Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  Here.

  There had been no appetite for feasting, no nerves for dancing or for revelry. The command to all had been to assemble, and the wraiths who now sat around the hall – and Kay could see them still trickling in, by the twos and fives – had come to speak, and not to celebrate. Some faces, she saw, looked hopeful, jubilant, expectant – these, she supposed, would be the right-wraiths. Rumours had been passed. Stories had been told. Others seemed more nervous, more fearful, and there were many of them – these, Kay guessed, were Ghast’s servants, the left-wraiths and the lesser right-wraiths. Of Ghast there was as yet no sign, though they had set a chair for him in the centre of the lower part of the hall, opposite the dais. Kay sat in the very midst of all, on a tiny stool at the midpoint of the hall’s long length, but hard up against the benches of the right-wraiths. Opposite her, on another stool, Ell perched nervously, holding Phantastes’ sack with the horn within. When the procession began, she knew her part – to blow one long peal on the horn, and then to wait. She had practised in the car, very nearly driving them from the road and their senses; but Kay thought now, with pleasure, that Ell would pull it off perfectly.

  To think, she mused to herself again, that we have come to Bithynia.

  The hall was mostly unadorned – only a few banners hung to each side – and in many places the water and frost damage was severe, and plainly to be seen. Gouges stood out in some of the walls, and the mosaics of the floor were in places badly cracked or missing. But the ceiling was at last intact, and though the place was draughty, it also felt warm, and no rain or snow or wind seeped in through its massive leaded windows. Under heavy clouds, they were almost dark now; just beyond them the weather had turned ever fouler – cold, gusty and sleet-showered. It hardly mattered. With a handful of students and local men, her father had been at work here, off and on, for almost eight months, and together they had at least made the hall watertight and stopped the rot. In time more banners would hang again from poles anchored in the row of empty wall-slots. In time the floors would be relaid. In time the massive stalls would feel the sharp blades of the master woodcarvers, and the missing diamonds would be re-set in the oak lattice of the ceiling. In time the tapestries would come down from the mountain.

  But there was one thing, Kay thought with simple happiness as the great curtain at the lower hall was drawn aside, for which they would not have to wait. Six wraiths on either side now bore it up, set on a pallet hoisted with cross-staves, to the top of the hall and set it down. No one knew who had rebuilt it, or how it had been delivered to the hall. Ned More thought perhaps his foreman – who denied it – had had a hand in it, but others ventured that Ghast himself, to mock them, had caused it to be remade, and left for the right time in the vestibule of the Shuttle Hall. However it had got there, and whoever had carved and built it, as was the tradition, from solid ash, there it now stood: the great loom of the First Wraith, waxed and set with warp and woof, ready for the consult to begin.

  The loom bearers removed their staves and then took their own seats. The heavy green and gold embroidered curtain, fifteen feet across and at least as high, again drew back, and with a start Kay realized that the procession had already begun. It was a simple but a solemn movement down the hall, led by Phantastes and, behind him, one of the lesser imaginers whom he had appointed that day from among the exiled right-wraiths. They wore cassocks of green inlaid with silver, and around their collars tiny diamond studs; their heads were bare. After a short gap, next followed Razzio, leading Oidos and Ontos, all in heavy gowns and black cloaks, with buttons of jet and a single ivory stone set into the cuff at either hand. Behind them, again after a small space, the three youngest of the right-wraiths came in blue cassocks, with gold studs set round their collars; and behind them, last of all, the three youngest left-wraiths, in grey gowns and cloaks, with a black plotting stone threaded into the cuff at either hand, as before. Each of them carried a rod of black iron, its tip embellished with a snake writhing to the point, which was capped with a plotting stone. They came, each of them, without other adornment, and no further ceremony but the stately pace at which they measured the hall, and the register of import that lay graved in their twelve faces; even Phantastes, who had almost gibbered with enthusiasm about the Weave just that morning, stared forward with a resolution that shamed Kay for her delight. She looked down as they approached, and crossed her legs with a scowl.

  But at the same moment Ell slid to her feet, and when the twelve, led by Phantastes, stopped just shy of her stool, she lifted the horn to her lips and blew the peal for which she had practised all that day. Kay had heard the horn before, but not like this – not in this hall, with its huge resound and the amplifying distortion of its wooden ceiling and stalls. It whined like a siren, roared like a lion and wailed like a child all at once, and well before it ended Kay thought her eardrums might bleed with the singleness of its insistent boring, boring into her awareness. All her thoughts lay down and shrivelled before the noise. She watched the sound explode between her hands.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended, and as the hum and its after-peal rang in the ears of nearly a thousand wraiths, Phantastes called out to the hall in a resonant bass Kay had never before heard from him.

  ‘Leap, heart!’

  Every wraith in the Shuttle Hall answered him as one.

  ‘The wind will catch you!’

  Then the old imaginer led the procession again on its grave way to the dais. Kay studied them as they passed: Phantastes with his shining scalp, massive temples, broad shoulders and thick protruding veins upon his neck; the older right-wraith with his great eyes like pools, and again the thick blue veins running across his hands and down his necks; Razzio, Oidos and Ontos with their olive skin and different heights and gaits; the younger right-wraiths, again broad and tall, but sallow and sickly after decades – maybe centuries – in penurious hiding; and the younger left-wraiths, again short like Razzio, and one of them very corpulent, but with long, delicate fingers. As these last passed her, Phantastes had already reached the wheel. Without breaking step he advanced to its first position and set his rod into the hole, allowing it to slide heavily through his fingers until with a clang it stood sure; then he turned and took his place before his throne. The right-wraith behind him took the second position and the seat beside his master, and so, each placing a rod and each choosing a seat, they all completed their procession, the imaginers fanning off to the left, the plotters to the right, the right-wraiths to the far left and the left-wraiths to the far right. When they were all at last standing before their thrones, with a single motion they sat together. A murmur went around the hall, and Kay recognized that the consult had now officially begun.

  ‘Call the First Wraith!’ came a shout from the benches of the right-wraiths, followed by many others, from both sides, clamouring.

  Will appeared from the anteroom, adorned in nothing but his old cloak, and walked quickly, even urgently down the length of his hall with no ceremony at all; he even raised his eyebrows, with a little cock of the cheek, as he passed Kay, though he didn’t look up from the floor. First he went to the wheel and, grasping two rods in his outstretched hands, ground the huge iron frame along its circular path into its final position.

  Twelve nights.

  He stood for a moment, looking at it and seeming to draw his breath in dying waves. At the step, then, before the thrones, on one knee he received from Razzio the shuttle; when he reached the loom, he turned to face the hall and held it up before him. At this there was a greater murmur than before. Will held it to his lips and blew a seven-second note – not this time one of the familiar tones, but a new one: low, jarring, but rising, and finishing in a keen knife-thrust note as bleak and total as the horn of the Primary Fury. Kay stiffened; she needed no interpreter to tell her that this was the note of tragedy. Now the wraiths in the hall no longer murmured but talked openly, and their voices on both sides sounded distressed – why had the First Wraith chosen the no
te of the old tragedies? What would befall them all tonight?

  ‘Call the antagonist!’ shouted a voice from the benches of the left-wraiths, and though not as many voices as before answered it, still the call was taken up until Ghast himself appeared from the anteroom, his short, swart form dwarfed by the grand drape of the hall curtain. No wonder, Kay thought, Ghast had wanted to get away from this place – it was completely the wrong scale for him. Suddenly, across the hall among the left-wraiths, she picked out Flip sitting beside Kat and, catching his eye, smiled at him. He rolled his eyes; he thought he had an idea of what was coming.

  But at the sight of Ghast, a knot had gathered in Kay’s stomach. She saw him look out over the hall, and she thought suddenly that his gaze looked practised.

  In a flash she saw him walking the length of the hall alone, lamp held aloft in the darkness. She saw him pace the floor, saw him take the seat just opposite her on the bench among the left-wraiths. She saw his thoughts. My dream. What have we done? She knew it was no use trying to hold on to a dream, that it surfaced like bubbles in a pond, no sooner visible than vanished. She knew that she could not hold it even now, that it would slip from her fingers the instant she grasped after it. But it was there, that she knew – and her stomach tightened. Blood spilled on the stone.

  ‘Wraiths and phantasms!’ bellowed Ghast. ‘Many years ago we held what I thought was to be our last congregation in this hall. At your bidding, then, the instruments of the old ways were broken up and scattered, and a new order was spun for the Weave. Since then much has changed, and changed for the better.’ He was spitting out his words slowly and clearly, and though he was positioned at the low and far end of the hall, his eyes were roving over the crowded wraiths, taking in as many gazes as he could. Flickers of recognition played across his features as he spoke, and Kay knew he was consummately playing the politician. She watched the wraiths, picking out the few she knew – Foliot, installed at the high end of the hall among the left-wraiths; Kat beside Flip, and on the other side of her Sprite, by the floor, and Jack, among the stalls at the low end of the right-wraiths. Jack looked worried, Kay thought as Ghast went on.

  ‘For around us, too, the world has changed. Who sits by the fire to drink up the words of the poet? Who pores by weak candlelight over the heavy volumes of the old tales? When was the saga last sung? Who toils through the vedas? What child thinks of Alexander now? Where lie the bones of Gog Magog, or who honours the ashes of the jade queen? These are the lost preoccupations of lesser ages and the dreams of vanished nights. Who knows them now? Scholars!’ With theatrical exaggeration Ghast spat profusely on the floor before him. ‘Scholars who would sooner own a story than honour it, who would sooner scorn a tale than have skill in it.

  ‘It is the world of women and men that has driven us into the mountain, the world of women and men that has broken the loom, lost the shuttle, crushed the horn and burned the old thread. Some have called me bloody, some ruthless, but the imaginers were not dispersed, nor the right-wraiths scattered by my hand; or if my hand was the instrument, the world of women and men armed me to it.’ He paused, letting this improbable logic sink improbably in.

  Kay looked at Will, her eyes asking whether this had not gone on too long; but his face was inclined to the floor, his eyes scattered in the grey arcs of stone that washed across the hall between the benches.

  ‘The stories have all been written,’ Ghast shouted, ‘and there is no new thing under the sun! The great tree is dead, and its leaves all are withered! The moors and fens and mountains where once our wispers stalked are farmed, drained and scaled. Why should we walk now by the known ways of the earth, reminding the ungrateful of what they have chosen to forget? We do ourselves dishonour even to think it. There are some who think we must conserve the past and become curators of our vanished glories; but for whose sake shall we rebuild our great library? For whose sake re-hang the huge tapestried hall? Surely not for our own.

  ‘No.’ Ghast was striding the hall now, covering the floor between his low-set seat and the midpoint where Kay perched, increasingly worried, upon her stool. Had he come from the mountain for this? Was this the trap that she had dreamed? Will still hung his head, the shuttle moving absently between his fingers as he sat averted from the loom. Kay looked to Flip, but he was – strangely – beaming, as if privy to some joke Kay had not yet fathomed. And where was her father? Beyond the windows the meagre daylight – which was their only illumination – sagged and darkened, as if on Ghast’s cue. He was not speaking now but pacing the hall, searching the faces of the wraiths on both sides, challenging his antagonists to refute him. Had they come to Bithynia for the Bride? his eyes demanded. Had they really believed for a moment that such a childish myth could be?

  ‘The loom has been rebuilt, they say – but by whom, and for what? Indeed it stands before us, and I am grateful that it should be so, and that we should meet in the shadow of its authority. But what should we make upon its great rack now, except the greater sacrifice of our hands? I have heard the horn has been recovered. I have heard the shuttle has been dredged up from the ocean floor. I have heard of keys, of shellfruits, of blossoms underground – I have heard such whatnots! And to what end? That you should thrall yourselves to the empty ceremonies of a sterile and all-too-fruitful fruitlessness? That you should throw open the doors upon a tomb, and perish in it?’

  Suddenly, and with menacing strides, Ghast covered the half-length of the hall, drove directly up to Kay and pointed his stubby, fat finger right in her face. At his height, his eyes were almost level with her own. She recoiled from his curled lip, fearing he would spit even upon her. But instead – and for the first time that evening he lowered his voice – he spoke directly to her. ‘You don’t believe the hocus-pocus of shellfruits and causes any more than I do. I know you. You know what’s beneath the House of the Two Modes. You saw the carvings on the walls. You saw the altar. You know, as I know, that that house is built on a vast and swallowing grave. It is built on nothing but death. And through that door –’ he spun and shouted now at Will, who sat silently with his head bowed – ‘there is no passage.’ And now he turned back to Kay, and sneered almost down her throat. ‘In that night there are no stars, only darkness.’

  Kay’s throat suddenly ran dry as sand, and her stomach collapsed in sickening knots.

  ‘But we have an alternative. We may manage our stories. We may package them. We may sell them. Let us not go back to the Quarries – fine. Let us not go back to the mountain – good. Let us seal it up – excellent. But this place is no more our home now than those craggy voids, for the world of women and men has forgotten it, has thrown it through the door into the bottomless grave of useless history, and if we stay here – if we stay here like this, I say, then we fall with it!’

  Ghast stood very close to Kay and let his words sink in for a moment. Then, in a hushed voice, surely almost inaudible to the wraiths sitting at the far reaches of the stalls, he concluded. ‘Some of you may be surprised to see me here. Perhaps you thought I could not be lured by the trifling tale-telling of our right-handed retroverts. Perhaps you thought I would even now be making good my escape. But I have more respect for the Honourable Society than to think it the passive limb of a wasted, withered philosophy. You are something more than the playthings of tired, mad imaginations. And yet I am glad that we stand here once more, assembled in our ancient home, and with the due form of all our ritual toys observed. Let us resolve once and for all to leave this way. Let us create the forms for a new Weave, a better Weave, a more efficient Weave, a more prosperous Weave. Let us do so, and close these doors behind us forever.’

  Ghast fell silent where he stood, and the whole hall of wraiths on both sides sat speechless, each perhaps waiting for the other to begin. But where the shouts had pealed readily before Ghast’s arrival, now Kay thought despairingly that the smiles and bright looks had drooped, and the fixed grimaces of the left-wraiths had hardened. Still Will looked down, and still he turned
the shuttle absently in his hands. Meanwhile Ghast walked quietly back to the lower end of the hall. There was a chair there – a plain, everyday chair. Kay wondered that she hadn’t noticed it earlier. With one of his meaty hands he took hold of it by the back, then dragged it, scraping the stone floor, until it rested just beyond the lowest, the most humble of the stalls of the left-wraiths. He stood before it.

  ‘I have spoken,’ he said at last, and sat.

  The walls of stone where, at the ends of the hall, they rose unadorned from the floor to the oak-beamed ceiling were not more silent than the Weave during the long breath that greeted Ghast’s conclusion. Kay fought her rising panic as the silence continued and still Will did nothing. Then, suddenly, from a wraith sitting not three metres from her stool, a courage-curdling cry came: ‘Let him be king!’ Kay’s heart flooded furiously in her chest as the cry was taken up, and up, all around the hall – first by two or three, then five, then twenty, until hundreds of wraiths began to chant it in a gradually resolving unison. The sense of horror and alienation Kay experienced as, on her stool, she began to fold under the pressure of the chanting was absolute. For a long moment she dared not raise her eyes from the floor, even to steal a glance at Will or Flip; but when at last she did, she wished she hadn’t.