“But it’ll take Leiyatel ages to find me again,” Stella said, although she felt less hopeful than she’d tried to sound.
The grim look Nephril gave her didn’t bode well. “She will know nothing of thy supposed death, Stella. To her, thou hath simply disappeared, but thou can mark mine words, she will be on the lookout for thee, sensitive to the slightest whiff of thy presence.”
“Shit,” Stella hissed, “then we’ll just have to be quick about it. We’ll have to make up our minds as soon as we know what Aunt Prescinda discovers.”
Nephril only nodded as they now stood around in silence.
“Well?” Prescinda finally said. “What are we waiting for?”
By the time they’d climbed to the alcove’s door to the outside world, they were all puffing and panting as they wiped their faces. They’d pushed themselves hard in the stifling heat but now hung back, torn between the fresh air without and the discoveries that awaited there – both their own of Nature and Leiyatel’s of Stella.
“Remind me, Prescinda,” Nephril startled them by saying, “but what hath thou promised to do for us?” It drew a determined look from her, clear to them all despite the poor light.
“I’ve to see if Nature’s dark figure hides behind the eyes of one you,” to which Nephril solemnly nodded.
“So far, so good.” He turned to Stella. “Art thou ready, mine dear?” and now it was her turn to nod.
Nephril flung the door open and stood aside. “After thee, mine good ladies,” and they all hurried past, out into the bright sunshine of a late afternoon.
Stella waited whilst Nephril waved for Henson to stay with the carriage, Prescinda all the while keeping her back to them both, as agreed. To Stella’s surprise, Nephril took her hand in his own, his palm unusually damp.
They both now stared at Prescinda’s back.
“We are ready, Prescinda,” Nephril told her, quietly.
She turned, her eyes stilled and narrowed as she stared into his. “Hmm,” she presently said, but hesitated before turning her gaze to Stella.
She remained inscrutable for what seemed an eternity, so long Stella wondered if time had stopped. As her own eyes began to water, she noticed her aunt’s grow wider, her step back the answer Stella had dreaded the most.
“I can’t have,” Stella implored, staggering as the strength in her legs quickly ebbed.
Nephril’s hand gripped her own more firmly, his voice soft, considerate. “Come on, Stella, sit over here,” and he helped her towards the very alcove wall where her aunt had sat to recover her own strength, what now seemed so long ago.
“But I can’t have,” Stella almost pined as she refused to sit down, but then her voice abruptly firmed. “I don’t want to destroy Dica, certainly not the life it holds. Quite the opposite. I want it to be free, forever. Nature can’t be guiding my resolve – it never has, never will. It’s impossible. You must be wrong, Aunty. You must have...” but now she remembered Mister Crow, and all the other animals that had stood around her when she awoke beside the lake. So, they’d seen it too.
She swallowed, hard.
“Oh, bugger,” she breathed as her legs finally gave way beneath her.
Somehow, she now sat on the hard flags, her back cold against the alcove wall. Nephril was squatting before her, still holding her hand.
“I am sorry,” he said, his eyes heavy, glistening. He raised her hand and pressed his dry lips to her fingers. “Thou will understand, Stella, I am sure, when I say we can no longer countenance pursuing thy plan. The risk be too...”
“But, Nephril, you’ve already satisfied yourself it’s the right thing to do. You convinced yourself separately, after your talk with Dad, when I wasn’t even there. When you all thought I was dead. If Nature’s interfering through me, how could I have effected your decision then, eh? Tell me that. Nature’s in me, Nephril, not you.”
He shook his head and began to remind her of what was at stake, the immense damage that could be done, the ultimate destruction of the realm and all it held, but she heard little of it. Something had scratched at the back of her mind, something she’d overlooked, something she was certain could have no guile of Nature.
“Nephril?” she interrupted. “Do you remember mentioning the duties Dad came back with? You know, his reseeding task.”
“Err, yes, yes, I do, that time in mine study. What about it?”
“You used a term then you promised to explain later.”
“A term?”
“You said he’d a duty to reseed all ‘human’ families.”
“Did I? Well, it was true, he did.”
“In which case,” and Stella slipped her hand into one of her pockets, “you’d best have a look at this.” She pulled out a battered tobacco tin and pressed it into his hands.
“What be this, Stella?”
“It cushioned my fall onto Tabatha – old man Ditchwater’s daughter. That’s why the lid’s been a bit tight ever since, but if you can get into it, you’ll find an essay of Dad’s.”
After some effort and much prising, Nephril finally stared down into a tinful of charred paper. When he prodded them, a clump moved as one, fine cotton stitching evidently holding it together.
“Well, take it out,” Stella said, and he did, gently laying a patchwork page upon his palm, a bed of unassigned fragments left behind.
Mirabel and Prescinda gathered behind Nephril and stared over his shoulder as he lifted the paper to his eyes. He read for a while, tracing his finger delicately along the script, then looked up at Stella, lines etched about his eyes.
She quietly asked, “Is ‘Anasci’ another name for Nature, Nephril, and are ‘humans’ what Dad lived amongst in his time in ancient England, a vestige of which survives to this day in Dica. A vestige I’m a part of?”
“What’s all this about Nature,” Mirabel asked, “and – what was it you called them? ‘Humans’?”
Stella kept her gaze on Nephril. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this observation of Dad’s shed a different light on things?”
“What are you talking about, Stella?” Prescinda said as she gingerly took the flimsy sheet from Nephril’s hand and peered at it. “What’s Falmeard written about?”
“I think Dad brought back an ancient wisdom, Aunty. Something he clearly thought Leiyatel’s returned vigour no longer made relevant.”
“A wisdom?”
“Anasci is Nature, isn’t it, Nephril, and I am a human, aren’t I?”
He nodded.
“In which case, it all makes sense now. You realise what this means, though, Nephril. We’re going to have to rethink an awful lot of what we currently believe, particularly about us humans.” She smiled at her aunt before taking Falmeard’s revelation from her and clearing her throat.
“So, if you’re all ears, you’d best let me explain.”
48 Hanging in the Balance
“I spent a bit of time trying to understand this, Nephril, whilst waiting around for you at Carr Sceld.” Stella gently straightened the paper and placed it in her lap. “It made no sense then, not when I didn’t know what Anasci and humans were, so I eventually put it to the back of my mind.”
She squinted up at the sky.
“It’s the bit where Dad writes, ‘Anasci: alike to the fire of the sun’, that the problems started.” She looked down at Falmeard’s words and read, “The fire from which all things are born.”
“Born of Nature,” Nephril scoffed. “How could anything be born of that which drives all towards chaos?”
“Here,” and her fingertips caressed the words, “Dad describes the people he lived amongst, back then in England. He describes them as entirely of human stock; ‘before the advent of any Certain Power and its artefacts, and therefore devoid of any shield against Anasci’. He’s adamant that everyone in those days had Nature within them, that it was an inseparable part of all living things,” and Stella thought of Mr. Crow.
“In which case, how could they def
end themselves against Nature’s certain end, Stella? Why were they not driven to destroy themselves? Answer me that.”
“That, Nephril, is the whole point. Much of Dad’s essay is about his conviction that humans have always carried Nature within them, something he refers to as ‘Yin and Yang’. That was, until Nature was forced out of those chosen to live in Dica, forced out by the ancient engers of Eyesgarth.”
Stella again quietly read through more of her father’s essay. “He was obviously in the kitchen at Blisteraising when he wrote this,” she presently said, “for he says Nature can also be seen as the fire of a stove, hungrily burning away within, reducing wood and coal to ashes and cinders.”
“Precisely, Stella. Bringing destruction and disorder to everything, as it did to thy neighbour’s farmhouse.”
Stella winced. “But in this case, Nephril, constrained and ordered by the body of the stove; set to boil water for a cup of tea, to cook potatoes for our meals, roast that leg of lamb we all so love, heat our bones on a cold winter’s night.”
She gazed into his eyes. “That stove is life itself, Nephril, its purpose: to constrain Nature’s eternal drive towards disorder with its own cast-iron body. As Dad says in this essay, ‘Life and Nature have always lived in perpetual balance, for this is the very purpose of life.’”
Nephril stared at her for some time, clearly thinking. When he looked down and raked his hand through his hair, his words came out as no more than a whisper. “A simple soul, thy father, but one with an uncanny insight, one I have long learned to trust. If he be correct in this then it would answer why the folk of Dica have become what they have.”
“Stone-cold stoves, eh, Nephril?”
His eyes narrowed. “Perhaps so, mine dear, but still able to cast their cold stare into the heavens, still capable of turning its barren reaches into ordered stars. Is this not life’s one remaining duty, its forfeit for an ancient failing?”
Prescinda surprised them all. “Failing? You mean the glut you and Falmeard once talked about, Nephril, all that time ago?”
“Glut?”
Prescinda looked uncertain now as she peered at Nephril. “That morning we were heading to the harbour, you remember? To catch the boat across the bay, on our way to the Southern Hills ... where we found that ... that canal thing. When Falmeard told us about ... oh, what was it?”
“Ah,” Nephril said, “yes, of course, Pandora’s Box.”
“Was that it? When that magpie watched us as Falmeard explained how humans had once become a plague on the world?”
“Indeed, the very time, Prescinda,” and Nephril turned to Stella. “Be that the kind of balance thou speak of, eh, mine dear? When life’s greed drives it to despoil and destroy?”
In a flash, Stella now saw the obvious, staring at her from her father’s words. “But such a thing, Nephril, could only happen again if Leiyatel stays as she is. She is the only source of excess left us now. That’s why the ancient engers were so careful to quench the fire of Nature in each and every Dican, so we’d be impotent, malleable, unthreatening to Leiyatel’s eternal purpose. So we couldn’t despoil her as thoroughly as we once did the world before her.”
By now Nephril was grinning from ear to ear as he stared at Stella, his eyes clearly burning with understanding.
“Yes, Nephril,” she said. “Exactly. My plan will put Leiyatel’s excess forever beyond life’s grasp – and life forever beyond Leiyatel’s control. We would then be no different from every other living thing with which we share this small realm of ours.”
“A world devoid of any chance of another glut,” Prescinda quietly and rather distantly said.
“Yes, Aunty. A world in which survival must be earned, not effortlessly stolen.” Stella peered at her aunt as a thought struck her. “What made you remember the magpie, Aunty?”
“Magpie? What magpie?”
“You said you’d seen...” but the look in her aunt’s eyes told Stella she’d get no further. Confusion filled Prescinda’s recently astute gaze, and with it, brought to Stella’s mind how little time they now had left.
She carefully folded her father’s essay as she asked, “So, Nephril, what think you now to my plan? Is it some skulduggery of Anasci or the balanced reason of the free mind of a human?”
Nephril held her gaze for a moment before shouting towards the carriage, “Henson? If thou would oblige us and ready thyself and thy horse. We have urgent need now to be at Blisteraising, and before nightfall if possible.”
49 A Mystery and a Half
Henson drove the carriage on with such haste Mirabel’s words rattled from her mouth as she sat beside Stella. “I can’t say I understood much of what was said, but you all seem happy you know what you’re doing.”
“Yes, my love,” Stella said, “we do. We just need to get the cask to Leigarre Perfinn, and if you can make the place ready for it, then all will at last be as it should always have been.”
The carriage lurched and they rocked one against the other until it settled.
“The fabric of Dica,” Stella went on to say, “will then be forever preserved by a Leiyatel who can no longer constrain its people. A people, though, who will also have no call on her own powers, and so can never again become a plague on the land.”
Mirabel smiled at Stella, the kind of twinkle in her cuckoo eyes that only pride can bring. Stella wondered what the new order would mean for their close but somehow, it now seemed, disquieting friendship.
Beyond Mirabel’s smile, Stella noticed the wall of the Lords Demesne sweep by, the carriage now juddering as Henson applied the retarding brake to save the horse. She also noticed her aunt’s silence and asked after her. Prescinda seemed somehow far removed, squeezed into the corner opposite, and slow to answer that she was well enough. The way she peered at Stella, though, suggested otherwise.
“What are we doing here?” she eventually said, and Stella tried to reassure her but wasn’t convinced she’d succeeded. In fact, her aunt looked decidedly worried.
When they reached the bottom of the long descent, the smell of hot leather from the brake drifted in through the window. Henson now turned them onto the Cambray Road, on the level towards Blisteraising. Its better surface gave them some respite from the jarring, and Nephril soon began a solo refrain of snores against the horse’s rhythmic hooves.
As time passed, Stella found her own eyes growing heavy, her head nodding forward to startle her awake. She was just settling herself more comfortably when the carriage slowed.
Looking out, she realised they’d reached the long rise of Blaycow Hill, and so closed her eyes once more and shuffled back into her seat. She soon rediscovered that soft, floating space before sleep’s opening door, but Henson’s sharp call of “Whoa, Ginny” held her back. Shuffling around, she craned her head out of the window.
“What the bloody heck?” Henson gasped beneath his breath as he peered up the road. Stella followed his gaze.
A couple of hundred yards away, a team of dray-horses clattered and arched and skidded towards them, eyes white as they whinnied and neighed against the weight of the wagon at their backs. Sparks flew from their shoes as they futilely strained to hold back its mountainous load of barrels.
Henson and Stella both shot looks at the dry-stone walls lining the road, and at the narrow verges. Henson shouted, “The gate! Get the gate, lad,” which she only now noticed.
A last glance at the descending threat, and Stella leapt from the carriage. She threw herself at the field entrance, fumbling with the gate’s rope until casting off its loop. The gate itself swung heavily open, dragging her into the field.
“Gerrup, Ginny!” and the crack of a whip barely rose above the dray-wagon’s thunderous approach before the mare narrowly shot past as Stella fell to the ground. She rolled out of the way of the carriage’s wheels and froze where she now lay, looking out through the gateway at the road.
A pile of dray-horses slid by, the wagon seemingly climbing onto their prostrate bo
dies, barrels already spilling free. A hiss of brown foam soon spiralled from those striking the wall, a number spinning over into the field. Cold froth laced Stella’s face as one glanced by, thumping heavily to the ground barely a foot from where she lay.
Now staring through a pungent blur of beer, she watched the wall further down the field arch inwards as an almighty bellowing wave of wood and ale broke over it. The wave crashed like surf into the field, the wall finally slumping after it before the last clatter of its stones left an eerie hush of hissing barrels.
Stella slowly got to her feet, to stand with the others, staring slack-mouthed at the wreckage now strewn before them. When the last spouting hiss of foam trailed away into the early evening air, Stella wiped her face, the reassuring taste of hops at odds with the sight.
“Stay here, ladies,” Nephril told them before nodding at Henson. “Come on, lad,” but he hesitated and turned to Stella. “I think thou had best remain here too, Stephan. This be a job for Henson and mine self.”
His mouth firmed as he briefly stared at her, his eyes quickly narrowing. “In fact, I suggest thou wait in the carriage.”
Stella opened her mouth to object but a flick of Nephril’s head towards it stayed her, a mere shake enough of a warning. Obediently, she did as he asked, leaving Mirabel and Prescinda to watch the two men make their way solemnly down the field.
From the carriage window, Stella looked on as Nephril and Henson scrambled through the debris, hauling stones and fragments of wood and barrels out of the way. As they got on with their search, the shadows of the carriage and mare steadily lengthened towards them.
Eventually, a small group of people appeared at the far side of the field. Before long, they were talking with Nephril, his arm outstretched, clearly indicating what had happened. When more people clambered into the field from the road, Nephril strode back up the field.
He had a word with Prescinda and then swept Mirabel along with him to the carriage where he helped her in before leaning against its door.
Starmaker Stella (Dica Series Book 6) Page 21
