Shift had the OtterBox under his jersey and was hugging it to himself. Between the lumpy knit, the box itself and Jacob’s wad of cinnamon gum pressed over the microphone, surely Price wouldn’t be able to hear them. Though, if he was still awake and at his window, Price could see them, together in an empty village square, at the end of a long confabulation. Over breakfast Price might remark on how much Jacob and Shift had to say to one another. The safest response to that would be to say that he was sounding Shift out. ‘And what have you discovered?’ Price would ask. ‘He’s some kind of local,’ Jacob would say. ‘Or seasonal, maybe. I asked if he rented a holiday home, but he didn’t answer me. He’s a little simple, and I couldn’t figure out which end to pick him up by.’
Jacob decided that Price couldn’t overhear them. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I should pass this on—to you, Taryn and the raven. The server farm is using ski resort and theatrical snow machines, without providing refrigeration. Possibly they’re only acquiring what they need in the wrong order, but somehow I don’t think so. Because they have some kind of refrigeration anyway. Or something doing the same job. There’s one very cold building at the site. I’m just going to say it—a supernaturally cold building.’
‘They’re making snow for something that likes snow, but which comes with its own cold,’ Shift said.
He was quick. Jacob really had underestimated him. He said, ‘And they’ve recruited cryptographers as well as coders.’
‘Ah!’ Shift was excited. ‘They want the Firestarter, and they must think that whatever—’
Jacob had stepped into a steam room. He was surrounded by white obscurity. It was inside him, stifling all his senses, cooking his brain.
He found himself leaning on the car. It was wet and water had soaked all the way through his shirt front. Shift was shaking him. The OtterBox dropped from Shift’s jersey onto the gravel and Jacob saw the lozenge of gum come unstuck from the microphone.
Jacob held Shift off, and set a finger against his own lips. He turned his eyes to the boxed phone and gazed at it meaningfully. Then looked back at Shift—who’d got it, and was clearly wondering why Jacob had taken so long to tip him off about its having been tampered with. Shift’s expression was enquiring, then abruptly furious. He didn’t just release Jacob; he shoved him away, snatched up the box and stalked off in his squelching felt shoes.
‘And we were getting on so fucking swimmingly!’ Jacob shouted after him, for no good reason and nobody’s benefit. Then he got into Price’s car, drove a mile down the road and pulled over, marring the mossy edge of the forest not fifty feet from the tree where Beatrice Cornick had fallen. He ran the heater for a time, tilted the seat back and closed his eyes.
15
The Summer Road
It was a much smaller party that set out from the springs. Taryn, Shift, Jane, Neve and three other sidhe. They went later than planned, which meant they could travel without the litter. Taryn walked too. She didn’t have much stamina, but they made short days, with many rest stops. She and Jane kept to the path and took their time, while Shift and the sidhe ranged off after game—rabbits, wood pigeons, quail.
Three days’ walk took them many miles along a high path incised in the flanks of the mountains. Game supplemented the food they carried—cakes made of nut flour and sweet bean paste, dried fruit and hard cheeses. Taryn fought her cravings for wine, sugar and salt. And, by the time the party had divided, and only Jane, Neve, Shift and she remained on the downhill road, her cravings had gone.
On the long descent the views of the encircling mountains, and foothills of tussock and wildflowers, gradually packed themselves away. The landscape became beautiful in a more managed way. Days were warmer, and nights milder.
By the fourth day, the path they were on passed into an endless half-pipe of trees, a tunnel of overhanging shade that let the sun warm them for several hours before midday, and then descended into a gloom that kept them cool all afternoon. Some trees were coming into fruit—tart cherry and early plum—while others were still in blossom.
This was, Jane said, the Summer Road.
At intervals this continuous strip of orchard broadened around a stream or pond, where berry bushes grew, along with self-seeded bean vines and tomato plants—small yet—and the feathery tops of carrots, and radishes, chard and collards, beets and potatoes. These nodes of food-forest all had cooking sites. There were stone-lined earth ovens capable of feeding scores of people, and firepits covered by copper grilles, more suitable for a party their size. Copper pots were stacked by the source of water. Patches of flourishing fern could be cut to pad the ground under the bedrolls they carried (Shift was carrying Taryn’s). There was aloe to wash with, or soapwort.
Shift, Neve and Jane would unselfconsciously strip off to wash themselves and their clothes, then stand by the firepit, naked and steaming. They’d hang their laundered clothes in the tree branches—Neve twisting her overdress into a long rope which she then wound around the trunk of a tree. The dress would still be damp in the morning, evenly creased, and would mould itself to her body.
Each night Taryn closed her eyes on stars sparkling through fresh spring foliage. She would sleep deeply, not stirring until dawn. She slept, ate, drank, walked. There was little conversation between Neve and Shift, and what there was was polite and practical, and conducted in their language. Theirs was a comfortable silence, and Jane’s, Taryn realised, was respectful of her need to recover.
Taryn was better every day, stronger than she had been in years. She grew lithe and light-footed. Her hair softened and brightened, her skin felt supple and smooth. She was full of a sense of wellbeing and, as she became more accustomed to the plain fresh food, she felt she had never tasted such sweet peppery radishes, succulent earthy potatoes, savoury sticky rabbit meat, and huge cherries that gave between her teeth with a hard crack followed by a flood of sharply perfumed juice. The wildflowers, the tender foliage of the trees, each sunset with its high, lucent skies and soft shoals of cloud, all of it wrapped Taryn in a perfect sense of safety and contentment. She was enchanted, wide-eyed with wonder at a marsh covered in tiny dark blue flowers, and the apricot and fox-coloured songbirds, and the shy deer, their hides creamy white and dappled grey. All animals of types unknown to her, like the sleek, coal-black bear that ambled away from Neve’s warning gaze, and the herd of grey and chestnut spotted horses streaming along a ridge, and the big lake eels with their plum-purple skins. Fairy animals, each poised and pacific but somehow passionately alive.
The party descended in ease by the shallow uphill and slightly less shallow downhill undulations of the Summer Road. Despite the changes in the landscape, Taryn felt herself cleaving to it as if it were somewhere she was intimate with, and loved; the setting of some spectacular alteration in her circumstances, like that hunting camp in the Rockies where she bewitched the Muleskinner.
It was by this making of comparisons to analyse her feelings that Taryn returned from her period of healing to who she was, what mattered to her and what was inescapable. Her troubles had pressed on her for weeks, not just ill health caused by the demon, but the Muleskinner’s slow approach, and what she knew she owed him. And there were other failings; how she took her former husband’s generosity for granted, and how little kindness she seemed able to show to her father. The rest of it—her book, the festivals, her agent’s and publisher’s expectations—receded. But what had taken the place of the pressures wasn’t Taryn’s own tranquillity; it was the land itself, the Sidh, promising always to be there, always to be the same. Promising also that it would be the same Taryn who stepped out with sound knees and clear eyes from this blue lake, or stone hearth, or apple shade. Come again, be again—that was its promise, a sense of permanence Taryn hadn’t felt since she was under ten years old and only able to imagine that she would always stay at Princes Gate with her grandparents, always find the same old Monopoly set, quoits, croquet hoops and mallets, the familiar punt, the cats—only a little indifferent when
ever she arrived—but all as it should be, the same, permanent. The Sidh was turning Taryn into a child again, a child who knew everything sustaining would last. It gave her back that knowledge beyond faith—what the faithful mean when they say ‘faith’.
In the week they were on the Summer Road they twice passed small mixed parties of sidhe and Taken going the opposite direction. And at one encampment a single sidhe woman appeared on the grassy path near a stream and brought them a cake made of apple and walnuts and honey. She sat for a time with Neve, and spoke only to her, a little deferent. She scarcely looked at Jane, Taryn and Shift.
That evening, while Taryn and Jane were bathing in a pool downstream, Jane explained a few things about the Summer Road, its emptiness and long cultivation, and how and where the sidhe lived. She began by saying that Neve had her house near the Gate she guarded but didn’t maintain a household in one dwelling. ‘She moves around, with her usual retinue, and often leaves her more vulnerable dependents, like children, in places salubrious to them, often in human care. But never for long, because the children begin to pine without their daily ration of Neve’s attention. On this journey you will see a few dwellings. They’re close to the roads, and most are guest houses, like the house at Forsha Springs. The roads move between gates and cut-throughs, or desirable places to visit: a lake, a river landing, hot springs, one of the ancient forests where certain kinds of wild food flourish, like truffles or pine nuts. Trails go to the coast where the sidhe hunt seals for their skins, or up to mountain passes where the white tigers and leopards and foxes live, or faraway rivers full of alluvial gold. Most of the roads are arterial forests of fruiting trees.’
‘They’re nomads,’ Taryn said.
Jane nodded. ‘The only sizeable settlement is on the coast at the mouth of the River Seinisteigh, where they hold the Moot in late summer every ten years. And it’s not so much a town as a permanent encampment whose population rises and falls as people come and go.’
In Europe, long before canals and railways were built, there were paths for packhorses, and roads for carts and carriages. For a long time in Britain that had meant Roman roads, the remnants of a civilisation that understood that the control of a territory was a matter of getting armed men from one place to another at speed. Taryn had yet to see a fortress or watchtower in the Sidh. But what would these people have to watch out for, or defend themselves against? Certainly not one another, since they seemed to hold everything but their Taken in common. The recent incursion of demons appeared to astonish them, but their astonishment didn’t seem to give them any sense of urgency about putting a stop to it.
What’s so good, Taryn thought, about a world touched so lightly by people? She had always enjoyed cities, Paris and Berlin, Vancouver and Hong Kong. She loved living in London, though lately she’d felt disturbed by the ghostliness of Marble Arch and its surrounds at night, no lights on in the apartments, all of them owned but few of them occupied, while in the daytime the homeless—many of them refugees—washed their clothes in the fountains and slept beside them on the grass as they dried. And, even for her, enough money seemed to mean more money all the time. There was always something new to pay for the privilege of existence and participation in her city. If her father hadn’t paid for the hospital, she’d be being very careful with money now. It was two months until her next royalty cheque.
Taryn had a two-book contract; she had qualifications and no student debt, thanks to her father. She had no cause for complaint or fear about her future. And sooner or later she’d have time to settle on a plan for her next book and write her proposal for Angela.
In the months before the wedding, Carol and Taryn had talked about their futures at length over good bistro lunches in restaurants near Carol’s place of work. They’d sat at a window table to take stock of their lives. Taryn could still see her friend, champagne flute held high while, on the other side of the glass, cavalcades of lunchtime shoppers went by with their boutique bags. ‘I’ve found someone I love and trust enough to marry,’ Carol said. ‘Your book is a success. Look at us, finally on our way.’
Now, bedded down under the black and blazing skies of the Sidh, Taryn thought, Why is happiness so self-congratulatory? Because surely that had been happiness.
One evening, when Taryn and Jane were by a stream scrubbing cooking pans, their seats damp and hands red with cold and stippled by grit, Taryn asked Jane whether this love she had for the landscape meant she was bewitched. ‘Does it go on like this? Does the feeling eclipse everything?’
‘No. You’re not “Taken” in the traditional way. Shift only protects you. Do you remember the children at Neve’s house?’
Taryn recalled one little figure, rosy with health but somehow sullen and dazed.
‘If Neve told one of them to play, it would be like a hawk when the falconer pulls off its hood. It would take wing, so to speak, shout, and gambol, and produce childish fancies. And if Neve then told it to be peaceful, the child would lie about, suck its fingers and sleep. If Neve instructed you to play, you’d only say, “Play what?”’
‘True,’ said Taryn.
‘You’re just falling in love with the Sidh. Anyone would.’
Taryn picked up another handful of grit and continued to scour the pan of its sticky residue of cooked duck egg.
‘Like you I’m here without ever having been Taken in the usual sense,’ Jane said. ‘Let me tell you the story.
‘I first laid eyes on Shift when he came into my printing shop, where I was sitting with my type trays and composing block trying to set what I thought would be my last piece of paying work—a small job for a small fee. My legs had been bothering me for months. They’d become ulcerated, and it had got to the stage where I wasn’t able to stand to compose, and was scarcely able to remain upright long enough to set up the press when each plate was done.
‘Shift arrived carrying a copy of the Bible which I had printed for Mr Charles Thompson. It was a sweltering summer day, but he was wearing gloves and wouldn’t take them off when he was showing me what he admired about my Bible. Of course, his sidhe ancestry meant he was having to defend himself from the holy book. He told me he thought my Bible was a fine piece of work, and he’d like to commission me to print something for him. He had eighty pages in manuscript, and he wasn’t at all sure how many pages that would make in print. As to the print run, he was thinking two thousand copies.
‘That was an unprecedented number. I was curious to know what the manuscript was that he thought he could sell in that quantity, and how he planned to pay me. He was a gentleman but—’
‘Wait,’ said Taryn. ‘You’re talking about Charles Thompson’s Bible, 1805, Philadelphia?’
‘Yes. I was a citizen of Philadelphia, by way of Scotland,’ Jane said.
Taryn’s bibliographic mind suggested the rest: Jane Aitken, an early American printer, who died in the poorhouse.
Jane Aitken, no longer astonished by the facts of her own life, had failed to notice Taryn’s suffused cheeks, and continued to tell her story.
‘Shift showed me his manuscript. The writing was in our alphabet, but a language I couldn’t recognise. I tried sounding it out, but its phonetics were alien. He said some time ago he had tried to invent an alphabet for this language—one of its own, as St Cyril had for Russian, but had lost the manuscript written in that invented alphabet. Using an existing alphabet to approximate the phonetics of a wholly oral language was something his mother had worked at, and encouraged him to try. “She was much better at it than I am, and I made this work to honour her. I used the Roman alphabet, and was very careful to establish and maintain consistency with the rules of phonology and grammar.”
‘I said, “What language is this?”
‘He said, “One of the few I’ve had time to learn again.”
‘I couldn’t make any sense of his “again”. And he hadn’t answered my question. He went on to explain that the manuscript was a collection of songs. “Songs and poems,” he said.
“I didn’t have the heart to begin again with an encyclopaedia, because the manuscript I lost was an encyclopaedia. It was a pretty piece of illustrated work and I’m sure someone has it and is looking after it. Anyway, the people whose songs these are aren’t scholarly, and only have a child’s interest in taxonomy. So an encyclopaedia is pointless. I really have to stop trying to teach them anything.”
‘I was tired, so passed over all my questions to explain how I’d had to sell my printing press to cover my debts. But that a good friend of mine had leased it back to me so I might keep making books. I told him I only had the means of printing his book because of the grace and favour of my friend. But I didn’t tell him I was ill and that the poorhouse was looming. I only accepted his commission because he offered to pay part upfront. In Spanish gold. I didn’t ask where it came from. In the old world Napoleon’s war was only just over, and all sorts of people and monies were moving through the Americas. I took his commission, though I thought I’d go blind setting all those alien words. I used the money to buy back my press, as if by buying back my livelihood and freedom my health might follow.
‘Only days after that my legs worsened, and my health collapsed. I kept my lodgings and hired a nurse, but soon exhausted my funds and ended up in a charity hospital. Then, once I was strong enough to move, the hospital sent me to the poorhouse in Norristown, outside the city. People must work in the poorhouse, but I couldn’t get out of bed. And, once my fever left me and I began to regain some strength, it turned out that the ghost of the fever had got into my brain. I couldn’t tell whether I was awake or asleep, and my dreams and nightmares kept creeping up on me in the daytime. I was mourning all my losses. But what grieved me most was that I’d misplaced that gentleman’s manuscript of songs no doubt taught to him by the natives of some South Seas island. I would dream about that manuscript and cry out my apologies, like a madwoman convinced of her own strange sinfulness.’
The Absolute Book Page 20
