Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  For Flip was no longer smiling, but was himself chanting. Nor was he chanting only, but he began to beat his hands emphatically against the bench before him, in a display of impatience and fury. When Kay sought his gaze, she achieved no recognition; was this, she thought, what it was all for? All the friendship, the betrayals, the reconciliations, the stories, the trust? To bring us to this room, this fate, this event? And still between his hands, almost prostrate, Will turned the shuttle over. With sudden and piercing distress Kay remembered that, though Ghast had before aspired to a kingship over the Honourable Society, he had been prevented by the necessary form of proceeding: he required an author. Ell sat blinking and terrified on her stool, obviously wanting very much to break across the narrow floor to hide in her sister’s arms. She had never looked so small to Kay, or so important.

  The next few moments seemed to pass very quickly: Ghast stole over the length of the hall with his chair, placing himself opposite the loom and before the twelve knights; Flip slipped off the benches and delivered a velvet bag to Razzio, which Kay by its size and shape knew must contain a crown; the chanting intensified; and the three youngest left-wraiths, in what must have been a carefully orchestrated abduction, descended off the dais and, processing down the hall, suddenly snatched Ell and returned to the loom, bearing her between their hands. Kay’s instinct was to give chase and to free Ell from their grasp by any ineffectual means, but the chanting cowed her, and the elongated faces – set, determined – of so many wraiths around the hall.

  As if in a dream, and as the chanting continued, the three youngest left-wraiths deposited Ell on the dais before Razzio who, with his hands upon hers, helped her to lift the crown before the assembly. Flip took a place to the right of the loom, and they all – including Will, who at last and too late lifted his haggard head – turned to watch the proceedings. Ten of the knights sat still enthroned on the dais; only Razzio was on his feet, puffed out with the pride Kay had seen in him on their first arrival in Rome the week before, his chin thrust high into the air and his eyelids heavy upon the sights that did not truly concern him. Kay bored into their hearts as she watched how they betrayed themselves, the story of their trials and travels, the friendships and revelations they had sorrowed and suffered for. Now Razzio himself knelt low to the floor and presented his knee to Ell, gesturing for her to stand upon it and, from above, to place the crown upon the head of the seated Ghast. For his part, his face spoke total command: not a line, not a hairy mole was out of place.

  As Eloise lifted the shell-ivory crown, with its elaborate ornament of whorl and plotting stone, delicately into place upon Ghast’s head, the chanting erupted into a magnificent, feral cheer. The hair on the back of Kay’s neck bristled to hear it, and for the first time that day she felt not anger, but real fear. Ghast stood up to cheers and loud halloos from the hall all around, and stood fixed while the wraiths in company continued to salute him – by no means all, Kay thought as she looked tentatively around, but enough to carry the momentum of a cheer. Enough, she thought, to overpower the others.

  The greater half of the wraiths in the hall were still cheering as Flip, dragging Ell by her little hand, walked slowly back from the disregarded loom, past where Kay was sitting, towards the back of the hall. As they approached, Kay felt the full force of loss like a knife twisting in her gut. It has all been for this. All the searching, all the discovery, all the awful losses and recoveries. After all this, and I have lost her anyway. I had twelve nights to save you all, and on the twelfth, I failed.

  And for a moment she didn’t care.

  I am too tired.

  As Flip neared her, she saw his face. And, from nothing, her heart ignited in a rage. He still wore the same merry but deranged expression, intent and unhinged, but now he stared full in Kay’s face as he passed, taking her eyes in a hold that for an instant she thought she couldn’t sustain. Everything in her steeled and went cold, and her head felt flattened within by an overwhelming drone that she knew was nothing but the blood surging like ice through her veins.

  But then, suddenly, and so quickly that Kay instantly fretted that she had not seen it at all, she thought he winked. Kay’s thoughts spun. She sat dumb and unmoving – betrayed, reprieved, betrayed again, reprieved again, uncertain whether to collapse in defeat or throw back her shoulders in triumph.

  In a moment Flip had disappeared from the hall, and Ell with him, and the cheering began to fall just a little, and then, as if dragged down under its own weight, it died completely. Ghast seemed about to speak; but just as he raised his right hand and took a deep, ponderous breath, the curtain behind Kay was drawn and into the hall strode, very purposefully, her father.

  Within fifty long paces, all measured by a shocked silence, he had covered the length of the hall and stood before the loom and the newly crowned king. Without flourish, he sank to one knee, and in a direct address to Ghast requested, without ceremony or form, that the king would upon the festival of his coronation grant him a boon.

  Kay could see clearly Ghast’s discomfort: he still stood immediately next to the loom, where Will sat, indifferent; the eleven knights still sat enthroned behind him, where Razzio had retaken his seat; and it was obvious to all that he cared little for the petitioner. But, equally, this was to be his first act as king, and Ghast could not afford to trample too roughshod across the goodwill of his subjects. He turned, almost enquiringly, to Razzio, his neck stiffly soldered to his shoulders as if he feared to topple the crown from his fat head. With a wave of his long fingers Razzio signalled Oidos. She rose. ‘It is the ancient custom of the Honourable Society that a king of wraiths should not refuse a petitioner in the Weave,’ she said perfunctorily, and sat.

  ‘Then anything that is mine to give,’ Ghast replied, with a forced munificence and to all the company of the hall, ‘upon the day of my coronation I shall bestow without stint.’

  Ned More had neither flinched nor shaken, even for a moment, throughout this exchange, but still knelt, staring, at Ghast. ‘I desire then that you should cause me to weep,’ he said. Ghast stared at him. ‘Or if not to weep, then to laugh. Or to fear, to joy, to sorrow, to suffer. Tell me some tale.’

  Ghast, unnerved, looked again at Oidos, then over at Firedrake. With sudden resolution he said, ‘I shall call one of my wraiths –’

  ‘No,’ said Ned More quietly but forcefully. ‘I ask that it should be you.’

  Ghast, who had already raised his arm as if to summon one of the lesser left-wraiths to him, slowly allowed it to fall. His face looked ashen. ‘I will not,’ he said.

  ‘You must.’

  Kay hadn’t seen the curtains open for a final time. No one had. Nor did any wraith know the voice that spoke those commanding words – the clear and sonorous treble that sliced through the air like a sword at once rising and falling, striking and parrying; that both pierced the ear with its sudden violence and sheathed itself in the surety of its unimpeachable authority. But Kay knew that voice and, as she turned, tears had already begun to well in her exhausted eyes, and her hands, though she willed them to reach out, to clap, to fall upon that proud figure before her, only hung limp and paralysed by her sides.

  It was her mother.

  Oh my mother, oh my mother, cry, my wretched heart. Forgive me.

  Clare Worth was dressed in the same long green cassock, trimmed with silver and studded with diamonds, that Phantastes wore. In her hands she held a rod of black forged iron. She held it like a bat, across her body, as if she had come to break with tradition and not to fulfil it – as if at any moment she might stalk down the hall with her rod ready and begin to swing it. She stared at the wraiths around her, turning her head with a measured sweep to take in first the assembled left-wraiths, then their antagonists across the aisle, the whole body of right-wraiths, and at last the eleven knights assembled on the dais at the far end of the hall – and, last of all, Ghast upon his throne, and her husband, still patiently kneeling before him. Unlike everyone else in the h
all, he had not turned round or even flinched at the sound of this new voice. Kay stared hard at his back, uncertain if it was tight with anger or loose with relief.

  And then, with firm and unhurried steps, Clare Worth began to walk the length of the hall. The eye of every wraith followed her. Every breath drew even with her steps. Every heart sped to see the iron rod in her hands, that staff lost for a thousand years, for two thousand, for as long as a story can be told or a great imagining conjured. When she reached the hall’s end, she hoisted the rod erect in her hands, holding it above her head – and then, with purpose, drove it home into its ancient slot at the head of the great wheel.

  Kay lurched breaths. She had seen what she could not dare know, what she could not understand – the head of her mother’s iron staff, unlike all the others in this, that it was tipped with gold.

  It was you. All along, you. In the sewers at Alexandria. It was you with the kermes book. It was you in the catacombs. All along it was you.

  Phantastes stood, and stepped forward from his throne.

  My mother. You built the loom.

  ‘My lady,’ he said, and bowed. Even from where she sat, Kay could see the tears streaming down his suddenly haggard cheeks.

  Clare ignored him. It was as if she hadn’t even heard him. Her hands still grasped the iron rod where she had completed the circle. The room paused. The very air seemed unsure, and faltered. Her eyes were fixed on something distant, or something long ago, as if she were gathering her strength from a great afar.

  Suddenly, with a heave and a terrible cry, Clare Worth pulled back with all her strength on the iron rod in her hands. Kay thought for a second that she had bent it – but no, it wasn’t that. The rod, it appeared, was a kind of lever and, as her mother pulled on it, it declined from the centre of the circle with a hard grating sound, as of iron drawing against stone, or a plough cutting into rocky ground – and then rested, fixed and splayed. Clare Worth proceeded around the wheel, heaving on the rods one by one until they had all opened like petals, away from the centre of its circle. And with the last, almost like magic, the iron wheel opened at its hub, and from a circular boss she retrieved a huge, luminous dark-blue stone. Cupping it with both hands, she carried it down the length of the hall.

  ‘Mum,’ said Kay. ‘It’s Ell – they took her, I couldn’t –’

  ‘I love you,’ said Clare to Kay, placing the stone in her outstretched palms. Their eyes met in a fathomless tenderness, but she did not smile. ‘Don’t go running off again.’

  In the utter hush she re-crossed the length of the hall. The knights stood as she approached, making way for Clare Worth to assume the throne of honour at their centre, and then together the twelve of them took their seats. Ghast stared at them, at Kay, and with obvious terror at the heavy blue gem in her hands, which seemed to glow within its rounded surface with the white lines of a twelve-pointed star.

  Stars were there.

  Ghast had gone grey with fear. But that, Kay thought, was as nothing to the pallor that swept across his features as Will – without prologue or demonstration – slipped the pirn into the shuttle, then began to set the threads upon the loom. After so many years he would have a story at last.

  ‘Tell your story, Ghast of the Bindery, King of Wraiths and Phantasms.’ Clare Worth put her hands on the arms of her throne and closed her eyes. ‘Tell your story and grant your boon.’

  After a painfully protracted silence, during which not a single wraith so much as cleared her throat, Ghast began.

  ‘There was once a man. All his desire was to be great. He would achieve great things, but he had neither skill nor knowledge. He had no aptitude, no opportunity. For years he woke, ate, did unmemorable things, repeated them, ate again, slept; and he hid his desire for greatness in the darkest corner of his awareness. He hid it because, as an ambition he could not fulfil, it was able to cause him only pain. The years accumulated and grew upon him like earth, weighing him down, driving ever further into the cold, airless, lightless past his sacred hunger. If he had recalled his youthful ambition, he would have found that his appetite for greatness had dulled with the gradual accomplishment of mean honours, with the acquisition of almost useless abilities – but he never had the leisure to consider himself, and ever less as his authority widened, the demands on his schedule multiplied and the number of his clients grew.’

  The words were produced slowly, but not haltingly. Like them all, Kay could see that this kind of speaking did not come easily to Ghast, and yet his features and the tension in his frame as he spoke seemed to betray not only uneasiness, but a kind of contemptuous intensity. Before him, though completely disregarded, her father still knelt, impassive.

  ‘The day came when other men might have crested that imperceptible ridge, passing from a life of industrious ineffectiveness to one of unremarkable incapacity. But this man discovered, to his surprise, that the world around him had shrunk, withered, decayed, lapsed. The skills he had once sought and failed to achieve; the knowledge he had once sought to master, but staggered in; the opportunities that he had once so fervently coveted, but missed – these now had vanished from the world. Little by little the ambition and hunger that had relentlessly dogged his youngest years fought their way to the surface of his being and his doing, and he began to discover – though only by glimpses at first – that all he required to differentiate himself from and, indeed, to prefer himself to the world was his pure ambition. The hunger alone would set him apart. In a very little time he was reputed the greatest man then living, and so achieved his desire.’

  There Ghast ended, punctuating his speech with a defiant stare not only at Edward More, but at the assembled wraiths on both sides of the hall, whose expectation had demanded, and secured, this demeaning display from him. And well might he defy them, Kay thought, for his story had been awful, mean, pointless and empty; and as she followed his eyes to those of his audience, she saw in them the same distrust, the same dissatisfaction, the same contempt that he reflected back at them; nor was this among the right-wraiths only, but even the left-wraiths, and even those who only a short while before had chanted most enthusiastically, Ghast’s brief, incompetent and vicious display met with less than a resigned disbelief. It had aroused their impatience, their shame and even (as Kay watched the faces, and the minds that made the faces) their hatred. Ghast had ended, and the hall fell not silent, but uncomfortably, simmeringly void. Rustling, stamping and the clearing of throats began menacingly to emanate from the right of the hall, and from its left a shamed defiance. Kay could sense the coming confrontation, though it was not yet clear whether it would conclude as cooperation or an outright brawl.

  And then Ghast began again to speak – or so Kay thought, until, reverting to him, she found his lips still and his features verging on a poorly concealed rage. She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear whence the voice came, but it was scored and stippled out with the faint beat of a tapping drum – and though it rose and fell like a wave rolling (that both falls and rises only that it may go on rolling), or like a thread passing in and out of the texture of the weave, it always moved, was always there, full of forward motion. In a clap of stunned recognition, Kay realized that it was Will’s voice, and that he had taken up the story while he worked at it himself upon the loom.

  ‘This was the man of despair who, like Phaethon, child of Helios, attempted in his greed to seize and control that which lay beyond him – and, in reaching for it, destroyed it. Phaethon, disregarded boy, who was not content to remain one of the blessed children of the sun, to wear his father’s livery on his cheek or upon his shoulders; Phaethon who could not rest in his thought until he had caught the very reins in his hand, until he had put the horses under his sole direction, until he had seized his father’s chariot and driven the sun almost into the earth. Cruel and catastrophic ambition! The fertile vines of Italy and Greece burst into flame, and the vineyards, laid waste, became deserts; the sea like a pot set upon a stove bubbled and steamed, and then
boiled dry; the trees grown torches, the fields grown sheets of fire, burned, and upon them the people ran like whole, searing blisters, their eyes frying in their sockets and their skin pouring from their charring bones like fast-melted wax. Who heard the cries of children among the bellowings of oxen and horses, among the screams of plummeting eagles? Happy then were those who chanced before the relentless ball of flame to fall into some deep pool or flooded cavern, where they might shelter a while from the blast! Happy then were the worms, the moles, the badgers and the foxes that by burrowing in the cool soil and clay seemed to evade the scorching flames that fell from the air! Happy then were all those towering birds of prey that in the high mountains sought out ice and snow in which to blanket themselves! But pools were blasted away, the very clay was baked into dust, and the mountains stood bare but for the drifting heaps of ash that once had been forests. Small wonder, then, that, while the world burned, the father of the gods whetted his titanic bolt and, hurling it, dashed Phaethon from the sky and scattered him in pieces upon the earth.

  ‘So was the world and all that was in it brought to destruction by a childish overreaching, a greed born of despair that would rather kill the thing it covets than suffer others to enjoy it. It is a story as old as stories are, told by every people, a memory of the great cataclysms of the past and a prophecy of those to come. But it is not the last story; for always when the selfish appetite, overrunning everything, has consumed itself and fed at last upon its own ruin, then other voices, perhaps quiet at first, can be heard; then other feet, light steps though they may be, tread the embers and from them begin again to raise a harvest. The daughters of Helios, in grief for Phaethon, their brother, scoured the plains and shores of Italy looking for and collecting the pieces of his thunder-torn corpse. Piece by piece they composed him, a work of years, until they were able to give him burial, their brother, the companion of their mother’s womb, their blood and their flesh, at last laid to rest. But in their mourning, in their sad and weary steps as they brought his body to the grave, they also created something new: no sooner had they poured funeral libations upon his scattered corpse, no sooner had they cast the dust upon his body, no sooner had they with tears and laments sounded the last of his days than the gods caused thin webs to spin along their palms and fingers, transforming them into leaves, while a crusty bark ramified each limb, stretching and branching it into a network of trunk, bough, twig and stem. From their feet, where they stood along the banks of the river Eridanus, roots crawled into the earth, binding them to the shore, while from their eyes tears like thick slugs of amber dropped into the water below, as still they do today.