‘Katharine,’ said Kay. ‘My name is Katharine Worth-More.’
The old man smiled broadly, revealing a thousand furrows in his lean cheeks, above his eyes, and between his mouth and chin. ‘Yes. Katharine,’ he answered. He shifted his weight on to the pole, and drove the boat slowly in to the shore where she stood. ‘And I am Phantastes, the last imaginer,’ he said as the front of the long punt began to grate against the rocky soil of the ground before Kay’s feet. ‘Or very nearly the last.’
Part Two
* * *
WEFT
Integration
Guiding the punt across the underground lake, Phantastes pulled up alongside a cleft in the rock where water cascaded continuously from a gap very high up. It was a clean, clear stream, diverted, said the old wraith, from a reservoir. Kay doused her hair and washed her hands and face, and then Phantastes pushed the boat back out into the lake and made for the far shore.
Alert now, and shivering, Kay saw a small island – not big enough for five people to stand on, she thought. In the centre stood the massive remains of a giant tree, jagged and broken, thrusting up towards the ceiling.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘How did this get here?’
Phantastes continued gently guiding the boat towards the island. ‘When this tree first germinated, no more than a seedling, it stood in the middle of a low lagoon, a place where the Nile canals flooded with fresh water a wide area of low-lying marshland. It was only thousands of years later that the silt, constantly collecting around this place, enclosed it and then buried it. Long before that, the great vaulted roof that –’ and here he turned his head upwards, leaning on the long pole and gesturing with his arm to take in the whole cavern – ‘you do not see above you was built: one of the grandest, most beautiful temples ever designed, and the crowning architectural achievement of a great society. Of course, no one else now knows that it is here, or that it is of such antiquity. Only I know.’
Kay cocked her head to the left. ‘But they must know. I came down that duct from the sewage tunnel – someone must have built that.’
The boat made no sound at all as it drew up on the shore of the island. Phantastes held out his hand to help Kay ashore. Their quiet movements felt like reverence.
‘Did you think that was a sewer?’ the old wraith answered, smiling as he took a seat on one of the gnarled roots of the old trunk. ‘No, it was no duct that brought you here. No common sewer. The water that flows into the temple lagoon through that passage is a little purer than that. I dug it out myself, and lined it with grouted stone. It took me many years.’ He paused and looked at his withered hands where they rested gently one upon the other on his lap. ‘But I’m pleased you thought it was a drain. No one had ever noticed it until you slipped down it.’
Kay looked closely at his face, which was level with her own as she stood a metre or so away, at the edge of the tiny island. The skin beneath his eyes had become cockled over the years, gathering up into the inner corners by his hooked nose and radiating out in loose folds across cheeks that ridged up when he smiled. In this light, the colour of his face hung somewhere between brown and grey. Some of the small hairs around his mouth waved minutely in the air as he breathed. Even when he frowned he seemed kind, as if the frown were a comma between two smiles. ‘But all that time you spent digging it out,’ she said at last, voicing the question on which she had paused to regard him. ‘Why?’
‘Because when I arrived here –’ and for the second time he straightened, and swung his arm out wide to take in the whole cavern – ‘all this was dry. For thousands of years before that this marshland had been kept wet – even under the dome of the great temple – by the flooding of the Nile; but at last the silt, covering over the hidden temple, had cut the water off completely. And when the city above began to leach so much of the water away, and then other cities upstream; and fields, with their irrigation projects, and who knows what else – houses, swimming pools – then the marsh died completely. And if it hadn’t been for me –’ and he patted the root on which he sat – ‘all this would have died, too.’
‘But surely it is dead,’ said Kay. ‘It’s an old stump.’
At this Phantastes looked up sharply, his mouth suddenly set hard. Then he softened, and his eyes flattened as he smiled again, and he said, rising, ‘Come see, come look.’
Just opposite where they had been sitting, out of sight of the boat, a deep gash in the old trunk ran almost to the ground, making a jagged, steep V. The brittle husk and shell of the old tree was more than five centimetres deep, and within that Kay thought there was nothing.
‘Look inside,’ said Phantastes quietly, and he stood back so that she might climb up on to one of the roots and negotiate a passage for her head between the two steeply sloping edges of the trunk. At first it was so dark that she thought she was looking down a well, or into the earth itself; but after a few moments her eyes adjusted to the near-darkness and she could just make out, faintly, five hand-sized, oval leaves that were perhaps green, reaching out from a central stem that was thirty centimetres or more in height. It shot out from a crack in the weathered wood of the centre of the trunk, about a metre in diameter, and grew straight upwards. Kay hastily pulled her head out of the hole, bumping herself painfully on the right ear as she spun round too soon.
‘But how is it growing here? It’s so dark!’
‘It is the deepest well that holds the freshest water. Wait a few moments,’ Phantastes said, ‘and you will see the other little alteration I made to the Great Temple of Osiris.’
Kay stood there, leaning against the side of the cleft trunk, her heart beating fast. Osiris. For years she had heard the stories at bedtime, all of them: Osiris’ enmity with his brother, Set; his murder and dismemberment; Isis’ long and patient search, with the erection of a thousand temples all over Egypt. Her discovery of her husband’s body in a cedar box lying at the centre of a magnificent tree. But that tree was in –
‘Byblos,’ said Phantastes. ‘Yes, I know, it was in Byblos. But the priests of Osiris took a cutting from that tree and planted it here, at the very centre of the temple, in the marsh where the goddess later buried his body. And its roots grew down into his flesh, and it towered within the temple, the tips of its branches scraping against the stones of the vault above.’
‘But how?’ Kay said as a sense of the sanctity of this place began to dawn upon her. ‘How did the tree grow inside the temple? Didn’t it need light? Doesn’t this tree need light?’ She paused, staring at Phantastes. He said nothing. ‘A tree can’t grow in a cave, underground.’
‘Look,’ he said at last, tilting his chin upwards to the vault.
She followed his eyes with her own. For some reason she could not explain, her heart was hammering in her chest. The air was lightening very slightly around the cavern, and for the first time she could see the whole vault above. But she was totally unprepared for what happened next. A narrow beam of light suddenly flared from a hole in the roof, straight down the centre of the shaft of the gigantic old stump, and illuminated the tiny plant growing at its centre. Kay watched in wonder as the beam of light seemed to grow in intensity, transforming the little patch of wood at the centre of the stump from which the sapling sprang into a tiny, brilliant piece of daylight. It went on for about five minutes, during which she tried to stop time, to draw it out, to take in more of the deep, woody greenness of the tiny plant, the delicate hairs bristling under its five fanning leaves, the glistening luminescence of its taut stem.
This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
But then, as abruptly as it had begun, it ended, and the darkness again put out the light. Tears started in Kay’s dimmed eyes. The sight of that struggling, tiny stem with its delicate, childlike leaves – bathed in light – cast back into the darkness – it was too much.
‘Five minutes a day is all I could manage,’ said Phantastes quietly as he put his hand on her head. ‘Don’t cry. It’s enough.’
Kay turned and sat heavily on the upper roots. It hadn’t felt like five minutes.
‘It took me many years even to get that much. And that was before I knew for sure whether the tree still had life in it. Although I always suspected,’ he said, patting the desiccated trunk with his mottled, grey-veined hand, ‘that it did. First I had to find a little money – here and there – and then drive some people from their homes, which I did not much enjoy. It was necessary to demolish many buildings while I looked for the right place to dig. And then, after I finally found it, I lost many more years in making mirrors and glasses to focus the light. It doesn’t work perfectly even now, and it doesn’t last long, but the leaves get a little bit of light every morning. And with the river washing into the temple several times a day now, the conditions are improving. Who knows but, a few years from now, this green stem may grow thick and stout enough to bear its own fruit – the shellfruit of the tree of Byblos, whorled like the shuttle, each one a rife and mysterious trove of tiny seeds, and in every seed the promise of new life, new growth, stems, trunks, a thousand branches, leaves and fruit, harvest on harvest past imagining. All that may be. But for now, it is just enough.’
Kay was crying quietly.
‘Daughter,’ said the old wraith. ‘Even small, even delicate things can sometimes be remarkably resilient.’
For no reason she could name, all Kay’s urgency suddenly came striking back into her heart and lungs, pressing down on her chest like heavy stones. The sorrow that had been in her eyes suddenly gripped her heart, and she thought of Ell, remembered her father, remembered her mother at home, sitting at her desk behind the closed door of her room, sobbing quietly the night before they left – the night before Christmas. Where was she now? What had she thought when she woke up the next morning to find her daughters gone? What had she made of Kay’s hastily scrawled note? We are going to find Dad. We will be back soon. We love you, she had written, crammed in tiny letters on to the back of Will’s card, and left in the middle of Ell’s neatly made bed. Suddenly Kay felt she couldn’t breathe at all. She choked; although the choke sounded more like a sob. ‘Why am I here?’
She spoke before she meant to. Her voice echoed for a few moments, and then there was silence.
Phantastes sat down next to her on the stump.
‘Kay,’ he said, and his tone was much more familiar now, no more the tall and commanding presence he had been. He held out the palm of his right hand, extended before her. It seemed wonderfully still, open and capacious. Her eye was drawn instantly to its centre where the lines crossed, where the contour of finger, sinew, muscle and callus produced a slight cupping or hollow. ‘I am not one of those left-wraiths who plots people’s movements, as if a man or a woman or a child were no more than a little knot of likelihoods. I am an imaginer. For better or for worse, I see the insides of things. Tell me what is in your heart.’
Kay wanted to tell him what they had lost. She wanted to tell him about sitting at the kitchen table at home, where the lamp swung from the ceiling and gave a warm, golden glow. She wanted to tell him how her parents were seated opposite her, her mother gently stroking the back of her father’s hand while he read a book and she, with a pencil, planned a new painting – a big one – sketching out ideas and themes on to page after page of her notebook. She wanted to tell him how Ell liked to pretend that she had homework, too, so that at the end of the evening, when Kay presented her books to her parents, they could disappear upstairs together to play. But it was all so normal. Everything they had lost was so normal. One by one these things had slipped away: first her parents had begun to quarrel, and no one stroked the back of anyone’s hand. The notebook, her mother had lost, or put in a drawer. Then her father – he was always out working late, or away on some trip, and Kay was forever in her room, making lists of things she planned to do, or wanted. And Ell stood in the kitchen, turning the light on and off, over and over, until no one could stand her. Why did she do that? Kay wanted to tell Phantastes all this.
‘I let her go. I lost her. It was because I wasn’t watching. I thought it was all about me. I let her go. I let all of them go.’
Phantastes’ reply was swift. ‘No, Katharine. It’s not your fault.’
‘But I’m still the only one who can get them back. I’m the only one who can make it right. And I feel like I’ll never get to go home again. Not to the home I want.’
‘Your father said much the same thing to me once, in this very place.’
Kay looked up sharply, her chin cutting a slicing angle against her neck as she turned to gape at the old wraith. ‘How do you –?’
‘Do you think I do not know your father?’ Kay stared at him in mute unimagining. ‘Do you think he and I have not walked in the moonlight on the sands of Alexandria? That he and I have not sailed against the wind off the coast of Anatolia? That he and I have not gathered mulberries in Grecian groves? No, daughter, your father and I are old friends, colleagues and sworn brothers in a struggle far greater than you have yet glimpsed or imagined. A struggle in which Ghast is, has always been, our greatest and most dangerous enemy. And why do you think Ghast wanted your father dispersed, if not because he knew that Ned More was working for me?’
‘Working for you?’ Kay asked, her mouth hanging open and the words only half pronounced. Her lips, like her eyes, felt numb.
‘Among the right-wraiths, your father is known as the Builder. For years he has been excavating around the site of the ancient – and neglected – seat of the Honourable Society of Wraiths and Phantasms in Bithynia –’
Kay nodded with vigour. This was something she recognized. The Fragments Project. ‘He’s an archaeologist,’ she said.
‘But not as an archaeologist. No, your father is not studying the place because he wants to understand the past; he is rebuilding it because he wants to shape its future.’
‘But Will said –’
‘Will does not yet know. It would be too dangerous to tell him because, above all others, Ghast keeps him under constant watch.’
‘Watch?’ asked Kay. ‘Why?’
Phantastes stirred the water at the edge of the little island with the pole, which he had taken up again from where it was leaning against the old trunk. ‘Will may fumble sometimes. He may seem a little meek, a little broken. But do not underestimate him. There is no finer wraith in the mountain.’
Then why can’t he help me?
‘We must help him.’
Kay’s whole body stiffened. Even in the low light, Phantastes saw it.
‘We will find your sister, Katharine. And your father. We will save him. We will do it together. But to bring the Honourable Society back to Bithynia, to save Will from Ghast – this is what Ned More wants, too. You must help me now to keep Will safe. And you must help me to keep something else safe. It is far too dangerous for me to hold on to it.’ Here Phantastes leaned down to the boat and retrieved the book he had been holding before, when Kay first glimpsed him coming out of the darkness of the cavern. Only it could not be a book because, after unhooking a tiny clasp, Phantastes had opened it to reveal a fist-sized, lustrous white object inside. The book was a box, she realized, and it held something very beautiful. In a couple of steps Phantastes was at her side, and he offered it to her.
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I left the mountain in order to protect this from Ghast. It belongs to Will, but he wouldn’t mind.’ He smiled, holding out the box again.
Kay took the softly shining, smooth object, but cautiously, afraid it might be brittle like glass and break in her hands; or that it might be slippery, and drop to shatter on the small rocks at her feet. But it was heavy enough, and she could grip it easily. She turned it over in her hands. It was whorled like a shell and bone-smooth, cool to the touch. Here and there it was studded with something that, in the light, might have proved to be a gem or diamond. As she turned it over, she noticed that it was perforated with tiny holes.
‘Hold it up to your mouth,’ Phantastes s
aid, ‘and blow.’
She blew. At first she did not find just the right aperture, but in a moment she could feel the wind forcing a passage into one of the many tiny gaps. A deep, sonorous drone came vibrating out of the stone, and rang in the cavern. The bones in her shoulders shook with the heavy, sugary resonance of the tone; it seemed, as her lungs began to exhaust themselves, that the vibrations were spreading down into her ribs, so that her whole torso began to quiver, and she fought for the note not to end. When at last it did, she suddenly held the glassy stone away from her mouth, scrutinizing it again, then tried a different hole. This time the pitch was higher, and it oscillated like a wave breaking on the shore. Another clashed like swords, high and metallic. Another moaned – the voice of a grieving father at the grave of his only child. She held the stone out in astonishment.
Twelve Nights Page 14