Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology

by Mark Lawrence

  “All your money, 1essier,” said a man. He stepped out of an alley so narrow that a man’s shoulders would brush the houses. He had a soldiers heavy dagger in his hand, and he reached for the neck of Tomaso’s homespun gown. He was moving fast—his eyes seemed to burn with fanaticism. He fairly shrieked his words. “All your money!” he shrieked again, rocking Tomaso.

  Various instructors had taught a very young Tomaso about fighting, and one of the things they’d insisted on was that the stupidest thing a man could do was to grab another man’s shirt. Tomaso’s immediate reactions—fear, near panic, disorientation—were displaced by training. His left hand reached out, he swung his hips, and the other man’s arm broke—the snap audible in the street. With strength born of fear, Tomaso threw him across the street and into the stone wall of a nearby building for good measure.

  He screamed.

  Tomaso picked up his knife—a baselard dagger, and a very good one.

  He felt the strangest urge to kill the man. The thief lay on his back, face up, like a sacrifice in the Archaic times.

  A crowd was gathering. The man was whimpering—on and on. Praying to God. Begging forgiveness.

  Before Tomaso could move his cart, three soldiers appeared.

  #

  The Podesta looked at the knife, lying on the table between them. “If you are Tomaso Lupi of the noble house of Lupi, why are you dressed as a peasant?” he asked.

  “I was buying barrels for my wine,” Tomaso said.

  The Podesta sniffed as if he smelled something bad. “You see how a misunderstanding might arise,” he said. “The thief would never have attacked you if he had known you were a gentleman. My men would not have arrested you. In future, please dress to your station.” He slid the fine dagger across the table. “My first thought was that you were a spy for the Este.” He took his hand off the dagger—and grabbed Tomaso’s hand at the wrist. “In which case, I would rip your arms off your body in no time. Do you understand?”

  Tomaso understood very well—all the way back to the contada in the darkness. But he refused to surrender to all his new fears—he took the wagon to Giancarlo’s house, a fine snug cottage with six rooms and two hearths—the best in the village.

  Giancarlo was waiting in the yard—with his staff in his hands. But as soon as the wagon entered his yard, he grinned. “I admit it—I thought you stole it. Wagon, animal, and our barrels.” He shrugged. “Where in the name of the Virgin have you been?”

  Tomaso stumbled through his story, aware of Giuglia’s classical profile against a lantern inside. Giancarlo shook his head again and again. At the end, he said, “Show me how you broke the man’s arm?”

  He was interrupted by a moan from the cart. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Tomaso shrugged. “The thief. I claimed him.”

  #

  It took all autumn to heal the thief. His arm was badly broken and his shoulder dislocated, and he spent the first week in a state of suspicious hostility that seemed impenetrable. He spat—he swore.

  Giancarlo would not allow his daughter to visit. Tomaso agreed.

  The man was as much like an animal as any wolf Tomaso had known—his teeth gleamed and he seemed to give vent to his very feeling. He controlled nothing.

  He feared everything.

  Tomaso watched him carefully and locked him in a shed at night. And fed him.

  His grapes had gone for juice, and the juice was becoming wine. The moneylender loaned him money against his wine, like all the other small farmers.

  Tomaso thought a long time that fall, and then he sold his sword.

  That night, he cried. Not because he was a great man-at-arms, but because of what it meant. As long as the sword hung over his bed—

  It was gone. He tried not to look at the space on the wall.

  #

  At the edge of winter, Giancarlo suggested that they clear the old hilltop and plant more vines in spring. It was the best idea that Tomaso could imagine, and he forced the thief—Porto—to climb the hill with him. They worked for as long as the thief could stand, and then went and rested, and worked again.

  After a week of this, Porto sat on a huge squared stone, and looked up. “You really aren’t going to kill me,” he said.

  “I will if you don’t do better work than that,” Tomaso replied.

  Porto shrugged. “I’m your slave?”

  Tomaso knew a fair amount about slavery—from books. “I’ll pay you a wage like any other farm labour,” he said. “Right now—I’m too poor.” He cut with his borrowed axe—he didn’t even own an axe—at the roots of the brush he was trying to clear.

  Porto laughed. It was his first laugh in two months. “I was looking for farm work,” he said. “Fuck my mother, I was looking for farm work, and some bastard threw it in my face, and I beat him to the ground and took his money.”

  “Well,” said Tomaso. “I beat you to the ground and gave you farm work. The circle is complete.”

  Porto laughed. “I like the way you talk. You’re a fucking noble, pretending to be a peasant. Why?”

  “How about more work and less talk?” Tomaso said.

  “You don’t talk like us,” Porto said.

  Tomaso thought of Giuglia. “Many do,” he said. “You choose to speak that way. I choose to speak this way.”

  Porto spat. “Like a priest? Fucking sodomites.”

  But he went back to work.

  And very quickly, Porto became part of his life. He hated to get up and he wasn’t ever enthusiastic about anything, but when his shoulder was fully recovered, he could lift almost anything and he would work—with a vicious stream of profanity and complaint—from an hour past dawn until it was too late to see the ground. He was, in some ways, the toughest man Tomaso had known. He would work in snow. He would work as the air bit his lungs.

  He was afraid of books, and would not go near Tomaso while he read.

  “You’re a witch, aren’t you!” he said one day to Tomaso.

  Tomaso was trying to read a biography of the Empress Livia, and the Archaic was so complicated that he could only manage a few lines an hour, his finger moving along the script, his little bronze stylus cutting unknown words into the wax of his tablet. He allowed himself an hour a day to read—the brightest hour. He sat on Sundays after mass with the priest and went over his work. The priest always served him wine and treated him like a nobleman.

  The priest’s Archaic was a shadow of Tomaso’s, but neither man mentioned it.

  Tomaso sat with his hired man, with Giancarlo, and with Giuglia and her mother.

  As the fasting of lent began, and the moneylender became arrogant, Giancarlo visited more often.

  Porto laughed. “Just marry her and put us out of our misery!” he said. “She hates me, I’ll be back on the road—but I’m healed and I ain’t eaten this well in five years. I’ll go quiet.”

  They continued to clear the hilltop. It was now possible to see a line of low walls, which Giancarlo began to improve—the ancient walls became the foundations for orchard walls to keep out sheep. But the process of pulling stones out of the central space was endless, and Tomaso lost nails on his hands from prying them out of the cold ground. He used a pry bar borrowed from Pietro down the lane and Porto hauled the stones—neat, square cut stones—to the wall where Giancarlo laid them into the neatest dry stone in the valley.

  “If we find enough of this, we could sell some,” Giancarlo said. “This is fine stone.”

  Tomaso was beginning to face the possibility that all their work was for nothing—because the stone went down and down.

  The moneylender stopped by. “You now owe me ten ducats of gold,” he said. He shrugged. “Next time, I take things.” He had two thugs.

  When they were gone, Porto put a hand on Tomaso’s shoulder. “We could kill all three. Bury the bodies—who loves a moneylender?”

  Giancarlo stopped working on the wall, and they moved their clearing efforts by fifteen paces, to try and carve a
plot out of the hillside below all the collapsed stone.

  Spring began. Flowers bloomed, and Lent came at last to an end. The clearing began to look like a field, and Porto cut six trees to bring the sun. Tomaso sold his mother’s breviary to the priest and sold the heavy dagger that he’d taken from Porto, and paid the moneylender.

  Giuglia came up the hill one fine spring day, bringing water, wine, bread and oil, and stayed to work, sifting the fine dirt and carrying stones in her apron, and laughing. The hill was a dark place, and her laughter worked like something hermetical, banishing the feeling of hopelessness that was growing on Tomaso. The only things he had left to sell were his books.

  That evening, Giancarlo went off with his own hired man to help a neighbor, and Porto had begun to clear the last of the new ground and claimed he’d stay at it until dark. He’d found a silver coin in the dirt, and that had excited him in a way that nothing else had.

  Giuglia wiped the hair out of her eyes in the last of the sun. Her hair was bleached to a light brown and her skin was unfashionably dark, and her kirtle—once blue, and now something like the sky on a sunny day—was sweat stained.

  She sat on the low wall her father had started. “Are you going to marry me?” she asked.

  “If your father will have me,” Tomaso said. “I’m very poor.”

  She laughed—got up, and kissed him. And kissed him. And kissed him. “My mother said I’d have to do all the courting,” she said. “You are too courtly by half.”

  There was a hollow sound—a thud, as if someone had knocked on a big oak door. Tomaso had just summoned up all his courage and put a hand on Giuglia’s breast—

  “Master!” Porto shouted. “Messire Lupi!”

  Giuglia slapped his hand in scripted admonishment and then joined him in a dash across the cleared ground. Porto was at the edge of the clearing under the remaining wall of the ancient edifice. He emerged from the shadows into the last of the sun, and he was smudged with dirt.

  “The hill—it is hollow,” he said.

  #

  “It’s a door,” Giuglia said. She leaned close to the ancient wood. She had one hand to her throat and Tomaso thought she had never been so beautiful.

  “It’s a tomb,” the thief grumbled. “I won’t go near it.” He stood outside the ring of stones by what might once have been a portico.

  Tomaso and Giuglia ignored him and worked in the dying light of the sun to clear the lintel. The door–if indeed it was a door–was slanted with the stones of the hillside, cunningly worked in among them with generations of soil on top.

  Giuglia looked at the former thief. “He does no work,’ she spat.”

  Tomaso was surprised at her tone. “He dug out this entire pit, my love,” he said. “He’s tired.”

  She shook her head. “He’s afraid.”

  As the outlines of the lintel and capstone began to appear, they worked with increasing intensity. When Giuglia’s hand exposed the litter of metal on the capstone, she shrieked and then went and fetched a wooden pail of water–they all drank, and then she poured some over the capstone of the arched door.

  There were letters set in the stone. The letters appeared to be made of gold, or bright bronze–they were undimmed by time.

  The former thief and the peasant girl turned to their educated companion. He looked at the letters as the last strong rays of the sun made them seem to glow.

  “Witchcraft!” Porto spat, and backed away.

  Tomaso reached down and touched them.

  “Well?” asked Giuglia, her eyes huge.

  Tomaso shook his head. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “It is not Low Archaic or High Archaic. Indeed,” he sighed. “Indeed, I have never seen these letters before.” He smiled at his love. “But I agree that it is hermetical.” He held his hand over hers, cutting off the sun, and she could see that the letters glowed an orange-gold in the darkness under her hand.

  “Let’s open it!” Giuglia said. She bounced on her toes in eagerness.

  Porto took another step back and fingered his beard. He cocked an eyebrow at his master. “Tombs,” he said. “Could be money.” Shrugged. “Could be trouble.” He pointed. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “What kind of trouble?” Giuglia asked. “Daemons from hell?” Her tone was dismissive.

  Porto looked at the ground. “Maybe,” he admitted. “Or curses or other magery. Master doesn’t even know what the letters say.”

  Tomaso wanted to open the door. But he took a deep breath–and took two steps away from it, wary–from his reading–that the door itself might exert an influence.

  “What if there’s a treasure?” Giuglia asked from the portico.

  “You have no idea what might be in a tomb,” Porto said. “I don’t know nothing ‘bout magery, but I know this–once you open a box, it is fucking open.”

  “I need to get you home, my love,” Tomaso said quietly. “Go lay a fire and pour us some wine,” he ordered Porto.

  “Smart lad,” muttered the former thief, under his breath.

  Giuglia was standing in the little pit they had carved out, actually standing on the door. She shook her head. “This is too exciting. My mother won’t let me come tomorrow. She thinks we’ll make the beast with two backs the moment we’re alone.” She smiled, as if to suggest that the thought had occurred to her, as well.

  That smile penetrated whatever phantasm was on Tomaso Lupi, and he put a hand firmly on her arm. “As you love me, Giuglia–not tonight. Only a fool–or a man ensorcelled–would open this thing in the dark.”

  Giuglia turned her head sharply away. “You are a knight–you are supposed to be brave.”

  Tomaso felt the words as if they were a blow. But he had her arm, and he pulled. She stumbled and cursed him.

  He pulled her right out of the pit–it was only a few feet deep and he was very strong. He carried her three full paces across the small clearing where they intended to put new vines, and set her on her feet in the first of the moonlight.

  Before her feet touched the ground, she had stopped fighting him, and now she left her arms around his neck and kissed him. “By the Virgin mother, my love, I’m so sorry! Where did those words come from!”

  He laughed grimly. “Sorcery,” he said. “The tomb wants to be open.”

  #

  A dozen peasants came to gape at the door in the hillside. An hour after first light, Porto was on guard with the dagger and an axe, and Giancarlo came with two of his larger cousins.

  Giancarlo took Tomaso Lupi aside. ‘You were alone with my daughter for an hour,’ he said. His tone was serious, but not quite unfriendly.

  “I would be delighted to marry her,” Tomaso said.

  Giancarlo slapped him on the shoulder. “When?”

  “Post the banns,” Tomaso said. “Six weeks from the Sabbath.”

  Giancarlo sucked his front teeth for a moment. “Too soon—men will claim she’s pregnant. Twelve weeks. Is she pregnant?” he asked.

  Tomaso sighed. “No,” he said.

  He suspected his father-in-law thought he was a bit of a fool.

  “Now the other matter,” Giancarlo said. “The hill. What do you think it is?” he asked.

  Tomaso offered his prospective father-in-law a cup of herb tea. “I think it is a tomb from the very dawn of men,” he said.

  Giancarlo thought a moment. “Treasure?” he asked with the practicality of peasants and great nobles alike.

  Tomaso shrugged. “A powerful phantasm. Guiglia felt it.”

  Giancarlo nodded. “If we don’t open it, someone will come and take it from us,” he said.

  That hadn’t even occurred to Tomaso. He sighed. And wrote a letter on Giancarlo’s parchment, to Altichiero di Tuva.

  #

  Di Tuva embraced him warmly in the dooryard. “What’s this about?” he asked. He looked at the ground. “I’m—sorry. I have been no kind of friend.”

  Lupi embraced him again, a crushing, man’s embrace. “Forget all that,�
� he said. “I need you, and you come. That’s enough, surely? And perhaps—just maybe—I am doing you a favor.”

  Behind his little stone house, Giancarlo stood sweating in his best cote and hood. Di Tuva was an aristocrat, and Tomaso knew that his father-in-law-to-be was damned if he was going to look like a laborer. By his side stood Giuglia in her best Sabbath clothes.

  Di Tuva bowed to them as if they were courtiers.

  “This is my intended bride,” Tomaso Lupi said.

  “Then I get to kiss her!” Di Tuva said expansively, and shocked a dozen Beronese peasants by doing just that. “Beautiful like an angel!” He turned and glared at Tomaso. “It’s a wedding? I brought no present and I’m hardly dressed for it. And my wife will kill me—and you!”

  Tomaso grinned and bowed his own courtly bow. “We will of course invite you to the wedding,” he said, and Giuglia flushed—pleasure? Fear? But he went on. “I have a problem, and I wish your help.” And they all walked up the little hill behind the house.

  Porto stood guard. Just visible on the hilltop were Giancarlo’s two tough cousins. Around the base of the hill, a dozen more local men had gathered. They were sitting in the shade, eating figs.

  “What on earth is this? A wine tasting?” Di Tuva asked. He kept looking at Giuglia. When he and Tomaso were a little ahead of the others, he turned and hip-checked Lupi. “You dog! She’s magnificent!”

  Tomaso was too worried to smile or respond in kind.

  “You practice a little, yes? When you paint?” he asked.

  Di Tuva stopped. “Are we speaking of the science of hermeticism, or have you become a peasant?”

  “Don’t be touchy, my friend,” Tomaso shook his head. “I need your access to the powers.”

  “What in the name of the saints is this about?” Di Tuva asked, and then they crossed the tiny clearing and he saw the glowing letters.

  The moment his foot crossed the portico circle, he winced and stepped back. “Ah!” he said. “I see.”

  “I think it is a tomb,” Tomaso said. He showed Di Tuva the lettering.

  Di Tuva nodded. “Wonderful. Superb.” He turned. “We need Messire Petrarcha. He is a great magister.”