‘And Phantastes is the last of the imaginers, or nearly the last,’ Kay said quietly.
Will looked up sharply. ‘He is the last. Did he tell you about the others?’
Kay shook her head.
Though he sat silently enough, Will had suddenly become very agitated, and the silence was as loud as – louder than – the low tolling in her ears.
‘There were always three great imaginers, since there were imaginers at all, as far back as anyone could remember: Asclepius, Phantastes and the Siege Vacant. Asclepius was destroyed – his hubris – we do not speak of it, and a lesser right-wraith takes his place on ceremonial occasions – but the Siege Vacant – it has gone by other names –’
‘Phantastes told me about Asclepius, but he didn’t mention the other, the Siege –’
‘That’s because it pains him to speak of it. Of her. Unlike the other two imaginers, the Siege Vacant is an open position, filled by one of the lesser right-wraiths when the need arises, but never when the Weave is summoned; there her seat is always left unoccupied. I told you before that the knights are a thousand and one in number, but this isn’t strictly true. It is said that the first of the imaginers left the Honourable Society long ago, and hasn’t been seen since – the first of the imaginers, gone before my time, and no one knows where or why. Phantastes took the first place among the right-wraiths, leaving his own chair open; it has, ever after, been known as the Siege Vacant – an office never quite filled, because Phantastes believes, somewhere in his heart, that she will return.’
Kay propped herself up a little painfully on one elbow. ‘She?’
‘She is said to have been the greatest of them,’ Will replied. ‘It is even said that she built the great loom. She was called Scheherazade.’ He vented a long sigh.
Scheherazade, Mother of Stories, called the Breaker of Kings, the Freedom of Kingdoms, Scheherazade of the thousand tales, the healer, the seducer, the bride. Kay’s body shook and she sank back on to her pillow, looking up at the empty ceiling.
‘Well,’ Will went on. ‘I suppose Phantastes told you about the tree of Byblos and the Temple of Osiris. It was thousands of years ago, but he still remembers the old places with a kind of reverence, and it was inevitable that he would go back there. You heard me mention the leaves before?’ Kay nodded gingerly. ‘That tree is – was – very important to the imaginers because its leaves when you chew them put you in a state – of creativity, or epiphany – and the imaginers used to gather them fallen, and sometimes steal into the tree to pick the more potent fresh ones, when it still grew in the Temple of Osiris. One of the three imaginers was pretty much always in Alexandria, for that reason. I don’t know if Phantastes explained to you exactly what it is imaginers mostly do, but they often use the leaves for their imaginings, and it is a great good fortune that Phantastes had gathered so very many of them in the years before the temple was destroyed and the tree hacked down – he dried them, and has been using them ever since.
‘We should have foreseen, when the armies burned the temple and replaced it with churches to their blind gods, what it would mean for the imaginers. Without the tree, Phantastes had to ration the leaves. Without new leaves, Phantastes and the others would hardly dare imagine; and this weakened them, and their standing with the wraiths. It was during this most difficult time that Ghast, who has always hated imagining, and all the imaginers, first began to attract notice. The lesser left-wraiths started to adhere to him and his ideas, and it wasn’t long before his star, in the ascendant, began to eclipse the imaginers completely. Ghast is a plotter – but, to be honest, he is a poor one, and he might never have succeeded in seizing power in the Weave but for one thing. Now, Kay, listen closely. That thing is the House of Razzio in Rome.’
Here Will, who had begun to pause between sentences in order to adjust Kay’s pillows and straighten the light sheets in which she was partly wrapped, came to a full stop. His hands fluttered plottily in his lap. He looked troubled.
Kay was feeling stronger, and increasingly more alert and steady as he went on. ‘But how could anyone have preferred him to them? Phantastes is so kind.’
‘Necessity,’ said Will simply, his eyebrows arching as he dropped his head, defeated. ‘Razzio is the greatest of all the plotters – to the plotting wraiths what Phantastes is to the imaginers: their spiritual head, if you like. In Rome he has the greatest board in the world – two halls cannot hold it, nor a kingdom purchase the tenth part of its beautiful craftsmanship. It is laid in a floor all studded with gold and silverwork, and above it twists an arbour of branches and vines, with clusters of huge fruit hanging hidden behind the evergreen foliage. Beneath your feet the lines run for what seems like forever. And he doesn’t use stones. Two hundred wraiths – he calls them the causes – walk the boards where he calls them to and fro, and he constantly moves among them, trying out patterns, thinking about relationships, working through stories, and coming to know the beginnings and the ends of things. In the huge and sprawling palace that surrounds the board lives Oidos, moving in the silent rooms of the place of pure knowing; to her Razzio resorts to learn the meaning of what he sees plotted on the board. At the centre of the board, upon a raised platform roofed with stone, the other of the two modes, Ontos, dances in silent gyrations. His platform is known as the place of pure being, and while Razzio is on the board, Ontos never leaves it. Working with Oidos and with Ontos, Razzio has become the master of all there is to know about how causes create effects, and effects in turn become new causes. He can show you the million threads that ravel in and unravel out of every event. Everything in the House of the Two Modes comes from something else, and goes to something else. Everything makes sense. It is only there that my hands can truly be still.
‘Razzio is a great genius. He has only one flaw. He is very vain. He made up his mind before all time that his way of understanding the world was the right one, and he cannot stand even to be in the same room as Phantastes, or for that matter any of the right-wraiths. Like all the true plotters, he is short, but he is broad and powerful, and it is said that in early times he once bested Phantastes at wrestling – though it is difficult now to conceive of such a thing, both of them being so ancient. But whether that is true or not, it’s certainly the case that Phantastes will not tolerate Razzio any more than Razzio will acknowledge Phantastes; and so, when Ghast came to Razzio with a plan that, he said, would drive the great imaginers out of Bithynia for good, of course Razzio jumped at the idea. From his house in Rome he sent an army of his acolytes – all greater left-wraiths – to join with Ghast’s left-wraiths. Together the two factions began to dominate and determine all the councils held in our ancient hall.
‘When the wraiths were still gathered in Bithynia, once a year – in midwinter, on the twelve days – the twelve knights of Bithynia would return from their journeys, wherever in all the corners and edges of the earth they were, to celebrate the festival of renewal. From Alexandria the three imaginers; from Rome Razzio and the two modes, Oidos and Ontos, the eldest of the left-wraiths; from Lebanon in the east the three youngest of the left-wraiths; from Atlas in the west the three youngest of the right-wraiths. Over the twelve days the twelve knights would mark the festival with storytelling competitions, poetry competitions, song, dance, and of course the feasts – the likes of which I think the world does not elsewhere know: for sumptuousness, for high revelry, for state and for goodness. Oh, Kay, the Shuttle Hall –’
Kay had been looking down at the red hem of the blanket gathered in her lap. Now she stole a glance at Will as his voice faltered, and saw very briefly the tears already collecting on either side of his chin.
I can’t bear your tears.
After a few moments and a long breath he began again. ‘In the great hall, the Shuttle Hall, where the tiny diamonds in the ceiling, like stars, constellate and shine all night long in the middle of winter, and the mosaics on the floor sweep in foamy tides across shoals of pebbled thought, there did we feast, there s
ing, there tread the paces of the ancient metres, there create and recreate stories that, had they been told in words out of some forgotten language, still you would have wept for joy, and fear, and joy and fear, only to hear the sound of them. And every wraith in the world came there once a year, and the twelve knights did all this.
‘On the last of the twelve days of the festival, when each of the twelve knights had held court for one day, the general synod took place. In the stalls to one side of the hall the left-wraiths took their seats and, opposite them, the right-wraiths. First, before anything else could happen, the great horn was sounded, the Primary Fury – a blast like chaos, like all the clamours of the world gathered into one, shocking the very air and ripping through ears and heart, a cacophony to clear every thought, every fantasy from the minds of its hearers. Then, as the horn’s furious note faded, all eyes marked the procession of the twelve knights as they passed down the length of the hall in silence, each wearing the insignia of his or her order, each carrying one of the twelve staves of the Honourable Society – iron rods crowned by a writhing snake and a plotting stone. One by one the knights stowed their staves in the great wheel at the centre of the hall, where the light from the windows dazzles the floor with blue like sapphire; one by one the knights took to their thrones. Then the First Wraith entered, and walked the length of the hall. From the twelve knights he received the shuttle – fashioned from the most luminous, pearlescent stone, whorled and flexed, dimpled and notched to take the pirn – the bobbin – and with it the thread wherewith the weft is worked against the warp, and the web woven. The First Wraith blew upon the shuttle, a call harmonious to answer the great horn, music after fury, choosing a note that would set the tone for the story and the debate to come – love or war, tragedy or quest.
‘In that sound, as if in an embrace, as if enclosed and fortified in completeness, the mystery would truly begin. To you, Kay, a wraith must seem a strange sort of thing. We are here and not here, large and real and substantial, but fleeting, evanescent. We come and go like lights in the night. To you perhaps we are like angels, participating in your moment-to-moment, but somehow eternal. You cannot understand. But we are not so strange, if you think about it. What is love? Can you see it? What is justice, or truth? Can you touch them? Can you pour them into a bowl or throw them at the wall? But you know these things are. So I am, so Flip is. And so, to us, the Bride is – as ravishing as an epiphany, so beautiful in our thought and trust that she is Beauty itself, a form fleeting and fugitive; but as real, as eternal, as important as the greatest and most certain truths. Most people would do anything for love, for truth, for beauty. These things are absolute and the greatest goods. In just this way wraiths and phantasms live and die by the Bride, for in her, as she touches us and informs us, as she makes us who we are, we all participate in her as the flower does in scent, as the sun does in brightness, as the sky shares in blue and trees in green. In her we are wed to our own being – more, we are wed to being. In her we marry time and space, in her we are joined to truth, in her we are plighted.
‘At that sound of the shuttle, if the heart of a wraith is clean, the Bride enters. I cannot describe it to you except to say it is like a star at dawn, and like the dawn, too, something you become aware has been there all along, something that heralds, something that floods. Her presence steals over you like the blue light falling from the windows of the Shuttle Hall, and gathers, as if in a stone, as if in a luminous sapphire that you could hold in the palm of your hand, so real is her presence, so complete her assurance. The moment in that sound has a name: we call it the Bridestone – for what reason no one knows, or it has been long forgotten, but it lasts forever, though it is over in the blink of an eye, though it flies through your heart like a swallow through the hall, in at one window, across a single instant a-flutter and a-dart, and then out the opposite end. And yet an instant is enough, for there, in the presence of the Bride, time sways in its deep and the least of its drops is an eternity.
‘In the synods of old, the First Wraith blew upon the shuttle and then sat at the loom, and he wove as the wraiths rose to speak, each one a thread around him, and the day’s assembly with all its voices moved the First Wraith’s hands, and the tapestry he wove there was the great record and judgement of the assembly, in which, should you read it carefully, you would see every moment of that day and its concerns, alive and speaking in the cloth by colour, texture, pattern, contrast, subject. As you might imagine, we have thousands of them – I think you have seen some of them in the tapestry room in the mountains?’
Kay nodded. She heard the whisper of a light footfall and, following the report with her eye, noticed Flip leaning in the doorway. He smiled faintly, meeting her glance for a moment before looking back at Will who, oblivious to his audience and engrossed, went on.
‘The First Wraith was, you might say, the soul of the convocation and its mouth. Through him everything passed and was resolved; through him and through the motion of the shuttle in the threads of the loom. But the voices were those of all the wraiths, speaking if not in harmony then in symphony. We clashed, I don’t deny it; but our wars and campaigns found their way into the images we made, and from them flowed back into the stories we told, and spread abroad into the world for everyone to see, and to know, and to tell, to handle. But Ghast – what he did – it is almost unspeakable.
‘Because in that year, when Razzio sent his left-wraiths from the house in Rome and they plotted in the mountains the overthrow of the old order, the festival was held as always, and we feasted and revelled for the twelve days and nights, and the Weave assembled, as ever, and the shuttle was placed in the hand of the First Wraith, and he sat at the loom – and there was utter, unspeakable silence.’
Here Flip drew in a sharp breath, and Will spun round violently on his chair, throwing his hands before his face before he realized, just as quickly, who it was. He turned back wearily, breaking.
‘A few wraiths spoke – they tried to start the story, the debate, to find the theme, to gather up the threads – but as in weaving you cannot work a warp without a woof, one thread against another, so in debate, in song, no voice can speak alone, no song take flight without its undersong. The loom lurched now and again, and the shuttle clacked within it, but at the end of the day we were left with some straggly and disconnected patches of fabric, without an image, without a border, without any pattern. It was as if some huge weight which we thought stable and permanent had suddenly shifted, and because of its weight crashed all around us. We have never held a Weave since, and the festivals slip away, year after year, into memory. I have not heard such a song these two or three hundred years.
‘But it did not end there. It had hardly begun. For by the end of that day Ghast had mounted the pedestal, taken the shuttle from the very hand of the First Wraith, and had it cast into the sea. The loom was dismantled and, I was told, fed to the fire. The halls were shut that year, and boarded up, and at Ghast’s command we retreated into the mountains, the barbarians at our heels. And we left the mulberry orchards, and we left the plotting gardens with their winding streams, and we left our great library with half our books, and so many other things, all abandoned, all deserted in fear and without hope, without pattern, all haphazard. And the festivals were discontinued, and the twelve knights were sent to the twelve compass points of the earth, Kay.’
‘And Ghast set the First Wraith to work doing common removals,’ said Flip softly.
Kay’s eyes shot up to Will’s crumpled form where he slumped on the chair, his long legs drawn up to his chin, wrapped in his desperate arms. ‘You,’ she breathed.
You. It was you.
Will nodded his whole body slowly, without looking at her. It was if he were rocking himself to sleep, and when he carried on talking, his voice was a nightmare lullaby. ‘At first Ghast had me imprisoned for misleading the Honourable Society – for making false images. It was clear what his real target was; clear enough. Everyone knew. The old synthesis,
Kay, was between the imaginers and the plotters. Always, since time was, the great rift has yawned between these two ways – the warp against the weft – those who create from nothing, and those who believe only in causation. The plotters cannot accept that the imaginers conceive, and the imaginers cannot suffer the sterile mechanics of the plotters. To the plotters, the imaginers are charlatans; to the imaginers, the plotters are machines. This had always been the great divide. All our tapestries represent this conflict in one way or another, because as First Wraith my function was to synthesize and bind these two functions. Ghast wanted to end it; to use his alliance with Razzio to give the plotters the upper hand. He called it “progress”. He called it “a new era of efficiency”. Kay, he had many of the imaginers dispersed.’
Kay’s eye settled on the leather satchel Phantastes had given her, in which she was sure the shuttle still lay, waiting for the touch of its master. It was only at the foot of the bed – she could reach it, give it to Will and change everything, give him a salve for his grief. But something in her didn’t dare. Perhaps it was because Phantastes had told her to wait, had warned her, and she trusted him. But there was something deeper, too – it wouldn’t be right to put so beautiful a thing into the hands of a wraith who was still so … so broken.
All the while he spoke, Will stared over his knees at his hands; they lay there, drained of colour, the knuckles like white peaks in a rough landscape of age and suffering. Kay stared at them, too, and thought of the mountains from which they had flown without Ell, not knowing where she was or how to reach her, how to recover her, how to take her home again. Kay tried to picture in her mind how Ell would be feeling: the emptiness, the fear, but also the wonder, the freedom. Sometimes Ell loved to be lost – at the beach it was sometimes hours before she turned up after lying in the shade of some gorse bushes at the head of a low cliff, playing with the thistle tops. All that time she would watch walkers passing and ships sailing on the sea, and never cry or worry. Perhaps, Kay thought, this time it would be the same. Maybe she is somewhere calm and quiet. Maybe they have been good to her. The alternative wasn’t … It wasn’t possible to think about it.
Twelve Nights Page 17