The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Jacob Berger, you should look on this as an honour. For in many ways it works like honours as you understand them. If the Crown you serve were to offer you a knighthood and you turned it down, you could be sure the offer would never come again. I believe this very thing—a knighthood offered once and never again—has happened to Taryn Cornick’s former husband, Alan Palfreyman. He probably has few, or possibly no, regrets. But I want you to notice that “never again”. I want you to understand that this offer behaves like an honour. But it is better than any honour.’

  ‘Go on, say it,’ Jacob said. ‘You said “never again”; say “never more”.’

  Munin made the noise that might be a laugh. ‘Maybe you won’t die.’

  Jacob stopped shuffling on the slick slightly downhill surface. Once he was still, the cessation of sound was absolute. The raven had frozen as if she were a film running in his head. As if all of this, the wet hardness of rock and the damp flannel of fog on his face, were a thing he’d conjured. ‘Am I dying?’ he said. ‘I thought I was already dead.’

  ‘You are in a place between loss and longing where a soul might linger. I am hurrying you along.’

  ‘Do you want me to die?’

  ‘I thought I’d explained myself.’ She hopped around him, placing herself between his faded, filmy body and the hint of light ahead of them.

  ‘I gathered you were talking about a one-time-only offer,’ said Jacob. ‘But what exactly is it I should be afraid of missing out on?’

  Munin didn’t answer.

  ‘You don’t really want me to choose it, whatever it is. Really you’re advising against it.’

  The raven made a deep, twanging noise, it was impossible to say whether of surprise, pleasure or irritation.

  ‘Shift would know,’ Jacob said aloud, meaning Shift would know what kind of noise it was.

  ‘In these circumstances Shift would carry on like Cathy in Wuthering Heights and enrage the angels with cries and struggles.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Jacob said. ‘I didn’t mean if it were him dying and not me. And you’re no angel.’

  ‘However, I am offering you a place in one of the heavens. A place you’ve earned.’

  ‘Special conditions apply,’ said Jacob.

  Munin folded her elegant, black, well-breached legs under her and roosted on the rock.

  Jacob gazed at her, stubborn and stupid. He understood he was fading and that before the process was finished he should complete this damp, blind journey. He should close the deal. But somewhere behind him was his body, his friend Taryn, his duties, the badly managed world he loved, and Shift, whom he doubted he’d ever find in any kind of heaven.

  There was a clean white mist before them. It was as if they sat at the edge of a cliff above the sea, and the sun was just clearing the horizon. A dab of colour appeared in the mist. Many colours, like the stationary rainbow in the spray of a waterfall.

  Jacob heaved himself from his seat onto his knees and paused there, panting. He complained that this did seem to be his body. His damaged body. He raised his head to get his bearings. He would turn himself all the way around and go back. Everything he wanted was behind him. Ahead was a gate, or a bridge of beautiful refracted light, white light divided and revealed as many-not-one, like all the small chiefdoms of the heavens of these gods.

  It was snowing. The snowflakes streamed upwards, silent, at the speed of any feathery snowfall in still air.

  Jacob turned himself around and crept away from the light. After a time he saw the raven was ahead of him, walking, an awkward avian strut.

  Jacob was too tired to follow her, even with his eyes. He dropped his gaze. His hands had made blue dents in the snow. The snow had substance, and so did he. It was cold, and he was heavy.

  They came to a staircase, a spiral of solid stone between walls covered in tree roots. Each riser was deep in pure, feathery snow.

  The raven flew ahead in a tight spiral until her wings turned into a black wheel hovering high above Jacob, who sank down onto a step and stayed there, his back propped against tree roots. Soon there was snow in his lap, snow on his shoulders, snow on the crown of his head. Munin returned, alighted beside him and landed a sharp peck on the back of his right hand. Jacob opened his eyes and gazed around him at the white gloom. The air was full of ice crystals, sparkling like transparent confetti.

  The raven climbed into his lap and settled down, then addressed him with a formality that didn’t at all match the position she was in.

  ‘Jacob Berger, son of Carl Berger, car groomer of Sandwell, you have come a long way in life, and this is the furthest you’ve come. You turned your back on the heaven of heroes, but have found your way to the stair to Mimir’s Well. I was meaning to tell you about it, but it seems instead we’ve taken each other there. What better place than this to tell you this story? The story I’ve kept for Shift.’

  She began. ‘When Shift found his way up these stairs to Mimir’s Well, the Norn Mimir wasn’t there. But Odin was. And we were.

  ‘Shift stood watching us, listening to us, and we didn’t see him. Even Odin failed to notice we were under observation. Shift made himself known by coming closer, a picture of eagerness and timidity combined, a slight youth, underdressed for the weather, his fingertips bloodless, suppressing shivers and panting steam. Odin took off his cloak and dropped it around the boy’s shoulders. Shift braced himself to sustain the weight, shuffled closer, and set his hands on the coping of the well—supporting himself and the cloak’s weight that way. I laughed at him and he—who knew how a raven sounded when it laughed—looked at me with reproach.

  ‘We didn’t know what he was. The air was too cold to carry smells and it wasn’t until he came close that I caught the scent of sidhe, that and the marsh: hawk, eel, osprey. Too many mixed scents and nothing definite or decided, as if half his palette of smell were anosmic, that is, made to induce anosmia. It was like an injunction: “You shall not catch my scent.” Catch my scent, follow my trail, uncover me.

  ‘My sister and I are not indifferent to human beauty, and all strange and strong humans have beauty of some sort. This boy had no sort. Or he was impossible to anatomise. He was slight and dark-skinned, and wore drab clothes, and moved like a patch of windblown sand. He was beneath notice. Imagine putting out an all-points bulletin on that.

  ‘I was simultaneously shrugging at him and trying to fathom how he came to be there, a place a god might reach, at the end of a difficult pilgrimage, with fasting and ritual cleansing, with a will, followed by meditation and the abnegation of will. Or perhaps a soul wandering between loss and longing might reach that place, arrive and leave, having touched nothing and having been felt by no one.

  ‘This boy had a body. His fingertips were melting small holes in the frost on the coping of the well. His hands were bare, his nails white—which is how I saw that his skin was dark. He was slight, he was brown. My mind kept trying to list his particulars as I attempted to inspect him in parts. This part, that part. It was only when my eyes lit on the rose gold claws hanging at his throat, and I observed how they were both there, nestled in his woollen clothes, and also other places, sparking out their presence far from where we were, that I understood the boy was under a powerful enchantment. An enchantment strong enough to partly disguise the consummate ingenuity of the object he wore.

  ‘The boy thrust his hands into his armpits to warm them, lifted his chin, looked Odin in the eye and announced that he too felt the need of wisdom. “Before going any further,” he said.

  ‘“I should think this is far enough,” my sister said.

  ‘“This is the branch off a path between villages that climbs to a shrine. Or maybe only to a view. Or the place birds nest and you can steal their eggs to fortify yourself for your journey,” said the boy, and I understood he was boasting of his power to go anywhere. But mind, he was talking to birds, and testing us with a provocation. He was trying to be noticed, Hugin thought, and told me later.

&
nbsp; ‘“Unremarkable child,” my sister said to him. “People always have a first reason among reasons to request a gift from the gods.”

  ‘“I do,” he said. “I find myself unable to discover what king it would be best to serve. The Saxon and the Northmen threaten the kingdoms of the Angles and Welsh. The Empire of Rome has shrunk back over the horizon. We are broken and bare-boned. We need a king both strong and wise.”

  ‘“You would make yourself that monarch?” Odin asked.

  ‘“No one pays me any mind. Birds notice me, as if I’m a loving scarecrow. Shelter and shade when they need it. I could easily make a kingdom of badgers and foxes and wolves and birds, but people don’t see me. Men, sidhe—all the people who call themselves ‘people’. Even the dragons I freed from a sidhe gate didn’t see me, though I came close enough to caress them.”

  ‘“That’s the gap in your smell,” I said. “Dragon.”

  ‘“I wouldn’t know. We were underwater. I wasn’t breathing. The dragons were caught in my grandmother’s gate, which goes from a lake on one world to a lake in another. A deep lake I swam through with a sky above me and a sky below.” His face was shining as he spoke. It was like the momentary uncovering of a distant landmark in a shaft of light on a stormy day. He shone out, then the enchantment quenched him once more. “A king needs to be noticed,” he said, practical and humble, “by all the considerable people.”

  ‘Odin said, “Mimir’s Well requires a price. Even if the Norn isn’t here to ask it.”

  ‘“I could stand to lose an eye,” the boy said, though he looked doubtful. “I’d be losing half the world whenever I was a bird. I’d have to give up being birds.”

  ‘Listening to him, I was beginning to feel as if I were trying to keep small stones on a cairn in a hard rainfall. There was a hero my sister and I once had the charge of burying, stone by stone. It had rained and the stones would keep rolling off his beautiful forehead. My gathering on this occasion was meant to uncover rather than cover something, to keep it in mind once it was in sight, to make a list of the facts so far. But it was very difficult. He was very slippery.

  ‘What I gathered was this. That his grandmother was a Gatemaker of the sidhe. I had believed them all gone. The boy could be a bird, a badger, a fox—and probably a dragon if he’d detained them long enough to learn one, and had the ability to encompass that knowledge. The boy was an instinctual shapeshifter, which meant he only wore the boy shape because his kin were sidhe and human and he’d loved their faces and held their hands. Sustained contact was the only way he might have learned to be a dragon. Dragons don’t belong in any of the worlds, Earth or the Sidh, the hells, the heavens, the uncertain others. They are made from stuff no other living thing is made of—microbes to redwoods, amoeba to whales. Nothing is like a dragon. There are only a handful of them; they come from who knows where and, having come, keep themselves to themselves. They are never met with, which is just as well, since even a god might only match but not master one. But this child had hung in the water beside dragons and caressed them.

  ‘These things I’d managed to gather about him. And that he was not much more than a child, his ancestry was human and sidhe, and something else that gave him the blank bit that the unlikeness of dragons had so easily rubbed off on. I understood all that—and that he was putting himself aside, doing so because he was under an enchantment that instructed, “Do not look at me, or notice me. Do not count me in.” He wasn’t immune to that enchantment, and was discounting himself.

  ‘It seemed that this was what interested Odin also. “Child,” he said, “you offer a sacrifice and ask for wisdom, but not to rule yourself, because, you say, men won’t follow you. But what of birds and beasts? Once you are duly wise, perhaps the birds and beasts that see you now will cease to pay you mind.”

  ‘“It is mind, not homage. They give me nothing more than their attention. They’re not my followers. Not my fiefdom. And, were I wise, why should they spurn me?”

  ‘“You’d risk giving up even their notice?”

  ‘“I don’t consider that I am risking it. Unless you tell me that’s to be my sacrifice.”

  ‘“The Well decides what to ask of you. Though I might instruct the Well, to help shape its ideas.”

  ‘The boy said, “Let the Well choose.” He stood straight, braced and trembling under the weight of Odin’s cloak. He looked like someone standing at the door of a pavilion, a nobleman’s dwelling in the encampment of his army.

  ‘But Odin wasn’t done. “The birds aren’t already asking you to be their champion? You’re sure of that? Why are you only willing to bargain with the Well?”

  ‘“I do understand that I’m bargaining with you, All-Father. But I don’t understand why you seem to want reassurances about birds and beasts. They can’t give me more wisdom than they already have. I’m a bird, a bear, a salmon, an ox. I’m wise in their ways. But I need the wisdom of books. All the books I might read in a lifetime. I need the judgement of someone older than I am, a mother, a grandmother. But my mother is dead, and my grandmother is in retirement. So the wisdom I need must be my own.”

  ‘“You want books? Is wisdom human?”

  ‘“The sidhe are threatened by nothing but their own customs, and they won’t change. The kingdom I see the need for is a human kingdom. One with a court, laws, an army, roads, written intelligence passed from person to person, and tools and engines. I have asked men ploughing the fields, and women milking cows and cutting turf, peddlers and boatman, weavers and shepherds, soldiers and monks, what kind of king they want. They say a wise king or a kind one. I asked each king I visited what kind of king he’d be if crowned the monarch of greater and more populous land. ‘Wise, I hope,’ they said. Or, ‘Strong. Like a father to his children,’ they said. Or ‘Godly. Christian.’ There was even one who said that he was content as he was. And all I could think to do for him was make his orchards double in size. I’ve read many books. I have them in my mind, complete, and can tell you what each one said. But the more I seek answers and examine candidates and learn what people in the past have written down, the less equal I am to the task of making the best choice.”

  ‘Odin was silent for a time. And then when he spoke again it was in his high, nasal bardic voice. “He hurried to a place from which others were fleeing, and held his course directly into danger.”

  ‘There was a pause filled with the pattering of wet snow, then the boy said, “Pliny the Younger.”

  ‘“After that eruption at Pompei the world was without birds,” Odin said.

  ‘“I’ve seen birds flying and on fire,” said the boy. “Why do you want me to imagine a world without birds?”

  ‘“You should return to your marsh and grow into your small godhood,” said Hugin, who by looking at the boy would know some of the things he’d done, and guess some of the things he might do. “A boy who can scatter windfall apples in a field and call on the-time-of-trees to make them grow, is a boy who should pursue his imagination in that direction. Not in the direction of the governance of men.”

  ‘“Gods, even small ones, have more in common with monarchs than with a volcano, or a forest fire. Gods and monarchs belong to laws, volcanoes and fires to causes,” said the boy.

  ‘“I don’t understand your distinction,” I said.

  ‘“Belong is the wrong word. I’m not wise enough to find the right one.”

  ‘“Laws, not causes? Decisions, not happenstance?” Odin said, helping the boy explain himself.

  ‘The boy nodded. “I have no quarrel with happenstance or chance. I have no desire to influence them.”

  ‘“And you want to be a kingmaker, though the level of wisdom you seek is more that of someone who’d like to speak to gods without causing offence?” Odin said.

  ‘“Enough of your one-eyed examination,” said the boy, angry now, and quite prepared to cause offence. “You can’t make me see as you do without first taking my eye.”

  ‘“That is for the Well to d
ecide. The Well’s sacrifices aren’t simply a subtraction balanced against the addition of its gifts. My eye made my ravens. Without my ravens what I know and understand would be confined to what I witness myself.”

  ‘The boy shot us a look, eager, covetous, and I thought maybe he wanted company as much as he wanted wisdom. And company was something he’d never find with the very air around him whispering that he must be turned from, neglected, forgotten, and that doors should be closed in his face by people thinking only how the wind had got up, and that there was a chill in the air. Whatever this boy had come to Mimir’s Well to ask, the prior and more powerful plea of that enchantment would drown him out. I understood this and spoke up to tell Odin how he should counsel the Well. He should explain in detail what the child wanted and why, so that his will would be served. “Let us make sure the child’s desires at least direct the fulfilment of his wish. The spell on him will choose his sacrifice. We have no power over that.”

  ‘Odin agreed. He abandoned his strange quizzing about silence and birds. But later, in our sleep, in our dream, my sister and I were one raven again, flying over a drowned world in the silence of a promise. And the ark this time wasn’t Noah’s big-bellied cedar ship, but that other ark of the Scriptures, that carved and gilded box that held fragments of the Great God of the Desert’s covenant with his people. In our dream that buoyant box was bobbing on the waves, and riding on it was the boy’s mother, the witch of the marshlands, whom we had never seen alive. Her face was ravaged by her final illness, an illness whose cause was having put her whole long half-sidhe life into a spell made to hide her son from his father’s enemies.

  ‘Odin turned to the Well, leaned into its milky light and whispered in the language of the Norn, which sounds like the voice of a pressure ridge, where a plate of sea ice joins an ice shelf. Crisp subharmonics. Odin explained what the boy wanted, how simple and innocent a wish it was.