It was Ned who got him out, jumping in fully dressed in spite of his sprained ankle, heaving him out of the water while the other boys reached down to haul him over the edge. They’d done lifesaving techniques earlier that term, and someone managed to pump at his chest while someone else tried mouth-to-mouth. Ned said: “Get Mr. Niall,” meaning the games master, but no one did and it seemed an incredibly long time before any adults appeared on the scene to take over. There was blood on Nathan’s head, on his arm, blood fanning out across the wet floor tiles. Rix stood back from the rest of the group, looking pale and uncomfortable.
“This is your fault,” Ned said, struggling to evade his own guilt, knowing Nathan would never have reacted to Rix’s taunting if it hadn’t been for him.
“He was sh-showing off,” Rix stammered, determined to convince himself.
Later, in the headmaster’s study, he said the same thing.
ANNIE WAS informed and drove to the school in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, exercising all the self-control she possessed in order not to go too fast. By the time she got there they were able to tell her Nathan would be all right: he had a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, severe bruising, and what the doctor called “extensive physical trauma,” but no broken bones or internal damage. His first words to her were: “Sorry, Mum.” She sat by his bed in the infirmary, holding his hand until it occurred to her that might embarrass him, torn between standard maternal anxiety, pointless anger—why is he always doing dangerous things, even when it isn’t necessary?—and the sneaking paranoia of other, deeper doubts. Romany Macaire, tumbling into the river … Nathan, diving into a pool too shallow for him … Water, water, everywhere … Was it mere coincidence, or some dark supernatural plot?
“Don’t overreact,” Bartlemy said when she confided in him. “We’re surrounded by water all the time. It’s essential to life. Don’t start seeing demons in every raindrop. Teenage boys do rash and often stupid things. Children fall into rivers. Accidents happen. It’s a very human weakness, needing someone to blame.”
Ned blamed Rix, at least to his classmates. To Nathan, he blamed himself, saying awkwardly: “It was me. I made you do it. I shouldn’t have—”
“Forget it,” Nathan said. “It was my own stupid fault. I knew the dive wasn’t possible there but I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it.”
He, too, was blaming himself, not just for his recklessness but for the seed of unthinking arrogance that had made him believe that whatever he did, no matter how foolhardy, he would somehow get away with. His guardian angel—or devil—would take care of him.
But the devil had let him down, and now he knew he was vulnerable, and a tiny germ of fear grew at the back of his thought, not the fear of danger but the fear of fear itself. He could be hurt—he might be killed. Knowing that, would he be able to explore the otherworlds as boldly as before, doing whatever he needed to do, or would his newfound fear hold him back?
He couldn’t talk to Ned about it, or any of his other classmates, because they knew nothing of the voyages he made in his dreams and would only think him nuts if they did. He couldn’t talk to Annie, because she was his mother and worried about him too much already. He couldn’t talk to Bartlemy, because although his uncle came to see him once he was back home, they had no privacy for confidences.
In the end, he talked to Hazel. Just as he always had.
“You think too much,” Hazel said. “Like what’s-his-name in Shakespeare who wanted to avenge his father’s murder and kept messing it up and killing the wrong people.” She’d been on a school trip to see Hamlet the previous term. “He got rid of nearly everyone in the play before he killed the right person, didn’t he? The point is, he spent too much time agonizing and making long speeches to himself instead of just getting on with the job. You’re starting to do that. Picking your feelings to bits and worrying about them. It’s a waste of time.”
“I don’t make long speeches,” Nathan objected.
“You’d better not,” Hazel said grimly. “The play was quite good but the speeches were boring.”
“They’re famous,” Nathan said, quoting: “To be or not to be, that is the question— and something about to die, to sleep—to sleep perchance to dream … For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …”
“Boring,” Hazel said. “You’re going all thoughtful on me. That’s your problem. Thinking.”
“Thinking is a sign of intelligence,” Nathan said.
“No it isn’t,” Hazel argued. “Stupid people think, too. It’s the thinking that makes them stupid. Like that guy in the play. He stuck his sword in a curtain and killed a harmless old man because he thought he was someone else. Hamfist, Prince of Denmark. Stupid.”
“I don’t go around sticking swords into people,” Nathan said. “At least, only once.” He had picked up the Traitor’s Sword—the Sword of Straw—and slashed at the Urdemon of Carboneck, but killing a demon, he felt, wasn’t the same as killing a person. “Anyhow, that was self-defense. I didn’t have much of a choice. The point is, maybe I found it easy to be brave, because—subconsciously—I thought I was sort of looked after. And now I know I’m not… well…”
“You were brave from the start,” Hazel responded. “You couldn’t have felt looked after then. If you’re more scared now, you’ll just have to be braver. You’ll manage it. You’re a brave kind of person. As long as you don’t start thinking about it.”
She hadn’t told him about the gnomons. Bartlemy had said he would set the trap that weekend. Hazel had already decided that if she didn’t think about what she had to do she wouldn’t worry, and if she didn’t worry she wouldn’t panic, but the effort of not thinking was taking its toll. She knew she wasn’t as brave as Nathan, but that only meant she had to try harder. Nathan’s self-doubts she regarded as trivial—yet it was strangely reassuring to find that he, too, was having to cope with the possibility of failure and fear. Somehow it made her feel better about her own secret terrors.
“No thinking,” Nathan said. “Right. I’ll—um—bear that in mind.” “And don’t start being clever,” Hazel added, throwing him a dark look. “I can’t stand that, either.”
“Sorry,” Nathan said. “Am I treading on your inferiority complex?” “I don’t have one,” Hazel snapped. “I don’t do complexes and stuff.” “Oh really? Then why—”
But that was the moment when Annie put her head around the door with an offer of tea and cake, and the downhill run to a juvenile squabble was averted.
SINCE THE accident Nathan had been on painkillers to help him sleep at night, and his dreams had stayed inside his head. The drugs, he suspected, affected his sleep patterns, making it impossible for him to stray outside his own world, but because the concussion had made him sick and the bruising had left him too stiff to move, he had been feeling far from adventurous. Still, he was strong and resilient with quick powers of recovery, and that night he decided he could do without the acetaminophen, though he didn’t mention it to Annie. It was hard to get comfortable—his shoulder still twinged at any awkward movement— but eventually he drifted into sleep, and through sleep into dream.
Only it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.
He was diving into deep water, hurtling down and down through an endless gulf of blue. The seabed rushed toward him like a moving wall. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. He tried to close his eyes, to brace himself for the impact—but there was none. No impact, no eyes. With an exquisite surge of relief he realized he was only an atom of thought, a bodiless observer whose horrifying plunge had speed but no substance. He slowed as the seafloor drew near and found himself gliding above the level sand that stretched away in every direction, featureless as a desert. He guessed the water couldn’t actually be all that deep, since he could still see in the blue dimness, and high above there was the glimmer of the sun’s rays reaching down. Something like a cloud passed overhead, a huge shadow blotting out the far-off daylight. A ship, he thought, gazing upward�
�but no, this was Widewater, it must be, where the land had been devoured by sea and there were neither people nor ships. Yet it looked like a ship, a vast, deep-bellied tanker hundreds of feet long. Others followed, five, six, eight, one far smaller, another little more than a dinghy. Not ships: whales. A pod of whales far larger than any in our world, sailing the ocean like a convoy of giant galleons.
His thought floated up, passing among them, emerging into a world of sky and sea. A golden void of sunlight hung all around him. The backs of the whales arched out of the water, rising and falling like slow waves on their way to the horizon. Below him he heard a strange echoing boom, like the music of sea trumpets blown in the deeps, and he knew they were singing. He thought, on a note of revelation: This is their world. Nothing here can hurt them. All of Widewater was their kingdom.
Around the rim of the sky, clouds were piling up, great thunder-heads swelling visibly, rank on rank of them, like mountain ranges marching across the sea. The sun was swallowed up; a wind came scurrying before the storm, whipping the waves into restless peaks. But the whales did not vary their pace, heaving and sinking to the same steady beat. A dark rain came slanting down; thunder drums drowned out the whalesong. Purple lightning stabbed at the wave caps, foiled by the salt water. A stem of cloud came writhing downward, sucking the sea into its vortex, until sea and sky were joined by a whirling cord as thick as a giant’s arm. The water seemed to be flowing up it, feeding the storm-heart.
Then Nathan saw the Goddess.
He could not tell if she was solid or phantom, vapor or water, but it made no difference: she was terrible. Her upper body seemed to spout from the wavering column of the tornado, filling the sky, a pale cloudy shape with billowing hair that mingled with the thunderheads and lightning eyes. Her arms were stretched wide as if to draw the whole ocean into her embrace; the storm flowed from her fingertips. This was the Goddess who had eaten the islands, destroying all human life, who had made Widewater into a sea without a shore—the Queen of the Deep, ruler of maelstrom and tempest, an elemental with no soul and no heart, made of rage, and power, and greed. Even as he was, without form or substance, Nathan feared her.
Not just because she was a goddess. Because he knew her …
She bent down over the whale pod; he seemed to hear her voice like a giant whisper on the wind. Lungbreathers! The whales dived, eluding her cold grasp—all save one, the larger of the two calves, who hung back from curiosity, or because his reflexes were too slow. Her long fingers spanned his back, and the sea plucked him away from the others— away and away—sucking him into the storm, rolling him in the waves, spinning him into the tumult of the tornado. Nathan followed, drawn in her wake, closing his mind against the nightmare of engulfing water…
Long after, or so it seemed, the sea was calm again. The morning sun shone down through the water onto a coral reef flickering with smallfish. The young whale was coasting along its border, now far from family and friends, seeking the currents that would lead him back to the north. Then Nathan saw the fin cutting the water, just one at first, then another, and another. Following him. Circling. Nathan didn’t want to watch anymore, but the dream would not let him go, not till the sea exploded into a froth of lashing bodies, and the red came, pluming up through the foam. Then at last it was all over, and the sea was quiet, and the finned shadows flicked and circled, flicked and circled, while the stain thinned like smoke on the surface of the water, vanishing into a vastness of blue.
Nathan sank out of the dream, and once again he thought he was drowning, plunging into a darkness without air or breath. He struggled in a growing panic, fighting against the familiar asphyxiation—and then he was in bed, breathing normally, and there was a hand on his forehead. A hand that felt unnatural, cold and leather-smooth. A hand in a glove.
The hand was withdrawn, and when it returned it felt like skin. Nathan’s eyes were shut, but a picture formed in his head: the Grandir in his protective clothing, with his white mask and black gauntlets. It was an oddly comforting image. He found himself thinking about skin, human skin, the softness of it, its coolness and its warmth, the intimacy of its touch. Only a flimsy layer between hand and brow, between sense and senses, between heart and heartbeat. Animals had hide and scales and fur, feathers and down, protection and insulation. But humans wrapped themselves in a tissue-thin covering so transparent the blood vessels showed through, so fragile it might puncture on a leaf edge or a blade of grass, so sensitive it could feel the lightest pressure, from the footstep of a fly to the breath of a zephyr. Yet humans in their vulnerable skin were the most deadly predators in all the worlds …
It occurred to him that these thoughts didn’t come from him—they were unfamiliar, alien thoughts that seemed to stretch his mind into strange dimensions. The Grandir’s thoughts, flowing from the touch of his fingers into Nathan’s head …
He opened his eyes.
A face was bending over him, a face that he had seen only once before, yet he seemed to know it well. A dark curving face with a metallic sheen on the hooked cheekbones and the blade of the nose. Hooded eyes, and beneath the hoods the glimmer of hidden fires, like glints of light in a black opal. Behind the eyes, deeps of power and thought, a force of personality that could reshape the cosmos. But for now, it was all focused on Nathan. There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows that seemed to convey both anger and gentleness. The Grandir’s spirit was larger than that of other men; he could feel many emotions at once.
He said: “You fear the water, don’t you? It is waiting for you in your dreams, but you fear to go there, to be overwhelmed by it—smashed against the rocks, crushed into the seabed. I have read the fear in your heart where there was none before. You must face it, and face it down. There are things you have to do, even in the dark of the sea.”
“What happens if I become solid?” Nathan said. “I won’t be able to do it. Whatever it is. I won’t be able to breathe.”
“You must find a way. Your folly has made your fear—the risk you took, when no risk was necessary—and for what? For what?” The frown intensified; for a moment, anger supervened. “To impress your peers! To vindicate the one you call friend! They are nothing—less than nothing—but you matter. You have no idea how much you matter. And you might have been killed—for a gesture! An instant of bravado!”
The hand had left Nathan’s forehead to stroke his hair. For all the Grandir’s fury and frustration, his touch was soft as a caress.
Nathan said: “Everyone matters.” He was trying to hang on to that.
“You don’t understand. One day—but not yet, not yet. You must take care. No more folly. No more rashness.” Voice and face changed. The hard curve of his mouth appeared to soften. Almost, he smiled. “You are just a boy—so young, so very young. It is long and long since I had contact with youth. I had forgotten how it shines—how valiant it is, and how defenseless. You have tasks to accomplish, but your youth will find a way. You will go back to Widewater. I will care for you— when I can. But I cannot always save you. Remember that.”
Nathan said sharply: “Did you show me the whales? And the Goddess?”
“These are things you needed to see—”
“Who is she? I thought—I knew her.”
“She is Nefanu, Thalassé, Queen of the Sea. You know her double, the witch from the river. But the spirit in your world is far less in power, though not in hunger. She would make earth her kingdom, a desert like Widewater, landless and bare. She seeks to open the Gate and draw power from her sister-spirit, her other self—but that is unimportant. She has no part in my plans. It is Nefanu who dominates your task.”
“But how can I face a goddess?” Nathan demanded, trying to sit up.
The hand restrained him.
“Only do what you must. Perform the task ordained for you; no more.”
“What task?”
“You know what task. Enough questions. There may be a time later, but not now. Now, Time is running out. My world is running ou
t. Do your part. All my trust is in you …”
The dream was receding, almost as if the Grandir was thrusting him away, back into sleep, into his own universe. He knew a sudden fever of urgency—if he could only find the right questions maybe he would learn the answers at last. One day, the Grandir had said. He was groping blindly between worlds, fulfilling some obscure destiny that no one would ever explain—a pawn in an inscrutable chess game, a puppet on detachable strings. He knew it had to do with the Great Spell—with the Grail relics that he alone could retrieve—but there was still no answer to the great Why? Why was he born with this bizarre ability to travel the multiverse—an ability he could not even control? Why was he sent on this unknown quest? Why him?
He tried to speak, to protest… but the Grandir’s face was slipping away, curving into the swirl of the galaxy, glimmering into stars. Darkness followed, and a sleep without dreams, and he woke in the morning to the pain in his shoulder, and the ache in his head, and a tangle of thoughts to unravel.
Annie brought him tea in bed, a rare indulgence that, as she explained to him, would run out as soon as his bruises unstiffened.
“I’m not really stiff now,” he said provocatively. “I could get up easily.”
“No you don’t.” She scrutinized his face, noting the sallow tinge to his complexion and the shadows under his eyes. “You look as though you’ve slept badly. Did you take your painkillers?”
“I don’t like taking pills all the time.”
“Yes, but the doctor said you’re supposed to take them at night for at least another week.” She sat down on the bed, her exasperation changing to anxiety. “Have you—have you been dreaming again?” And, after a pause: “Those dreams?”
He shrugged. Nodded.
“For God’s sake.” Annie fumbled for the right words, not wanting to hear herself fussing—knowing fussing would do no good. “You’re not fit enough yet…”
The Poisoned Crown Page 6