Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

‘Now,’ cried Wynter. Thomes had predictably not risked the test flight himself. Terror seized him as the craft surged upwards, reducing the town to so many dolls’ houses. Wynter stood. ‘One sweep of the river,’ he shouted, ‘to let them see their rulers.’

  The craft banked hard to the north and west. The Apothecaries furled back the canopy.

  Below, poles and coracles rolled across the ground. The hubbub of pre-Race joshing subsided as one hand pointed, then ten, then the entire populace. The Master Tanner, never one to miss an opportunity for ingratiation, bellowed, ‘Elijah! Elijah!’

  The word took hold, from a lone voice to a chant to a roaring chorus. Wynter awarded his public one magisterial wave before directing the craft towards Rotherweird Westwood.

  With the gnarl he traced the contours of the Rotherweird escarpment. ‘Behold the frontiers of our new world – to doom and renewal!’

  Recent successes had refuelled Wynter’s self-belief. The countrysiders had been immured, Morval retaken and Scry and the mysterious Gabriel liquidated, and Calx Bole and Nona had rediscovered deference.

  He was again his own master.

  Morval’s pencil danced. On the pad on her knees Wynter’s ecstatic face took shape. She rediscovered her voice, muttering into her lap, ‘Methinks I am a prophet, new inspired . . .’

  2

  An Ultimatum

  Gorhambury abandoned the Umpire’s chair, taking with him the Great Equinox Race (Guild) Amendment Regulations from the lectern in front of him. The chaos induced by the spring bore had in the past delivered a random fairness. A flat-water start would mean more jockeying for position, more liberties taken. To be closer to the action, Gorhambury had commissioned from the Polks a coil-driven coracle with a prominent pennant emblazoned UMPIRE – GIVE WAY. All the teams had been informed.

  He handed over the Chair to Rhombus Smith and boarded his vessel.

  The surprise entry by the Apothecaries had given the Race an additional edge. They looked like well-drilled magpies, here to win. The Mixers eyed them with unconcealed loathing.

  Trouble is rarely an only child. An urgent message had diverted Gorhambury to the Manor, where Persephone Brown awaited him in the Great Hall. An Apothecary from Thomes’ bodyguard stood beside her.

  She spoke in a deadpan voice, but her eyes blazed. ‘When I return, surrender the keys of the town to me.’

  Gorhambury could not believe his ears. The keys, emblematic of the town itself, rested in the Mayor’s sole custody. ‘I will do no such thing. You know the law as well as I do.’

  ‘Then I will have to take them.’

  ‘You are not the Mayor.’

  ‘The Age of the Herald passed long ago. Now the Age of the Mayor will pass. We enter the last Age. We stand at the gates of Spring.’

  ‘And I have a race to umpire,’ Gorhambury had replied curtly.

  ‘Run along then. But don’t say you haven’t been warned.’

  As Gorhambury surveyed the skirmishing mass of coracles, he shook his head in despair. The Lord of Misrule had been unleashed.

  3

  A Mixing of Opposites

  The tile beneath the Claud chapel unexpectedly delivered Orelia to the curious causeway dividing the two contrasting lakes, which glimmered in a dense mist, red and blue respectively. The stone bench, its natural colour darkened by damp, looked less inviting than on her previous visit. She discovered an inscription on its underside, previously missed, which read:

  Go find where the wind blows,

  Go find its lung of stone,

  Learn what only it knows

  All else is blood and bone.

  Obscure but lyrical, it had a pagan ring. Did the author mean that all was perishable but the force of Nature? Or was it an exhortation to get to the heart of the matter?

  She tramped the causeway in search of inspiration.

  The cups: she had overlooked the cups. She gambled correctly that the red cup would take molten liquid and the blue cup the ice-fire.

  Thank you, St Jude. Now what?

  Kneeling, with her body arched well back, she poured out the contents, each into their opposing lake. From the point of contact, a scarlet line veined across the ice and a blue line went zigzagging through the lava.

  Terror seized her: she had triggered a tipping point. The two lakes began to thrash and roil. Waves lapped the causeway from violent cross-currents as the surfaces heaved and steam thickened into smoke.

  In near darkness, Orelia ran without looking back.

  A deafening roar rent the air as the tile duly swallowed her up.

  4

  The Poisoning

  Wynter entered the white tile first. He would have preferred clear weather for his return. Instead, a clinging mist shrouded the scene of his former triumphs. But the gnarl, quivering in anticipation in his right hand, relegated the disappointment to a minor detail. He waited for the others. He would lead them to the mixing-point as in the old days.

  Thomes, for all his limitations, could distinguish fake from real. The journey from the tile and the pyramidal seed heads in the grass convinced him that Wynter had indeed found the monsters’ breeding ground. A leathery-winged bird skimming overhead closed the case.

  He nodded approvingly.

  The Apothecaries arrived, then Morval, then Sly.

  Wynter watched Morval like a snake. She looked satisfyingly diminished, so close to the scene of her transformation. He smiled at her. Feel your punishment for killing my Carcasey Jack, said the smile.

  Morval stared back at him and whispered, ‘The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.’

  Wynter laughed and turned his back on her. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  Through the grass they tramped, Thomes, Sly and the Apothecaries all cowed by the strangeness of the place and Wynter’s insouciance.

  Thomes hastily revised his master plan: work with Wynter, discard Persephone Brown.

  Morval alone, attuned to Nature even here, registered a moment of crisis: Life or Death; all in the balance.

  Sly complimented himself on disposing of Snorkel. Soon, under his new master, he would have two worlds to administer. He dreamed of mining for jewels and precious metals in this virgin land.

  *

  Gabriel had believed before; now he was convinced. Jones had been a lead scout. He read the lie of the land like a map, knowing not only what you could see from where, but also from where you could be seen. He had lined their faces with mud. Even Valourhand, a student of stealth, was impressed.

  ‘Move your head up to see; slow, slow, slow. The temptation is to rush when you get close to the eyes. It’s movement which draws attention.’ Jones sniffed. ‘Wind direction could hardly be better. We should hear them, but not vice versa.’

  He raised his own head, inch by inch. ‘First mistake,’ he whispered. ‘He’s left no guard on the tile.’

  Jones slid down the contour and across, ever closer to the mixing-point. They followed, apprentices behind their master.

  *

  ‘This is the place, Master Thomes,’ cried Wynter. High in the branches of the huge tree hung a rope. Grass half covered a wrecked rusty cage. ‘Up there – that’s where the monsters are made.’

  Wynter’s new acolytes followed his gaze and peered into the mist, where a patch of air shimmered and danced.

  ‘It’s a creative energy which rearranges cellular structures,’ Wynter said, his tone offhand, ‘but it’s secondary to our present undertaking. Get your men up and put the needles everywhere, trunk and branches. But no injecting yet.’

  The extendable ladders lifted men high; slings and harnesses further aided their ascent. All over the tree, stiletto points bit into the bark.

  ‘It’s bleeding,’ cried one, as sap trickled along the wood, then fell in viscous threads.

  ‘Of course it’s bleeding,’ cried Wynter. ‘It’s a living thing.’

  *

  Gabriel, lover of trees, gritted his teeth. ‘They’re killing it.�
��

  ‘It’s dying already,’ replied Jones.

  Of course it is, thought Gabriel, but how can Jones know? Then he remembered: Gregorius had been the Green Man – he would not only know, he would feel.

  ‘But why hasten the process?’ he asked.

  Valourhand, taking her turn to look, responded with three words: ‘Yggdrasil and Ragnarok.’ So many threads had come together.

  As they backed down the slope, she explained, ‘He’s gambling that the sister tree under Rotherweird will take over, wrenching our valley into Lost Acre’s dimension, or at least into a different one.’

  ‘How could he possibly know to do that?’ asked Gabriel.

  ‘Bole is scientifically minded.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ replied Gabriel incredulously.

  Valourhand, thinking aloud, continued, ‘Why did Bole choose Flask? That may shed some light – but what matters now is that severance would sunder Rotherweird and destroy the rest of the planet. Wynter will then rule everyone and everywhere that’s left. With the mixing-point he creates his own legends, monsters and heroes. He can start again.’

  ‘He’s playing with forces he doesn’t understand,’ replied Gabriel grimly. ‘I can’t stomach this. I’m sorry.’

  Jones seized Gabriel by the shoulders and held him down. ‘No, we all wait. That’s how it must be.’

  Gabriel relented. The strange mist and the atmosphere of suspended animation had an expectancy about it. Wynter’s objectives might be destructive, but he sensed a chance for renewal too. They were at the gates of Spring, after all. If he could sense it, Jones the Green Man must do so too. But what was Jones waiting for?

  Valourhand watched in horror. That’s why Wynter came back. Only the theory still felt flawed: Wynter could never have had the necessary knowledge in Elizabethan times. Bole must have designed this strategy centuries later, but all to the glorification of his master? Wheels within wheels within wheels . . .

  Unseen below them, Persephone Brown, in a loose shimmering dress of green, yellow and white, left the spiderwoman’s lair and flitted along the bank of the stream.

  *

  Wynter held up a gold pocket watch. ‘It is time. Humanity has polluted and wrecked his earthly paradise, so now it pays. Go to, go to.’

  The Apothecaries, their puritan zeal sharpened by talk of apocalypse, scurried from syringe to syringe, pressing down the plastic plungers one after the other.

  Morval faithfully sketched the scene at speed: figures in black and white swarming a giant tree like so many ants.

  The branches shivered in agony. Outsize viridian bubbles formed in the wounds, detached and floated away. Then in undamaged areas, more bubbles formed and followed. The great tree was trying to breathe.

  The bubbles had a spectacular beauty, an inner life which coiled and smoked. No two were alike. Some travelled fast; some held still despite the breeze – like different atomic particles, thought Valourhand. But what did these strange translucent spheres contain?

  She raised a hand to one, but it evaded her. The mist began to roil as the earth beneath the tree groaned like the timbers of a ship at sea.

  Valourhand eased up the slope again and turned her attention from the Apothecaries to Wynter. The silvery gleam of the escharion nestled in the crook of his arm. His head spun round, but not in her direction, back towards the white tile. He peered, right hand levelled above his eyes.

  ‘He comes,’ bellowed Wynter suddenly. ‘The fool comes. The beautiful boy would defy us again.’

  Tyke wore a simple shirt, sleeves rolled up, breeches and boots, no hat. By some miracle the wounds inflicted by Carcasey Jack had vanished. He carried in his right hand a tall green staff.

  Sly seized a pike, but Wynter restrained him. ‘He’s mine. You can have the pleasure of witnessing due punishment.’

  He placed the escharion in the grass and strode forward to meet Tyke.

  The Apothecaries in the tree froze, silhouetted like rotten fruit, as Tyke and Wynter closed. Tyke gestured down the slope towards Jones, Gabriel and Valourhand. Not your fight, said the sweep of the arm.

  The gnarl flicked out thorny tentacles which lacerated Tyke. Blood stained his arms and face. Valourhand cried out as Wynter waved the gnarl from side to side like a scourge. On striking the stems detached – only for more to form.

  To Wynter’s fury, Tyke did not resist. Only feet away from Wynter, his own staff finally responded, but with nothing more than the thinnest stems of green, which loosely clung to Wynter as a benevolent climber might to a tree, too loose even to hinder him.

  ‘God,’ cried Gabriel, ‘look.’

  Orelia, walking from the direction of the white tile to the tree, halted on seeing Wynter – only it was no longer Wynter. His form was changing, as if unwoven by the green staff’s tendrils. Then his face altered too.

  Everthorne! ‘No! Please! Stop!’ she screamed.

  But Everthorne was not truly Everthorne; the lookalike maintained the savage assault on Tyke, who stumbled, fighting to stay upright, as another set of flaying branches ripped at his thighs and legs. Yet still the green staff worked its gentle counter-offensive.

  Orelia sank to her knees as her lover lost definition and in his place appeared a diminutive red-haired dwarf – unmistakably Vibes. Tyke staggered on downhill, the shapeshifter and the gnarl relentlessly pursuing him.

  Jones read Tyke’s intentions. ‘He’s leading him on,’ he whispered to Valourhand and Gabriel. ‘Let him, however hard. As you would for me.’

  Valourhand in her distress barely caught the oddness of the remark, but Gabriel did.

  The diminutive Vibes yielded to Ferox, Jones’ old comrade-in-arms, who proved even more vicious than his predecessors. The gnarl’s thorned growth had ceased to detach and now encased Tyke, squeezing torso and neck. This time the green staff responded, ripping away the gnarl’s grip.

  ‘That’s Flask,’ shouted Valourhand.

  Orelia, sole witness to the original transformation, alone fully appreciated the dark brilliance of Bole’s original self-sacrifice. He had let Wynter take his body, confident of engineering a confrontation with Tyke and the green staff in due time, knowing that would restore him – at Wynter’s expense. But Bole did not appear next; instead, it was a young man with a kindly face. In a brief lull, Bole’s influence diminished and the gnarl’s attack slackened: Benedict Roc, the Master Carver and Bole’s first victim, had found the will to fight.

  But Bole owned him, and Bole duly won.

  For the first time, one of the protagonists spoke. The corpulent Bole, now fully in view and his face lit by triumph, cried out, ‘Nona, it’s done! All is done.’

  Only then did they see Persephone Brown, in a dress of shimmering green, yellow and white, with a circlet around her forehead.

  ‘Finish it,’ she said, and Orelia’s eyes narrowed. The way she spoke jarred.

  The gnarl redoubled its attack as Tyke crawled on his hands and knees onto the circle of laid stones at the bottom of the meadow, and at the same moment the green staff abandoned Tyke’s defence. Its trails of green fell away, leaving only a single shoot, which dived deep into the ground. A line appeared as it followed the edge of the stones. Orelia ran down to help, only for a shoot from the gnarl to whip her feet away.

  As she clambered to her feet, she understood. These weren’t stones from ancient times – they were Rotherweird cobbles. Bole had built the tower under Rotherweird’s streets, which required a deep cavern. Somehow Wynter’s sphere, which had been entrusted to Pomeny Tighe, had replaced the open pothole in Lost Acre with the paved Rotherweird surface. She recalled the last jotting on the list in Bolitho’s observatory: cobbled together. He must have shared his discovery with Tyke.

  Bole was revelling in his victory. ‘How would you like it, Tyke? Carotid artery, punctured lungs, a twig in the brain?’ He waved the gnarl once more. ‘You might have bettered the mixing-point, but nobody betters me.’

  He raised the gnarl for the cou
p de grâce but as he did, the green shoot completed its circle and with a deep rumble, the ground opened up – and Bole disappeared with the gnarl into the deeps.

  Now Valourhand did run, and Gabriel too, for only a single shoot from the green staff was holding Tyke on the chasm’s brink. As gently as they could, they hauled his barely conscious body to safety.

  Steam rose from far below, yellowish, with more than a hint of sulphur.

  ‘Tyke, Tyke!’ Valourhand shouted, ‘fight! Fight! Get me water – quick,’ she demanded, and Orelia hurried to the stream to fill her water bottle.

  Persephone Brown ran uphill past her, apparently unaffected by Bole’s fate. Thomes and his Apothecaries rushed to join her at the white tile. One by one, they disappeared as the bubbles from the dying tree drifted about their heads. Only Morval remained by the tree, forgotten and superfluous in Wynter’s absence.

  Gabriel squeezed Orelia’s arm, a gesture of comfort, as Valourhand ministered to Tyke with an uncharacteristic gentleness.

  ‘How did you get past the guards?’ Gabriel asked Orelia.

  ‘I didn’t come from there. There’s a chapel on the escarpment.’

  ‘The Claud family chapel.’ He reflected. ‘I always wondered why it was there.’ He gave her another squeeze. ‘Well done. I bet it wasn’t obvious. Tiles never are.’

  Blood seeped from the wounds crisscrossing Tyke’s face and body, but his eyes remained themselves. From the grass, tiny spiders appeared, as they had done before, and wove the skin together.

  Morval Seer did not move from the tree, but she spoke in Tyke’s direction. ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old,’ she said.

  Tyke spoke at last. ‘Look to the world, don’t look to me.’ Around him the bubbles began to burst in tiny flashes of energy like blown fuses. The great tree was shedding a lifetime’s memories. Different minds caught different images.

  Gabriel saw a barren landscape, rock and dust intersected with mazy lines of ice and fire, with one sign of life: a slim sapling on a shallow prominence, encased in thick protective bark, already boasting a splash of green in fields of ochre brown.