‘In the same way Isis, goddess of the moon, soaked all Egypt in her tears when, after the death of her husband Osiris, she roamed the valley of the Nile, seeking the scattered pieces of his body. With his death the great light of the sun had been extinguished; all Egypt surrendered to flood, to rot and to plague; and it seemed as if every good of the world would be drowned in the relentless waves of the spreading river. But in her grief Isis told another tale, and as she gathered here an arm, there a finger, here the hip of her beloved and there a rib, piecemeal she reconstructed her lord and husband, until the day when, through her devotion and determination, he sat again upon the royal throne at Abydos, dispensing justice. It is said that this queen of Egypt breathed life into her dead and dismembered lord not merely by her laments, her tears or her faith, but by her stories: myths of Osiris’ great acts dropped from her mouth as she trod her pilgrim way; myths and legends, the histories of his ancestors, the tale of his miraculous birth, his attributes and his life, word after word knitted like the stitches wherewith surgeons bind flesh on flesh to heal the ragged wound. So by telling him over she gathered him together. So by telling over his story, even now, we too not only remember him and her, the tale together with its teller, but also breathe into them both new life, and renew our own.
‘For which poet, which teller of stories, is not also a healer? Which ballad-maker is not likewise a priest, who in laying on the hands of a parable brings the dead again to life? To spin a yarn, as the singer Orpheus knew, is to go to hell for your bride – as Orpheus himself did when the gods moved the venomous snake to strike the heel of his beloved Eurydice. Orpheus braved the gods, charming the three-headed dog of the underworld, Cerberus, and seducing the ear of horrid Persephone, queen of Hades, before he might in triumph lead his bride again towards the light. So, even in death there is life, even in the end there lies a beginning, even from ashes a conquest may rise. Then let fall your tears of amber, O you daughters of Helios! Drop here and there your quickening stories, Isis, faithful queen! And you, Orpheus, great singer of tales, go you to hell and ransom the fair Eurydice – for while I weave, the Bride still whispers among the groves of old Bithynia!’
Kay knew as soon as the last word was pronounced that it had happened again: she must have slipped mesmerized into that same trance she had experienced in Paris three days before, because she now stood not before her chair or in the middle of the hall, but at its end, just before the dais and adjacent to the loom itself, which still worked quickly, weaving, under the hands of the First Wraith. In her cupped hands lay the Bridestone, faintly glowing, its star the quiet, still promise of a new birth; in Will’s hands the shuttle, by contrast, moved like a wild and a live thing. He was nowhere near completion, but the beginnings of the tapestry had started to take colour under his hands as the shuttle wove through the threads with such speed that the air, rushing through it, created a low hum from every one of its tiny apertures: a quiet music, whistling and droning from Will’s light grasp as he worked. Kay watched his delicate fingers threading in the total silence of the hall. She knew, this time, what had shocked the wraiths, and why they now sat so still. She knew what momentous heavings were stirring in their conscious thoughts, but strangely this understanding of their gravity seemed to free her from it, and she was all witness to Will’s working, and she loved the dance of his hands among the thread, the way his fingers hardly touched the shuttle at all – as if they held, rather, all the air around its quick ovular sheen, and didn’t so much push it through the warp as guide the places where it might no longer be. It was a negative moment, a play of space and gap, a dance between forms.
But the movement of the shuttle was not all; there was, too, the hard pressure of the bar, and the relentless closing up of space between the threads – and the bar worked like a lung, yawning open to free the hands, then slamming closed to build the weave, then open again, then closed. The voice of the shuttle moved murmuring in among these long breaths, with the lesser music of words weaving in the line, and Kay knew that the origin of the poetry she had been sung all her life lay in this two-plied weaving-up of depth, of motion, time, colour, as the shifting weight of recognition turned over, behind her, in hundreds on hundreds of minds, like the upending of some great mass in the sea. And she was conscious then of another sound, which was nearby and completely unlike the silence, completely unlike the blurred chaos of the shuttle; it pealed raspingly, like the death to which it was the prelude. Kay didn’t need to look behind her to know that Ghast now lay upon the stone floor of the hall, or that the little rhythm of flecking hisses she heard was his last breath escaping between his foamy lips. Her father would be kneeling still at his side, trying to revive him; perhaps Kat, too, or another – but there would be no saving him. Kay felt neither sorry nor glad; she simply felt the open and closing of the bar as it moved across the gaps of threading fingers. Within the black border that would run all around the final work, she had known what the image would be, and she smiled now to see the face of Eurydice emerging, wreathed with serpents.
There was but one thing remaining. Kay knew just how it would be. She turned to face the silent hall, and the eyes of the whole Honourable Society of Wraiths and Phantasms settled upon her. She was still smiling. Almost as one, every wraith in the hall turned to follow her own gaze towards the far entrance, where Ell’s face suddenly appeared, draped in the embroidered green velvet that still curtained her little body.
‘Mum!’ she shouted, and the peal of it rang across the ranks of wraiths as a ripple spreads on water, washing every face with the joy of return, of renewal, of rebirth. Ell broke through the curtains and ran the length of the hall, her feet stamping upon the mosaics – and, threading the rods, straight across the opened flower of the wheel. And the centuries of wraiths where she passed rose as one to their feet. And as she threw herself into her mother’s outstretched arms, every one of their voices – with the very stones and glass, the wood and each painted ornament that decked the ancient hall, still rocking to the beat of the working loom – exploded into song.
Epilogue
The fingers moved across the piano keys like a rippling wave over pebbles. Kay watched them roll and then, by little leaps, spring up and down across the arpeggios, or fan to collect distributed chords. Her mother’s hands were long and slender, with no apparent cast of muscle to them at all; and yet she could make the little room throb with the sound of a handgrip. Nor did she ever look down at them as they wheeled, eddied, pounced, twirled and wove across the keyboard, instead keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the score flung open on the rack before her. It was almost as if she were two people, and not one: a watcher with her eyes and a doer with her hands. As the long waltz fell into the last of its cadences, Kay bounced a little on to her toes and, from her patient stand next to the higher registers, cleared her throat.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Katharine.’ Clare Worth placed her hands exactly on her thighs, and swivelled upon her stool so as to face her daughter.
‘Do you ever look at your hands while you’re playing the piano?’
‘Not for a long time, Katharine. Why?’
‘They remind me of something. Well, of a lot of things, actually.’ Of a shuttle as white as the purest ivory, of the dark lamp-black of the plotting stone, of the hands that dance in the air, of an outstretched palm and of the cloth that sews the needle.
Clare Worth was silent, and Kay wasn’t sure that she even took a breath. Outside a wood pigeon found its throat, but her mother just regarded her calmly, staring directly into her eyes; and for a moment Kay felt as if a hood had been drawn up over all the world but this one face, which lay revealed to her in all its simplicity and ancientness, its inarticulate kindness, its mathematical materiality.
‘By the muses, they remind me of those things, too, Kay,’ said Clare Worth at last. ‘I’m so very, very glad that you are all home again.’ Without another word she stood and lifted the cover of the huge piano, drawing up the prop
to set the cover open. With the same quiet delicacy she removed the music stand and all its furniture. When she had exposed the sounding board, and above it all the instrument’s strings and hammers, then she sat down and began again to play from the beginning – and while the music whorled and threaded, the two of them poured their mutual gaze upon her long, agile, harp-stringing, loom-building fingers.
Acknowledgements
Early readers – Jason Scott-Warren, Deborah Meyler, Jonathan Sissons, Adam Gauntlett and Davara Bennett – helped me to pull Twelve Nights out of its dusty shoebox and coax it into shape. I am so grateful for their encouragement!
Again and again Emily Sahakian has set me straight when I have lost the plot; she is that right stedfast starre, in Ocean waues yet neuer wet.
To Ruth Knowles at Penguin Random House, and all the team there, I can only imagine how much I owe.
To all of them, and to you, latest reader, with open arms, thanks.
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First published 2018
Text copyright © Andrew Zurcher, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-38765-9
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Twelve Nights Page 35