by Sarah Rayne
‘Box lanterns,’ explained Snizort. ‘A very old idea.’
The inside of the shelter was almost completed, and it was becoming clearer with every hour that, as soon as the doors were in place and the mechanisms for locking them home were screwed on, they would all go below and stay there.
It was larger and much better equipped than people had visualised when they started it. Quilp had been made to rescind the tax on the parti-coloured stone, and they had lined the shelter with it. It would be extremely strong, said Floy, looking to Borage for confirmation. It would protect them against any splits in the hillside.
‘Could that happen?’ asked one of the Council.
‘Anything could happen,’ said Floy.
The strange, slightly feverish mood of the previous days had vanished now; people not on dug-out duty took to huddling together in their houses, little groups of them gathering together for warmth and comfort, tending the fires which would not burn properly because of the wind shrieking down the chimneys and fastening the shutters firmly so that the horrid light would not seep through the cracks.
Seeing the two shelters take shape, helping where he could, Floy had the strong impression that something ancient and powerful, something steeped in legend, was being re-born.
For Mankind has been here before, it has sheltered from Flood and Deluge before … cedar and cypress wood were used then, and the whole was smeared within with pitch … Two animals of each sort were taken aboard, and a raven and a dove, so that messengers could be sent out to test the waters when they had receded …
Floy shook his head, but for a moment the strange image persisted, so that he had the strongest impression of Time spread out before him like a huge, glistening tapestry, interwoven with crimson and gold and silver, the entire history of every world ever lived and ever lost and ever died for …
And Time is running down, he thought, looking up at the darkling skies, seeing the massing clouds piling into pinnacles and peaks and huge, improbable impenetrable castles. Time is running out and running down, and I do not think we have very long left to us …
But standing in the shrieking night that was closing down on Renascia, with the Twilight Mountains black rearing silhouettes behind him, he looked down on the little houses and the shops and the grassed areas that people had so carefully tended, and thought: We have faced catastrophes and deluges and fires and floods and famines before … We have somehow survived …
We have been here before, thought Floy.
But shall we escape this time?
‘It’s all going quite well,’ said Snizort, in the warm, safe-feeling house, when Floy and Fenella came to supper to eat Snodgrass’s delicious baked ham with potted mushrooms, and blackcurrant pudding to follow.
‘I suppose we’ll all go in the shelter, will we?’ asked Snodgrass, setting out glasses for the carrot wine which was his newest experiment.
‘Well, there’s certainly room for everyone,’ said Snizort, taking a second helping of blackcurrant pudding and adding custard. ‘I suppose if there wasn’t we might have to draw lots for places. My word, now that's an old custom, the drawing of lots. It was the Second Elizabethans who used to do that, or would it have been even earlier … ? Let me think. I’m bound to have a note of it somewhere … Of course, if it was left to me, I’d say we ought to take some of the animals as well. One — or perhaps two? — of every living species on Renascia. Yes, two would be better — ’
‘It’s what the first Settlers did,’ said Snodgrass in a down-to-earth manner.
‘Is it really?’ said Floy. ‘I don’t believe I ever knew that.’
‘Oh yes, my word, yes certainly.’ Snodgrass peered at Floy over his spectacles. ‘Of course, they couldn’t bring two of everything,’ he said earnestly.
‘There wouldn’t have been the room,’ put in Snizort.
‘But they brought — let me see — chickens and ducks for sure.’
‘Eggs,’ said Snizort knowledgeably.
‘And I think that lambs and sheep were Earth things as well.’
‘I think we ought to take down some seedlings,’ said Snizort. ‘You ought to prepare for every eventuality. Is anyone having that last helping of pudding?’
Walking back to their house, their collars turned up against the cold, Fenella wearing her fur-trimmed cloak with the hood, Floy said, ‘Snizort and Snodgrass think of it almost as a game,’ and Fenella jumped, because she had been thinking the same thing and Floy sometimes had the way of echoing your thoughts which could be disconcerting.
She slipped her hand through his arm, and said, ‘It’s oddly comforting, though, isn’t it? And I think that, beneath it all, they are very serious indeed. It is just that they so enjoy their pieces of history and their discoveries.’
‘Could you wish they had not made this particular discovery?’
‘I don’t know.’ Fenella considered. ‘Would it have been better not to know?’
‘I’d rather know,’ said Floy, standing still and staring out towards the Twilight Mountains, his eyes narrowed. ‘If there’s something out there that’s sucking us into its black core, I’d rather know about it.’ He grinned down at her. ‘That way we can at least put up some kind of a fight.’
Some kind of a fight …
‘Floy, what will happen?’ asked Fenella, who had been trying not to ask this ever since they had found the Casket.
‘Truly, I have no idea.’ He frowned. ‘The idea — the whole concept of what our ancestors called a vortex is difficult to grasp.’ He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ‘I imagine it as a great, deep, chasm — perhaps a black tunnel, where there is nothing at all, not even Time.’
Nothing, not even Time …
Fenella shivered, and said, ‘I don’t think of it like that. I think of it as a creature, a beast, something up there that is settling down into its lair, circling round as it does so. I know we shall fight,’ said Fenella, seriously. And then, ‘Why have the days gone?’
‘Because Time is slowing down,’ said Floy in an expressionless voice. ‘Haven’t you felt that?’
‘Yes.’
He smiled at her. ‘Would you prefer me to protect you, as all the other ladies are being protected?’ he said. ‘To pat you on the head and say, “Now, my dear, there is nothing for you to worry about, and we shall simply live in a shelter for a few hours, and then come out again to our homes and lives”? And tell you to run away and help with the soup-making?’
‘No,’ said Fenella. ‘Oh no.’
Quilp was living in chaos, which was not the sort of thing he cared for. It was not the sort of thing they had ever permitted on Renascia. Chaos could lead to confusion, and confusion could lead to downright anarchy, and they all knew what that meant!
It was Floy’s fault, of course. Floy was turning the whole of Renascia upside-down and inside-out; he was sweeping aside all of Quilp’s carefully thought out taxes and rules, and once a tax or a law had been rescinded, it was extremely difficult to get it restored. It was very nearly impossible. When Quilp thought of how he had worked and planned and — yes, all right, plotted! — to get taxes on the multi-coloured stone, and on people’s earnings, and on the houses and the highways, and of how he had been making himself and his fellow Council members a very nice little profit out of it all, black fury entered his heart. He dared say the next thing that would happen would be that Floy would start delving into Marplot’s ledgers, which was the very last thing they could permit.
Something would have to be done. Could they somehow get rid of Floy? He considered the idea, and the more he considered it, the better he liked it. He liked even better the thought that with Floy out of the way, he, Quilp, would be the obvious choice for Leader. Leader of the Council of Nine. It sounded well. Ruler of Renascia sounded even better. It would all have to be carefully handled and the Council would have to be subtly manipulated, but Quilp could do it.
And although it was not in his creed to be secretive or furtive, he called a
very secretive and extremely furtive assembly of his fellow Councillors, with the sole exception of Floy. He hesitated over the inclusion of Borage the Builder, who was so pleased with having been appointed to oversee the construction of the shelters that he might turn out to have divided loyalties. But if there was one thing Quilp had always been, it was democratic. It would have been undemocratic not to have included Borage. In any case, what about all those houses Borage had built, actually using the cheapest possible materials, but recording that extremely expensive materials had been purchased? Borage had quite as much to lose as any of them. Anyway, somebody might have told him about it behind Quilp’s back.
None of them dared risk Floy delving into the Council’s financial affairs. There had once been a saying about there being a tide in the affairs of men which, if taken, could lead anywhere at all. Quilp thought there was a tide in the affairs of Renascia’s Council now, and if they did not take advantage of it, there might never be another opportunity. It went against Quilp’s nature to plot and scheme and intrigue, but there was too much at stake.
They met in Prunum’s Wine Shop. Quilp had specified the hour but, even as he battled his way down the street to the Wine Shop’s jutting bow windows, it occurred to him that it had taken a very long time for the hour to arrive. His own clock seemed to have run down somehow, and so he had sat in the window of his house, watching the huge Tompion piece in the square outside. That had never been known to give an incorrect time, and so Quilp knew he could trust it. Even so, it seemed to take a remarkably long time to reach the appointed hour. He found himself hoping that he would not be late for this very important meeting.
But when he reached the Wine Shop, the others were only just arriving, so it was all right. Probably this rather nasty perpetual darkness sent people’s ideas of time a bit out of kilter. And so he nodded to the pretty young thing who served the wine and the various brews. He noticed that she was looking particularly toothsome, took a minute to suggest that they might sup together very soon, then made his way to the back of the shop.
Prunum had set aside his back room for the meeting and was serving them some of his wortleberry wine, which Quilp did not care for, but which it would have been discourteous and unpolitic to have refused. He seated himself at the scrubbed table which Prunum had provided and eyed them all solemnly.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we have on our hands a situation so grave and so fraught with danger that I believe we should ask ourselves questions we have not, until now, needed to ask.’ A silence. No one spoke. Quilp sipped the wortleberry wine at his elbow and went on.
‘Our dear Renascia is being threatened and menaced,’ he said, and several voices murmured, ‘the Black Chasm,’ and several heads nodded.
‘Not only by that,’ said Quilp who, in fact, found the whole thing so outlandish that he could not even bring himself to pronounce the words. ‘Not only by that, gentlemen.’ He raised a clenched fist. ‘It is threatened from within,’ he said and looked at them and waited.
‘Floy,’ said Marplot, who had seen, as clearly as Quilp, that Floy would soon be asking for details about the various monetary transactions that surrounded the shelter-construction. He had taken the precaution of locking away the Moneyhouse’s ledgers and had even gone so far as to enter a sum from his own funds against a certain amount he had borrowed for himself without the encumbrance of interest or even repayment. ‘Floy,’ he said, very grimly indeed.
‘Floy,’ said Quilp, nodding. He looked round at the Council, and said, very sadly, ‘My dear good friends, I fear we can reach only one conclusion about him.’ And then, with a nice sense of timing, said in a doom-laden voice, ‘Floy will have to be got rid of.’
Prunum said hesitantly, ‘Is it absolutely necessary to do that?’
‘I fear it is,’ said Quilp, sorrowfully.
‘Well I say he goes,’ put in Prismus who liked to say he had not the squeamishness of the rest. ‘And the sooner the better,’ he added for good measure.
Borage entered a caveat. Floy was working so hard to save them from the Chasm, he said, worried. Only look how he had thought of the shelters, and how he and his sister were to be found at the dug-outs for several hours at a stretch. ‘I speak as I find,’ he said, firmly.
‘It’s a pity you find so little, then,’ said Marplot.
‘But,’ said Prunum, ‘it isn’t just a matter of Floy asking — ah-difficult questions about money matters, of course. It’s a much greater matter than that.’
He glanced at Quilp, and Quilp, pleased to find such an ally, said, ‘Precisely, my dear Prunum. I am glad to see you have such a complete understanding of the situation.’ Prunum beamed and thought that the private arrangement between himself and Quilp and the pretty young thing who served wine in the public rooms and provided quite another entertainment in the private rooms, had not done him so badly.
Quilp said, ‘As our good Prunum says, it is a much larger matter than Floy’s unexpected involvement with the finances of the Council. Floy is making changes. He is already sweeping aside our rules and our laws. He’s a reformist,’ said Quilp. ‘I’ve seen it from the very beginning. He’s a progressivist. He’ll change everything, and not for the better, mark my words. Hasn’t he already begun?’ demanded Quilp, bringing his clenched fist down on the table. ‘Hasn’t he already swept aside our laws and rescinded the taxes? He says it’s simply until after the danger is past,’ said Quilp. ‘He says it’s until it’s known what kind of life we can lead. But is it just until the danger to Renascia is past? Is it just for the duration of this threat?’
He leaned forward. ‘We have to ask ourselves that question, gentlemen. And if the answer to it is “no, it is not just for the duration, it is for good”, then we have to ask ourselves whether Floy can be allowed to continue as Renascia’s leader.’ He sat back and folded his arms. ‘It becomes a much larger question, a much more basic question than Floy simply noticing a few minor discrepancies in our books,’ said Quilp, and everyone nodded in agreement, because it was one thing to remove a leader simply because he might catch you out in a smidgen of sharp practice. It was another altogether to remove that leader because he was a danger to the wellbeing of the people. Those of the Council who had felt a bit troubled about Quilp’s suggestion, began to feel very much better.
Marplot said he had always thought that Floy and his sister were exaggerating the threat.
‘Of course they’re exaggerating it,’ said Quilp pouncing on this as a useful point, ‘of course they are. They see it as a means to bring in their own method of governing.’ He leaned back in his seat, and reached for the wine glass again. ‘Before we know it, they’ll be transferring our leading concerns into public ownership.’
‘What would that mean?’ said Prunum.
‘Probably that institutions such as the Moneyhouse would not be run by an individual, but by a Council composed of the people of Renascia,’ said Quilp, and there was a touch of malice in his tone. ‘Which would mean, my dear Marplot, that not just Floy, but every soul on Renascia would be privy to accounts and ledgers and balance sheets.’
Marplot said, ‘Dear me,’ and took a gulp of wortleberry wine.
‘Would Floy really do that?’ asked Prunum, who was making a very nice thing out of his private supper room and the young ladies who were not overly particular about whom they entertained there and how they did it. ‘Would he really?’
‘I happen to know that he would certainly do it,’ said Quilp, who did not know any such thing, but was not going to lose any opportunity of turning the Council against Floy.
‘I don’t think we could allow that, you know,’ said Marplot, worriedly. ‘I think we would have to do something about that. It wouldn’t be anything to do with Floy and the — ’
‘Minor discrepancies,’ said Borage.
‘Precisely,’ said Marplot.
‘Floy must be got rid of,’ said Prismus. And then, ‘But how could we do it?’
Quilp said, ‘Floy a
nd his sister have turned this absurd idea of the vortex to their advantage. Well, let us now turn it to ours.’
Marplot said, ‘Excuse me, Quilp, but do you believe in the vortex?’
‘I am prepared to admit that there may, after all, be something in the information on the Golden Tablets,’ said Quilp in a dignified voice that indicated that he was of sufficiently strong character to be able to admit when he had made a misjudgment. ‘And I think that we may have to endure a few hours of unpleasantness.’ He made an airy gesture. ‘Some strong winds, perhaps violent storms. Even one or two localised fires on the higher parts of Renascia. It will be a little disruptive, but there are the shelters,’ said Quilp, and thought that he was almost managing to make it sound as if the shelters had been his sole idea. ‘After a few hours — at the very most a day — we shall emerge and return to our homes.’
The others nodded, as if they, too, thought this.
‘And that is my idea,’ said Quilp, and looked at them all very steadily. ‘Supposing, gentlemen, just supposing that Floy was not with us when we came out of the shelters?’
‘How could that happen?’
‘Supposing,’ said Quilp, ‘that Floy and his troublesome sister did not come into the shelters with us in the first place?
‘Supposing we accidentally shut them outside.
‘Just as Renascia tips towards the Black Chasm … ’
Chapter Five
The shelters were very nearly finished. All that remained was for the door mechanisms to be put into place so that, when they were all safely inside, the great, solid doors that Borage and his workmen had so precisely hewn from the parti-coloured stone could be closed tight and sealed. An exact fit, Borage had said, pleased. They could not afford to have any cracks or crevices through which water might seep. The doors would fit exactly and precisely. There were the grilles as well; Borage had been extremely pleased with these. They were strong, iron, shutter-like structures, carefully angled so that when the shutters were removed, they would give a clear view directly on to Renascia’s plains. There was a small chamber directly behind each grille, sealed off from the main shelter, and one or two of the men would climb into these small chambers in order to unseal the grilles and peer out to see if all the danger had passed.
