Rotherweird

by Andrew Caldecott

  ‘The tile sucks you in and spits you out – I arrived to find this monstrous spider creature – look, please don’t think I’m mad – in the kitchen of an underground house and, I regret to say, full of purloined library books.’

  Ferensen dabbed Valourhand’s forehead with a sponge. ‘Did the spider have any humanity?’

  ‘It spoke English for a start – and yes,’ Gorhambury seemed lost for words, ‘plenty of human bits,’ he added, ‘but all horribly muddled.’

  ‘Female?’

  Gorhambury considered. ‘Bristly hair like a man, but voice and eyelashes of a woman.’

  Salt watched Ferensen, who had put the same questions to him years ago, when he had staggered to Ferensen’s tower, wounded by the same creature. His last question was particularly

  strange.

  Gorhambury thought so too. He did not know this countrysider; the mere fact he had a way with medicine did not make him trustworthy. ‘Isn’t this a matter for the Town Hall?’

  Ferensen stood away from Valourhand. His voice acquired such a tone of authority that Gorhambury took a pace backwards. ‘Like it or not, Mr Gorhambury, the Town Hall is corrupt. If you can’t see that when you yourself worked there, then you’re blind, deaf and dumb. Worse, you don’t know what you’d be giving away if you reported this. I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Why do you think we suppress our history? Why does the rest of England keep us at bay? Why was there a prohibited quarter? Why are we blessed with so many gifted scientists? Why do we never pursue the answers to these obvious questions?’

  Gorhambury hesitated. He read deep pain in the old man’s face.

  Salt interrupted, ‘Is your black tile a metre square with a flower incised on it?’

  Gorhambury nodded as Ferensen resumed, ‘It’s not so much a door as a portal to a different plane. Isn’t that right, Salt?’

  The botanist did not reply. Every new recruit diluted his great secret.

  Gorhambury reflected: Salt’s own scar and his instant decision to take the girl to Ferensen suggested an understanding of where they had been and what they had encountered. Ferensen had now given him sufficient facts to make it clear that he too was well-

  informed. They seemed to be decent people – and he had no wish to share his nocturnal adventure with the Mayor.

  Ferensen refilled their glasses. Valourhand heard the tinkle as the decanter met the edge of the glass. Warmth and feeling were returning, but she kept her eyes shut. She would learn more that way.

  ‘Anything else you can tell me?’ Gorhambury asked Ferensen.

  ‘There’s another door marked by a white tile – it too has a flower incised on its surface – but you arrive in a different part of the same place.’

  Salt clenched his fists. Secrets diminished by sharing, the more so with a narrow-minded civil servant.

  ‘Is this world all underground?’ asked Gorhambury.

  ‘Hardly. It’s a world not unlike ours was, long ago, but with special and dangerous properties. The white tile opens in a meadow.’ Again Salt winced, and again Ferensen took no notice. ‘There are probably other ways in too.’

  ‘And that abomination – where did that come from?’

  The old man’s voice trembled, hinting at a suppressed emotional pain. ‘She was not always like that,’ he said, before abruptly changing tack. ‘We three must make some decisions—’

  ‘We four,’ interrupted Vixen Valourhand, swinging her feet round and sitting up normally. ‘I’ve questions of my own.’

  ‘After thanking Mr Ferensen,’ said Gorhambury primly. ‘You were at death’s door half an hour ago. And Mr Salt too.’ Ever the unthanked worker, he did not think to include himself.

  Valourhand managed a nod, but Ferensen ignored the exchange. A meeting must be held and a company formed. The black tile had to be kept from Slickstone and guarded.

  Valourhand had taken in Ferensen and his tower with no more than mild curiosity. Had she been born a countrysider, she would have lived like this. Yet now he did astonish her. As he bent over to bandage her leg, she caught in his weatherbeaten features an unmistakable glimpse of a much younger man, his face captured in the mosaic on the underground passageway’s ceiling. So he had been there – but when? Why had he been commemorated rather than attacked? Before she could fashion a cunning question, a deep, sonorous note invaded the room. Twenty seconds, and the mournful voice of Doom’s Tocsin tolled again.

  Seconds later Bill Ferdy burst in, pointing back through the open door and crying, ‘Look – come look! Quick!’

  Ferdy ran out, and though still in pain, Valourhand followed. Boris Polk and Gregorius Jones, already halfway up the hill, had stopped and were staring at the valley below. Rotherweird, ordinarily no more than a cluster of lights on the floor of the valley, flickered in and out of view, exposed by a fierce orange glow. For a town of timber, the worst nightmare had come: fire, the great devourer.

  The others hurried to the summit of the hill. The spectacle held them briefly, but before Ferensen could digest the implications, Boris had bellowed a call to arms with the single word, ‘Hydra!’ and rushed downhill to the charabanc, Gregorius Jones following at a sprint. Action was his kind of language.

  Ferensen watched them go before taking control. He appeared to see more danger in what lay behind the fire than the fire itself. ‘The odds do not favour accident, believe me. Get the beer-cart, Ferdy, we’re going in.’ He turned to Salt. ‘We’re calling a meeting –

  tonight.’ He gave Ferdy a knowing wink. ‘I suspect you know somewhere safe and hidden.’

  ‘No problem,’ replied Ferdy with his own knowing wink.

  ‘I want you, Boris, Orelia Roc.’ He paused. ‘Oh yes, and bring our new friends, Mr Gorhambury and the indomitable Jones, also the current modern historian. Bert, of course, but above all, I want Mr Finch.’

  ‘Above all, you want me,’ interrupted Valourhand.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Ferensen.

  Ferdy returned to the issue of Finch. ‘You’ll have a job luring him from his lair.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ replied Ferensen. ‘Gather as soon as the fire is under control.’

  Gorhambury thought of the possible causes. The Safety from Fire Regulations were comprehensive and generally well observed, but of late there had been too much casual smoking in town, a matter he had raised with the Mayor on several occasions.

  Ferensen’s poultice had remarkably restorative properties. Vixen Valourhand thought not of her wound or people or buildings, only of fire, which she loved for its beauty, fierceness and uncomplicated warmth. She must be up close.

  *

  The fire took hold so fast that the town discovered it only minutes before the countrysiders. Frantic knocking at the window of Baubles & Relics brought Orelia downstairs. Outside, Fanguin, in overcoat and a faintly ludicrous woollen hat, was gesturing extravagantly.

  ‘Your house is burning,’ he blurted as she opened the door. Orelia looked blank. ‘Your other house,’ he added.

  Orelia rushed outside: from the far end of town smoke shot through with sparks was pouring across the sky. Other inhabitants of the Golden Mean were emerging from their homes, many with buckets.

  ‘What next?’ Orelia cried in despair. She pulled on jeans and boots, a jersey and a long overcoat over her pyjamas.

  *

  Two vehicles left the Ferdys’ farm that night. The charabanc, with Boris and Jones, travelled at breakneck speed; and some ten minutes later the beer-cart followed at a statelier pace with a crate of pint glasses, a barrel of beer, Bill Ferdy, Ferensen, Valourhand and Gorhambury.

  Boris Polk cursed his impulsiveness on finding the portcullis up but the South Gate shut – the keys were still with Gorhambury. But his luck was in: from a small door cut into the great nail-studded oak gate emerged a young guard wearing an overcoat over his pyjamas. ‘Nobody’s allowed in – order of the Mayor!’ he declared, squinting into the headlights of the charabanc. He paused. �
��Is that you, B Polk or B Polk?’

  Boris stepped out of the vehicle with a flourish, goggles perched above his eyebrows. ‘It is B Polk – B for Boris – and you have a choice. Prize prat or superhero!’

  ‘What are you up to?’ the guard enquired suspiciously.

  ‘Let me in and you’ll find out,’ was the riposte. The guard, too distracted to enquire further into what Polk and Jones were doing outside the gates at such an hour, succumbed. ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘The late Mrs Banter’s house – she’s burning like a torch. It’s serious.’

  Boris’ pace scarcely slowed despite the narrowness of the streets, and in no time he and Jones were hurrying into the yard of The Polk Land & Water Company, where Bert stood like a sentry on duty.

  ‘Hydra!’ bellowed Boris.

  ‘Shed’s open,’ replied Bert, ‘but have you done your final “minor adjustments”?’

  ‘No time for that – this is the moment she was born for,’ answered Boris as he sprinted off with Jones.

  3

  Fire and Water

  It takes a disaster to sharpen any emergency service; and Rotherweird had not endured a fire on this scale in living memory. For a town that prided itself on scientific expertise and logic, the response was chaotic. The compound with the solitary fire engine was locked, and in the absence of Gorhambury, the key could not be found. Once tracked down, the key to the fire engine proved equally elusive. Its route, once mobile, was blocked by a rickshaw in the Golden Mean whose owner could not be found. The Mayor’s office rang Gorhambury, only to be tersely informed by his erstwhile landlord that he had been evicted two months earlier for non-payment of rent and had left no forwarding

  address.

  Faced with this abject failure by the municipal authorities, Rotherweird’s citizens turned to self-help. Ladders of all sizes were retrieved from unlikely places, metal buckets likewise, and a human chain began swinging pails from hand to hand to Pagan Lane from the pump on the Church Green.

  Despite their efforts, the situation remained critical: embers were smouldering on neighbouring roofs as the temperature grew so intense that dousing the flames from ladders became too perilous. Mercifully, Aether’s Way did not abut Mrs Banter’s tower.

  Snorkel arrived with a retinue of Council employees. A large striped drum, designed for traffic duty on market days, served as his rostrum. Snorkel seized a megaphone and climbed onto the drum. ‘Don’t panic!’ he screamed. The Head of Emergency Services ambled towards him.

  Snorkel leaned down, forgetting to turn off the megaphone, and cried, ‘This is a bloody shambles!’

  Together they restored a semblance of order, clearing Pagan Lane of onlookers and diplomatically substituting the more elderly helpers. Ladders close to the fire were recovered, and the main effort shifted its focus to neighbouring gardens and roofs – better to lose one tower than the whole town.

  Snorkel then made a mistake by suggesting that anyone with homes at risk should close their windows – as everyone felt exposed in a town of wood, many abandoned the human chain and the supply of water slowed, leaving the fate of the town in the balance. Smoke began to rise from the timbers of two adjoining towers and the embers snagged in neighbouring beams began to flicker with flame. A huge spiral of sparks soared into the sky as the top section of Deirdre Banter’s tower collapsed with a roar.

  Valourhand worked her way to a convenient viewpoint and gazed into the inferno, her pupils dilating with excitement. She thought of the forges of myth, toiling to produce legendary weapons – the work that the North Tower now performed. She imagined a different crucible where strands of DNA coiled and merged, blueprints for sensory organs and cerebral structures.

  Orelia felt near-suicidal. She suspected that her aunt’s notebooks had provided not only the tinder but an arsonist’s motive – the fire was working down the tower towards the ground floor, not the other way. She caught a murmur in the crowd and followed their pointing arms to see a large cat on the first-floor roof, turning this way and that, trapped.

  Driven as much by despair at her family’s misfortune as by sympathy, she seized a ladder, ran forward and climbed to the hip of the roof before anyone could stop her. The soles of her shoes stuck to the hot slates.

  Move fast and on tiptoe, she advised herself, and you are less likely to burn. She almost danced her way towards the cat, which had its back to her. Only when it turned did she realise something was wrong: parts of the misshapen face and body, including the eyes and blotches of pink skin between tufts of hair, suggested a half-human creature. The cat arched its neck and spat.

  Then to her horror it reared up on its hind legs and spoke. ‘Do you have the book? Where—?’

  Orelia looked blank, betraying her lack of a useful answer. The creature sprang, its face contorted by a mix of hatred and suffering, claws extended like knives. She ducked instinctively as the cat passed over her lowered head. Fire played around its

  feet.

  ‘Die, child,’ added the creature as it leapt from the roof and disappeared.

  Orelia could barely move her feet. Her soles had all but melted through, and more and more flames flickered from holes in the roof as the slates cracked in the heat, split and tumbled to the ground. The smoke closed her eyes.

  The crowd below groaned, as horrified as they were transfixed.

  At that moment, as if by divine intervention, an extraordinary vehicle lurched into Pagan Lane: long and thin, pillar-box red, with large iron wheels and a forest of multicoloured wires coated in Polk-patented fire-retardant paint. Pedals on each side were manned by Jones and Bert Polk, and Boris steered. On the chassis four white hoses lay coiled around a thicker hose. Pistons rose and fell as if in a demented sewing machine.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ bellowed Snorkel, megaphone back in hand. ‘It’s not licensed, it’s not registered, it’s not—’

  ‘But suppose it works,’ whispered the Head of Emergency Services.

  While Bert secured a signature, guaranteeing reasonable remuneration if the Hydra worked, Jones unwound the thicker white hose from the centre of the vehicle and connected it to the nearest hydrant.

  ‘Not that bloody man Fanguin!’ complained the Mayor, but too late: Boris had already recruited his crew of four and was busy distributing small boxes with sticks and switches. He gave a one-minute crash course – ‘Up, down, left, right, nozzle wide, nozzle tight . . . squirt. Awake the Hydra!’

  Like cobras responding to a charmer’s call, the hoses uncoiled and rose higher and higher, before dipping their heads to spray water.

  Snorkel changed tune with alacrity, bellowing encouragement through his megaphone. ‘Capital work, Polk! Keep going!’

  The Hydra transformed a fiery scene that illuminated everyone into one of steam, where few could see anything. Blinded and drenched, Orelia lost all sense of place.

  ‘Up there!’ screamed the crowd, gesticulating at the swaying figure on the roof.

  Jones’ primal chivalric urge resurfaced with a rush of adrenalin.

  ‘There’s a young lady!’ he bellowed, jumping up and down like a child deprived of a favourite toy. Boris produced a further set of controls of a different colour covered in sticky labels marked Do not use – untested.

  ‘You are sure?’ queried Bert.

  ‘Do it!’ bellowed Jones.

  From a drum in the middle of the Hydra a wire ladder rose.

  ‘Hold on!’ yelled Boris, but the intrepid gymnast needed no invitation; he was already in position, clasping the top rung. Boris flicked the switch upwards.

  ‘Eeee–aaaagh—!’ shrieked Jones as he disappeared into a roiling mix of smoke and steam.

  The ladder did not share the hoses’ elegance of movement but shot upwards at breakneck speed. Boris moved the plastic control stick to the right, prompting a further expletive from the clouds of steam through which Jones was intermittently appearing. The crowd, quietened by the anti-climax that follows the death of a fire, r
evived.

  ‘Awake the Hydra!’

  Orelia sank to a crouch. She was slipping slowly down the roof in a treacherous mix of ash and water, lines of black rubber trailing from her melted soles. Jones swooped from behind and swept her high into the air before being reeled back to earth, to the tumultuous ecstasy of the crowd.

  With a flamboyant sweep of the hand Jones waved away the applause. ‘Look to the lady!’

  A believer in traditional remedies passed a phial of smelling salts across Orelia’s nostrils, with instantaneous effect.

  The steam cleared, and so did the crowd. From high above the town, charred fragments of the private lives of her inhabitants, as recorded by Mrs Banter, floated down like funeral confetti.

  4

  Of Towers and Tunnels

  Ferensen made his dispositions during the journey, entrusting to Bill Ferdy and Gorhambury the task of gathering his meeting. He accepted Ferdy’s choice of rendezvous.

  Unlike the charabanc, the beer-cart went to the South Gate and remained outside. Gorhambury apprehensively let them in, but he need not have worried: by the time of their arrival the fire had drawn even the solitary guard to the north end of town. Ferdy and Gorhambury hurried off, carrying a barrel under a

  blanket.

  Ferensen wrapped his cloak around him, pulled down a wide-brimmed hat and headed towards the School. He had watched the town develop over the centuries from afar. Now, inside, close up, the density of the place, the forest of towers, the affluence of the shop-window displays and the sense of a vibrant community enchanted him. He understood now why they tolerated Snorkel: he ran a town that worked.

  He recalled a very different Rotherweird: a single wooden bridge, no perimeter walls, no gateways, and stabling and a smithy where Market Square now stood. The School had been nothing more than a tithe barn, and the adjacent Tower of Knowledge, as Sir Henry Grassal liked to call it, was now the North Tower. Other than those buildings, the church and the Manor, Rotherweird Island had been orchard and meadow, with a few scattered standing stones, and enclosures for pigs and sheep. Cereal crops had been grown on the Island Field, the large but flat and less conspicuous island southwest of the town bounded mostly by a tributary of the main