The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  They emerged in the tangle of camomile, tansy and old lilac bushes around the folly. It was a mellow sunset and the lake was stippled with feeding sprat and pond skimmers on their pontoons of thready legs.

  The view from the folly shook Taryn’s heart. The smooth lake, reed margin and long lawn up to the house were the same as ever. The stonework of the house had been cleaned. And two freshly painted punts were tied up at the new jetty, which extended far enough out into the deep water for swimmers to dive off it.

  The ravens perched on the balustrade of the folly, sunning themselves. They were indistinguishable from each other, but discernibly larger than earthly ravens. Munin soon made herself known by hopping in a circuit right around the balustrade to make a pecking pass at Shift as he came up the steps. ‘No bodyguard,’ she scolded. Then, ‘No brass band either.’

  The folly was reminiscent of a band rotunda, but had a central table fixed to the floor right where any musicians would sit.

  The table was a good place to lay the Firestarter. Shift put it down, and the ravens alighted beside it on the tabletop and tried what everyone had to try at least once. They attacked the seal with their beaks. They took turns to peck at it, and then worked in concert. Hugin desisted first, and stood preening her feathers, like someone flattening their hair when something hair-raising has happened.

  ‘It’s hours until midnight,’ Jacob complained. ‘And it’s not as if we needed to come early to case the joint. I for one do not want to sit twiddling my thumbs.’

  Munin offered to twiddle Jacob’s thumbs for him, but said she’d have to remove them first.

  He ignored her. ‘We have time to hike to Prince’s Gate Magna, have a pint, use the payphone, and be back well before midnight.’

  Taryn said, ‘I would like to speak to my father. He’ll have had the police and press all over him about Tintern.’

  No one responded.

  Taryn said, ‘I’m sure the sisters can be trusted to mind the Firestarter.’

  ‘I’ll bring you a boat,’ Munin said and swooped across the lake, her pinions almost brushing their reflection on the water. She lifted the mooring line of one punt off its post and stretched it out, flapping strongly until the bow came around. The punt drifted slowly after the furious feathered black star of the raven.

  ‘It is best to have a boat on either shore.’ Having articulated her practical thought, Neve looked frowning from face to face. ‘We’re not under an enchantment, are we?’

  ‘I think you’re all feeling the way I normally feel,’ Shift said. ‘It’s the Firestarter’s field of influence. You’ve entered the realm of the unseen. Welcome.’

  Neve went down to the shore and took the rope from Munin. She tied the punt up.

  Jacob asked whether Neve’s sword was the only weapon they had.

  Hugin spat like an angry cat. ‘I can stop time by flying around this building.’

  ‘But then nothing happens,’ Shift said.

  ‘True. But it does give me time to think.’

  ‘But time starts again from where it left off,’ Shift said. ‘Stopping it only makes a difference to you. Same with Munin and her dispensing with intervening time. To us it just looks like she never goes anywhere, and you’re heroically decisive.’

  Both ravens took off, and then the next instant landed in front of Shift. And so did a sizeable pile of snails, several of whom were already putting out exploratory horns. ‘Have some snails,’ Munin said to Shift. ‘You’ve earned them.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. All I have right now is intervening time,’ Shift said.

  ‘And the Firestarter.’ Hugin speared a snail and smashed its shell to pulp around its distressed foaming flesh. She ate it, and several more, leaving dark smears on the tabletop’s chequerboard green and white marble. The other snails made off slowly around the fragments of their fellows.

  ‘Once we reach the lane it’s about forty minutes’ walk to Prince’s Gate Magna,’ Jacob said. ‘We have six hours to kill.’

  ‘Bearing in mind the nettles on the wall,’ Taryn said.

  Jacob looked perplexed; he remembered the nettles on the wall.

  Taryn said she’d show him where there was a culvert that went under the wall and lane. ‘If Agile Media has put a grate on it, we’ll come right back.’

  ‘Are you going all the way with him, Taryn?’ Neve said.

  Taryn met Neve’s gaze, trying to convey that she was going to make sure that Jacob came back. Even if that meant following him to the village.

  Neve caught on, and nodded.

  The punt had a pole and no oars. Taryn stood in the stern and poled them towards the shore farthest from the house. She watched the big trees, the walled rose garden, and the house move in relation to her, and what the evening light was doing. It was all so familiar that she kept expecting to look down and see her summer shorts and grass-stained childish knees.

  Jacob told her he was going to call Raymond Price. ‘To have a future I need a witness. Otherwise it’ll be far too lonely.’

  ‘Am I not a witness? Or don’t you plan to stay with us?’

  ‘You’re not planning to stay either.’

  ‘For some intervening time,’ Taryn said. ‘The length of my sentence.’

  ‘It’s self-punishment, Taryn.’

  ‘And what you’re planning is self-preservation?’

  They wobbled their way off the punt onto the wooded shore. Taryn looked around. ‘This is Lower Field Wood. Prince’s Gate Wood is outside the new boundary.’

  ‘I think that’s where I pulled over and slept in Price’s car.’

  ‘I’ve never caught up with that story,’ Taryn said. ‘You told me what you’d learned, but not the circumstances around it. Where you were, what the weather was doing, how you felt. There are all these things that happened to you and me that we haven’t shared with each other.’ She let go of a branch too soon and it flicked Jacob in the face. After that his eyes were watering.

  The wood ended twenty feet within the stone wall that bordered the narrow lane. The lane where Stuart’s car had hatched a dragon. The sun had gone. The hedgerow covering the wall was browning and mildewed in some places, and jewelled with rosehips in others.

  ‘I’m going to have this land restored to my family,’ Taryn said.

  ‘When the prize is divvied up? Whatever the prize is. I think you must have a clearer idea than I do of what will happen.’

  ‘Is that why you think you need Price?’

  ‘I want a gun in my hand.’

  Taryn turned along the wall and walked to where the field dipped for a stream, and the wall rose with the road over the culvert. It was always quiet in that place. Taryn remembered that hush, then how, nearer to the pipe, Bea’s voice would pick up an echo. It was always Bea talking—telling a story, making plans.

  ‘You only want a gun in your hands because you’re furious,’ Taryn said. ‘You think the blood on Shift’s clothes was Aeng’s because you’d like to attack Aeng.’

  ‘I was happy with Aeng.’

  ‘And without responsibilities.’ Jacob must know that Aeng’s only requirement of Jacob had been that he believed the story he was being told.

  Jacob didn’t answer her.

  Taryn slithered down the grassy bank into the waterway. Her feet went through a crop of cress, and found water. It welled up, slick with frogspawn and rotted vegetable matter, and soaked her boots.

  Jacob followed her.

  Taryn squelched her way along the channel. The pipe was smaller than she remembered. She hadn’t been through it since she was eleven or twelve. She and Bea would use it when they were on the wrong side of the lake and couldn’t be bothered doubling back to the driveway. The pipe was higher than the channel, but Taryn still had to stoop to look inside. She anticipated both possibilities—a grate blocking the pipe, and the end opening on another field drain on the far side of the hump in the lane.

  Something was blocking the pipe. Taryn’s eyes adjuste
d. She could make out hooves and a brindled hide, a large hipbone, the yellowed fringe of a black and white tail.

  Jacob stooped beside her. They looked at the dead animal blocking the pipe. There was no smell of decay, just cow, and brackish water.

  ‘Why would a cow go in there?’ Jacob said. He didn’t know anything about farm animals and seemed to think she might be able to tell him.

  ‘It’s a young bull. And only recently dead. There’s no smell.’

  ‘How did it get in there?’ Jacob was trying to work out the physics.

  So was Taryn. The physics, the psychology, the probability.

  She and Jacob gazed at each other for a time. Then she said, ‘We could brave the nettles.’

  ‘Let’s not bother,’ he said, decisive. He straightened and waded back to the place they’d come down the bank. He waited for her and boosted her up before him, then climbed, slipping back a few times and tearing up clumps of weeds. When they emerged from the hollow they were water-stained and covered in burrs. Grandma Ruth used to call them biddi-bids.

  They skirted the wood, which was dark and full of snagging tree roots. They had to push their way through sedges and wade for a distance before they reached the little beach where they’d left the punt. Mosquitoes were biting. The twilit blue sky was grainy with them.

  They climbed into the punt slimed and itchy, and Taryn poled her way back to the island.

  Someone had illuminated the camping lantern that an Agile Media employee kept stored under the table. Everyone was where they’d been when Taryn and Jacob left, sitting still in the greenish light. There were no snails left. Broken shells and smears of flesh and foam covered the table. It seemed to Taryn that everyone was trying to look innocent, as if they’d been up to something and had hastily pulled themselves back together—which Taryn was sure the ravens never had to do.

  She took off her boots and dried her legs with her skirt. The mosquitoes had followed them, but Taryn could see the swarming transparencies of mendings zipping through the air, hunting them.

  Jacob sat down next to Shift and immediately said, ‘Whose blood was it?’

  ‘Mine,’ Shift said. ‘While you were all asleep I took Neve’s sword, planted my feet on the box, and tried to lever off the seal. I got very enthusiastic. The sword slipped and I sliced myself. It didn’t hurt much, so I took my trousers off to have a look. That’s when the calf muscle sagged off my left leg. I shifted. When I changed back I picked up my blood-soaked trousers and went to the pool to wash. Then you came along. I had no idea what you were thinking.’

  ‘If you’d passed out you might have bled to death,’ Neve said.

  ‘I know. It was incredibly stupid. I feel shaky every time I think about it.’

  Jacob laughed. ‘That would have been a pretty lame end to all this.’

  Neve muttered that she’d still have managed to secure a bargain about the Tithe.

  They sat in silence for a long time until, around eleven, perhaps meaning to be there first and check the lie of the land, the demons arrived on the island. They didn’t use Shift’s gate and rise out of the lake; they flew in after a journey from some other gate or cut-through. Three of them had wings. A fourth was supported by a cloud of smoke. They arrived from above, three alighting like waterfowl, and the third dropping out of a steep parabola as if it travelled by great bounds rather than flew. Two of the demons were tall and looked as if they were at death’s door from starvation. One was suede-skinned and pallid, the other covered in suppurating boils and blisters. The one in smoke was shapely and human-looking, but had no arms. The last was Basil Cornick’s yellow and turquoise monster, but without any sign of genitalia, erect or otherwise.

  They crowded into the folly. One of the thin demons immediately took a seat on a bench by the wall. It looked exhausted. The vivid one swelled its muscles and folded its arms like a bouncer at the door of a nightclub. The smoky one darted at Neve, faster than Taryn’s eyes could register. It snatched the sword off her and thrust it into the stone tabletop. The sword stuck with only a foot of blade showing beneath its hilt. It quivered and shimmered.

  ‘Not a good start,’ Neve said.

  The demons blinked at her, three with stony expressions and the fourth pulling faces, the changes between each inhumanly rapid.

  ‘We will conduct this meeting in English,’ Shift said, ‘out of deference to—’

  ‘—the people of the land,’ Taryn supplied, thinking of the opening ceremony at the Auckland Writers Festival. She was the people of this land.

  ‘I’m sure it’s all the same to you what language we speak,’ Shift added.

  ‘We will not bargain,’ said the demon in smoke. ‘We revile all who are not ourselves.’

  ‘Why are you here, then? Do you imagine you can just take the Firestarter from us?’ Neve said.

  ‘I took your sword.’

  Shift said, ‘If you took the Firestarter, you couldn’t open it. If you burned everything around it to ashes of ashes, it would still be intact. The box was made using the power it contains.’

  ‘And if we can’t open it, what use is it to us?’ the leader said, the one whose dark face had a diamond-shaped boss of bone above his nose, and whose mantle of smoke stood in place of arms. Taryn didn’t like to look at him too long. She thought his question must be meant to divine how much they knew about the contents of the box. Her eyes slid away from the group. There was a light on in the room that once housed her grandfather’s library. The intervening time disappeared again. She wished, and almost believed, that her sister would come out through the doors onto the terrace and run down the lawn.

  Shift said, ‘Will you strike a deal with me if I promise to put what the box contains into your hands?’

  ‘Sidhe trickery,’ said the mottled one. ‘You don’t say you’ll leave it in our hands after putting it there.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Shift. ‘I will leave what the box contains in your hands.’

  ‘We don’t trade promises,’ the pallid demon said, continuing to be obdurate. He looked around, jeering at the ravens, the humans, Neve. ‘He has no solidarity. He says “I”, not “we”.’

  ‘We don’t hate everything that isn’t us,’ Neve said. ‘We don’t need to say or think “we” all the time.’

  The turquoise and yellow monster spoke up. ‘Do you know what the box contains?’

  ‘A thing that won’t burn.’

  ‘And what good would such a thing be to us?’ said the smoke-wrapped demon, resolute in his scorn.

  Shift’s tone when he answered was matter-of-fact. ‘It is a scroll made from the skin of an angel. The skin is tattooed with words, in an ink made of the angel’s own blood. The scroll is a primer of the tongues of angels, otherwise known as the Language of Command. A language that, like the language of the sidhe, has no written form. The primer is, I believe, in the Roman alphabet, with the phonetics of Latin used to approximate the sounds of the words of the Language of Command.’

  The demons had become very still. One finally asked, ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Giving a purely spoken language the silent but visible voice of a written form is something my mother taught me. I enjoyed it enough to try again as a scholarly pastime, even after I’d forgotten being taught, and forgotten the small pieces of my mother’s own great project that she showed me when I was a child. I invented an alphabet for the sidhe—who didn’t have any use for it.’

  ‘You’ve done it three times,’ Neve said. ‘Solving the challenges the same way each time. No one tells you you’re repeating yourself because we don’t like to spoil your enjoyment. Also it’s interesting and instructive to see the character of an intellect assert itself like any other habit of temperament. It has helped us understand you a little better. Now, of course, Jane Aitken has printed books in your written sidhe, and you will inherit your own work as a fait accompli.’

  Jacob looked at Taryn and rolled his eyes. He seemed almost cheerful. She suspected that Neve’
s sidhe indolence about achievements helped him feel a little superior to them—a least in some respects. He may have been jilted, but he would never be so complacent about an effort in futility.

  The suppurating demon spoke up in a grating whisper, as if it were ulcerated through and through. ‘Why would you give up your birthright?’

  The pallid one said, ‘How do you mean to open the box?’

  ‘I have another birthright. It’s one of the two things I’m bargaining for.’

  ‘State your conditions,’ said the mottled monster. It was getting excited. Its genitalia had appeared, a growing protuberance more like a snail’s horn than a tumescent penis. The sight filled Taryn with queasy horror. She leaned against Jacob. Who was trembling.

  Shift stretched, and his elbows cracked. ‘I should say first that you won’t need your cryptographers at the server farm, and that getting them to figure out the language would likely have killed them, or driven them mad.’

  ‘They don’t care about that,’ Jacob said.

  ‘No. But nevertheless they won’t need cryptographers. My mother’s primer will lay it all out for them.’

  ‘If that’s what it is,’ said Jacob.

  ‘I can’t see what else it would be.’

  The mottled demon said, ‘We meant to programme the machines to formulate the sentences we require. We would each learn parts of a Battle Speech. Each—one—of—us,’ it said, clearly having some cognitive difficulty with even making a pass at personal pronouns in the singular.

  ‘You’ll all have understudies, I hope,’ said Hugin. ‘Redundancies.’

  The demon ignored her. It asked Shift, ‘Is that a condition? That the cryptographers be given their freedom?’

  ‘Let to live,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Yes, we will grant that,’ said the smoky one, with transparently insincere magnanimity.

  ‘That wasn’t a condition. That was one of the two things I must say first.’

  ‘Hurry up, then. What else must you first say, little princeling?’

  Demons didn’t do diplomacy.

  ‘I want you to understand that the language is lethal with short exposure to humans, and with only a little longer to sidhe. You are not your masters. The language doesn’t just cause you pain because they use it to compel you. It compels you because it causes you pain.’