Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘In a way,’ said Phantastes, ‘you might say you asked your question of every wraith in the garden. Every one of them mirrored it. Every one of them was tied to you.’

  Kay pushed Will’s arms away in frustration. ‘And what was the answer? What did they do?’

  ‘They slept, Kay, like you. After a while they all lay down wherever they were, and they were silent and still, as if they were dead. And they slept.’

  So it was all for nothing. All that pain. All that awful joy. All that pushing and all that connection. All that war for nothing.

  And now the tears began to gather in Kay’s eyes so fast that she had no time even to sob. And Will rocked her back and forth, his side by her side not so much a comfort but a deep ground and well of sorrow from which she drew bucket after bucket of tears, drawing and pouring, pouring and again drawing, in a continual motion that felt easier than anything she had ever done in her life.

  ‘Whatever is in you, Kay, let it out now,’ said Will.

  ‘But what if there is nothing in me at all?’

  ‘What indeed.’

  It was a bark like that of a dog: short, peremptory, fierce, the menace before a fight.

  It came from Razzio. He stood behind the great stone table at which Phantastes was seated. From where Kay was sitting on the grass, he seemed despite his size to tower above it, and the turret of that tower was contempt. The sneer on his face seemed to bite into her eyes when she looked at him: aggressive, bitter, and yet revolted.

  ‘As if you were the victim,’ he said. ‘As if any of this concerned you. That you should dare even to think so.’ He spat on the table.

  ‘Razzio –’ Will put out one of his arms in a vain effort to plot away the old left-wraith’s anger, to ward him off with the swirl of his fingers.

  Razzio made a fist and held it up before his face. He stared at it as it tightened. He seemed to be striving to crush his own fingers. Kay felt everything in her body and her mind withdrawing from his awful fury – everything but her eyes, which remained fixed, nailed to that tightening fist.

  He slammed it down on the stone, making a crunching sound that Kay knew was not the table giving way before skin and bone, but skin and bone compressing and breaking on the unyielding surface of the table. She expected Razzio to shout or cry out, but his face remained stubbornly impassive. He seemed more curious about his hand than pained by it. Like the rest of them, stunned and paralysed, he stood regarding the broken tissue of his fist where it lay before him.

  ‘This is how it should be,’ he said quietly – quietly, but his voice was still a thin thread of rage. ‘It should be like this. There are bounds. There are impassable limits. A plotter cannot plot without these securities.’ Behind him the causes had ceased drifting. Around the garden they stood still and expectant.

  Razzio drew himself up to his stout tallest. He held up his right fist then, with his left hand, finger by finger, prised it apart. It was already starting to show a bruise along the inside edge of the palm, and unfolding it seemed to take all his concentration, as if he were meditating on the pain it caused him. Kay felt Will’s own hand on her shoulder as a stay against Razzio’s fury. Her tears were drying on her face; she could feel them hardening, pursing together the skin of her cheeks in the fresh, cool air of the winter’s morning.

  Razzio stood still, regarding his hand. He looked at the table before him. With another sudden burst of energy he laid his arm on the edge of the table, then dragged it in an arc right across it. A few plates, several glasses and a candlestick, a book and some clothing fell to the ground, some of it shattering. He seemed neither to notice nor to care. Phantastes had pushed himself back to avoid the sweep of Razzio’s arm; now they stared at one another.

  ‘I am angry,’ said Razzio.

  ‘We can see that,’ said Phantastes.

  ‘I make no apology for my anger.’ Razzio took a seat opposite Phantastes, and with his left hand smoothed the creases and crumples in his clothing. ‘Sit at the table, all of you,’ he said. He did not look at them. Nor did he wait for them to take their places before he began to speak.

  ‘I have watched your approach to the House of the Two Modes. I have watched it with growing disquiet. Ghast had no business interfering with the girl, the author; she ought to have come here, where she might have found her room in the place of pure knowing. Ghast should not have attacked you in Alexandria, and the murder of our brother, Pyrexis, is a crime that will never be blotted from our story. By the stone,’ he said, ‘that pocky mank-wraith has gone too far. I may not have been a friend to the right-wraiths –’ here he looked pointedly at Phantastes – ‘indeed, I may never be a friend to the right-wraiths, but even I can see that we must return the Society to cohesion, to unity. Had you seen what I have seen on the board many times lately, you might not even have risked coming here.’

  Razzio turned to Phantastes and addressed him directly. ‘My most ancient antagonist, we have not spoken, even by our seconds, for many centuries. You have suffered a terrible reversal of fortune, caused in no small part by my own ambition for primacy in the assembly. I do not hesitate to acknowledge my part in this. I cannot think what grief it must be to you to be robbed of your temple, to suffer daily the loss of that immortal flower that was the root of your art and function. Had I been deprived of the board, I should surely have lost my mind; though its loss is by its very nature the one chance I cannot, with any kind of plotting, forecast. Indeed, this single blind spot in my art has for many years been the subject of my most intense speculation.’ Here he turned, and focused eyes of such deep and penetrating incision on Kay that she almost squirmed beneath them. ‘I think you know how Ghast conspired to dissolve the Society of Wraiths and Phantasms and to lead the wraiths out of Bithynia into exile. You may have learned something of my own regrettable part in the swelling of this ulcerous boil that now grows to such a head and crust. But there is one thing you cannot know, one thing that all the stories in the world cannot narrate, that even the dreams of the last imaginer of the timeless temple of Alexandria cannot picture, because even I myself could not see it, and still cannot. All I can see is that it has a great deal to do with you, our new young friend.’

  Razzio closed his eyes and folded his hands across his stomach. Kay, by contrast, sat up in her chair, her eyes glistening like those of a cat on the hunt.

  ‘I must tell you what has happened here. I am not a great storyteller. You must bear with me.’

  Kay saw the quick glance Will shot Phantastes, but Phantastes, with his eyes closed, took no notice.

  ‘The plots have always changed for as long as the board has been. The wraiths drift and dance about the garden, Ontos conducts them and I gather up from him, from them and from the places of pure knowing an estimation of things. This estimation is never the same, because the world beyond the board is never the same. Sometimes Ontos dances intricately and with the most minute articulations of fingers and eyes; then I must spend hours roaming through the rooms of pure knowing, and Oidos opens a thousand drawers before I can resolve the plot, which is long, difficult and involved. Sometimes, by contrast, the wraiths in the garden slouch and are silent, and Ontos hardly moves at all; then I sit with Oidos on one of the great thrones, and we watch the light drift by hours across the bare walls of a stately room. On other days I must run – I do, I must run – through the places of pure knowing, frantically searching for the signs that will connect and interpret the motions of the wraiths in the garden. Once I sat for a week with a piece of blank paper in my hand, while all the while Ontos slept. But even then a plot emerged from the causes, the dance of forms, the places of pure knowing; a plot always emerges.

  ‘Two months ago this changed. I was walking through the garden in the morning, as I always do, taking note of the positions of each of the wraiths – every one of them a cause that plots an entity on the board. You know roughly how it works: instead of stones on a board I read people and things in the garden, setting them in play and
then watching their movements day by day. All the things interact in some way with Ontos, even if only by ignoring him and his conducting; and from observing him I can also judge the mode of the movement – is it happy? Sad? Optimistic? Made in fear? In love? Then I know what the movement is, and its mood; taking this in to Oidos, I place the fact and the mode, by certain clues collected in the garden, against one or more of the ten thousand things she preserves in the place of pure knowing. From the union of movement, mood and knowledge, understanding arises; and these understandings present themselves as narratives. Century after century I have studied Ontos in the evening, walked the garden in the morning and passed the afternoon in the house of the ten thousand things. Always the day yields up its journey. Always I take to my bed its insight.

  ‘Two months ago, while walking in the garden, I observed something strange. On the grass near the dais one of the causes lay asleep. This in itself was not unusual – many wraiths sleep in the garden. Some sleep only in the garden. But this wraith was sleeping at a time when Ontos himself was writhing with acrobatic intensity. Every other wraith in the garden was surging with unbounded energy. Nor did this wraith awake the day after, or the day after that. Indeed, it was not just a sleep, but something deeper. And since that day, another twenty-three causes have, without obvious explanation, slipped into the same coma. Each time I have watched them. Each time I have removed them to a prepared infirmary inside. Each time I have tended them carefully, trying to keep them alive. If one should die – what would that mean for the board? How could I understand the disappearance of a cause?’

  While Razzio was speaking, one of the causes had put fruit on the table. Will had a grape between the fingers of his right hand. Again and again he was raising it a few centimetres above his plate; again and again he was dropping it. Kay stared at the grape while Razzio gathered his thoughts.

  ‘You must understand the importance of this event. I cannot finish my plotting; instead of reaching an understanding, I am left in ignorance. This is quite unprecedented, quite unlike anything that has ever happened before.’

  His eyes still closed and his hands still folded loosely across his stomach, Razzio reclined in silence in his chair. The other two wraiths said nothing. Kay looked back and forth from one face to the other, but they were both blank. She sat up and put her hands on the table.

  ‘Where are these causes going? And why does it matter if –?’ She stopped, realizing that what she had been about to say would probably offend Razzio. ‘I mean, what will happen if you can’t plot?’

  What has this to do with me?

  No one answered. The three wraiths sat in complete stillness, just as they had before. Nothing happened. Kay reached forward and took some grapes; one by one she plucked them off, put them in her mouth, chewed them and swallowed them. She put her hands in her lap. She put her hands on the edge of the chair behind her back. It was no use. Every moment passed like a sentence beginning with the same word and, no matter what she did, the moment ended and began again, and ended and began again, the same. She didn’t notice the tension in her arms and legs until she was almost ready to scream.

  ‘You know what this means,’ said Will softly.

  ‘The end of beauty,’ Phantastes whispered.

  Kay slammed a flat palm down on the stone table. It hardly made a sound. She didn’t raise her head, but she knew that they were all looking at her, and that they all knew exactly what she wanted. Will pushed back his chair, and Kay could sense out of the corner of her eye that he was carefully turning to face her. As she waited for him, she noticed that, where her hand had curled on the table, her knuckles had turned white.

  I’ve seen that before. I make no apology for my anger.

  ‘Plotters work with boards, Kay,’ he said. ‘The boards are of a certain size. We move the stones around the boards, watching the patterns. Our hands think through the narratives of things as they guide and are guided by the stones. But always the stones stay on the board and the narratives are, as we say, conserved. If stones could fall off the board or come on to the board from nowhere, the plotting could not function. For that reason, there is nothing a plotter fears more than the edge of the board; nothing a plotter guards more carefully than the security of the stones. Causes must generate effects, and effects derive from causes; a cause without an effect or an effect without a cause would break the principle of conservation, and would undermine the plot.

  ‘The greatest stories flirt with the edge, and become great exactly because of this flirtation. They skirt it, needle it, always toying with the loss of a cause or with the spontaneous effect; but the art of the greatest storytellers lies in the surprise of conservation, in the delight of an expectation dashed, only to be fulfilled. It may be a simple rule, but it is a rule.

  ‘One of our most ancient stories is that of return. A man goes away, then comes back. At home perhaps he leaves a wife and a child. Think that this man goes off to war, and that the war eats up ten years of his life. Think that his journey home is thwarted. Call him Odysseus. Imagine his wife, Penelope, sitting beside their bed every night of those ten years, then another ten, expecting his return. Down the stairs, through two or three strong stone-framed doors, see her child, Telemachus, being carried out of the hall by his nurse. Penelope is followed from the room by the taunts and jeers of a hundred drunken and violent men, her suitors – no better than vultures circling the carcass of her broken marriage, men aspiring to seize the throne of her kingdom in Ithaka, men spending the wealth of Odysseus’ royal house. They are impatient. See the snarling, the sharp-toothed smiles behind their grimy beards, when they demand of Penelope every morning, How long – how long must we wait for your decision? How long until you forget the return of your husband, until you give up your expectation that he will return? She despairs. By night she lies undreaming and rigid in her bed, wishing that, should she fall asleep, this Odysseus, this man, this cause, would return by morning, would deliver her from her despair. She ruses: she weaves a shroud for her husband’s father and promises the suitors that she will choose one among them to be her new husband, that she will forget Odysseus, once the shroud has been completed. By day she weaves this, her forgetting; by night, in place of her anxious despair, she unravels the threads, remembering. Ravel, unravel, ravel, unravel; forget, recall, forget, recall. Meanwhile, on the sea Odysseus is making for home. Always beyond the shore of Ithaka, though he may come to a stall, he never comes to a stop. She may weave and weave; but always she recalls. The edge between forgetting and recalling, between weaving and unravelling, becomes a habit for Penelope; for landlorn Odysseus the edge between hurry and delay becomes a habit and, in the long years of his wandering, his nature. The story begins to look as if it will go on forever, and there is a night, as Penelope cries herself to sleep, when she recognizes this comfort with the edge as despair. She lies along it all night like a knife.’

  Kay found herself holding her temples hard, with her eyes squeezed shut. She was thinking of her mother: alone, frightened, anxious. ‘Make the story end,’ she said weakly. ‘Make it end.’

  Razzio stood up abruptly, pushing his chair back violently across the cobbles. ‘Oh, but it has ended, child,’ he said. His voice was suddenly as stern as iron once more. ‘It ended yesterday when you climbed on to the dais and all twenty-four wraiths woke from their slumbers at a stroke. In a single instant they opened their eyes. In a single motion they rose from their beds and filed into the garden. Behold them now,’ he said, gesturing with his bruised hand in a wide arc around him. Looking up, Kay realized with a shock that the twenty-four wraiths had quietly and without ceremony circled the table, and now stood watching them. Their faces were entirely blank. ‘I demand an explanation,’ said Razzio.

  Kay was stunned. They all were.

  ‘But there is no explanation that you can give me, because this is not your story. You know as little about it as you know about yourself and, by the stone, that’s little enough. This is not your story;
it is my story. It is my story, and I will no longer sit idly by and watch Ghast presume to meddle with it.

  ‘I have been working here in my garden for several years on a particular project. It is a great endeavour, the most difficult task I have ever set myself. There are many kinds of story, as we all know. We know their sources, their characteristics. We know how to evolve them. In the Weave, at the Feast of the Twelve Nights, together we composed stories of many kinds – dream visions, great epics, tales of love and friendship, quests, myths, great landscapes of exploration and conquest, stories of battles, of self-discovery, stories of perseverance, hope and survival, stories of despair, loss and defeat. But the methods by which we made our stories were imperfect, and even if they resulted in a great profusion of stories, they never resulted in perfect ones. As long as I have been in the Honourable Society, we have never told the perfect story. Always there was room for improvement. Always there was a need to keep going.

  ‘For the last several years I have been toiling almost without rest to create the most perfect stories that can be, one of every type: a story of love, a story of conquest, a story of discovery, and so on. I have set in motion among the causes ideas and actions of such beauty and precision that their every least quirk and oddity has been a revelation. We have discovered and made much in this time. In the last few months I have neared the completion of my goal. To Ghast I sent the fruits of my labours, for we had a bargain. From him I expected advancement – I do not shame to say it. In return for these blueprints, the instruction manuals for building the greatest stories ever to be told, he promised that I should be elevated, that I should be made first among the twelve knights. We have not held a Weave in many years, but now we shall never require one again; I have created a method for composing stories better than any such quarrelsome, noisy congregation could produce.’