The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  As the ferry glided across the still lake, the island revealed itself. It wasn’t another sidhe food forest, but a human settlement. Its large garden beds were sheltered on two sides by green walls of flowering tomato and cucumber frames, the rest of the space devoted to root and salad crops in neat rows, and the traditional Iroquois ‘Three Sisters’ planting of corn stalks with bean vines climbing them, surrounded by tumbled heaps of squash. The houses were stone, their turf roofs planted with herbs and flowers. The goats in a nearby meadow hadn’t invaded the gardens, which suggested to Taryn that there was magic at work. She strained her eyes to see the blistered atmosphere of mendings, but couldn’t. Then she noticed that the small windows of the houses weren’t open and protected by mendings, but shuttered, or covered with sheets of thick parchment soaked with beeswax.

  Some distance from the settlement, on a spit of land and half hidden by trees, were two sidhe buildings—an airy and pleasingly asymmetrical dwelling, and a conical building with a low spire and blind walls. It looked like a tomb.

  As soon as the barge connected with the silvered timber landing Neve leaped to shore and set off towards those buildings. Once she was out of the way a good number of the island’s occupants came down to greet Jane.

  The women were all in robust health, but no more restored to youth, beauty and wholeness than Jane was. Some were missing teeth, or had crooked limbs. Their hair was often grey, but the grey was lustrous. Most of the women were as collected as Jane herself, but Taryn noted some odd mannerisms, defensive stooping walks, tics, hand wringing. These would have been odd outsiders even in Taryn’s world—a world that was kinder than the one in which they were locked up two hundred years ago. The women might be shy or odd, but they all looked happy. Happy to see Jane, and overjoyed by a visit from their benefactor.

  Shift let himself be absorbed by the crowd of the shy and strange. The women hugged and kissed him, all talking at once, telling him their news—about gardens, goats, poultry, choirs, card games, bad weather, how much honey and how many preserves they’d swapped to have their mendings refreshed by passing Ladies and Gentlemen. They said that the Ladies and Gentlemen had left some children in the care of the women. Kernow the Grandfather would come along this road any day now, and the Ladies and Gentlemen liked the little ones to spend time with the Grandfather as well as the hundred grandmothers of the Island of Women.

  As Shift was carried off by the throng Taryn heard him called by his name, also ‘dear’ and ‘pet’.

  A few of the women stayed behind with Jane. They relieved her of her bedding bundle and stood smiling at Taryn, waiting for an introduction.

  ‘This is Taryn Cornick,’ Jane said. ‘Shift took her to save her from a demon.’

  The women exclaimed. Taryn heard only surprise and sympathy, no fear, or that other thing, which she’d noticed even in Berger, who, given his line of work, might sometime have been tempted to acts that would compromise the safety of his soul. The other thing was reproach. No matter how out of the ordinary demonic possession was, it was still somehow a smoker’s lung cancer, a drunk’s pancreatitis, a philanderer’s STI—a thing she had brought upon herself by not behaving properly. But there was no reproach in the women’s words and looks, and Taryn imagined they were pretty conversant with stern judgements made against the hapless or unlucky.

  The women welcomed Taryn and said they’d find her a whole hut to herself. ‘Don’t let us wear you out, young one. Some of us are unstoppable once we get talking.’

  Jane told them, ‘Shift wants Taryn to learn Grandfather Kernow’s stories, so the children won’t have him all to themselves.’

  ‘Why would Shift transfer a story?’ one woman asked.

  ‘Things are afoot,’ Jane said.

  The woman crossed herself. ‘Demons are afoot.’ She shot Taryn a glance that was a shade more wary and less sympathetic. ‘A group of them passed by at the last full moon, along the Horse Road. Their party included a great manlike monster—yellow-skinned and dappled blue. When they came near the landing on the far shore, the Queen roused herself to go out and challenge them. She was so incensed by the trespass that she put on her veil, stuffed her ears with beeswax and had us pull her across the lake. But as soon as the horrible creatures saw her and the sword she carried they fled—one on wings of smoke.’

  Jane said to Taryn, ‘If Shift wants to question a demon he’ll have to catch one. I’m sure they’ll flee from him too.’

  Taryn might have said that the sticky monster outside the Bibliothèque Méjanes had shown no fear at the sight of Shift, and that was before he was disabled by iron shot. But she didn’t want to worry her hosts.

  They climbed a path between burgeoning gardens. Chickens started away before them, then fell in behind and followed. They looked like Shift’s chickens, and not at all like the graceful fairy fowl Taryn had spotted along the Summer Road. Taryn looked around with more attention at the goats, the sheep, the gentle-eyed white cow up to her hocks in clover. All of them were earthly animals.

  Jane followed her gaze. ‘The truly Taken are never homesick. But we have been. Shift fetched us the ancestors of these animals.’

  ‘The Queen has kept to her house since her outing,’ one of the women told Jane. ‘She no longer lets us grind spices for her incense. She claims she can hear the rasp of the mortar and pestle as it burns.’

  Jane looked solemn. ‘If she’s stopped eating smoke, then she’s not long out of her tomb.’

  ‘The lady Neve will be unhappy to discover that the Queen is falling away. The last of her mother’s cohort.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane.

  The group paused and looked over at the house in the trees. Neve was nearly there. A breeze caught her hair, and it rippled like a silk pennant.

  ‘The Queen was ashamed at having to watch the demons run and not be able to pursue because, she said, running jarred her skull. She’s so angry she’s sent for some Builders to make a forcebeast and catch the trespassers.’

  Another woman added, ‘She says she can’t even make her own mendings anymore, and that birds fly through her house.’

  Jane sighed. ‘Neve will repair her mendings.’

  ‘Here is your hut, Taryn,’ said the woman who had crossed herself. ‘I imagine you’ll enjoy four walls and a roof after days under the stars.’

  The woman was right. It had been lonely and eerie to wake up under the skeins of a galactic arm, with frost setting on the fur of her hooded bedroll, and the voices of the night birds naked and close.

  Taryn ducked her head to pass under the lintel. She found a single room with a woollen futon mattress on a solid timber bed, a ewer and basin, and wood stacked on the hearth, with a tinderbox to light the fire. There was also a kettle, and a fat beeswax candle on the mantelpiece.

  Jane said she’d bring Taryn water. ‘I’ll be nearby.’

  Another woman promised bread and soup. Then, in response to Taryn’s look of surprise, ‘Yes, we grow rye as well as corn. The lady burns incense when our bread is baking.’

  Jane said, ‘Get some rest, Taryn.’

  Ten minutes later a loose-bellied, beige cat came and plopped itself down on Taryn’s doorstep in the sunlight and stayed there, blinking and purring, as if Taryn had caught and reeled it in on a thread of love she didn’t even know was dangling from her tightly knitted adult soul. As if it had followed its nose to find the girl who had always rushed off to see her grandmother’s cats as soon as her father’s car rolled up at the door of Princes Gate.

  Jane brought water and filled Taryn’s ewer. A procession of children appeared from somewhere further inland and rushed down to a stream on the lakeshore to continue the game it seemed they’d been playing for some time. They’d made a rock dam and fashioned cities from sand—towns with curtain walls and castles with crenellated towers. Generic sandcastles, which made Taryn wonder how they remembered to build like that, and if the memory came with reminders of long-ago picnics, and lost families. She wondered whe
ther fairyland had any settlement large enough to be called a town, like the town the children were building. Somewhere with theatres and concert halls and art galleries and marketplaces and parliaments. Places where children might have richer experiences. Not just a visit from a surrogate grandfather, but a whole civil world.

  Taryn wondered if they got to grow up.

  The smell of baking filled the village and Taryn saw Shift hurry off upwind, not stopping and settling till he was a good way off. After a time Neve came back around the shore and sat beside him. Taryn joined them.

  The aunt and nephew were sitting hip to hip on an undercut bank on the lakeshore, legs dangling, a long sword lying across their knees. The sword had a plain hilt of white metal, and an ornate scabbard of knotted gold wire encrusted with amber and uncut sapphires.

  Taryn took a seat beside Shift on the lip of the bank.

  ‘This is the plan,’ Shift said. ‘Tomorrow we will set out for Hell’s Gate. Along the way we’ll meet Kernow, and you will hear his story. I’ve Taken no one in the past two hundred years but the women of the island, and you. I’m choosing you to remember things for me. You’re scholarly, and have a great respect for the documentary sources of history. You won’t be soggy about the details, or add a gloss, or interpret what you hear.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll interpret privately,’ Neve said.

  ‘But Shift—I don’t want to stay in the Sidh. I want to live my life and try to make amends. I’m not saying no, or making a bid for freedom. But there are things I have to fix, and things I owe my father. And, more immediately, I hope my grandmother will come up with something about what happened to Grandad’s library. She has most of his papers. I want to see to that. Then I need to spend the rest of my life doing something useful, like helping to save libraries. Not those full of rare books, but public libraries.’

  ‘Surely you want to avoid Hell,’ Neve said.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t just want to fix things to fix myself—I want to make amends.’

  ‘My plan and yours can work together,’ Shift said. ‘Sometime within the next ten years someone will bring me to you—all ignorant and instinctual—and you can repeat whatever stories you’ve memorised. By then you’ll be a happier person, one who got to fix things, and who kept a few truths safe for me.’

  ‘Why not just write them down?’

  ‘At one time I destroyed all my own writings. At another I lost a whole library. I can’t trust myself with my belongings.’

  Taryn peered around Shift at Neve, who was caressing the hilt of the sword. She asked, ‘Do you know where his library got to?’

  ‘We haven’t any interest in books. We don’t write them, or read them. We live forever, our memories are perfect, and we hold all knowledge in common.’

  ‘Thank you for being frank with me,’ Taryn said.

  ‘You shouldn’t express gratitude. It’s an insult to them,’ Shift said.

  Neve waved at him. ‘You deserve frankness, Taryn Cornick of the Northovers. Shift has chosen you.’

  ‘Which suggests he’s a person of more status than your treatment would seem to merit,’ Taryn said, mischievous.

  Neve gave a faint chilly smile. ‘Shift is a disappointment to us all.’

  Shift said, ‘So, Taryn, the plan is that we set out tomorrow on the road Kernow is travelling. We’ll pause where we meet him, and he’ll tell you one of his stories. Then we go on to Hell’s Gate, which Neve can turn to send you to London. She’ll drop you somewhere discreet close to your home. We stay at the gate to wait for a demon. Once we’ve caught one—’

  Neve said, ‘I cut off its limbs and we keep it prisoner until we get satisfactory answers.’

  Shift said, ‘Once we have some satisfactory answers, Neve can line up gates to send me to you in Australia.’

  ‘New Zealand,’ Taryn corrected him. ‘I’m at Auckland before Sydney. Where you’re sent will depend on how long the demon holds out. Remember I’m in the Coromandel for five days between Auckland and Sydney, visiting my grandmother Ruth. She should know about the dispersal of Grandad’s library.’

  Shift frowned at the sword. ‘When you were recuperating in my hut, I did come up with a better plan. I asked the Sisters if Odin would help me catch and question a demon. The demons aren’t afraid of me. And I suspect they’ll not be particularly afraid of Neve either. A god, on the other hand.’

  ‘Odin refused Shift,’ Neve told Taryn.

  ‘Munin is displeased,’ Shift said.

  ‘Which she expresses how?’ Taryn asked.

  ‘By scheming.’

  ‘She might come up with something. She’s a devious bird,’ said Neve. ‘Meanwhile Shift and I will try our best to discover what these demons want with the Firestarter. If we find it before they do, we can offer it to Hell in exchange for better terms on the Tithe.’

  Shift nodded. ‘That’s our plan.’

  Taryn found it hard to believe that Neve cared about the terms of the Tithe. Neve, who’d stolen away thousands of slaves or soldiers and treated them with kindness, then treachery. Neve, who had no soul to harm with her cruelties. But she did seem loyal to Shift, so perhaps had some kind of heart.

  Taryn said, ‘Okay. That sounds like a plan.’

  Taryn’s party met Kernow and his company in the middle of the great marsh. A camp of wicker-framed waxed linen tents had been erected on a vast platform of bundled reeds that rose a good metre and a half above the tops of the moulting bulrushes. The tents encircled a stone hearth heaped with live coals on which wrapped parcels of fish and eel and squash were baking for a mid-afternoon meal. Plenty for everyone, since their party had been spotted while still some distance off, from the top of the camp’s single more permanent structure.

  Rising metres above the platform on four sturdy cross-braced poles, the structure was roofed with fresh cedar shingles. It was open-sided, apart from a single rail at waist height. To Taryn the building looked like a fire watchtower, but when she was invited there after the meal Shift called it ‘the breeze house’.

  He showed her up and left her there, returning some minutes later with Kernow. Shift crouched at the foot of the ladder, coaxed the old man onto his back, then piggy-backed him up.

  Taryn and Kernow had met over the meal, but Shift nervously repeated his introductions, then scampered back down the ladder, as if hastening to escape. However he reappeared three more times, bearing cushions, fruit and beverages. Then he left them alone.

  Taryn and the old man stood for a time, leaning on the rail, facing south. Kernow pointed out the place, miles off, where the Builders were at work. She could just make out three triangle gantries, their shapes wavering in the late afternoon air.

  ‘In the past they’ve always carried their materials in skiffs along one of the channels that run from the cut-throughs at either side of the marsh,’ Kernow explained. ‘But these are extensive repairs. A sinkhole appeared last winter. The marshwater drained away into the earth for miles around it. The Builders are making a small hill on the dry area. They’ll rebuild the boardwalk around it. You’ll continue your journey on the temporary track of bundled reeds. It will be half a day’s wet walking.’

  Taryn listened to Kernow’s account of the work, concentrating hard, and gradually acclimatised herself to his by turns lilting and hesitant English.

  He pointed to the shadowy furrows following the Builders back to their worksite. It looked as if small invisible dogs were energetically forging a way through long grass. ‘Those are the Builder’s Hands. They are like mendings, only of much greater size.’ He moved his purple-knuckled hand to indicate a place further away. ‘And those three Builders are maintaining a forcebeast. They make them for this kind of work, repairing roads, and clearing rockfalls from mountain passes. Those Builders didn’t break for a meal, so must be making as much use of their beast as they can before having to let it go.’

  Taryn peered at the three sidhe, and the patch of turbulent air between them. She saw two logs lift
into the air and hang, poised like a drummer’s drumsticks at the opening of a song. The Builders moved off, the suspended timber drifting after them.

  ‘The sidhe once used forcebeasts to defend themselves. I suppose if these unwelcome incursions continue they might make one to chase and punish the demons.’

  After a time the old man left the rail and made himself comfortable on the cushions. Taryn joined him and poured the tea—nettle for him, ginger and honey for her—and he began to tell the story she was tasked to learn.

  She wished she could take notes. Taryn had the habits of a good researcher. She always did her reading, thought through what she’d read, then went back to read again, and only then took notes. Her initial reading was always for the shape of the story. Notes were for the facts: places, dates, persons. In this case the Welsh border, somewhere near the Monnow, in the fourth century CE. Personages: a captain of the king’s guards, a witch, an archer, a monk, a number of soldiers, an unhappy king, and a boy called Shift—who couldn’t stomach red meat or grain and who, much to Taryn’s surprise, was dead and in his grave at the beginning of the story.

  17

  Kernow’s Story

  I was sent by my troubled and sleepless king, with nine of my men, to fetch the witch Adhan.

  Adhan lived with her son at the edge of a great marsh. No one had ever seen the witch’s boy up close for, whenever visitors approached, she’d tell him to run and hide. When he was small he’d conceal himself in the whins near her hut. Later she’d send him out into the waterways. I once glimpsed him making off, his arms flapping for balance as he jumped from one footing to the next. It looked as if he were playing at flight, and perhaps he was, since all he knew was eels, fish and waterfowl.

  Whenever the king’s emissaries visited Adhan they’d always approach her hut by a detour along the last spur of elevated land. There they’d stop to be seen, for she was not someone you’d want to alarm or offend.

  That hot evening, as our horses found the uphill path, I was saying a prayer under my breath. ‘Great God in Heaven,’ I prayed. ‘Let the witch be dead, as rumour says, let her hut be empty, and grass growing on her doorstep. Let us find no sign of her son.’ For I had orders I could barely stomach, and an abandoned hut and empty-handed return would be a good outcome for me.