The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn had just listened to Jacob tell her about Shift as an owl in the churchyard at Princes Gate Magna. She was reassured that he hadn’t seen the change. The change was too much to contemplate. She felt the same way about the saltwater crocodile. She wanted to think of the crocodile as something Shift had summoned. It wasn’t him. How could it be?

  She thought then of the wind on the crown of her head as she rocketed up through the air above that country lane. And how her feet were free and swinging. She used her memories to measure a hand, a clawed forepaw. ‘The dragon was big. Its grip was between my shoulders and knees and it had me and the jeep’s door.’ She remembered the billows of grey radiance. ‘It had a light moving inside it. Like static coming off a synthetic carpet. It was transparent. I think I could see muscles moving like currents in clear water. I think it stepped on the bonnet of the car to push off. I heard the engine grind on the road. The engine was still running.’

  ‘Why do you think he avoids causing a stir?’ Jacob said.

  ‘You mean more of a stir?’

  ‘A saltwater crocodile is a mystery, but it’s not unfathomable. I think we could all do with a dose of the unfathomable right about now.’

  Taryn was becoming very sensitive to the use of ‘we’. Not sensitive like the people who monitor language use for offence to themselves or others, but sensitive to whom the speaker hoped to be. She realised that Jacob’s ‘we’ and hers were even more different than they had been. Her ‘we’ included Shift. Even if it didn’t include his cold, passionate aunt.

  She said, ‘The unfathomable would just be another bit of astonishing news. Lots of people might live in the hope of aliens arriving, and powerful people being put on the spot, and the rules of politics and society changing instantly, like The Day the Earth Stood Still. But a dragon appearing in the skies of England would be like the Virgin of Srebrenica, a sign and portent. You can’t approve of portents if you don’t believe in destiny. You can’t want other people to believe in portents—even just to shake them up.’

  ‘Do you believe in destiny?’

  ‘No. I believe that you and I are part of something that is only coincidentally to do with us. You less than me. My grandfather helped hide the Firestarter in a cave on his land during World War Two, and the British Museum didn’t want to take it back, or forgot to take it back, since it makes people forget it. I don’t think you and I will benefit from any of this—what’s happened to me is basically that I found out I was damned decades before I have to die and go to Hell. I get to postpone it. If I stay in the Sidh, I live a long life. That’s a benefit. But you don’t have any benefits, unless you count knowing how things work over and above, or maybe just around, our own earthly reality. You do love being in the know, so maybe that’s enough for you.’

  Jacob released her hand. He closed his eyes and Taryn stood there, wavering between sternness and pity. He had done so much for her. Too much. He should bow out now. Shift should practise catch-and-release with Jacob, who didn’t need to be saved from Hell. Reject us, she thought at the man in the hospital bed. Let your ‘we’ continue to be humanity, or the British public, or whatever it’s so far been when you say ‘we’.

  Jacob opened his eyes. He said, ‘The Firestarter has a spell on it that makes human beings disregard it. Shift has a spell on him that makes everyone—gods, demigods, sidhe, us—disregard him. Think about Munin’s dream. That she and her sister were one raven again, flying over the flooded Earth, looking for land and finding only an ark, not Noah’s, but the Ark of the Covenant from King David’s story. In their dream, Shift’s mother was riding on it.’

  Jacob was right. It wasn’t the same spell, but it was the same witch who cast it. ‘The Firestarter is Shift’s mother’s work,’ Taryn said.

  Jacob frowned, he seemed to tussle with something. Taryn felt a damp fog close around her too. She was waiting on the shore of the lake at Princes Gate. Her grandfather had gone to get the punt from its mooring in the reeds. Her hand was under the canvas he’d used to wrap the box—her fingers slipping smoothly over lubricating charcoal dust. She shook her head. ‘All right. We know that’s half the answer.’

  ‘Do you think Shift knows?’

  Taryn considered and quickly came to the conclusion that Shift must know. That’s why he was so assiduous in his pursuit of the Firestarter, and at such pains to make as few ripples as possible. ‘He wants it because he’s worked out it’s his,’ she said. ‘It’s something he was meant to have.’

  ‘He doesn’t care about the Tithe or the terms of the bargain,’ Jacob said.

  ‘I don’t know what he cares about.’

  Jacob’s hand returned to hers and they stayed like that, hand in hand, until it was time for her to go.

  24

  A Torah Above the Torah

  For the first part of the drive Taryn tilted back the passenger seat and slept. She’d had four days when she’d sometimes dozed in the family room on the ward, and had only gone back to Alan’s once, very late, when she was so sleepy and vague with painkillers that she wasn’t a safe driver. She’d seen Jacob now. They were both up to speed—and fully cognisant about how unequal they were to everything. She might as well be a baby Shift was carrying about. Something soft and helpless and dependent. All she had to offer him was a single story—about her father’s ‘screen test’. One story, so she hugged it to herself, didn’t tell it, and spent the drive asleep.

  After a toilet stop, once they were back on the road, Taryn asked Shift to tell her about Hell. How had he escaped?

  He told her that the fuming demon had dropped him directly on the other side of Hell’s Gate, in a long, shallowly sloping tunnel. A lava tube. There was a dim brownish light at the very end. It was too dark for Shift to see his attacker. He just lay quiet and listened to it hissing and flopping. He could feel Neve trying to open the gate, and then he felt the Sidh swing away from where he was. ‘I thought she’d moved it. I wondered whether you’d notice she had, and what kind of act she was putting on. I was worried about you. But then I thought, “Why would Neve do that? No one is going to want to hand me over to Hell prematurely, without negotiations and justifications and ceremony and farewells.”

  ‘I got up and tried to make calculations about the size of the lava tube. There wasn’t enough light to measure it with my eyes. I couldn’t gauge the distance to the dull illumination at its end. I couldn’t tell whether that light was shining on the slick walls of a bend, or was an opening to some very dimly lit place. I’d never been to Hell. I had no knowledge about it other than what stories provide. Hebrew and Christian stories, because this was that Hell. The one the sidhe have a pact with.

  ‘There was heat coming up the tunnel. If I was going much further, I’d have to change myself into something heat-resistant. A dragon was the obvious choice. But my dragon was too big for the tunnel. I have many kinds of hawk, and dog, and horse, but only one kind of dragon. So I stood there in the dark and hoped the demon had forgotten me. Which wasn’t much of a strategy. I listened to that sound, of something smoky, and sandy, flopping about in its death throes. Something essential to the demon’s pattern had been wounded by Neve’s attack. Her sword had disrupted it, and it couldn’t pull itself together. I listened to its scrapes and whispers become slower, quieter. I listened to it swearing, and moaning, and weeping. And I wasn’t thinking, “Die, my enemy!” I was thinking of it as a person. Because life is all people. All people everywhere.

  ‘Once it was quiet I got up and made my way down the tube. I walked for maybe an hour. I got thirsty. The patch of light grew larger, and rosier. And then everything became a little Plato’s Cave, because I saw shadows against the light, a group of demons, coming up the lava tube. The tunnel was still too narrow for a dragon. And demons weren’t going to be impressed by a tiger, or crocodile, or a taipan. I didn’t even think it would do me much good to throw them around. And I could do that—I could shove them back down the tunnel, and press them to the floor. Kernow t
old you his story, so you know I can do that.’

  Taryn thought that raising a river from its bed and making a spiralling cone of it was rather more than ‘throwing things around’. She asked, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I just stood there and waited. I’d like to say calmly. The group came up on me, hurrying once they saw me. Eager. They were all different, all formidable and dreadful—or mostly dreadful.’ Shift frowned, a little flicker of something like wonder passed over his face. ‘One of them was tall and had velvety skin, yellow-webbed turquoise. The colours of a poisonous frog.’

  Taryn laughed. ‘And did it have a big stiffy?’

  Shift looked startled.

  ‘I have a story to tell you. But first you finish yours.’

  ‘We just stood looking at one another. And then I said, “You will let me by. I’m on my way to speak to your rulers.” This generated a certain amount of shuffling. They exchanged glances—like people.’

  Taryn’s ears started to ring.

  ‘“Since I can’t find a satisfactory answer to my questions,’ I said, “I’m forced to take up matters with someone above you.”

  ‘Demons don’t seem to be very good at hiding their feelings. One of them was growling, and another one was filling the air with a smell like burning kumquats. “Or perhaps, after all, you could satisfy my curiosity,” I said. “Why are demons trespassing in the Sidh?” I was pretending not to know they were looking for the Firestarter. One of them said, “You have Taryn Cornick.” And I said, “Not about my person.” And then the tall yellow and turquoise one began to get a hard-on. Which was disconcerting. I decided it was for the Firestarter. Not for you or me.’

  Taryn laughed.

  ‘Perhaps it was the excitement of having a secret. I’ll say this: they’re not a poker-faced people. Though I guess the big yellow and turquoise one was poker-something-else.’

  ‘Would you just stop,’ Taryn scolded. She sat up and rubbed the knotted muscle between her eyebrows and tried to collect her thoughts. Of course she wanted to know how he’d escaped, and wanted him to tell her, but she had a notion about that, and her notion was unfolding itself around her, more kaleidoscope than flower, shining and symmetrical. ‘Do you remember what my demon was shouting before you turned into a dragon and carried us off?’

  Shift tilted his head. A gesture of birdlike attention.

  ‘“Hell is the homeland,”’ she quoted, and watched him think. She saw the spark catch, and his eyes go the green of a mythical first springtime. ‘It’s not Hell that wants the Firestarter,’ she said. ‘It’s the demons.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You said they have masters. Fallen angels, I presume. I imagine you and I are on the same page about how Hell is organised. According to the stories.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The fallen angels arrived in Hell when they were thrown out of Heaven?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘They took over.’

  ‘A small number of angels is stronger than a great number of demons. They’re like the men with the guns. Except no one can take their guns.’

  ‘Okay,’ Taryn said. ‘Then “Hell is the homeland” is the rallying cry of an independence movement.’

  Taryn watched understanding and calculation cascading in Shift’s eyes. Then he returned his attention to the road, slowed down and turned into the lane that ran along the boundary of what remained of the Northover land. It was dusk, and very green beyond the car windows. But the green was in the car too, something sparkling and voiceless, and dark and unfathomable, like acres of old-growth forest. The spell had withdrawn, and uncovered him. For one exultant moment she imagined she—Taryn Cornick—had broken the spell.

  The great spell with the same character as the one on the Firestarter.

  Taryn watched Shift as he peered ahead for oncoming cars and made mental notes about the passing bays. He said, ‘It’s not guns or brute strength that keeps the demons subdued. It’s a language.’

  He slowed and pulled in at the gate to the rye field. He got out and opened it. Then he got back in, drove bumping into the field, then reversed to tuck the car in against the hedge, facing the gate.

  ‘How long are we leaving my car here?’

  ‘You are going to send an email to your former husband’s factotum, the useful Mr Stuart, and tell him it’s here.’

  Taryn got out her phone and spent a few minutes composing an email. She reflected that she must by now have burned up all of Alan’s goodwill. There was no point her being worried about it, but she was. She frowned over the email and fretted about the consequences of sending it. Shift meanwhile had got out of the car and was leaning on its side, in the last of the light, looking up into a sky of browns and soft lavenders, darker than the usual summer south-eastern haze, for it was stained by the smoke of European forest fires. Taryn got out too and leaned on the warm metal. ‘My mind wandered,’ she said. ‘You were telling me how you escaped from Hell.’

  Shift looked at her curiously, then laughed. ‘There was a brief stand-off. Then they seized me bodily—but not roughly, so I held off on any defensive action until I knew what they were doing. What they did was lift me over their heads and run me back up the tunnel. They charged the gate and they threw me at it. And it was open. Neve must have moved it away from the Sidh and opened it.’

  ‘She didn’t seem to be able to open it onto Hell.’

  Shift shrugged. ‘We aren’t going to know what she did until we ask her.’

  ‘Where did you come out?’

  ‘Lake Baikal, near the mouth of the Turka. Long hours of daylight. I couldn’t be a dragon; too conspicuous. Besides, it’s difficult to stop being a dragon, so I don’t like to do it. Or rather, I do like to do it, very much, which is why it’s difficult to stop.’ He gave a little yelp of laughter. ‘I am always dragon myself back.’

  Taryn moaned. ‘Please.’

  ‘I considered setting out for Australia—’

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘New Zealand—but decided instead to become a high-flying goose and fly back to London, where I could hover around outside Jacob’s place of work.’

  ‘On the grounds that Jacob was more helpful to you than I was? More helpful than my grandfather’s papers pertaining to the distribution of his library?’

  ‘Papers are just papers, Taryn. They sit about mutely, waiting to be read.’

  ‘Whereas Jacob?’

  ‘Whereas Jacob could send you a message telling you I was safe.’

  ‘Oh,’ Taryn said.

  ‘I was hovering around in human form when Raymond Price approached me and told me that you were back in the country but that your phone had been unmoving in Alan Palfreyman’s windbreak for some hours. And that he couldn’t locate Jacob. And that he presumed I was waiting to catch Jacob. He didn’t ask me why I didn’t have a phone or anyone’s number. He didn’t seem surprised that I got in his car. He didn’t seem baffled by my trusting him. He was businesslike and helpful. He gave me a packet of peanuts to eat when I told him I was hungry. We were hours away, Taryn. I could have got there much faster as a dragon, but imagine the repercussions. There’s no point in just providing a spectacle. There’s no point in changing people’s minds or even their world views, but not having the means to change the world. That’s just acting in bad faith.’

  Taryn was startled. She had never considered that Shift was thinking of changing the world. She asked, ‘How would you change the world?’

  ‘I wouldn’t change it.’

  It took a moment, but suddenly Taryn was furious. ‘Why the hell are you always so careful?’

  ‘What else should I be? Most of the good in the world is remedial. It’s fixing things and caring for people. Taking care.’

  ‘Right. And none of it is your business.’

  Shift drooped a little. ‘That’s what Jacob said.’

  ‘It’s what you said! Jacob and I are only quoting you! And your people are preparing to send a hundred
thousand souls off to Hell to buy another century of their beautiful civilised lives. Which is why I have a lot of sympathy for the demons. At least the demons want to change things.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Shift said. His tone wasn’t any cooler. It wasn’t tired, or patient, or riled or defensive. It just had that formidable neutrality he often used when speaking to one of his people. Who didn’t consider themselves to be his people.

  Taryn sighed. What else could she expect of this person with very few attachments and only a small hoard of his past, a legacy consisting of a few stories, like boundary pegs around a bit of real estate he never meant to develop. She had a tiny part in that impoverished future. All she could do was refine her story, whittle her peg. She guessed she should approach it all as a puzzle, a conundrum, a bit of research. ‘So,’ she said, ‘why do you think the demons want the Firestarter?’

  ‘It’s the Torah above the Torah.’

  Taryn clapped her hands to her face and rubbed it hard. How sharp and angular her jaw was now. It felt like it had when she was twenty. Shift didn’t take pity on her. Nor should he. After all, she was the one who’d had the wit to realise that the demons and Hell weren’t the same thing. It hadn’t occurred to him.

  Taryn mused for a time, and kept rubbing her face until her skin burned. Then she stopped and abruptly uncovered her eyes and gazed at Shift. His silhouette was haloed in a pink and green swarm of visual snow. He was facing her fully and she had the impression he was smiling at her. She said, ‘The Torah is the word of God. A Torah above the Torah would be the language of God.’

  ‘That’s right. And we’re back here now, at the place you got lost before the birds flew into their nests in the hedgerow, before the first stars came out. But let’s see how you do this time—Taryn Cornick of the Northovers, Valravn, Hero of Understanding. Because now I think you can ask the question you couldn’t ask or even hear asked.’

  Taryn struggled for a minute, with the graciousness and oddity of his address, and the half hour she’d just lost as if she’d been drugged—or possessed. And then her scalp caught fire. All over her body her superficial nerves heated up. She wanted to throw off her clothes. She pushed off the car where she was leaning and staggered a few paces into the thick of the rye. She had to stop herself from looking about for the wasp nest she must accidentally have disturbed. Her ears roared.