Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘Now we’re in the Quarries. It’s not much, but this is where we live. Where the wraiths live, I mean. It’s an unspoken rule that we don’t speak in the Quarries – well, it would be unspoken, wouldn’t it?’ He smiled. ‘Here we are wordless, though in your case I think anyone would make an exception. Still, try to keep your voices down. I’ll show you where you can sleep.’

  Taking the girls by the hand again, Will led them ever down, this time by a short, steep flight of steps into what felt at first like a pit. When they hit the bottom of the steps and turned through a gash in the wall, they found themselves in another room with a kind of window to one side, and open above to the roof of the cave. Lanterns were hung here and there. Exhausted, Kay slumped to the floor, cradling Ell on her lap. Will pushed a heavy wooden door shut behind them, put his hand to the key in the lock, then hesitated – and, thinking better of it, left it alone. From the table he took a dark loaf of bread, broke it and handed two wedges to the girls. It was the sort of thing that, normally, they would both have refused: brown, almost black, rough, dry. But now Kay ate hungrily. As she chewed, the sound of water, louder here, came to her ears.

  ‘Are we near a river?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, we are, of sorts,’ said Will, now taking a stone jug and pouring some water into small clay beakers that he handed to the girls. ‘You’re drinking it. When we were delving here, centuries ago, we exposed one of the old currents from the glacial melt to the east, tunnelling here through the soft stone of the mountain’s lower buttress. We dug it out and quarried around it, which left us with a very useful water supply and a continuous source of beautiful music. This may not be home, but it has its consolations.’

  ‘And the stars?’ Kay asked, pointing weakly up.

  ‘We cut shafts directly up through the mountain there to the sunlight. The shafts help to circulate the air, and they are, you have to admit, spectacular.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Cutting them was my idea.’

  Kay thought wearily that it must be day. How was it day. What were they doing. Where were they. She was too tired to ask any questions; she felt them sputtering in her throat like wet candles.

  ‘Since coming back into the mountain, we do everything here but our work.’ Will pulled over a small table, along with two chairs that had been left by the wall. He put each of the girls on a chair, then sat on the floor, facing them. ‘You must have a thousand questions,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear them. Quietly.’

  Kay tried to focus. She leaned away into the hard struts of the straight-backed wooden chair, pressing her bones against the ridges. She rubbed them painfully from side to side as she looked about the room, willing herself to be alert. In some places it had been chiselled out of the rock, in others practically gouged. Across the ceiling and floor, the rough strokes of the hammers were sometimes still visible, the surfaces left unfinished, creating dips and rises everywhere. But around the window and the door that stood opposite the gap through which they had come in, it was different. Here with fine tools some workman had carved every edge precisely, patiently cutting out figures in the stone, pillars and fluting; and, though there was no system to it – it seemed to be a haphazard collage – it was beautiful; like opening the door of an old wardrobe, Kay thought, and finding it crammed to bursting with a snowy forest. Now that her eyes had grown accustomed to the low light, she realized that the stone was not exactly the dull grey of granite but a faint blue, like the sky in the east the moment before dusk.

  ‘Why did you quarry here? Where is all this?’ she asked, lifting her left hand again and gesturing around, beyond the door. The door Will had almost locked. Had he intended to lock someone out? Or was he about to lock them in?

  Will frowned quickly at her question, as if he had been stung by a wasp, and clasped his arms around his knees, digging in his chin. ‘In Bithynia,’ he said, his voice almost as hollow, almost as faint, as an echo. His eyes closed, and Kay could tell, as she had on the balloon, that more was coming, if she were only to wait. ‘From the Quarries we carved the sky-stone and floated it down the river to the sea. From the mine below the mountain we dug out gold and silver, rich veins with which we threaded the living wood of our halls. Now the Quarries are our home, and the mines –’

  But Ell cut in: ‘What did he mean, that … loud man, when he said he had “finished with him”? Is our dad here?’

  Will opened his eyes but did not look up. They were wet with tears. At first Kay wondered if the sorrow was for his home; but then suddenly she felt she knew why he had thought to lock the door, why she had lost her interest in questions. She willed him to stop, not to say the words. Not in front of Ell. She wanted to stand up, to lean over, to clap her hands over his mouth. But instead she sat frozen, the high back of the chair cleaving into the back of her skull.

  ‘No. He isn’t here,’ Will started, his voice rising – but then he stopped. With a finger of his right hand he followed the ridges of the textured floor of the cave, their ups and downs, their shunts and returns, their half-moons and careening circles. Kay watched this movement closely, aware that its expressive patterning, like the movement of the stones on the plotting board, was rich with significance. Then the finger began to lift, and was soon tapping out random points across the floor, as if mapping raindrops or pecking for grain. ‘No,’ Will said quietly, his tone softer, ‘no, he isn’t here.’

  ‘Then where is he?’

  The finger went on tapping, tapping. Kay watched it for a while, then looked over at her sister. Although Ell sat a head lower than her on the next chair, her expression was so alert, her eyes so wide and her strawberry hair so electric with her absorption that Kay felt as if she herself were instead looking up at her sister.

  ‘After removal,’ Will said quietly, ‘dispersal.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Ell asked, not missing a beat. She swivelled towards Kay. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  Will was silent, but his finger still plucked and dived, though it was slowing. Kay wanted to reach out to Ell: she understood enough of what ‘dispersal’ meant to know that it sounded bad, horrible, wrong. Too much like ‘disposal’. But Ell was still strong and resolute in her defiance.

  Will looked up and unfurled his hands over the floor, palms down, as if warming them on the creases and hollows of its rough pattern. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said.

  The little girl shot back, ‘I don’t want a story. I want to get our dad.’ She had not even flinched, let alone budged.

  ‘Still, this is a story that is about getting. Sometimes there are truths and comforts and ways in stories that are not so apparent outside stories. Sometimes stories are answers, or make answers possible. Sometimes they are the mothers of answers.’ He was staring hard at Kay now, directly into her eyes. When she met his gaze, she thought his eyes were the calmest, most ice-like blue she had ever seen. She felt as if tears might well out of her fingertips.

  ‘Many hundreds of years ago, before histories were written down in books, great cities and nations told stories about themselves as a way of remembering who they were, where they had come from and what they wanted for themselves and their children. The men and women who told these stories were poets, and because they had to remember huge numbers of facts – names, places, events, in a web of causes and consequences spanning hundreds, even thousands, of years – they had to come up with ways of making their memories stronger. More secure. So they fashioned their stories into rhythms and rhymes, lines and verses, and decorated them with distinctive patterns of language that would help them to put every piece of every story in exactly the right place every time they told it. And they told their stories often: every night, sometimes to one or two children, sometimes to crowds gathered around a great fire or under the stars on a summer evening, they remembered, and they witnessed, and they prophesied.’

  As Will spoke and his finger wove across the stone, Kay felt his tone change, and change again. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope, where the colours an
d shapes shift as it turns, building patterns as delicate as a butterfly’s wings. She heard kindness and compassion, brilliance and vision, and beneath it all a music she was sure she knew: the music of her father’s voice, reading, reading, reading in the dark of the night. Ell held out her hand and Kay took it; somehow they managed to slip to the floor, and sat clasped together in the shadow of Will’s voice.

  ‘Now, turning your story in just such a way that it was most beautiful, most striking, most memorable was a great skill and a gift – something that could be learned, but only by those who were born with a readiness to it. And so famous families of poets arose, men and women with that readiness, who were trained in the mysteries of speaking and who conserved the traditions of the nations, and the cities, and the families. And they competed with one another, and some were considered lesser, others better, and some very few the best.

  ‘Among the best – by far the most celebrated, and indeed the greatest – was the poet Orpheus. He was born the only son of a long line of singers, and the talent ran so rife in him it was said that he himself would never have children, that he gave so much to his tellings, he had nothing left to beget. Stories must be his children. Everywhere he went, he went singing, and in his hands, if there was no harp, still his fingers danced in the air, plucking notes from the breezes, or from the rain, or from shafts of light that dropped at morning and evening between the clouds. As an infant, before even he learned to speak, he learned the rhythms and tones of the ancient modes and melodies, and they were constantly in his throat. And what a throat: like that of a swan for beauty, of a nightingale for song; for strength like that of a wrestler. Beauty and power joined in every syllable, in every line and stanza.’

  ‘Was his father proud of him?’ asked Ell. Kay glanced sharply across, annoyed at her for breaking the flow of the tale, annoyed at herself for being annoyed. Ell was sleepy. Her eyelids were sinking.

  ‘Yes, very proud,’ said Will. ‘For he quickly mastered all the traditional tales on which his father’s reputation had been founded. He sang the great battle stories, with their interludes of love, and the fortunes of the famous dynasties descended from the heroes and the gods. As a young man, he was already capable of a depth and range of narrative, memory and passion usually reached by only the best singers in their prime. It had become a speculation on everyone’s lips: where would this great artist go next? Where would he find his material? It was the custom in those days for poets to rely on certain tricks of the memory to make the delivery of their songs easier – certain elements of a song would resurface again and again, like bells ringing: four- or five-word phrases, sometimes slightly altered but still roughly the same, returning to the verse like a refrain. This made the poet’s load lighter, but also delighted the audience: there is nothing more satisfying than the return of something familiar. There is nothing like ease in the midst of difficulty, nothing like cool water at the height of a hot day. Orpheus, beyond all the other poets of his age, had become adept at this technique, and was famed for the subtle ways in which he could lay down a theme or a motif, let it change or metamorphose and then lie fallow before reviving it, calling it back into the light. Where other poets would make in their poems a web of themes, some of which they caught up again, and others not, it was said that Orpheus never lost a single word. It was said that he could let a word die and go to hell, but he would ransom it back again before the poem was done.’

  Kay bristled. Go to hell, she thought.

  Ell hadn’t drifted off. ‘No one comes back from hell,’ she said.

  Will’s finger stopped in the air, and he raised his head to look at the girls, each in turn, for a long moment. His eyes seemed full of care for them, as if they were small and helpless. ‘Should I keep going?’ he asked.

  Kay nodded. Will’s finger began to move and move. It took him almost a minute to join his voice to it again.

  ‘It was maybe inevitable that so skilled and able a craftsman should fall in love with the Bride. She never comes freely to those who love her. She must be sought, though never directly. One day her lovers find her as they go about their trade. So did Orpheus as he sang beneath a spreading plane tree in a valley in Macedonia. He had been reciting one of the older tales – a history of the making of the world. The best stories pose impossible questions: where was the creation that made this creator? How could he make, and be by that making made? As Orpheus sang, turning and returning to the problem of his art, the nature that fostered it and the art that cultivated that nature, he began to lose control of his tale. Instead, it started to take a purpose and a length of its own, gathering by digressions great folds and skirts, pleated narratives hanging from the main hem. Story after story ribboned from his aching tongue. Searching for one thing, for one great story, he made many. It was far into the night before, in a mood created by his exhaustion and the accelerating rhythm of his invention, he began to see something new, something dazzling. In a voice of sudden thunder he threw it from him like a bolt: the very impossibility of the world was its cause. This is that quality of the Bride which is called her most arcane.

  ‘That night, through a copse at the edge of the village Orpheus glimpsed the Bride for the first time. She wore the same loose-fitting white gown as always, the garment that had first given her her name. She moved silently and at the edge of his vision between the trees. The Bride only ever appeared by means of some other thing, through some other thing, as if she were a light in water or the sudden hues hanging in the air after a storm. Orpheus could feel this, could feel that he must not look at her; and as he looked away with the song running through his mind and his ears, her white gown drifted towards him until he could feel her breath weaving through the hair on the back of his neck. He thought then that, if he lost her, and the touch he knew she was about to bestow, he would never be able to invite her presence again. He was wrong. It was only his first time.’

  The Bride, Kay thought. ‘The Bride,’ she said. ‘Who is that? My father works on her.’

  Will’s finger kept moving, this time dancing over the stone like a feather floating on water. ‘No one knows who she is,’ he said softly.

  ‘But Orpheus saw her. You said he saw her. So what does she look like? Who is she?’

  ‘She is that thing that no one can ever see clearly. The thing you can almost grasp, the thing you can very nearly make out, but then it eludes you – she is what gets away, like a thought or a vision at the moment you start from sleep, like the strand you lose when you look at the twine. Or when you love someone very, very much, and you think you might almost burst – she is the bursting.’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ Kay cried, as if she would cry, even though she knew that her heart and her head were clear and dry. ‘He can never see her.’

  ‘Never,’ agreed Will.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ said Kay, tightening her arms around Ell, whose warm, huddled body had sagged into sleep.

  ‘He couldn’t stand it, either. The song ended for Orpheus that night, and he did lose the Bride; but she came again and again. He became so practised at invoking the Bride that soon he had only to slip into that familiar mode of thinking or telling, and he would catch sight of her white shift, or hear the light step of her sandals on the grass behind him. It was never the same thoughts, of course – a thought is like the track of a cartwheel in the dirt of a road: the more you think it, the more you run it down the road, the more it wears in, becoming a rut; and a rut slops up and chokes the passage, and that is fatal to the rhythm of the Bride. Always, then, he sought out new stories, new rhythms, new modes in which his thought might tumble over itself, like a wave endlessly reverberating against a shore but never breaking; so that he might live every day in the expectation of a presence, the sense of companionship and witness that he had never before had occasion to feel.

  ‘What the poet had not counted upon, but what others saw in him from the start, was the way this hunger for the Bride was changing him. He was gradually being torn apart fro
m within. As he searched tirelessly for more experiences, more stories, more rhythms, more forms, always after a new means by which he might summon the beautiful, fugitive figure that was almost within his reach, it was true that his art soared, and that he became the greatest poet of all the ages. But his innovations and experimentations, his long nights without sleep and days without rest, the months after months when he stood chanting ever new, ever more complex and moving tales – all this came at a price. The love of the Bride gouged him, scooped at him, quarried him. His eyes sank in his head and his lips paled and cracked; his hair by strands came loose and was shed; his muscles dwindled and his skin grew sallow; his tongue dried; and in his temper and thought, too, he grew always more brittle, less resilient. Finally, one day, coming out of the mountains of Thessalia and taking a seat in a crowded market to tell a variation on the most ancient narrative of the flood, the inevitable occurred. Orpheus’ rhythm had become so strong that the Bride, rather than stalking silently behind him, appeared to be running towards him from far off. And as he sang, the faces expectant and full of delight around him, at last he looked up, full into her face as she approached. And at that moment, slowing, she reached out her arm and touched him.’

  In the long afterlight cast by the starry holes in the roof of the cave, Will looked slowly down at the faces of the two girls, now slumped against each other on the ground beside him, in one another’s arms, the regular, almost silent rise and fall of their breaths indicating how fast asleep they had fallen. He drew with his finger absently on the rock of the cave floor, tracing ellipses.