A mouthful sufficed. What the aroma had loosened, the taste swept away – the play, the death of Rodney Slickstone and the entry of the Green Man. Weapons were downed as present anger ebbed away and older wounds eased. Disappointments, bereavements, unrequited love and deepset grudges lost their cutting edges.
The townsfolk, men, women and children, lolled on the grass or swayed like sailors at sea, hammered in their midsummer reverie. High in the auditorium Oblong glimpsed Aggs and Fanguin, together, alone, and oddly immune.
*
Some two hours later the undertaker broke the good news to the Mayor. ‘It appears young Slickstone passed away before or during his performance,’ said Mors Valett.
‘What performance?’
‘He was dressed as a knight. Nerves, I imagine. As for Lady Slickstone and Sir Veronal, there’s no sign of them, and the car has gone.’
Snorkel added his own epitaph on the dead boy. ‘Not a death to investigate.’
‘Accidental, and a quick burial in all this heat,’ Valett agreed.
The Hammer had done its work. Barrels of Sturdy now took over as the pennant of The Journeyman’s Gist fluttered in the late afternoon breeze.
*
The Green Man felt the stream about its roots, chill and sustaining, and then the meadow grass beyond. Salt registered the presence of other trees, ancient trees, and then a different presence, eerie and familiar. In the clearing by the white tile the Green Man stopped. The final transformation was quick. The seedpods of the midsummer flower, already mature, burst, and the mixing-point disengaged. Sub-atomic particles rose to the gate in the sky in a seething ball of high energy. The fissure through which the bubbles had passed admitted them and closed.
Salt first examined his hands – skin, cuticles, nails, just as they had been. His clothes and shoes were untouched. An ugly bruise ran down his left shoulder, but Rodney Slickstone’s hammer had done no greater damage. A few dead leaves, unique in shape and out of season, were already scattering across the clearing. Nothing else remained of the midsummer flower.
Salt resisted with ease any temptation to test the white tile. He was done with Lost Acre; now more primal urges were at work – hunger and thirst in particular.
Staggering back to the Fair, a familiar voice called from behind. ‘I do believe you did it,’ said Orelia.
‘Nature did,’ he replied, before realising she must have returned through the white tile, and that Lost Acre was saved.
‘Want to know about Sir Veronal?’
‘Not quite yet.’
The pair headed back to the Fair.
At dusk they told their respective stories. The Polks took the fate of their bubbles philosophically. Salt and Orelia held back details, but described the mission as accomplished, thanks in no small part to their transport. Sir Veronal had met a deserved end, they added, playing once too often with the mixing-point. They consumed what remained of the Polks’ substantial picnic.
The mood only darkened with a casual question from Bert. ‘Any sign of Ferensen? He said he was going in – and didn’t expect to be back.’
‘Don’t worry,’ replied Boris, ‘Ferensens always come back.’
*
Ferensen stood in the middle of the mere, its waters frozen and sealed in white. For some time he had known he had a pursuer; only here was he free from cover. On the fringe of the ice he could see movement; too late did he realise that it was Morval’s spider, weaving a web to fence him in. The sky was riven with cracks, apparently about to fall in. He raced to the margin, but the high-tensile threads were everywhere. Better to fight in the open,
he decided.
He did not have to wait long. The creature burst from the trees and made straight for him. Ferensen held his ground and levelled his makeshift spear. The spider circled, spitting, looking for weakness. A line of thread, the material viscous, snagged the blade. The more Ferensen shook the weapon, the more restricted its movement became. The spider began to reel him in until Ferensen had no choice but to relinquish it. Another thread looped round his knee, and he stumbled and fell.
As he did so, the sky transformed and lost all its lines of fracture, turning uniform and intensely blue. A rush of warm air passed over like a blessing, and in a fleeting moment Ferensen glimpsed a single star above the horizon, omen for a new dawn, perhaps. A roll of thunder roared out, flowed by a high-pitched sing-song note, and a series of loud reports. The ice cracked into a grey-white jigsaw as the snow quickly melted away.
There was no time to dwell on Lost Acre’s salvation: Ferensen found himself marooned on a large piece of ice with the spider, whose heavier weight tilted the floe, causing water to lap over the edge. The rejuvenated sun beat down. Ferensen, without protection from the warmth, felt horribly exposed.
The spider, now bent on survival, cast threads to adjacent islands in search of stability, but its weight was too great and the ice too slippery without the snow for traction. As the spider skidded into the water, it threw a last line round Ferensen’s ankles, dragging him down too.
So dark, so cold, so tired – Ferensen flailed in the water, but his movement felt controlled. He wriggled free from the spider’s line as its bulbous body fell lifeless into the deeps below – but miraculously he was not gasping for air. He swam, feeling the water along the sides of his body, the temperature rising and falling according to depth. He slid through fronds and over boulders. The darkness lightened as the ice melted and sunlight broke through. The water was not stagnant but gently on the move over the gravelly bottom.
Half-memories fought for recognition, prompted by this rearrangement of his being. Fleetingly, he found himself looking up through a floating garden to a vast sky, turning through the water by the twist and turn of his body – a fragment of half of his long-forgotten past. Then the other, human, half took over and he saw himself suspended in a cage with a transparent jug beside him containing a snake-like creature, wriggling, shiny and black as liquorice – and then he recalled the agony of the conjoining. The Eleusians carried him through Lost Acre, still ostensibly human, in a net, crying all the while, ‘What shall we do with slippery Seer?’
Of his sister, he could see no sign. They had hurled him in the mere, and as he began to gasp and splutter, so he changed. They had made him an eelman.
He remembered too what lived in the mere: tiny fish like rainbows with razor-teeth. The Eleusians had thrown hooks at him, drawing blood, summoning his would-be killers. Now explanations exploded in his brain – his gift for the weather, his discomfort in heat – and a memory from his other being: a floating garden, the great Sargasso sea.
Then down the lateral line of his ribs came a very present warning: movement that was not his own, all round him, above and below and beside. He had escaped death here before, but how? He frantically ransacked his confused brain for answers as the first searing pain struck his side.
He accelerated around the perimeter of the pond, diving through rocks and weed, but the pursuing shoal was remorseless. Then he remembered a tunnel in the bed of the mere. Trusting to recollection, he dived deep and found the entrance, but his pursuers came with him, savaging him as he took turnings by instinct – right, left, left, straight on. Still he kept going, hunted on land, hunted in water.
What shall we do with slippery Seer?
His determination to cheat his tormentors saved him now, as it had saved him then. At the dead end of the last tunnel, he caught the square of colour – orange-red, the same size and dimension as the black and the white tiles, and also incised with a flower. He plunged into it. They had not pursued him last time and they would not pursue him now, just as the spiderwoman had not pursued Valourhand and Gorhambury. Lost Acre’s residents knew their place.
He emerged in a brick tunnel where the Rother first surfaced to the north of the town, close to the start of the Great Equinox Race. He crawled out, covered in mud, bleeding and exhausted, but still himself – just as he had done centuries earlier. He set off hom
e, almost naked, but joyous to feel the dry earth crumble beneath his toes.
*
At sunset on the longest day of the year, great fires were lit on the Island Field to roast carcases pinned on iron spits.
The Journeyman’s Gist in its temporary guise of a beer-tent dispensed lavish quantities of Sturdy, replenishing the Ferdy finances and winning new admirers. Snorkel made a speech, rather later than he had planned, although he could not explain quite how the delay had occurred. Such an unparallelled sense of wellbeing could not pass without the Town Hall claiming the lion’s share of the credit. For the Ferdys the hyperbole mattered little beside the revival of their fortunes and maintaining the secret of the Hammer.
All agreed it had been a most remarkable Midsummer Fair.
Only Orelia harboured the uncomfortable suspicion that something was horribly wrong.
Old History
January 30, 1572. Lost Acre.
It is execution day.
Sir Robert Oxenbridge leads with Hubert Finch; Wynter, ever in search of supernatural connection, follows carrying his cage like Christ did His cross; then come the male Eleusians, young men now, with another cage configured for their special punishment; and flanking them armed guards, as prepared for attack from without as within in this strange and dangerous place. Of Ferox, there is no sign. From Oxenbridge’s belt hangs a velvet pouch – the stones, the instrument of execution.
They trudge through the grass in silence.
Slickstone cannot come to terms with the prospect of tabula rasa, all that he is about to lose – his command of language, his experience, knowledge and memory, taken back to a drivelling child. Do these fools not understand the difference between deleting the minds of urchins in the cause of progress and deleting those of the chosen few? Laws and ethics were not designed for such extremes.
Beside him a middle-aged man, his manner and dress suggestive of rank, carries a pulley across his shoulder. Affecting bravado, Slickstone asks, ‘And what do you do in this company?’
‘I design.’ The man delivers a judgmental glare: but not your devilish designing, it says.
‘Weapons? Games? Fishing nets?’
‘Houses – I build houses with style and ornament. A town will rise from this wreckage.’
‘You have a name?’
‘You won’t remember it, now, will you?’
‘It’s a compliment, Master Builder; your name will be the last new fact to lodge before oblivion.’
The man hesitates – might not these fiends reach beyond the grave, or even tabula rasa? Then he remembered their victims – the appalling mismatches of human and animal the soldiers had had to put out of their misery. Wynter’s sect has instilled enough fear in the innocent. He would not be cowed. ‘Banter,’ he says, ‘Peregrine Banter.’
At that moment the tree comes into view. Slickstone recalls the work it had witnessed, such fine work, to be rendered futile by these over-orderly imbeciles.
Nemesis.
*
Sir Robert Oxenbridge has seen his share of executions, such is the nature of religious wars and town sieges. A fair and moderate man, he ordered them himself only when clemency had no credibility, when survival represented the greater threat, and when the rule of law prescribed it.
He has seen fanatics on the scaffold and heard their defiant speeches, but he has never heard a performance – for that was the word – quite like this.
Leaders go first. That is the golden rule, both in terms of deterrence and chivalry.
Wynter says nothing during the progress from the town to the white tile to the mixing-point, neither to his gaolers nor to his followers tramping behind to their own terrible fate. He has insisted on carrying his own cage, subservient almost. He does not resist. Indeed, he walks in.
Only as the boom begins to move does Wynter speak. He projects his voice with immense power, but as a statement, not a shout or a scream. ‘You know not what you do,’ he says – six words bearing a multitude of interpretations, a last mad declaration by a deluded genius, a plea for his own dark brand of science and experiment – or, and this seems more in accord with the confidence of his facial expression, a claim to resurrection.
About that, at least, Oxenbridge has no concerns. Bodies with life and bodies without – whatever is lost between the two does not return to the earthly sphere, and nobody can resurrect from nothing, surely.
The cage swings in with Wynter and swings back without him. Oxenbridge briefly wonders where his constituent parts have gone. The slippery patch of sky glimmers, ruthless and impervious to human command. Do as you would be done by. He raises his hand. The cage is changed and the remaining men are brought forward, Veronal Slickstone first.
January 30, 1592. Rotherweird Town.
Snow has fallen in the night, twenty years to the day from Wynter’s execution.
Hubert Finch, first Herald of Rotherweird, has reason to rest on his laurels. Walls surround the island and the Manor. A second bridge has been built. A score of houses, each unique in its way, have been erected, all designed and built to last by the energetic Mr Banter. True to his word, Oxenbridge left behind his craftsmen and his soldiers.
The resulting security and quality of building attract wives from villages outside the valley. Finch’s rule is respected, as is the law against the study of the past – a suitable price for the promise of a prosperous future. In the hills above Rotherweird a brewer adds hops to his ale, making the finest of beers.
Additional comfort comes with a report from London about the fate of the men sentenced with Wynter and abandoned by Drake in foetid swampland in the Indies. Six of the seven have been found dead. The last is missing, presumed dead.
On this particular morning Finch has a visitor – one of Mr Banter’s assistants, Benedict Roc, the sullen but brilliant master carver who has given the interior its unique character – and added a few hidden extras of his own design.
‘Master Finch, I am to check the archivoire.’
This strange name has been given to the great room in Escutcheon Place that houses what remains of Rotherweird’s old history. An archive can be consulted; the archivoire cannot, save by the Herald and his descendants, and even they are constrained, as the master craftsman is about to remind him.
‘To check what exactly?’
‘Her mechanisms.’
‘Mechanisms?’
‘Her hidey-holes – it is in my orders to confirm their working order, just this once.’
That makes sense. Escutcheon Place holds the trial records and artefacts connected with Wynter’s practices in secret compartments; even Finch does not know where these repositories are, nor of what these artefacts consist. Oxenbridge has left him a sealed envelope and a key, to be respectively opened and used in only the direst emergency.
He places a guard on the door and admits the craftsman while he himself checks a new weir south of the Island Field. On his return all looks well. The craftsman has done his work in an hour and left. The guard has seen nothing untoward. The archivoire appears as he left it.
Late that night his preparations for bed are interrupted by the watch calling out, ‘Mr Finch, you best come quick.’
After a clear day the snow has hardened to the consistency of ground glass and the smaller streams in the Island Field are frozen to the colour of old bones. The master craftsman’s body lies on the woodland edge beyond the island stream, shrouded in white, save for the face, where the snow has been scraped away. Blue lines round the neck suggest strangulation.
‘The physician says he’s been here a good two days,’ says the first guard.
‘Which is wrong, ’cos I saw him yesterday,’ corrects the second.
‘I saw him today,’ adds Finch, ‘but . . .’ He pauses. It makes no sense. ‘The physician is right: there are no footprints, and the body is covered in snow. There has been no snow since yesterday night.’
‘He shook my hand. He were no ghost.’
Finch is puzzled
. The craftsman liked only the contact of wood. He would not have shaken hands. He nodded, if you were lucky.
‘He is unmarried, Mr Finch, although they say there’s a woman and child in Hoy. We can bury him tomorrow.’
Finch decides to close the debate and the risk of rumour. ‘He must have slipped on the ice. It happens.’
Back in Escutcheon Place Finch decides against reporting the incident to London for fear of compromising Rotherweird’s independence.
A ghost, an anniversary and a murder – surely Wynter cannot reach from the grave, still less an empty one?
Finch neutrally records the incident in his formal record.
The craftsman’s workmanship lives on. The dead man’s apprentice takes over and excels. The town grows. The name on the craftsman’s gravestone fades to disconnected lines.
JULY
1
Home Sweet Home
Valourhand had never before felt so settled. Her fierceness remained, but had been channelled into work – not teaching work but learning work; here in Lost Acre she had no pupils or timetables to distract her, and no Strimmer to disturb her equilibrium.
Nor had she ever felt house-proud before. The kitchen remained the kitchen, but the large oak table now doubled as a workbench. Here she placed her microscope with its supporting parts, a remarkable variant on the usual outsider contraptions – one of the South Tower’s few useful inventions – and her notebooks. All these had been in her backpack when she went in several hours after Ferensen, prepared, if necessary, to fight with and for him. Instead she had found the spiderwoman’s lair deserted. She secured the door and bolted the windows, having overlooked them on her first visit, when the shutters had been closed.
The footprints outside suggested that Ferensen had survived and set out into the snowy landscape outside. She reckoned that in such an alien place, she would be more of a handicap than a blessing, so she stayed put.
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