by James Bennet
“As it happens, you’re in luck. Tomorrow night, Professor Winlock, the noted archaeologist, is giving a talk at the British Museum. It’s all very hush-hush, of course. An exclusive event for the Society. He’s putting his private collection on display and was kind enough to invite me. I’m afraid I can’t make it, but I’m sure with a phone call I could send you instead.” Bardolfe nodded, as if trying to convince himself. “If you want to know about long-lost treasures, Winlock is your man. But…are you sure you want to go to all that trouble? I mean, what you’ve just told me, Fulk’s claim – it honestly is absurd.”
Ben might have turned away then, chalked Fulk’s attack up to desperation, Babe’s threat to bluster and ravings. He might have let the house and the coven keep their gem, if they were the ones who had stolen it, and flown back to America, tried to patch things up with Rose. Like cards in a deck, he might have packed all these players away – witches, slayers and knights – and gone back to his everyday life, drinking, growing bored and waiting for calls from prospecting criminals…
He heard Fulk Fitzwarren in his skull, a hoarse, boastful challenge.
You’re asleep, Red Ben. You’ve been asleep for centuries.
He remembered the symbol etched on his door, a stark, knowing calling card.
And he saw something in Bardolfe’s eyes, a flicker of insincerity. Something that had at first escaped him.
Doubt.
“I’ll go,” he said. “But what if I have more questions?”
“Then you’ll have to take them up with my secretary.” Bardolfe was all business again. “I have a flight to Cairo in the morning. I’m going to watch the syzygy.”
Another strange word. “The scissor what?”
“The Egyptian eclipse. I’m attending a bash with some astronomer friends of mine. Even old knights need holidays, you know.” He reached up to pat Ben’s shoulder. “Go and see Winlock at the museum. I’ll let him know you’re coming. One conversation with him and I’m sure your little quest will reach its end.”
Ben stared at the knight for a moment, then sighed and nodded. If this was the only thread on offer, he guessed he would have to take it.
“And you can send me a cheque for the window.”
SIX
In dreams, Ben saw Rose. Before obelisks. Before doubt. The day they met.
In hindsight, he should have heeded the north-east wind blowing against him as he made his way back from Gowanus over to Atlantic Avenue. The February cold whipped off the Bay like a giant hand pushing him back, slapping his cheeks and pinching his ears. He wasn’t in the best of moods. He was only in Brooklyn on a clean-up mission, and one that had left a sour taste in his mouth. Remnants tended to live long lives and sometimes, alone and isolated, the odd one or two would go a little cuckoo, as in the case of Gard Jordsønn. Gard had come from a long line of flesh eaters, tracing back to the cave-dwelling trolls of Norway, who had since all gone into the Sleep, leaving their nocturnal descendant to make his lonely way in the world. He had sailed across the sea and found employment in a Brooklyn scrapyard. He’d generally kept himself out of trouble until, as was often the case, the modern world came creeping in, the isolation becoming too much. Eventually he had caved in to hunger and started dining on the local residents, something the Guild just wouldn’t stand for, and so they had charged Ben with the task. Ben found the troll weeping and wringing his big grey hands in a filthy hole near the Carroll Street Bridge, and after a brief debate about the Old Lands, he had performed an ad hoc cremation and left the neighbourhoods of Gowanus, Prospect Heights and Red Hook to sleep easier in their beds.
Dispatching fellow Remnants, whatever their proclivities, didn’t tend to put a spring in his step. Nevertheless, these necessary evils were part and parcel of the Pact, a drawback of upholding the Lore. Without them, all hell would break loose. He was thinking these thoughts, the wind resisting his stride along Atlantic Avenue, when he had come across the bookstall. A laden trestle table rested on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps to an old and obviously ailing library, the sunken brownstone cake of a building sandwiched between used-furniture stores and chintzy-looking boutiques. The stacks were high and teetering, and some of the books shared their stories with the sky, their covers flipping back and forth in the intermittent gusts. His hand was already up, a no thank you on his lips, when the woman stepped forward to shake her bucket at him.
“Hey, mister, come on.” And before he knew it, she was standing in his way. “Surely you can spare a couple of bucks for the Crown Heights orphanage? The cutbacks could be shutting us down soon and, well, these kids gotta eat.”
He would like to think that he stopped due to a sense of charity. Charity that reached out like a gracious spirit and pressed lightly, ever so lightly against his lips, pursing the profanity there. Maybe it was down to the stray curl of gold that dangled from under the woman’s woolly hat, or the way she planted her pumps on the pavement, a guard forbidding entrance. Maybe it was her winter-cloud eyes looking up and assessing him, her lips closing, her smile becoming a disappointed line, finding him wanting.
“I’m sorry, I’m…”
Maybe it had nothing to do with looks at all.
“Busy, sure.” And she was pissed. He could see that. “Don’t let me interrupt your life or anything. What’s a few homeless brats, right? Have a nice day.”
She was turning away, bucket, gold, grey and all, when he reached out and touched her gently on the shoulder.
“Hey, that’s not fair,” he said. “Can’t a guy just walk down the street any more?”
She didn’t apologise. She didn’t even look at him. For the woman called Rose, a name he would come to learn like a song, Ben no longer existed. Or if he did, it was just as someone to shrug at, to quickly dismiss. Some kind of urban troll…
“Some folks have it harder, is all. It doesn’t take much to…”
Bergamot drifted on the air; her perfume, he guessed, spiced by annoyance. Common sense said it was wrong. He knew it was wrong. Drawbacks to the Lore forgotten, he said it anyway.
“Tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. OK?”
She glanced at him, cool and wary, and spoke to the passing traffic in the road.
“A deal? What kind of deal?”
“Shelter from this goddamned wind for starters. A five-minute coffee across the street.”
“Mister, are you serious? Can’t you see I’m—”
“And I’ll make a donation. I promise.”
“You will, huh?” She shook her head, smiling. Then the winter clouds returned. “My time is worth a couple of bucks. Is that what you think?”
He stood there, basking in her Brooklynite sass and her open suspicion. He hadn’t failed to notice the way she glanced at the other collectors working by the stall. The flip-flapping books. Obviously considering.
“No, I don’t think that at all. I’ll buy every last one of these books.”
“All of them? Are you nuts?”
“No,” he said, and he told his first lie. “I’m just your average, ordinary guy.”
Later – with the taste of mocha still on her lips and a niggling attraction tugging at her mind, or so she had once told him – Rose had looked in her plastic bucket and found the million-dollar cheque. He’d imagined she’d have a hundred questions and maybe even feel laughed at, so he had written his number on the back.
Wednesday morning. Rain swept a curtain over the city. Drizzle hushed against the window, a persistent visitor, rousing Ben from whiskey-tinged sleep. He woke up on the couch in the lounge with centuries of history spinning around his head, narrated by Sir Maurice Bardolfe. That and the vague memory of bergamot drifting on a February wind. Surprise surprise, he was naked again, his borrowed raincoat lying in tatters somewhere on Hampstead Heath. At least the streets had been dark when he’d come home, but all these transformations were going to cost him. One of these days, he was going to get caught. He stretched, yawned, scratched his balls and flick
ed on the TV. The news-reader delivered Armageddon with a smile. Three minutes of breakfast news and he flicked the TV off again. Who needed a morning dose of depression? He felt low enough as it was.
Barrow Hill Road no longer felt safe. He knew he would have to get over that. There was no easy way to relocate the hoard. Anyway, discretion versus valour aside, he wasn’t about to run and hide. Let his midnight visitor enter his lair. Let whoever it was find out what that meant when he woke up and caught them…He went into the bathroom and took a leak. Then he went to brush his teeth but found no toothbrush or paste. There wasn’t even soap for a shower, and he rubbed his copper stubble in annoyance. Life wanted him dirty, unable to wash away his fears. Entering his supposed bedroom for the first time in a year, he pulled on some jeans and a hoodie, found a cap and some brand-new trainers, forgotten in a box. In the kitchen, his ablutions consisted of a cold flannel over his face and a healthy slug of Jack.
As the liquor warmed him, Ben closed his eyes and remembered Bardolfe’s invitation, the card trembling in the old man’s hand before he’d departed Paladin’s Court, leaving gouges in the lawn. With no way to carry such a delicate item without travelling home half naked by taxi, Ben had committed the card to memory. If he could recall eight hundred and sixty years, what were a few embossed lines? He was familiar with the British Museum, of course. He had only needed the time and the floor. Bardolfe might think there was nothing to fear. Ben wasn’t so sure. In the Legends bar, Fulk had meant business. On the Brooklyn Bridge, so had the CROWS. The slayer and the witch at least believed that some event had broken the Pact, and obviously it had something to do with the stolen Star. Fulk had boasted that Ben wasn’t alone any more. Babe Cathy had mentioned another, some mysterious she. Revenge drives her on…Apparently the Lore held no weight for either of them; they had attacked him without hesitation. Then there was the doubt on Bardolfe’s face. Ben reckoned that the Guild were out of touch, shut away in their ivory tower in NW3, as far removed from current events as the Lambton armour from public display. No matter how Bardolfe dismissed Fulk’s claim, Ben wasn’t prepared to risk it. Maybe this Professor Winlock could shed some light on things, pluck him from his growing confusion and put him on the path to the truth.
In the meantime, Ben did what any self-respecting myth would do under the circumstances. He went shopping.
Making use of an old travel card found in a kitchen drawer, he caught the tube to Belgravia, where his private bank, the Blain Trust, kept their humble headquarters. Dealing with high-street banks only led to complications, the regular drafting of fake wills creating a paper chain to his existence. It was bad enough securing identities across the ages, let alone having to attend his own funerals, pretending he was some long-lost cousin or foreign nephew, the sole beneficiary of a grand and ancient fortune. The Blain Trust understood his situation. In many ways, the company shared it. A dwarf chieftain ran the small Chapel Street office, dwarves being one of the few Remnant groups that could fit into modern society completely undetected. Beards counted for a lot. Tight lips counted for more. Ben trusted the bank implicitly. Dwarves were natural-born financiers, and Delvin Blain, CEO, had helped Ben out of more than one scrape in the past. Blain filtered Ben’s wealth into several offshore accounts and forged the necessary documents to support his life in the modern world. It was hard to call the treasurer a friend – he was much too gruff for that – but given a choice, Ben would have chosen the Remnant’s trust over any institution in the City, which gambled freely with people’s cash and never picked up the bill.
He spent half an hour in Blain’s cramped office, explaining his recent cash-flow problem to a man who looked more like a walnut and his leggy human assistant. The dwarf tended to favour tall blondes. A password was merely a formality, but Ben gave it anyway and emerged back on to Belgrave Square with a freshly printed plastic card and a six-figure credit limit. Buoyed up, he braved the drizzle and walked the twenty minutes to Knightsbridge, where he took a detour into the library and delved into the reference section, sniffing out a decent dictionary.
First, he looked up syzygy, trying several spellings until he hit the right one:
Syzygy/sizziji/ n. 1. Astron. Conjunction or opposition, esp. of the moon with the sun. 2. A pair of connected or correlated things.
Then he went looking for skent, and this time his search took him straight to the counter, where, after some contemplation, the woman who sat there told him the correct spelling of the word.
Pschent/skent/ n. The double crown worn by Ancient Egyptian kings, symbolic of dominion over Upper and Lower Egypt, previously known as two separate kingdoms.
The Egyptian connection wasn’t lost on him. What was the New York exhibition called? Nubian Footprints. Nubia as in northeast Africa. And then there was Bardolfe, trotting off to watch the eclipse – the syzygy – in Cairo. Ben mulled over the coincidence in the crowds milling through Beauchamp Place, shoppers, tourists and beggars jostling like Trafalgar Square pigeons over scattered seed. He came up with nothing but more anxiety, but at least now he knew what Babe Cathy had been on about on the Brooklyn Bridge. He made sure to bear it in mind.
These whispers from the past made everything around him seem about as enduring as smoke. It only seemed an eye-blink ago that the buildings around him had been a woodland hamlet, home to one of Longshanks’ mansions and a rickety “knight’s bridge” that crossed the River Westbourne. Later, grandeur had come strutting into the suburb, snapping its glamorous fingers at the place and demanding grand oriental exhibitions and white stucco-fronted houses. Through it all, people had come and gone, in girdle, tunic and tux, rising and falling as quickly as flowers in a sped-up film, each one taking their turn while Ben watched them all blossom and fade, blossom and fade…
In this day and age, the River Westbourne ran underground and the robbers who had once haunted the bridge ran the local shops. London was playing a new allegro, a jumbled medley of the ages. Ben learnt the steps of the dance, trudging along the chewing-gum- and litter-strewn pavement. In amongst the Tudor relics, the decrepit survivors of the Great Fire, Christopher Wren’s classic dome competed with the thrust of Gherkin and Shard. The streets he walked were a living museum, one he often found hard to look at, the memories crowding his mind as he strolled into Knightsbridge, Georgian houses filling the spaces where trees, meadows and maidens once rolled. To the north, the Hyde Park Barracks reared its ugly, crate-like head, the final nail in the coffin of scenic.
For all the changes around him, Ben took a strange kind of comfort in them. He lingered on a street corner to breathe it all in, the fumes and the noise, reminding himself…London remained a dragon’s city. A dragon hadn’t graced the Royal Arms of England since the reign of Good Queen Bess, but dragons still clutched the shield of London and guarded the City gates, the most elaborate statue rendered in bronze atop a memorial in Temple Bar. George still fought his dragon at St John’s Church, and several dragons stood sentry on the Holborn Viaduct, their red and silver flanks adorning the bridge. A dragon still carried a cannon on its back in Horse Guards Parade, and a dragon still hung in the National Gallery, the old painting by Uccello showing England’s greatest patron about his usual business, beast slaying and damsel rescue. Dragons still danced on the Chinatown gates, spitting fire at evil spirits. Across the city – the dragon city – the beasts played out their time-worn roles of menace and mascot, peril and protector, resplendent in stone, metal and paint. Ben shook his head, striding out into the traffic with a sense of greater confidence (and without feeling overly concerned whether a cyclist smashed into him or not). The Thames Valley had suited his kind long before anyone had called it that, and the Great Fire aside, there were reasons why some folks called London the Smoke…
London roared and honked in his ears. Shops promised everything from dream holidays to endless beauty and Ben didn’t believe a word of it. He made his way along Brompton Road, brushed by businessmen and avoiding the glances of gum-chewing girls. F
or a brief time he could pretend that he was one of them, some red-stubbled hunk strutting down the road, his lips set wryly in his strong jaw, his hair casually mussed, his everyday clothes hiding more than muscle.
In Gieves & Hawkes, he ignored the assistant’s sceptical stare and selected a single-breasted gabardine suit. The dark, tightly woven fabric whispered class under his hands. The shoes he picked out were Italian. The cufflinks gold. He drew a line at a bow tie and chose a straight one instead, green silk to match his eyes. After this minor dent in his credit card, and equipped for the evening ahead, he stopped to eat a vegetarian wrap and fling some toiletries into a basket along with a fresh bottle of Jack, before heading back home.
For a while, these mundane chores stopped him from thinking about his predicament. But not for long enough. Whatever he would like to believe, or however Bardolfe had dismissed the notion, Ben sensed that his life was in danger.
The symbol etched on his stout red door wouldn’t let him forget it.
SEVEN
Wednesday night. Ben arrived late at the museum. He hurried through the gates and up the steps, passing under the famous Greek pediment, the sculptures above him depicting The Progress of Civilisation. On the left side of the pediment, Man emerged from primal rock as a barbaric, ignorant being. After meeting an angel, a spirit holding the Lamp of Knowledge, Man spanned the carved tableau through a series of acquired skills – painting and science, geometry and drama, music and poetry – until he arrived on the right side of the pediment as Educated Man, learned enough to dominate the world. Someone had explained the scene to Ben years ago and he still had mixed feelings about it. Progress for some, it seemed, always meant decline for others.
He gave his name to an usher in the entrance hall, relieved to find that Sir Maurice Bardolfe had made good on his phone call. The usher led him through the Great Court, their footsteps echoing across acres of polished white tiles. A hundred feet over their head stretched the largest covered roof in Europe. The old reading room, a round white hub edged by broad, curving steps, threw out a tessellated web, a triangulate marvel of steel and glass that made a prison of the dusk. The lights were low, the museum closed to the general public, and Ben passed obelisks and totem poles, relics looming from the settling gloom. The Great Court was a juxtaposition of old and new, the courtyard walls lined with the façades of ancient temples. Despite his qualms about progress, it remained an impressive sight.