34 An Oversight
“Your story must have a beginning, a middle and an end, Jusuf,” the voice of his grandfather spoke to him from the billowing skein that carried them so swiftly on. “A beginning to draw your listener in when their mind may be anywhere but upon your tale.”
“A beginning?” Jusuf sang in his mind. “A beginning?” and he felt his grandfather’s hand upon his arm, steadying, reassuring, marking out a new rhythm for his song: the rhythm of the sea.
“I will start at the beginning of my journey, Grandfather,” Jusuf decided, “for the first step of any journey always holds most promise, sets intrigue within the mind.”
“Good. Then spin your thread, Jusuf, my boy; spin it so it may be woven into this very cloth, and by it read in times to come. Make it start, then, upon the sea, Ceuta behind you and intrigue along its tempting course ahead.”
Jusuf did. He spun his thread, spun it from his last view from Bab el-Zakat of Ceuta’s Monte Anyera, then of his sight of the lands of his people that had been lost to the thieving Christian infidels. This he then wove into his and his grandfather’s cloth, wove it as a bright thread through an otherwise dull fabric.
Then he spun a thread of storm, a dark thread of terror and mortal fear, and this too he wove into his tale, its pattern one of merciful escape and the fateful saving of an enemy’s life. And on he spun and wove, until his design depicted Foy and their loss of the Nao Providência to the pirate Capitão Treffry, to the need to hide his plague-burden and then on yet further still to… To his first vision in the Ship Inn, unknowing he was her forebear, of—of Kate.
Kate who, after his painful black loss of Rodrigo’s friendship, many more woven threads brought him to see again, there across the hearth in his forge. Threads that revealed he’d seen her before: glimpses from the corner of his eye, like when he’d heard those cracks of thunder so close above the Salutation Inn.
But already that part of the cloth had swept on by, and with it his and Gwenna’s first kiss and the shock and joy of learning she wasn’t barren, then Saint Petroc’s bones and the abbot’s crumbling seal, and on and on. Until here he was: sending his own Songs of Our Forebears to the very one he now knew could do no other than hear. The one he saw, sitting across a small table from him in a simple wooden building. A hovel that boasted rain-lashed glass in its window openings.
Glass in such a humble dwelling—it could only be his distant future, a future to which he had to speak.
“And here I come to the end of my story,” he calmly told Kate. “The story of your forebear: not what I want of you, but who I truly am,” and the fabric of that story billowed out silently behind him. “In your deepest darkness, let a simple candle’s light guide your way,” but Kate’s eyes only narrowed, briefly, before she let out a yelp and shot to her feet.
She soon knelt beside him, where he writhed on the floor, his mind aflame within a suffocating tapestry that swirled all about him. Then he groaned, loudly, sat up and puked down his tee-shirt, the chalet spinning violently about his head.
“Oh, God,” he groaned and was sick again.
“Shit, Colin. What’s wrong?”
He couldn’t answer, not until he’d writhed onto his stomach and gripped the threadbare carpet tightly in both fists, but even then he could only manage “Bad trip” before heaving once more.
Kate tended to Colin as best she could, as his writhing and mewling and groaning would allow. She cleaned him up then brought him orange juice to drink. By the time the morning had worn on towards noon and the rain given way to sunlight, Colin found himself sitting groggily on the sofa.
He felt wretched.
The room had stopped spinning, but it still swayed alarmingly whenever he moved his head. The bright sunshine flooding the view through the window opposite eventually tempted him to open his eyes, but its glare sent sharp slivers of pain through them. Only once Kate had chivvied him into eating a little dry toast did he begin to feel a bit better.
He looked at his watch, closed his eyes and groaned. “I don’t think,” he at first slurred, but then gathered his meagre reserves. “I don’t think we’re going to get that shopping done, Kate.”
“Don’t worry about it, Colin. We can just about get by on what we have in until tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I’m more worried about you.”
“I… I do feel a bit better. That toast helped.”
Colin drew in a long breath, relieved his mind stayed still, even a strange calmness settling within it.
“There wouldn’t be any more toast, would there?” he said, opening his eyes to find Kate looking much relieved.
“I’ll get you some. Then, when you feel up to it, maybe you could tell me what the hell happened, eh?”
He carefully nodded.
This time Colin’s slow unfolding of his phantasm allowed Kate to write it all down without interruption. Only when he came to Jusuf’s long, deep and repeated tokes on the funnel’s spout did she need to speak, and this time to prompt him on.
“It was just a weird trip,” was all he could find to say.
“Yeah, but what kind of trip?”
“A bad trip.”
“I know that; you said before. But what happened during it?”
“Just weird stuff,” and when Kate only lofted her eyebrows, he gave her a beseeching look. “Not much of it made any sense. Like I said: weird. Stuff about cloth.”
“Cloth?”
“Weaving cloth. Well, I suppose it was some sort of analogy, you know, for Jusuf’s… Yeah, for his story; that I do remember. His Songs of Our Forebears.”
“But what about the whereabouts of his plague-burden?”
“Dunno. Don’t remember anything about that. He just seemed to be going back through what we already know happened to him.”
“What, like making sure he left threads through his story’s fabric that we could follow to home in on the significant bits?”
Colin stared at Kate. “Yeah. Just like that. Of course. Now it makes a bit more sense, but there’s a lot of it that’s still just a jumble. I can only assume Jusuf was far more tolerant of dope than me. I mean, the amount he smoked just blew me away.”
“So you don’t remember telling me something before you slipped from your chair?”
“Telling you something?”
“Sounded gibberish to me… Well, maybe a bit Arabic, I suppose, or maybe a fifteenth century version.”
“I remember he’d been talking with his grandfather, so maybe it was fifteenth century Berber?”
“I don’t know. Come to that, I’ve never heard twentieth century Berber, either, not that I know of.”
“Well, Kate, I was so stoned it can’t have been me speaking. I was just too far gone for that. So, it had to be Jusuf himself, Jusuf seeing through the clear water beneath the tide’s inrushing surf.”
Kate gawped at him. “You’re obviously still stoned, Colin.”
“No. It makes sense: for him to have spoken to you through me, he must have been seeing you; seeing you like I’ve been seeing Gwenna. Seeing his distant future descendant.”
“In which case, if he knew who I was by then, he must have been telling me where he’d hidden his burden. He must have been. So we could go and fix its damned crap seal.”
Colin closed his eyes and leant his head back against the sofa and groaned. “Oh, shit,” he drew out. “The most important thing we needed to hear, the whole point of all the phantasms he set in motion, and he told you the answer to the entire mystery in Berber! What an idiot; a real effing idiot.”
He shook his head in despair.
“Because, Kate, what I do distinctly remember is that he used the last of his dope in making that,” and he nodded towards the joss stick holder on the table under the window. “Whatever he said to you, he knew it was the last time we’d ever be in contact. The very last chance he would have to tell us how to save the world. And he blew it!”
/> 35 The Power of Suggestion
Despair and despondency drove deep into Colin’s weakened state. Kate didn’t press him further, clearly giving him time to recover, and the afternoon steadily wore on to their evening meal, largely conducted in silence. He’d eaten with a bit more enjoyment than he’d expected, feeling surprisingly restored once they’d cleared away and sat down on the sofa.
It must have shown, for after a while Kate asked, “You feel more up to discussing this morning?”
Colin stared at her for a moment, then nodded “Okay”.
“You sure?”
“Yep. Feel strangely as fit as a fiddle now.”
She looked at him for a moment, clearly thinking. “Which is what’s got me to wondering.”
“Wondering?”
“Hmm. You only had the one spliff before the phantasm, so… So how come you suffered so badly?”
“Because of the amount Jusuf smoked; a lethal amount.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t actually get into your body. The one that stayed here. And your mind couldn’t really have been exposed to it, and even if it somehow had, then it was no more than a couple of seconds’ worth.”
“It felt longer. And it felt like I’d physically smoked that much.”
Kate clamped her lips together and squinted at him. “Exactly. It felt like it; only felt like it. But you couldn’t have done. Could you? Not really. And you’ve recovered so quickly.”
“Well, when you put it like that, no, I don’t suppose I could have. Not physically.”
“So your bummer of a high must’ve been psychosomatic.”
“Just suggestion?”
“Hmm.”
From Colin’s close perspective it proved hard to agree, but the facts did seem to point that way. “So what you suggesting?”
“Well, if you weren’t really experiencing a bad trip, then surely your memory of what happened shouldn’t have been affected, just displaced somehow. Overshadowed by what you thought was happening to you.”
“Go on.”
“If I were to read aloud the notes I made, sort of get you to relive it without any dope in your system at all, then maybe, in the cold light of day, you could unearth those memories.”
It sounded a bit risky to Colin, the thought of going through another bad trip too much even to consider. But then there was a lot riding on it. That he couldn’t deny, and so he finally found himself nodding.
Kate had a perfect narrator’s voice, well-paced and with enough feeling to it to bring everything back surprisingly strongly, so much so he became nervous as she neared describing Jusuf taking up the funnel.
But he needn’t have worried: the memories of what had happened after Jusuf’s massive tokes just came back to him as nothing more than that. They still seemed inexplicable, but the detail was there, all of which Kate carefully wrote down. And finally, they came to Jusuf’s words to her, words that sat in Colin’s mind more as meaning than spoken thoughts. He considered how best to convey them, and at last spoke.
Kate wrote them down, then looked up, her face a picture of confusion. “There must be more,” she urged. “There must be. This,” and she stabbed the pad with her pen, “tells us nothing.”
“Read it back to me, Kate,” and she did.
“‘And here I come to the end of my story. The story of your forebear’, which is pretty straightforward, but then we get: ‘Not what I want of you, but who I truly am’. I mean, surely that’s exactly what he did want: us to do something. Something damned important, like make his bottle of plague safe, for Pete’s sake.”
“Well, maybe—”
“And the coup de grace turns out to be a riddle: ‘In your deepest darkness, let a simple candle’s light guide your way’. Why set a riddle when he could just have told me straight out? Eh, Colin? Why the man-of-mystery? Why not ‘It’s under the middle front row seat in the High Street Odeon cinema in Truro’?”
She threw her pen down on her pad and crossed her arms. “You must have forgotten what he said after this,” she levelled at him, “or slipped from your chair before he finished.”
A sense of guilt welled up in Colin’s chest, the thought he might have been to blame for their failure, that somehow he’d not lasted the course. Lamely, he quietly told her he was sure there’d been nothing more, that Jusuf had seemed relieved to have spoken those words as his final ones to her. But the doubt still left him feeling uncomfortable.
Kate took a deep breath, raggedly expelled, then softened her features a little. “I’m sorry, Colin. I didn’t mean to… Well, to accuse you of anything. But you’ve got to admit, Jusuf’s words are hardly helpful.”
Colin took up Kate’s pad. “Not what he wanted but who he was,” he paraphrased. “It sounds to me like he was worried we wouldn’t believe his message, not without understanding who he was and what he’d been through. You know, the context. Maybe he wasn’t sure we’d have already been following his story, that we might not have come across it before he spoke to you. It’s as though he’s saying: know who I am through what happened to me, then you’ll know the importance of what you need to do.”
“Then why not just say so, then tell us where he’d hidden the damned thing.”
“Well, he was stoned. I mean, really stoned.” But then Colin rubbed his chin thoughtfully, going back in his mind through all he knew of Jusuf, all the insights he’d had from his intimate company, mind within mind. He looked across at Kate, her expression one of confusion at the nascent grin he felt sure his own now held.
“Jusuf was a straightforward man, Kate. A skilled blacksmith, yes, but although not brilliantly well-educated, far from stupid. A kind and gentle man who tried to take what he found at face value. No complications. Like me, an engineer, a clever one, mind, and so I reckon what we should do is just take what he said at face value: ‘In your deepest darkness, let a simple candle’s light guide your way’.”
“Well, we’re in our ‘Deepest darkness’ now, Colin. A darkness of despair, and a darkness that’s stopping us seeing what we should do next—and more to the point: where.”
“Have we got any candles?”
“Candles? Well, yes, there should be some. Before the chalet got mains electricity it had gas mantles. The Calor gas bottles tended to have a bit of a habit of running out without warning, so there were always some to hand.”
“Do you think you could find one?”
“I imagine they’re still somewhere in the shed. Why?”
“Because, once we’ve brought ‘Deepest darkness’ to this room, by turning off the electric lights, I think we’re going to need a ‘Candle’s light to guide our way’.”
By the time Kate had found an old box of household candles in the shed, dusk was fast slipping into nighttime. She came in and dropped it and her torch on the table as Colin came through with a couple of mugs of tea.
“Oh great, you found some,” he said. “Just need a saucer, then,” and he went back into the galley to get one. “And then wait until the night’s at its darkest,” he called back.
“Well, that’s going to be about one in the morning,” Kate said, as Colin stuck the candle to the saucer and placed it on the table, beside the joss stick holder. As they began their wait, Kate asked what he was up to.
“I don’t quite know yet. We need to wait and see.”
“You know, Colin, I think you and Jusuf really did come out of the same mould; a damned infuriating engineer’s mould.”
He grinned at her at first, but then said, “His final words told us to know who he was, right?” Kate nodded. “Well, he was a blacksmith.”
“So?”
“So what do blacksmiths do?”
“Shoe horses?”
“Work metal,” and he nodded towards the joss stick holder. “Metalwork like that.”
Kate peered at the thing. “But what about it?”
“I don’t know, not yet, but I suspect we might find out as soon as it’s dark enough,” and they continued th
eir wait. Kate half-heartedly tried to read her book. Eventually, Colin got up and lit the candle from his trusty Zippo, then drew the curtains. “Time for deepest darkness, I reckon,” and he switched off the light.
They both sat at the table, peering at the candlelit holder. It looked no different, not to Colin’s eye, yellower, dimmer, perhaps a more noticeable lustre, but otherwise unremarkable.
“Well?” Kate said.
“Hmm,” and Colin moved the candle around the holder, looking for any telltale marks or indentations, or maybe some pattern or other that only the candlelight could reveal. He found nothing. Nothing more than what they now knew to be centuries of wear-and-tear.
“All right,” he said, raising his brows, “maybe I’ve been barking up the wrong—”
“Colin!” Kate almost spat. “Move the candle back a bit…to where you had it just then.” Slowly, he did so. “There. Hold it there. Do you see it?”
“What?” and he peered harder at the holder whilst trying to keep the candle still.
“There,” and Colin realised she was pointing at the wall, the bit between the bottom of the curtains and the table top. “See it?”
He did. A pattern of sprinkled dots of faint candlelight wavered there in the holder’s shadow, in sympathy with his unsteady hold of the candle. Then he understood.
Without saying a word, he looked around in desperation and spotted Kate’s notepad. He put the candle down on the table, much to Kate’s protestations, and picked the pad up off the sofa, propping it against the bottom of the curtains.
Clearer now, the candle at last steady and the wallpaper’s confusing pattern hidden behind the pad, Colin could make out a couple of strange words that dimly glowed from the paper. Like an electronic calculator’s matrix display, they said “inscrybd stone”.
“What the hell does that mean?” he asked, but Kate had got up and was searching for something in the gloom. She came back with a scrap of paper, on which she wrote down the ghostly words.
“There must be more,” she said, and so Colin slowly rotated the holder by its feet. More words seemed magically to form, this time “hedestocc”, which ran above “insyde bellfrye”. When he again rotated the holder, only “Myke save” appeared from the candlelight’s projection through the holder’s newly aligned peppering of holes.
The Forebear's Candle: A time travel mystery and love story set against the intrigue of Henry Tudor's England Page 20