The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn interrupted Jane to ask what name Shift had given her.

  ‘Mr Shaw is what I heard and what he wrote down for me on the order. But the name on the manuscript was the Gaelic, Seaghdh, which means “hawkish”.’ Then Jane sighed. ‘In time my disorderly shouting and weeping caused me to fall from the poorhouse into a madhouse. I was lost to all my friends. And unlucky, because I might have gone to the Quaker hospital, but was instead sent to a crueller, more remote place.

  ‘But Mr Shaw found me. He greased palms so we might have an interview. The first I knew about it the asylum nurses carried me off to change me into clean clothes, wash my face and tie back my hair. They always did that any time a visitor came.’ Jane’s normally serene smile wavered a little. ‘I believe he only wanted to discover what I’d done with his manuscript. But I was a pitiful spectacle. I wept all over his starched shirt-cuffs, and he gave up enquiring after the manuscript and asked me the polite and kind things people ask, like how I fared, where I slept and what my keepers fed me. I answered him truthfully—that we were served only stale bread and spoiled meat, that we washed with scraps of soap, all in the same water. That I had boils on my back after being dried with a towel smeared with blood from another woman’s sores. That when we walked we were tied around our waists and roped together, and that we were out under the sky in that way only on Sundays, when we were herded to hear sermons in a freezing church. That every other day of the week we would sit for hours on hard forms lining the walls of a great, cold room, given nothing to do. That even ancient women had to sit all day, and would beg to lie down, even on the floor. Oh—I told him all of it. And that I’d seen women wild with grief trying to resist some hard treatment until subdued by beatings, smothered, or choked, or half drowned in cold baths. “I’m losing my teeth,” I said. “I’m losing my hair, and my mind.”

  ‘Since he brought me here, he has been giving me books. Whatever he thinks I’d like. Best of all was Emily Dickinson.’ She quoted, ‘These Fevered Days—to take them to the Forest / Where Waters cool around the mosses crawl— / And shade is all that devastates the coolness.

  ‘When I think of what I saw in Mr Shaw’s eyes as he sat across a table from me in the receiving room of that asylum, I think of Miss Dickinson’s devastated coolness. I didn’t see pain or anger or pity, just a green cooling. And I thought—again like a madwoman—that it wasn’t a man sitting there listening to me, but a forest.

  ‘Then he asked after his manuscript, and I cried, from guilt, and fear that once I told him what had happened to it he would just go away in disgust, leaving me where I was.

  ‘“Is it lost?” he asked. And all I could do was nod. I was weeping so hard I couldn’t see his face anymore. But he was sitting still, and that gave me hope. Then he said, “Never mind. I’m always losing books. I even lost a whole library.” Then he set an orange on the table in front of me, got up and left me where I was.

  ‘I was taken back to the cold hall, where I shared my orange with the women nearest me on the form. I kept one segment, deciding that it would be the last morsel of food to ever pass my lips. And that night, once I was in my cot, I ate that piece of orange then lay straight, rehearsing for my coffin—though I knew I’d not have one, only a shroud, as yellow as my canvas day dress.

  ‘At midnight all the nurses fell asleep at their stations, and the doors of the dormitories unlocked themselves, and the inmates woke up and were drawn into the great hall by the smell coming from a basket packed with warm cakes made of almonds and clementines. We crowded around the basket in our grubby nightgowns, stuffing our faces. Except for me; I’d made that promise to myself and wasn’t busy eating, so I was the first to see the water at the other end of the hall. The flagstones were dark, not from a spill, but covered by a sheet of water sparkling in the light of an unseen moon. Beyond the water was a shore; sedges silvered by moonlight. Some women grabbed more cakes and others dropped the ones they held. We crept towards the water. We were fearful and amazed, but it was the open air. One by one we came to the end of the cold stone floor and stepped down into thigh-deep, cool lakewater. There was a moon above us, and more stars than I’d ever seen. Beyond the reeds was the slope of a sweet meadow.

  ‘But you know the place: the Island of Apples. They’d built a fire, and there were clean garments and blankets waiting for us. Neve, her followers and Taken were there to help Shift with us. The sidhe were frightening, but gentle. We had already eaten the cakes he had made from fairy almonds and honey and clementines—and some of us had shared a fairy orange. So we were his.

  ‘It wasn’t until 1918 that Neve discovered he didn’t mean to gift us all two hundred years of safety and happiness then turn us over to Hell. She and others of the sidhe were, at that time, giving up the first of the sleek and happy innocents they rescued from ships lost on the Middle Passage. French soldiers had already been Taken in their thousands as replacements from that battlefield that France never returned to farmland, so that ploughing farmers haven’t been puzzled at turning up far fewer bones than missing men. The Africans Taken in the eighteenth century were given in the last Tithe. The remainder of them will go in the coming one, and the French soldiers in the Tithe after that. But Shift means to keep all the women from that miserable asylum. You’ll meet them soon. You are going to Hell’s Gate by way of the Island of Women.’

  A few minutes passed before Taryn noticed that Jane had stopped speaking. The printer was watching her with a careful look. Taryn’s face felt stiff, and not from the threads of new skin formed under her scabs, most of which had fallen off after the many baths of their journey. She was silent because she was shocked. There had been talk about ‘Taken’—how she was one of them—but she hadn’t imagined the scale or the husbandry of the enterprise.

  According to folktales, and later literary productions, the fairy took pretty children, like the boy Oberon and Titania squabble over in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They stole away bards like Yeats’s Ossian, or beautiful knights like Tamlin. They acquired those they admired. And they actually did do that. They’d done it long and often enough for those stories to survive. Taryn remembered reading a shrewd examination of tales of Changeling children. Its argument was this: the ‘Changeling’ was an infant who’d survived a disease that inflamed the brain. Survived damaged, the infant’s grace gone clumsy, its bright eyes dulled, and childish prattle turned to mucosal grunting. The parents of that child, in their appalling grief, might find a little comfort in the belief that their rosy infant had only been replaced, and was in fact safe, caressed by some beautiful lady in a firelit hall under the wintery mountains.

  But it seemed that those stories of the selective theft of humans by fairy only used to be true. The sidhe weren’t cold-hearted seducers and accidental saviours; they were dealing in souls by bulk. They were snatching chained men and women from the holds of sinking slave ships, and soldiers from the putrid mud of trenches at the end of the Voie Sacrée, the road that carried a generation of young men to their deaths at Verdun. The sidhe saved those people, body and soul, fattened them on happiness for two hundred years, then sent them away to Hell. The Tithe wasn’t a home kill; it was an abattoir.

  It was Taryn’s instinct to research her way to under-standing, so she thought of a question she could ask. ‘What is Hell’s price for one sidhe life?’

  ‘Five human souls each hundred years.’

  That didn’t help Taryn. They’d met next to no one on their journey. There were no towns or villages, just the road and camps provisioned by orchards and gardens. She had no idea how many sidhe there were. How many times five.

  Jane said, ‘In former times each one of them paid for him or her self. They took who they wanted and, in time, surrendered people they loved. But now there are many of them who can’t go to our world, endure its challenges and summon enough presence to make any human love them. So the strong and energetic ones like Neve collect for others so that those others might go on living.’

  �
�Can you give me numbers?’ Taryn asked, as if she were a reporter at a press conference trying to wring facts out of the spokesperson on the podium. It was her way of managing her horror.

  ‘The sidhe number in only thousands. A little over twenty thousand, I think. But that still means a hundred thousand humans souls paid out at each Tithe.’

  Taryn said nothing.

  ‘You’re safe,’ Jane said.

  ‘I’m not thinking of myself. Who pays for Shift’s life?’

  ‘No one. He’s not subject to the Tithe.’

  Taryn remembered her demon’s taunts about Shift’s shrivelled little soul. ‘Because he has a soul?’

  ‘Yes. He has an immortal soul and a mortal body. The sidhe don’t have souls and can live for a very, very long time, if they don’t die by violence. But they aren’t paying for their eternal youth, as some of the stories say. They’re paying for their freedom and sovereignty. The Pact put an end to a war between the Sidh and Hell. Long, long ago.’

  ‘Shift is worried about the Tithe. He seems to think he’ll be compelled to give you up,’ Taryn said. ‘But if his life has no price, how can they compel him?’

  Jane frowned. ‘Is he worried?’

  ‘It’s why he’s so determined to discover what Hell is up to. At least that’s what he says. He thinks that, if Hell is doing something different, then maybe the terms of the Tithe can change.’

  ‘Hell is trespassing in the Sidh very close to the time of the Tithe, as if the Tithe is a small ceremonial matter. I don’t know if that points to a possible change in the Pact, but it is worth looking into.’

  ‘Can the other sidhe compel him to give you up?’

  ‘They see that he hasn’t made us love him, so they can’t understand why he wants to keep us. A parcel of old and broken women. Maybe they imagine his loyalty to us is a stubborn habit he’ll outgrow. Something they can scold him out of, by reminding him of his kinship and their long hospitality towards him. But none of that adds up to compulsion.’

  This seemed a spectacular failure of imagination by Neve and her people. But Taryn had the impression imagination wasn’t a strong characteristic of the sidhe, who were at once too preoccupied, placid and self-satisfied for the curiosity and restlessness needed to look beyond themselves and what they knew.

  ‘Do you love him?’ Taryn asked Jane.

  ‘He’s been like a son to me.’

  ‘Isn’t he a bit old for that? Or, as you say, long-lived.’

  ‘When we first met, his friends had just had to raise him again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Jane frowned at Taryn. She was weighing things. She got up to set all the scoured pans on a sun-warmed stone to dry, and Taryn imagined the conversation was over. She’d been trusted so far and no further. But then Jane dried her hands on her dress and took a seat on the stone. She patted it. ‘Come up here out of the damp.’

  Taryn perched beside her. The seat was warm. She was surprised how cold she’d let herself get. The rock under her wet legs started to steam.

  ‘Shift rescued me and the other inmates on an impulse, but it took organisation, labour, provisions, a wide swing of gate to reach across the Atlantic. You, he took on the spur of the moment, to free you from a demon. He should have no plans for you. But he has told me he means to bring you to some of his old friends to learn their stories. Now you’re telling me he’s afraid of having to give people up. And I think surely he doesn’t imagine he’ll be made to surrender his old Taken, like Kernow, or Petrus, who has been here for nearly five hundred years.’ Jane sounded perplexed and troubled.

  ‘But why am I expected to learn people’s stories rather than just listen to them?’

  ‘Shift’s stories,’ Jane said. ‘His memories. We keep them for him. He forgets everything.’

  Wait, Taryn thought, he’s vague because he’s confab-ulating? Filling in gaps in his memory like an end-stage alcoholic with wet brain? No. Shift was way too collected for that.

  ‘The Tithe comes every hundred years, and is due this year,’ Jane said, in the tone of someone setting out a proposition step by step.

  Taryn nodded. Apart from the alarming immanence of the Tithe she’d got this part of the contract.

  ‘Quite unrelated to the Tithe, except they’re near in date, there is another “taking” that comes around every two hundred years, and is now four years off. Shift’s covenant acts every two hundred years to subtract five years from his age and make him forget everything.’

  ‘Five years’ worth of everything?’ Taryn knew this wasn’t what Jane meant, but the true state of things was too horrible to contemplate.

  Jane put a hand on Taryn’s arm. The hand was warm now. ‘Two hundred years of everything. He’s five years younger, and he begins again. That’s why I say he was a son to me. When I met him he was only a handful of years on from his hollowing out. Neve calls it “Shiftback”.’ Jane surprised Taryn then by glancing nervously behind her, making sure they weren’t overheard. She leaned closer. ‘That’s why Neve was so helpful about his wishes for me and the other women. It wasn’t because she was thinking of the Tithe. It had just been and gone and the sidhe like to enjoy the lightness of some long decades before it looms again. No, it was because Neve is always tender to him when he comes back. His mother was her sister. Neve treats him harshly sometimes, but these cold-hearted people do love their kin.’

  Jane had been checking that Neve wasn’t there to overhear her revealing this relationship that, as far as Taryn could see, declared itself in nothing Neve did.

  Except Neve was with them now. She was going with them all the way to Hell’s Gate.

  Jane was gazing at Taryn. ‘You see?’

  Taryn couldn’t see the relationship. Neve was stony and unalterable. Shift was tentative and changeable. Shift was unprepossessing, quiet, shy. Neve was magnificent. ‘I believe you,’ Taryn said. ‘But Neve seems to have a low opinion of him. And I can’t see how he could have been transcribing sidhe songs and organising for them to be printed so soon after forgetting everything. And surely an adult returned to infancy would be like an infant, shitting themselves and throwing tantrums? Also, can someone go on caring about another person once they’ve forgotten what they knew about them? Surely if he knows nothing he can feel nothing.’

  Jane scrubbed a hand through her hair. ‘Come and ask him about it yourself.’

  Taryn was taken aback. It would be like asking someone with a terminal illness to talk about their funeral plans. But Jane had picked up a load of air-dried pans and was heading uphill, into the small node of orchard and berry bushes just off the long green tunnel of the Summer Road. Taryn picked up the remaining pans and followed.

  They found Neve scaling a fish she’d caught in the stream. Shift was building a fire. He had two flints, a pile of dried moss and kindling ready beside him.

  Taryn snatched at Jane and squeezed her arm. But Jane was already speaking. ‘Taryn would like to know what you remember when you forget yourself at Shiftback. How you remember. How it works.’

  Shift didn’t respond until his efforts had produced a thread of smoke in the moss, then flame. He fed the flame, then scooped up the burning moss on a bit of bark and slipped the whole thing under the kindling in the firepit. He stooped and blew on the flames, then sat by the fire feeding it.

  ‘Every two hundred years I grow younger and forget everything that’s happened to me, and all that I’ve learned. I’ve always been curious about the mechanisms of that. In the last fifty years neuroscience has offered me some new perspectives. This is what happens, I think. I lose the explicit or declarative parts of my long-term memory. That is, my memory is wiped of facts and events. Also I lose my autobiographical or episodic memory. I forget my life. Which is why I have my friends remember what happened to us—how we met, what we shared. For instance, how I came to Jane with a manuscript I wanted her to print. And how later I was able to help her in return.

  ‘I don’t lose my procedura
l memory. So I can still ride, and groom a horse. I can cook. Catch a fish. Burp a baby. Turn the pages of a book without tearing them. I don’t forget physical skills, or any of the things I was born able to do. Also I retain one part of my episodic memory. I might forget who I’ve loved, or hated. But when I meet them again, though I know nothing about them’—he looked at Neve—‘about us, I do remember how I felt. Anyone I felt warm about, I warm to. Anyone I’ve trusted, I trust.’

  ‘What more can we ask?’ Jane said, to console him.

  ‘All that learning we can ask,’ Neve said, ‘more magic than anyone has ever possessed. And his memory of the face of my dead sister. All gone.’

  There was a long silence in which the air seemed to tremble.

  Shift continued to feed the fire.

  Neve met Taryn’s eyes and actually addressed her. ‘The Tithe is a covenant we can challenge. We may not care that the Tithe’s conditions foster treachery and cruelty, but the pact has an ugly shape, and its ugliness is a weakness. A weakness that offers hope it might be amended. But the Shiftback is fair. It is just, shapely and asked for. It’s a covenant without faults and it can’t be undone.’

  Shift said, ‘In the end I’ll choose to become a raven. I’ll go live with the sisters. They can keep me warm in their nest as my feathers change to down and skin grows over my eyes.’

  He liked to read thrillers, bought his books online, and the post shop at Princes Gate Magna kept them for him. He preferred hard cheese to soft, drove with the spatial judgement of Schumacher, and insisted his hens were people. And he was even less human than his inhuman aunt.

  16

  The Island of Women

  The island was accessible only by boat or barge. The barge was unattended, but Shift and Jane rolled up their sleeves and pulled it across the water, hand over hand, by its dripping rope. It bumped into the bank and they climbed on.