Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘The Bride,’ he said from somewhere very near her ear – perhaps he was leaning or kneeling above her? – ‘of Bithynia. The queen of silk, the mulberry maid, touch to the torch hearts of ten thousand lovers, the only immortal. When I was a boy, before all this, I saw her once, fleetingly, below our house in the valley, in among the plantations, passing on her way to the sea at dusk. Whenever I think of it, of her, I can still feel on my face the damp weight of the air that evening, like a tiny bristling chill on the skin above my lips. Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’

  There was silence then, or rather a rushing drone like a low howl. Kay felt the spear all right, remembering the sharp, pointed voices of her parents bouncing off the close walls of the little kitchen; the thrusts and parries; the cold, hardened looks. In her mind’s eye, as the wind bristled and arched its back, she could see her father slumped where he stood, taking it, taking the criticism, as if he were a victim, as if he were just a misunderstood but patient hero. He had his bag slung over his shoulder, and his coat was on; he stood by the door that led out to the hallway, though he made no move to go. ‘She’s a Bride, after all – why don’t you marry her?’ There was never anything he could say to that.

  But Will was in another world. ‘There was a man in my village,’ he said; ‘an old man, half blind, who had when he was young fought for the Bride in the east, before the trading route was opened, and had lost the use of his legs. He would sit by day on a mat outside his door, in the shade of a massive cedar, and recite the stories he had learned on campaign: of her miraculous delivery out of the foam of the sea, of her Acquisition of the Nine Forms, of the Great Marriage. And he might relate, too, if you waited long enough and listened quietly, the prophecy of her passing.’

  Kay nodded heavily, as if she, and not the heavy rocking of the basket in the fore-wind that drove it, were moving her head. Her consciousness seemed to swim sidelong with the motion of her lolling temples, and she thought of opening her eyes. Eye. She couldn’t remember how many eyes she had, but then she didn’t need to see anyway.

  The prophecy of her passing, she thought. Passing.

  ‘Her passing out of this world,’ Will said finally and softly; but both girls were fast asleep.

  By the time Kay woke, everything was different. For one thing, it was dark again. But the air was dry, too, and bitterly cold, as sharp on her bones as cut glass. Ell had crumpled to one side, and lay lightly snoring; to her other side Kay found the wraiths close, sitting opposite one another as they played some game on a board between them. They stared at little black stones and from time to time, without really taking turns, they moved them.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Kay abruptly.

  Will picked up one of the stones and gripped it in his hand. He seemed startled, then relaxed. ‘We’re going to see Sergeant Ghast about your father. We’re going to do something about all this witnessing.’

  ‘And authoring,’ added Flip. He checked a meter and gave the balloon a long pulse of flame.

  ‘But where …?’ Kay threw out her hand to take in the black void around the balloon, through which could only dimly be seen a rough, dry expanse of crag and scrub slowly passing beneath them as the wind drove the balloon ever on. ‘Where is all this? Where are we now?’

  ‘Everything flows down from the mountains,’ said Will. His head lay a little to one side, and he looked at her as if she were an object of great happiness. Every word he said to her he seemed to think a privilege. ‘As with water, so it is also with stories. If we want to get to the start of this one, we have to go up and into the mountain.’

  Kay could feel her blood rising. ‘You’re not answering me,’ she said. Flat, but not sullen.

  ‘There is no answer, really,’ said Will. ‘Or at least, not the kind of answer you want. At first you may feel disappointed, but in your frustration there is, too, perhaps, a little ground of hope.’ He looked down at the board before him, at the shining black stones, and moved first one then another, the first simply and curtly, the second in a long arc. ‘There are times when what is most important is glimpsed – can be glimpsed – only in the dark. There are times when any mountain will do, when it is important that one goes into a mountain rather than the mountain, this particular mountain. We are going to such a place, in such a way, to see a thing that lies higher than other things.’

  Kay wanted to be furious, but with every word Will spoke a little more of her frustration seemed to slip from her. Because he wasn’t ignoring her – quite the opposite. His eyes passed back and forth between her and the board on which his hand still rested, almost as if it were a canvas and he were painting her portrait, almost as if he were studying the lines and lights of her face by the raked glow of the lantern.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand at all.’

  ‘Good,’ said Flip. He was crouching nearer to her, and could reach out his hand and touch her arm. The feel of it, the gentle squeeze near her shoulder – avuncular, delicate strength – buoyed and inflated her. ‘Knowing that you don’t understand is good. It’s usually when people think they understand, when they really think they’re sure of themselves, that they’re dead wrong.’

  ‘What does Ghast want with my father?’

  Will and Flip both stared at the board before them.

  ‘What is he going to do with him?’

  ‘Will,’ said Flip, so quietly that Kay could barely hear him. ‘She is young, but –’

  ‘She is in danger.’

  ‘She is an author. She has come very far already, and very bravely.’

  Will sat back a bit, his arms still hugging his knees and pulling them up off the floor of the basket. ‘To tell you who Ghast is I need to tell you the story of the knights of Bithynia.’

  Bending his head over the board where he and Flip had been playing, Will began to move the small pieces – rounded stones, Kay saw, oblong in shape, of a greyish-blue cast, like the pebbles she sometimes gathered on the Norfolk coast. They swirled in patterns around the board, his long, delicate fingers stirring without pause independently one of the other in continuous curves, loops and eddies. At the end of each finger, at any given moment, one, or two, or a few stones were being gently pushed or pulled, so that Kay could see upon the board a pattern of movement being described in time, the stones collecting together, fanning apart, organizing into groups, trading elements, reconstituting and recombining, then all severing again, constantly changing their distribution across the face of the board. At first this movement bewildered her, and she thought in frustration that she would just turn round, crawl back through the rigging and rejoin Ell beneath the warm blanket. But as she kept watching, she saw that one of the stones was moving differently from the others, and she began to think there might be method to Will’s movements: this stone made short, jerky lurches, mostly in straight lines, though it was passed from finger to finger in the process and its motion was not, for that reason, at first obvious to her. As she watched, it was hit repeatedly by the other stones, and she thought that it must be a very sorry stone to be the victim of so many collisions; but it seemed rather that it was drawing these other stones to it – not least because these, after each hit, seemed to lurch away from the encounter with some of its character, interrupting their more graceful arcs around the board with increasingly stilted movements. As Will’s fingers continued to weave around the board, Kay began not to notice them at all, and could see only the lives of the stones: the way this one, like a virus, began to infect all the others with its short, jerking stutter, as if it were berating them for their beauty and making them ashamed. Kay’s head tightened, and she felt her chin thrusting forward as she tried to swallow a sob.

  ‘Will, stop.’

  It was Flip, placing his hand over the board and silencing Will’s fingers, who brought Kay back to her senses.

  ‘She can read it,’ he said. ‘You’re shouting at her. Stop it.’

  On the board
Flip’s hand tightened, his knuckles white as if he were pushing against Will’s fingers with enormous force.

  Kay looked up at Flip, but Will didn’t acknowledge him at all; he was speaking in a quiet voice, nearly a whisper, and Kay struggled to hear him above the intense thrill of the wind around them.

  ‘For centuries we were a guild, the thousand and one of us, every wraith an equal voice in the halls of Bithynia, each a knight. The left-wraiths, their hands full of stones, plotted the causes, the effects and the ways of things; while the right-wraiths, with their palms stretched open to the inspiration of the air, of dreams, imagined a universe of ideas. Together we sailed with the wind, weaving up the edges of the earth with our songs. Those were days of power, when the left-wraiths, great bards and tellers of tales, drew from the right-wraiths, from the imaginers and prophets, the matter and grounds for the most magical fables, for epics and romances that sprawled across the continents and encompassed the seven oceans. We lived and turned in a kind of balance then, a poised and perfect motion. The plotters revered the imaginers, and the imaginers in turn deferred to the plotters. We seemed to move in a kind of dance without end –’

  ‘Those days were long ago, old friend,’ said Flip. With a gentle gesture, as if he were setting down a delicate, valuable thing upon a precarious surface, he let go of Will’s hand where it lay on the board between them.

  ‘We were happy. Maybe we were too innocent. But we were happy.’ Kay thought the basket was too small to contain the vast void from which Will spoke. ‘But then the balance suddenly seemed to shift, and Ghast, who has forever been as he is now, a voice not so much of story or tale, neither of means nor of motion, no imaginer, no plotter, no visionary or spell-spinner, a force for –’

  ‘Result,’ put in Flip quietly. ‘From the very beginning, all Ghast has ever wanted has been a result.’

  Will nodded. ‘Result, yes. He seemed to be clotting around himself more and more of the left-wraiths. It began to appear that they were actually taking orders from him, and not, as formerly, working by the board. We had worked by the board for a thousand years. And they were moving towards Ghast. Over time Ghast attracted more of the left-wraiths, and then, gradually, the right-wraiths, too, and even some phantasms, until there were so many of them that they dared to put the guild to a vote – and we lost it. And Ghast was made Sergeant of the new order, and now we take that order from him.’

  ‘Except when that order happens to be on page nineteen of a sheet you wiped your nose with,’ said Flip.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Will, but he wasn’t listening.

  Flip rolled his eyes merrily at Kay, but she decided that she wasn’t listening, either. Flip got to his feet, climbed over Kay to the instruments and began fussing with the ropes and valves, checking his dials and muttering off occasional checklists.

  Kay stared hard at the board lying before her; at its irregular, unfinished border, its dark, stained surface that still showed the grain of the tree from which it had been cut, at the sheen that flared from it as the lantern swung unsteadily above. She was quickly spellbound, watching where Will’s fingers now continued circulating absent-mindedly, their tips brushing, nudging the stones against the occasional thuds and jolts of the basket in its forward swing. She could see something new in Will’s patterns, something strange that she felt should not have been there: two stones at the centre – one almost silent and still, but nudged at regular intervals like the tick of a clock; the other extravagant, sweeping in spontaneous arcs, impulsive, lucky. She felt instinctively that she was the first, that her sister was the second. She knew it as surely as if Will had taken out a brush and colours, and painted their portraits.

  Kay looked up to Will. ‘What is this board?’ she asked. ‘What are these stones? Is it a game?’

  Will frowned. ‘No, not a game. Not exactly a game. There is no contest here, no winner or loser – just movement and reading. It’s called a plotting board, and these are plotting stones. No left-wraith will travel without them; they are always with us. It gives us a way to reduce to its simplest elements any story, any situation, any narrative, so that we can see its structure and understand how what is happening now is connected to what has come before, and how what is happening now will lead to other situations and stories in the future.’

  ‘So this is a way of predicting the future? Can you tell me what’s going to happen to me? Can you see if we’ll find our father?’

  ‘No. That’s prophesying. That’s different; there are wraiths who do it, but they don’t do it with plotting boards. They pluck visions out of the air as the eye does stars on a cold night. With plotting boards we just look at the shapes of stories and try to understand the way those shapes work. It’s about probabilities, patterns, habits, the way things tend to fall out. For example, the stone you saw before was Ghast, and the stones around it some of the other wraiths; and I think the interactions between this stone and the others you could see showed the way Ghast came to relate to them, began to exert influence on them, made them into images of himself.’

  Kay nodded, wishing that the blackish-bluish stones, now so still but for the occasional nudging, would swirl back again into their finger-driven dance, gliding across the surface of the mottled board.

  ‘And afterwards, that stone was me,’ she said, touching it, ‘and this one was Ell.’

  Will looked at her sharply, as if she had stung him.

  ‘Or not,’ she offered. ‘Maybe I was wrong.’

  ‘No,’ he answered, softening. His fingers danced again on the board. ‘There are many ways of seeing any particular movement. And there are many others, of course – countless others. The tension I showed you might also be the relation between order and randomness. Or you might see that movement as the spread of disease, communicating itself between, say, mice in a den or rabbits in a warren, and in time contaminating the whole group. There are as many interpretations of that structure as you have time to evolve them; but I told you it was Ghast, and so you saw Ghast.’

  ‘But is what you do on the board true?’ Kay was groping for something, but she wasn’t sure what.

  ‘Models, thoughts and stories are always true. What you do with them is a different thing.’

  At that moment there was a lurch, and Flip – who had been muttering – began to bark and then to shout. Will leaped to a low squat, his head suddenly, carelessly tangled in the rigging, his long fingers clutching at the air. Everything clashed around them, instruments swinging, tumbling, colliding and breaking as the basket leaped wildly through the sky. It was falling. Before she could register what Flip was saying, Kay was halfway back to the rear of the basket, skirting round towards Ell who, roused with the jolt and the noise, blinked with terror into the grey-black of the night. Will fell down to the floor to haul on a winch, and Flip furiously released gas into the envelope of the balloon – trying, Kay guessed, to create lift in the nauseating plunge of free-fall. For a long while she felt as if she were bouncing, weightless, on the moon. Her arms were around Ell when she finally made sense of the shouting: ‘By the air, through the air.’

  Just before they crashed, Kay remembered what, sitting at that plotting board as the commotion began, she had seen: a single, graceful stone still arcing untouched and alone around the margins of the knotted board – slowly, but elegantly, spinning.

  ‘There was a crash.’

  They clustered and shifted before him, long and light forms scarcely able to hold their shape against his squat and solid deformity.

  ‘How many dead?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘None yet.’

  With sudden decision he strode forward. They parted to let him through, like oil before water, then closed in behind him.

  ‘We must prepare a welcome. See that everything is made ready for them, and for the girl. We must bring our new plans forward.’

  The nearest, being the most servile as well as the most ambitious, saw his opportunity.

  ‘We have plotted
it on the board, and –’

  The rebuke was total, even as the stride unbroken.

  ‘Make no mention of your grandmother’s superstitions. Not to me. I will not have your stones and swirling sorceries here.’

  They passed in a little group into a large and open hall. Ghast took the centre and spun around slowly. He held his knotted stubs of hands up to the vast reach of the room.

  ‘Call me your master. The master of all this.’

  ‘You are the only master in the mountain.’

  ‘Mine is the only hand that can command. Mine is the only fist. And yet I am not the only master.’

  In the hall a hundred lights were lighted.

  ‘Be gentle with the girl. She is a means to my end. And with her sister – however it falls out.’ He waved his hand in annoyance. ‘But as for the other, spare neither strokes nor speeches. Net him about with lies. He must break, and soon.’

  Ghast

  If the flying had been cold and turbulent, if it had seemed sometimes difficult and nauseating, the sudden final descent of the balloon – though short – was far worse. Kay’s stomach heaved into the tips of her fingers, and her throat, dry and knotted like the gall of an oak, choked her. She almost felt relief when, after a few seconds, the basket crashed into what sounded like rocky ground. In a slow havoc it began to drag, splinter and throb all at once. The envelope of the balloon continued to deflate, and pulled first rigging then cloth all around them. Flip must have put out the fire, she thought, because for the first time since the morning it was pitch-dark. Time moved so slowly that Kay felt oddly as if she had a lot of time to think as she gripped Ell to her, groping for air with a free hand and continuing to wedge herself into the cavity under the basket’s rim. She caught some breath and gradually felt the terrible forward crushing of the basket ease towards rest. And then all was quiet.