‘You want me to keep this?’ she asked. It was the most beautifully made thing she had ever handled.
‘The voice of the shuttle,’ said Phantastes quietly. ‘And the first note you sounded was that of love. Yes,’ he went on. ‘I almost think you should be the one to carry it for Will – to bear it, to keep it for him.’ He shook his bowed head slowly, and Kay saw a tear drop from the tip of his nose. But he looked up, his eyes shining, and held out the box for her to replace the shuttle. ‘Come,’ he said more briskly, stowing the box in the punt and taking up the pole again. Kay followed him, fluid with questions, and began asking them the moment she was seated, looking up at the old wraith as he pushed them round the island and towards the near shore behind it.
‘Is the shuttle Will’s, then?’
‘I suppose neither he nor that worthless Philip has told you just who Will is,’ said Phantastes, grinning so that the etched lines of his face stretched, soaking in the inky light.
‘No,’ Kay answered.
‘Then we will let him tell you himself, in his own way. Next question.’
‘How did you know that Ghast had taken my sister and my father?’
‘Not all the wispers are loyal to Ghast – even those he trusts most answer in their quiet ways to me. Despite themselves sometimes. I have been taking regular reports on him, and on you, for quite some time.’
Phantastes grinned at her again, now so widely and impishly that his ears flexed. ‘Have a look at the top of the box there –’ he gestured down below his feet to where the shuttle lay in its wooden case – ‘and I think you might put a few things together.’
Kay looked. Carved into the dark wood of the lid was a shape which she had to trace with her finger before she could resolve it completely: a slender snake entwined with a sword. She knew that symbol. She looked up quickly. ‘Rex, the old porter at my father’s office!’
‘Is that how he hid himself?’ Phantastes asked, chuckling. ‘Yes, he’s one of mine. That was a clever ploy of his, yes. I sent him to recover several vital items, including that shuttle, from your father’s study. Next question.’
‘Where has Ghast taken my father and my sister? How do we get them back?’
Phantastes didn’t answer. They were almost at the shore and, with a wide sweep of the punt pole, he gracefully swung the boat parallel with the long stone plinth on to which they both immediately stepped. Kay turned to him as he secured the punt, and said to his hunched back, ‘I mean it. Where are they?’
‘First we will have to find Will and Philip,’ he answered, neither turning round nor looking up. ‘I have a feeling they will be waiting for us in the compound above. I need to know one or two things before we can start making preparations for integration.’ He turned on his heel and, squatting, placed his hands on the ground before him. He looked straight into Kay’s eyes. ‘But we will find them, and we will recover them.’
Kay smiled. If Will gave her hope, Phantastes made her feel safe.
The old wraith rose and set off at pace towards a low door; here a passage led off the landing. Kay followed, almost skipping. Her clothes had almost dried in the warm draughts that stirred the cavern, and as she moved she felt suddenly light. They went up several slightly sloping tunnels, and through one or two open gates.
‘The flush –’ Kay began.
‘Is finished for the day,’ Phantastes called over his shoulder. ‘Anyway, these passages do not connect to the sewerage system. These are the old corridors of the temple buildings, which I excavated and restored. And in a moment you can see my most ambitious work.’
They went round a few tight corners, and then, without warning, passed through a low door into a huge, open atrium; round the outside a staircase spiralled upwards as far as the eye could see.
‘I confess I cheated a bit. We’re actually inside an old tower – like everything else, engulfed by the silt – which I dug, or rather flushed, out. Well, dug and flushed. All the sediment that used to fill it is back in the lake,’ he said, ‘where it belongs. The stairs –’ which they were already climbing – ‘were mostly already here. I made some improvements and repairs. It’s a wonderful commute,’ he added, laughing over his shoulder at her: she was struggling to keep pace as they rose through the increasingly brighter air towards the top. The atrium seemed to be narrowing as they climbed, until finally it was little more than a circular stone stairwell. Light came from the centre of the roof – very close now – and Kay realized that it was the sun shining through a skylight, and that they had reached ground level again. Just under the skylight, a door stood shut; pulling a ring of keys from the belt beneath his robe, Phantastes quickly opened it. The heavy wood swung wide to reveal an ordinary white-walled room, with sunlight pouring in from two open windows on the left. It dazzled Kay’s eyes, and she squinted to see the wooden trestle table standing in the centre, and on it a pile of what looked like dried leaves. Around the walls, tall bookshelves sagged under masses of volumes of every size. The ceiling was painted sky-blue.
‘Welcome to my home,’ said Phantastes.
He closed the door behind them and locked it. No sooner had he replaced the keys at his belt than a small, balding, wizened wraith scurried in through the door opposite and began to push the dried leaves into a heap, with the same motion setting down two or three heavy books and opening them. Phantastes joined him at the table, peering down at the huge folio volumes as the little man opened them and began, using a small rule, to scan through lines of heavily inked Gothic print.
‘Have you found it yet?’ said Phantastes quietly, but with authority and urgency.
Kay looked intently at the dark, almost hairless head as it pored over the books. The little wraith said nothing for a moment, but kept running his nimble hands back and forth across the lines of text, mumbling softly to himself. When he looked up at last, he blinked several times in the way someone might clear his throat. And then he cleared his throat.
‘Nothing yet. But the maker is still at the fountain, and it may be that I have not remembered all that there is to recall.’
‘Keep listening to him,’ Phantastes said, setting his hand on the other wraith’s slender arm. ‘It will come to him in time.’ The old wraith then turned round, indicating Kay with his arm, and said, ‘The young man’s daughter. The Builder.’ The shrunken little wraith bowed with great ceremony. To Kay, Phantastes said, ‘Kay, this is our chronicler, Eumnestes. He will remember anything these forty thousand years. And remembering is the first part of integration.’
And then, his duty done, the little wraith bustled out of the room again, the books tucked one under each arm.
‘Sit down,’ said Phantastes gently, pulling out one of the four high-backed wooden chairs that stood around the table. ‘What has Will told you about integration?’
Kay shook her head. ‘Nothing. He hasn’t told me anything.’
‘So you need to know everything from the beginning,’ said the wraith. Kay nodded. ‘The trouble,’ he went on, ‘is figuring out where the beginning is. I suppose you have heard of Tantalus.’ Kay nodded again. ‘His story begins at the beginning in a way, though even by that time it had told itself many times over. Still.’
Phantastes spun round, his finger immediately dancing along the high shelves on the wall opposite. He was looking for something. When he found it and hefted it free, Kay saw that it was a large leather-bound book with gold letters tooled across the spine and the cover. She had no time to look at it, though, because no sooner had he placed it before her than he began to riffle through the ancient yellowed pages, mumbling as he went. Kay saw handwritten English text framing beautiful illustrations in red, purple, blue and gold. Finally Phantastes was satisfied and his hands stopped. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Read that.’
Kay began to read.
‘Out loud,’ said the wraith.
‘Tantalus was a very pious man, and when he came to be king, his piety, which had always been acknowledged even by those who thought re
ligion a pageant of empty rituals, was heralded the known world over. He had an only son, a beautiful boy called Pelops. Pelops rode poised between childhood and age, full of promise, and that promise was of greatness. Tantalus heard the rumours of his son’s goodness, his generosity, his courage, his quick intelligence, and he approved them with his own eyes, observing Pelops whether in the toils of his military exercise down by the stables, or in the less sweaty but no less challenging labours set him by his tutors in arithmetic, composition, music and astronomy. Tantalus was excessively proud of his son, and lamented every day the loss of his wife in a hunting accident, which had left him without the possibility of further children. All his hope and his throne’s future was tied up, by her death, in this boy; and he often thought it a marvel, as he watched him in conference with some of his councillors, or running in high spirits with a pack of hounds out of the castle grounds, that his own heart did not burst with pride.
‘It was with the most painfully anguished regret, then, that he received, and obeyed, the oracle sent him in his son’s fourteenth year, that for the good of the nation, and for his own fame and honour, he should make his son a sacrifice to the gods of Olympus. Tantalus sent to the oracle once every year, and had many times in the past received replies that troubled or confused him; but always his piety led him through, and he considered the pain of his many penances and privations the proper price of good kingship. This time, however, he chewed bitterly over his instruction. Could his piety rise even to this? In the end, after a sleepless night, he resolved that the gods were indeed testing him, and that the sacrifice demanded was so total, so difficult, precisely because the Olympians were prepared to reward his fidelity with equal favour. He drew the knife himself when, the next day, his son’s blood was poured into the sacred vessels in the temple of Zeus Thunderer.
‘It may well have been a test; what man can know the mind of the gods? For certain we can say only that the outcome was not what he expected: within the year a famine raged in the country, a plague felled one out of every three householders, a terrible whirlwind and a tempest destroyed many of the great public buildings, including the temple of Zeus Thunderer – and Tantalus himself, his faith in the gods not only shaken but entirely consumed, withered and died of grief. His councillors, seeing the better part of the Greek world thrown into civil chaos, sent again to the oracle and received this answer: that there was a young man in Epidaurus, a son of Apollo, who could heal Pelops and return his body to life; and that, unless they brought him to do this, the whole of Lydia, of Greece and of Crete would be plunged into turmoil for a hundred years, and their own names wiped from the records of humanity. This Asclepius – for so he was called – was sent for, and within a few days arrived, disembarking from Tantalus’ ship at the head of a convoy of a hundred mules. Every one of these mules was laden with two baskets, and every basket contained a score of snakes, gathered from every variety across the known world. Many of the most potent venoms in the world are also, under different circumstances, powerful as medicinals and elixirs, and Asclepius beyond all others excelled in this snake lore. Alighting with his snakes at the ruined temple of Zeus, this son of Apollo called for the hewn limbs of Pelops to be brought to him as quickly as possible; thereafter he disappeared from public view, retreating into the deep impenetrability of the sanctum. All the locals could see was that the snakes had been loosed, and they moved freely around the temple in their masses, transforming the place into a horror and convincing many of the citizens that they would escape the compound and infest the city. But they did not; and on the third day Pelops was seen to walk on his own feet out of the temple, through the agora, to his home in the castle. He ruled Lydia, Phrygia, Paphlagonia and most of Greece for sixty years; and Asclepius, travelling with freedom and royal warrant throughout his domains, created a name for himself as the greatest healer the world has ever known. It was in his schools that the great doctor Hippocrates first trained; and it was said that even Apollo, from whom all his arts of healing had been derived, eventually acknowledged Asclepius his better in medicine.’
The text ended there, with a bold, black, horizontal line. Kay stopped reading and looked up at Phantastes, who had taken a seat opposite her, across the table strewn with dried leaves.
‘It was also said, long after,’ he continued, ‘that Asclepius was finally destroyed by Zeus, who was enraged by his hubris and his skill in the lives and deaths of mortals. But in fact the great healer left Greece to join us in Bithynia, and he was one of the greatest imaginers among us. For integration – healing – and imagining go hand in hand, and one cannot make up a whole without an idea to bind it. And it is in the fate of Tantalus that perhaps even a child may glimpse the mystery of integration and its special power. Tantalus was ordered by the gods to sacrifice his only son, who was his pride, his all in all, the only joy he had in his life; he was also punished brutally for his obedience, and some say he is being punished still. But Tantalus’ cruel piety gave us also Asclepius: so the snake gives fatal venom, but also rebirth; and so too the imaginer conjures merely dreams, but those dreams – those stories – can show us a kind of higher truth.’
‘Will is always saying that,’ said Kay. Phantastes raised his eyebrows. ‘That stories are usually the best answers. Better than facts.’
‘Sometimes,’ agreed Phantastes, ‘they are. There are some – like Ghast – who have called us only forgers of lies. And to one way of thinking, that’s just what we are. There was one piece of Pelops’ body that Asclepius could not heal because it had been eaten by a dog – the shoulder. He made him a new one out of ivory. But this was a fitting loss, because it is always the dog, the unbeliever, who cannot be restored by our imaginings, who is leaden and impervious to the healing of the imagination.
‘If we are to recover your father, we will need an imagining – a great new vision; one that can inspire even a man who has lost everything, who has lost himself, with new hope, new purpose, new belief. New self. That is why Will has brought you here to me. Together we can find a story, a vision, that will help to recover your father. But before I can create that imagining, if I can, I need to know the point from which to work – the raw materials, if you will. I can imagine anything, of course, but in order to make an imagining that will mean something to your father, something that will resonate especially and perfectly with him, I will need –’
‘A clue,’ said Kay.
Brought up short, Phantastes stared at her for a moment without comprehension.
‘A thread, so you’re not running around blindly in the maze. A scent, like for a dog,’ added Kay. ‘Dogs can hunt anything. But if they are to hunt the right thing, they have to be given the right scent first. To start out with. They have to know what they’re looking for.’
Phantastes smiled. ‘Exactly.’
‘And so your friend, the little bald person –’
‘Eumnestes.’
‘He is looking for this thing so that you can imagine a new story for my father?’
‘Eumnestes reads the chronicles and histories, the stories, the epics and romances of earlier times. He knows all that has ever been done, and all that might have been done, and all that ought to have been done – that, or he knows where to find it. Eumnestes knows all the stories. In one of those stories I hope we can find the right idea. And with the right idea, an imaginer can produce such a vision that your father will not only rouse himself from his stupor, but sing and dance, too. We will find your father, and we will wake him.’
‘You won’t find anything about him in your books,’ said Kay. ‘You’ll find lots of things, but nothing that will speak to him. If you want to speak to him, you need me.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said softly. ‘Perhaps you are right.’
And then, suddenly, the wraith looked down and scooped up some of the dried leaves, holding them out cupped in two hands for Kay to see. ‘You know what these are.’
‘From the tree downstairs? But there are so many –’
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‘Hush,’ warned the old wraith. ‘None of them know about the temple. I haven’t told anyone, so you and I are the only ones in the world. Not even Eumnestes –’ and here he paused, looking up through the door at a lithe, athletic and very serious boy pushing a large crate down the hallway beyond – ‘or that rascal Anamnestes know about it. Not that I don’t trust them, but … Well, Ghast is a serious antagonist. If I can turn his acolytes to my service, perhaps he can do the same to me.’
‘But the tree is so small, and there are hundreds of leaves here.’
‘I gathered these leaves ten thousand years ago,’ said the old wraith, almost laughing with a melancholy sigh as he let them fall back to the table. ‘When that trunk you saw was no jagged skeletal husk but a huge pillar of wood, and the leaves fell by the cartload every autumn. You had to be quick, of course, because the priests didn’t take kindly to anyone stealing into the temple or pilfering bits of their tree; but I came away with stuffed pockets most of the time.’
‘Why did you gather them? What are they for? Cooking?’
‘Yes, you might say that, yes. We treat it like a herb, and steep it in hot water. But it is not for nourishment. Come, I will show you.’
Phantastes took Kay’s suddenly tiny hand and drew her out into the hallway. The scale of the place hit her like a slap: the corridor stretched for hundreds of metres in both directions, with scores of rooms just like the one from which they had come opening in either direction. Everywhere the whitewashed walls gave way to sky-blue ceilings, and at the ends of the hallway it seemed to Kay that she could see a huge floor-to-ceiling mirror that showed the two of them – one towering, gaunt wraith in his flowing, hooded, grey-black gown, and one tired, drooping, scruffy child, with her hair drawn back, in the grey cotton robe that Will had given her on the plane. Standing slightly to one side, in both directions she was able to see multiple – infinite – copies of her mirrored image cascading back at her. She stopped where she was, and waved her arm at it, watching the pattern of repeated movement at one end.
Twelve Nights Page 15