the way, despite the loping walk, he carries his makeshift spear with aplomb.

  ‘I teach it English,’ says Wynter.

  ‘Let me help him,’ says Malise.

  ‘Him’, not ‘it’; ‘help’ not ‘teach’. Ferox nods to himself. He prefers the boy’s English. In return he will teach the boy how to navigate the dangers of this place.

  ‘Whether you do that depends . . . on how your future plays out,’ says Wynter before turning to Ferox. ‘Labor omnia vincit.’

  Ferox leads and Malise follows obediently in the tracks of the furry feet, Ferox parting the stalks with his spear. The strange fauna of this kingdom appear to respect the weaselman. Distorted creatures fly, burrow or scuttle away.

  ‘Open the baskets!’ cries Wynter.

  The great tree stands out, not just for its isolation and size, but for its falling leaves, which flap and glide like bodiless bats, the seeds lined along the back like spinal vertebrae.

  The servant chooses a particular cage from the pile as Wynter points to a shimmering patch of sky. ‘No god, please note, Master Malise, just a physical phenomenon for use by any creature with the wit to understand it.’

  Wynter places four stones, each in a notch in a bar of the cage, only one to a side.

  ‘An ancient art, creaturing. The Druids studied it.’

  Calx Bole unloads two baskets, places a russet squirrel and a thrush in the cage and slides the bars across.

  ‘Sometimes it reduces, sometimes it enlarges, but it always mixes.’

  Into the shimmering patch of sky went the cage; out came the cage. Wynter hit the palm of one hand with the other fist as a misshapen mix of feather and fur, beak and mouth struggled to fly. He kicks it.

  ‘Go on, Bole!’

  The servant clumsily tries to kill the monstrosity as it lurches into the air, only to plunge into the long grass. Wynter laughs as Ferox moves with lolloping grace and strikes once. It is enough.

  ‘Better,’ says Bole, as Wynter retrieves the stones.

  ‘But not good enough.’ Wynter turns to Malise. ‘Experiment requires many hands – to note, to cage, to measure, to adjust. If in time we are to advance ourselves as well as the lower orders of life, we need assistants with sharp minds.’

  Even Malise is shocked. ‘You mean you’d put people in there, mix people with—?’

  Ferox looks sideways, oddly distracted, as Wynter continues regardless, ‘With hope, in time, we will. Our slippery pocket of air does not distinguish, does she, Calx? She replicates. She does what she’s told.’

  ‘But we’re all different.’

  ‘Any worthwhile task has the spice of risk. Never fear, you’ll soon discover a taste for it.’

  After another failure there is success: a small hairless creature with splayed feet and tiny eyes that Wynter calls a rat-mole, despite the presence of stunted wings.

  ‘Keep it,’ says Wynter. ‘They won’t believe you otherwise.’ His words have layers of meaning: persuade your fellow children; choose my way, not Grassal’s; recruit. ‘Feed it mice, worms and small birds, and make sure they’re alive. Now, let me show you our best experiment.’

  He raises a tiny box, a latticework prison with protruding blades of grass. ‘In here we have our shortest-lived insect, the mayfly. After immersion in the mixing-point, still it lives. How long, Bole?’

  ‘Sixty-nine days.’

  Malise is quick. ‘How old then is Ferox?’

  ‘Past counting,’ replies the weaselman.

  He comes from an age of Latin, concludes Malise.

  They return to the white tile.

  ‘Ferox stays here,’ Wynter says.

  Malise and Ferox nod to each other.

  ‘May he return,’ whispers Ferox in his new language, with a nod towards Malise.

  ‘That is in his hands – he has much work to do.’

  The basket judders as Malise carries his trophy home. How he would have their attention now!

  *

  At first, all has gone well at Rotherweird Manor. The Seers and the newcomers have discovered their identical ages and the closeness of their birthdays, all within weeks, most within days, of each other, and their diverse gifts from mathematics to alchemy, anatomy to celestial studies. Hieronymus and his sister have introduced their new companions to the richness of the Rotherweird Valley. Only Malise has held aloof, a cruel boy, an experimenter with animals. Yet he has excelled at whatever subject Sir Henry chooses to teach, save for the more artistic.

  But over time the Seers’ influence has waned as Malise has made his move for dominance. The girls have sided with him, jealous of Morval’s beauty. He has discovered the locals’ humble background: the children of swineherds! He calls them ‘countrysiders’. Only Throckmorton, an enthusiast for celestial theory, planets and stars, has remained loyal to the Seers. Yet so immersed are they in the natural world and its portrayal, visual and analytical, that they have taken little notice of their exclusion.

  Then Malise begins to disappear at night. He asks questions in class unrelated to their curriculum – about poisons, parasites, the study of political power. Then he releases his creature in the dormitory, his ‘familiar’, as he calls it. The Seers sense its disfigured nature.

  Sir Henry notices the change and turns to his first charges for help. ‘You’ll not wish to talk of friends out of school, but sometimes the young must be saved from themselves. Malise went missing again last night. Do you know where he goes? Whom he sees? He returns well cared for. I would send searchers, but we must preserve our secrecy here. We don’t know how the new Queen stands on the matter. Anything you can tell me . . . ?’

  Sir Henry does not expect an answer: informing would appear vengeful – but Sir Henry has overlooked a different force. The two orphans live by a fierce moral order, with Nature at its centre.

  ‘Malise has another teacher,’ says Hieronymus.

  ‘An evil teacher,’ adds Morval.

  ‘Why evil?’

  ‘He made Malise a pet.’

  ‘An unnatural creature,’ they add together.

  ‘Who is this teacher?’

  ‘Charon or some such . . .’

  Geryon Wynter, thinks Sir Henry. Why is Wynter stalking my charges?

  ‘Show me,’ he says, and they do, when Malise is absent – not a rarity these days.

  *

  The children advance in a line with sticks. Sir Henry fumbles for and finds the basket under Malise’s cot in the great barn. He turns it out. The creature is not of this world: bald, with purple skin, lidless crimson eyes, stunted, half-developed leathery wings, ferocious claws and jagged teeth. Grassal calls for a net as the creature half flies, hissing and snapping, but they do not lis
ten; they are seized by a mixture of fear and the excitement of the hunt. The abomination is beaten to death despite Sir Henry’s calls for restraint. Only the Seers and Throckmorton hang back.

  Malise has a gift for timing. He appears in the doorway as Sir Henry shakes the body from the net. He picks up his ‘familiar’, cradles it, and leaves, with a parting glance at Sir Henry of unadulterated hatred.

  ‘The creature is not of this world.’

  Two months later. The Tower of Knowledge once more.

  Sir Henry has moved on to perspective and optical instruments. It is near midnight, close to the Feast of the Nativity, the golden door is open to the sky’s most wondrous gift – the winter constellations – and Sir Henry, face aglow in the candlelight, is speaking of reconciliation. Using a tube with proportional glasses, they come up, one by one, to observe the smudged outline of mountains on the face of a waning moon.

  ‘I don’t know how you came by this, or who fashioned it, but what a gift!’

  Malise presents the object as a fawning tribute and apology for the monstrous creature. Bought from a merchant in Hoy, he says. Sir Henry holds up the lens with its bulbous, brassy body.

  ‘We fix it here and . . .’

  The old man bends to the telescope, pressing his right eye to the rim. There is a click. A whirr. A terrible scream. He falls, hands streaming blood, as Malise smiles. Arms and legs dance in shock as the poison works behind the eye. There is pandemonium – the Seers try vainly to absorb the tainted blood with cloth; others rush to Sir Henry’s library, but they lack a starting point. A physician comes and offers comfort, but no cure. Malise and the eye-piece disappear.

  The old man’s limbs begin to dance. His mouth leaks blood. He takes a day to die.

  *

  Sir Henry, confident in his health for a few years yet and concerned not to jeopardise the progress of his charges until at least their majority, had postponed arrangements for his succession.

  Wynter, primed by Malise as to the absence of any apparent heir or successor, appears at Grassal’s funeral. He pays tribute and explains how at a lunch Grassal appointed him to be their teacher and life-tenant of the Manor after his death. Think of his age, says Wynter; he had to make provision. He promises the children that Sir Henry intended for them unimaginable power, the chance to write their names in history.

  He does not linger. The next day he takes them to Lost Acre and they stand in awe before Ferox and then the mixing-point. The weaselman escorts them at noon, the safest time in this horribly dangerous place, on a path through the forest to a mere where fish break the surface and fly, snapping their jaws on insects as they pass.

  ‘Why we keep to the plains,’ explains Wynter, keen that his charges should understand the perils of the place. Malise skims flat stones along the surface of the water at the fish, and strikes lucky.

  That evening there is no more mention of Sir Henry. They are fifteen now, and it is time for change, Wynter tells them. They will have new names, a baptismal moment. His charges may choose one; and Bole will choose the other.

  Malise, ever searching for a drug that might induce truth-telling, chooses an unknown word: Veronal. Bole awards him Slickstone, superficially for his prowess with the skimming pebbles at the mere, but Wynter suspects there is intended ambiguity – hard and polished, but somehow slippery too: one to watch, in other words. Only the Seers decline to participate. Wynter makes no move. These are Grassal’s children in a way the others are not. Their friend Throckmorton, the student of the heavens, is named Fortemain by Bole, again a play of multiple meanings – a firm hand for the telescope, but perhaps a pointer too to the boy’s strength of character, a moral force who might yet cause trouble.

  That night they sit at a round table in the Great Hall. Wynter has provided a feast – brown trout from the river, venison from the woods, and plentiful mead. This is the beginning. His once-

  extravagant ambition takes flight. He has twelve disciples, a route to immortality and the chance to create the kind of monsters from which legends are made. Darker chapters lie ahead, for horror is part of the divine fabric. Gods and their stories are not knitted fireside toys.

  By flickering candles he christens himself and his new recruits the Eleusians. In London he has noted the coats of arms that decorate the banners, carriages and fireplaces of the rich and powerful.

  ‘Now you have names and soon, if you work hard enough, you will be the first in the history of Man to have living coats of arms. Morval Seer will record them.’

  After Lost Acre not one of them doubts that if they comply, this outlandish prophecy will come to pass.

  This scene will come to Sir Veronal as another bubble of memory slips through the tiny hole in the ruptured membrane of his temporal cortex and unloads its cargo of sound and image.

  Night after night the bubbles come and break, filling in the detail of his lost youth, chapter by chapter.

  MARCH

  1

  Of Pupils and Paddles

  On the first Monday of March, with little left of term, Rodney took his place in Form IV. To Oblong’s mild surprise he proved the perfect pupil on his opening day, speaking only when spoken to, and resisting any urge to exploit his father’s celebrity.

  The show of respect proved to be only an overture. The Rotherweird academic day ended with five minutes in the Form Master’s company. Rodney waited for his classmates to disperse.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Slickstone.’

  ‘I love my history, sir.’

  ‘That’s good to hear.’

  ‘We’re both outsiders, right?’

  ‘But outsiders in Rotherweird,’ replied Oblong.

  ‘Father requires you to teach me local history: how the town was built, when, by whom, why. I mean, good historians like you are inquisitive, aren’t they?’

  Oblong noted the familiar slippage from sycophancy to insolence and back, as first experienced at Sir Veronal’s party.

  ‘Yes, but when in Rome . . .’

  ‘Just what Sir V said you’d say. They learn our history – we should learn theirs.’

  ‘Sir V’ had become Rodney’s preferred form of address and reference to his putative father. Sir Veronal had never objected.

  ‘After 1800 elsewhere, Rodney, but here never – rules are rules.’

  ‘Sir V said you’d say that too. Remember, sir, he pays private rates for private lessons.’ Rodney offered the bribe with a tell-tale wink.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint.’

  ‘Look – if the town bothers you, we’ll explore the countryside –

  Saxons, Druids . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry, Slickstone. It’s more than my job’s worth.’

  The boy turned on his heels and marched out, leaving Oblong ill at ease. The History Regulations, once means to the political end of preserving Rotherweird’s independence, had probably lost their usefulness long ago. He found himself sympathising with Sir Veronal’s stance.

  At the School gates Rhombus Smith accosted him. ‘Remember your reports, Oblong: make them prompt and pithy.’

  ‘Headmaster, would the History Regulations allow a little exploration of our rural sites – burial mounds, forts, stone circles?’

  ‘The deeper you dig, the more you disturb – so, in a word, no.’

  Oblong debated these issues with himself so intensely that the Headmaster’s initial reminder only registered on his arrival at Artery Lane. Reports! Having never before lasted to the end of a term, he had overlooked the teacher’s most basic chore.

  Aggs arrived to replenish his cupboard with her homemade jam. ‘You ain’t writing their life histories, yer know,’ said Aggs, peering over his shoulder.

  ‘Much as I like Mr Fanguin, I don’t go for his one-word approach.’

  ‘And I don’t go for your one-volume approach. Anyways, you ought to be out and about, getting fit.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The Great Equinox Race, of course.’

 
‘Ah,’ said Oblong, who, despite his gangly shape, fancied himself over a middle distance, ‘if it’s eight hundred yards or so, I’m your man.’

  ‘Who’s talking about running?’

  ‘Come on, Aggs, out with it. You’re my general person.’

  ‘Avoid a single – they capsize unless you’re an expert, which you ain’t. He be a turner and a twister, Old Man Rother.’

  ‘I’m losing you.’

  ‘The pub is the place to find a partner – people always chop and change. It’s about the weight – two-ers and three-ers need just the right— Blimey, Mr Oblong, you never look, do yer? Right now through them trees . . .’

  Through his study window and the sweeps of willow breaking leaf, he glimpsed what looked like a half-walnut shell, and then another, in which figures paddled and poled for dear life. ‘What are they, Aggs?’

  ‘And you the historian! They’re coracles, the finest of vessels, to them what understand ’em! Willow and hide!’

  They looked impossible to control. Oblong’s swimming stroke had once been charitably described as puppy-paddle. As for rowing, his legs were too long and his right arm stronger than his left. He shook his head with an apologetic smile.

  Aggs smiled back. ‘I’ll send a costume round. I know just the thing.’

  ‘Costume?’

  Aggs had a look for closing a subject. She would jut her jaw and grimace while the right eyebrow rose very slowly. She did so now and Oblong obligingly took the cue.

  Aggs returned to the reports. ‘Why d’yer think Mr Fanguin kept ’em short? There’s someone reads all the reports, ain’t there?’

  ‘Like whom?’

  ‘Like His Snorkelship.’

  The jaw jutted, the eyebrow rose like a tyre inflating, the grimace came and went.

  When Aggs left, Oblong remembered Fanguin’s reference to Snorkel’s ability to control. Getting to grips with the true pulse of Rotherweird was like peeling an onion – a process, he recalled, that usually ended in tears. He rewrote the reports, Fanguin-style.

  *

  An aggressive tuition programme with the best teachers money could buy had hurried Rodney to competence in most subjects, and the lure of the Slickstone inheritance ensured dedication, but he still lagged far behind in Rotherweird’s specialties, the sciences and mathematics. Briefed by Rhombus Smith, the teachers made allowances, but nonetheless resentment simmered in Rodney, especially in algebra classes, where the cow-faced countrysider Gwen Ferdy, seated one desk to his left, fielded every question the rest could not answer with matchless speed and accuracy.