The Christmas decorations came down from a biscuit tin stored in the attic, the tree was tied with musty garlands, the minty ends of paper chains were licked, the tissue bells, so knackered that their metal fastening clips had snapped off, were hung within scorching distance of the front-room fireplace, then everything went back upstairs. Janine came around to finish off the dates, nuts and candied orange slices. She only stopped eating after a chocolate tree ornament left over from the previous Christmas made her sick.
The new year set out in subzero temperatures that slowed life down. Daylight barely entered the house. Pauline hoovered round Bob’s legs and Bob took the dog on a lot of unnecessary walks that detoured past Shepherd Neame pubs. Janine sat in our kitchen and sniffled. She had formed an alliance with my mother that involved cataloguing complaints about men, individually and as a breed. The only sound of happiness in our house came from the tinny audience laughter of television shows, not a human sound at all, more like the drag of pebbles in the tide.
As usual, the pupils from my school passed their winter break standing around in bus shelters looking hard. And I returned to the end of the pier, to tumble back into a world of my own making, safe in the knowledge that no-one from Cole Bay could touch me there. I knew it was a life I could have no other way. In Calabash my stifled imagination ran riot, and all the things that were denied to me in the real world were available. I could breathe. I could laugh. My company was sought. My ideas were considered. My opinions were appreciated. In the royal court and the village streets I was treated with honour and honesty. Yet still the question lingered—was it entirely imagined or somehow real? And if it was imagined, why couldn’t I access it from anywhere else? I always arrived back in Cole Bay feeling drained of life and energy. Nothing in the real world held any importance for me. I had no money, no job, and no ambitions save to return as soon as possible to the world where my fantasies were made flesh.
Gradually I learned that there were visiting rules. I could only be guaranteed of reaching Calabash at certain times—just before sunset was easily the best—and it did not seem possible to cross on dry, sunny days when the sea was flat, or when there were too many other people about. Also, it was easier to make the transition if I was in a state of agitation, although the process usually left me with a churning stomach. After my earliest arrivals at the harbour, my reappearances caused no further disruption to the city’s well-ordered life, and the locals welcomed me with the same casual accord with which they greeted the gull-blown fishing boats returning from deep water with full holds.
My life was not schizophrenic, because the real world ceased to matter much at all. My mind became criss-crossed with chunks of half-remembered myth and fairy tale, from a timeless land that, in my darkest days, I supposed I had cobbled together out of storybooks, to make up for the fact that I would never have any genuine adventures.
I wonder now how on earth I could have failed to see so much.
Chapter 24
Midnight in the Burial Vault
1971. The year London stopped swinging and John Lennon told us that the dream was over. The utopian reveries of hippies drifted off in an aromatic haze. The first British soldier was killed in Ulster, gunned down in a Belfast street. The underground revolution withered away from lack of interest, and Pauline discovered fresh cause for complaint in the national changeover to decimal currency. Looking back, it seems that the commercialisation of the planet began there. As the tunnel of time opened out into a broader vision, the lunatic optimism of the sixties simply became a nose thumbed to postwar poverty, not a beginning at all but a final desperate fling.
If things were bad before that date, they really went downhill fast in its wake.
In February I began to look for work, but the only jobs available were the kind that could be taught to moderately bright chimpanzees. I managed a month sweeping up in a butcher’s shop until I could no longer stand the smell of offal. My job hosing fish guts from the floors of Mac Fisheries’ sheds lasted until I caught a chest cold and the doctor forbade me from working in a place which required me to spend half the day soaked in cold water. I recovered to pass the next six weeks stacking shelves in Cole Bay’s first supermarket, but quit after my former classmates began coming in for the specific purpose of shoplifting in front of me, and while there was a certain level of satisfaction to be gained from building towers out of boxes of Daz, it wasn’t a cornerstone on which to construct a career.
Back on the esplanade, Malcolm Slattery swapped his chopper for a motorbike with a tiny tank and extended front forks, like the one in Easy Rider. He still cruised patiently by, watching and waiting for my reappearance, the weaselly Laurence hiding around corners, acting as his spy. I cut new paths through the back alleys of the town, where my detractors would not find me. I began to believe that I had no friends, only friendly enemies.
But in Calabash…
—
‘I think I’ve found a way,’ the doctor informed me at last. ‘These plans; there are tunnels.’ He unrolled a vast crack-backed map across his work table while Menavino secured the top with pins. ‘A bit of a problem, though. I have no idea which way up this is. There are no compass points…’
‘Here, let me.’ I pulled a stool up to the table and examined the chaotic mass of broken lines. ‘I’m good at this sort of thing.’
The burial chambers were easy to locate, but the cartographer’s use of scale was haphazard, and it was hard to tell if any of the passages to the sarcophagus rooms were intended for human use, or whether they were merely sluice channels. ‘Why would there be tunnels?’
‘The chambers are not permanently sealed because decorative work continues on them long after the body arrives, and our artisans need access gates. Death can be sudden, but such chambers as these are the labour of lifetimes.’
‘And the workers continue to complete the burial vaults after they are filled?’
‘Sometimes for years.’
‘How do they get back inside?’
‘With a set of special keys. Like so.’
Menavino stepped forward and gave a broad grin. Digging into his tunic, he produced several twisted snakes of gold with a magician’s flourish.
‘We have from midnight until two hours beyond it. Only at this time are the gates accessible. Some kind of safety mechanism is built into the locks. We must return before the keys are missed,’ explained the doctor, tugging on his jacket. ‘Any later, and Menavino’s head will roll. You say you understand the map?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then let’s go.’
The entrance to the chambers was a diagonal door embedded in the hard-packed sand. Menavino set his oil-lamp on the ground and worked the first lock. The door—the first of three—pushed inwards to a set of dry stone steps. We resealed it behind us as we moved forwards in the gloom. The air was dusty and oppressive, but cleared and cooled with the passing of the third door, whereupon we found ourselves in the first of a series of small stone vaults. Our inexperience with the intricacies of the door locks meant that they took a considerable amount of time to open, and it felt as though over an hour had passed before we managed to reach the first chamber.
I directed Menavino’s lamp over the map and pointed. ‘We are here now. Which chamber belongs to Eliya?’
‘There are many rooms divided off from the central passageway,’ said the doctor. ‘I have never been down here. The only ones who are allowed to visit the chambers of the dead apart from the artisans are blood relatives. I do believe, however, that the males and the females of the royal line are kept on separate sides of the compound.’
I studied the map again, trying to remember what I had read about such burial chambers. ‘In that case the women are most likely to be buried to the left, in correspondence with the moon. The men will be on the right. They’ll be arranged by generations, but more important by social standing. As the Sultan’s wife, Eliya was of high rank, and should be one of the first we encounter.’
Eliya’s final resting place proved to be the chamber immediately connected to the one in which we were standing. Our lamp revealed walls of intricately patterned gold-leaf, and pictorial mosaics that chronicled the lives of those who had passed over. There were very few artifacts to be seen scattered around. In the centre of the chamber was an oblong box with thick clay sides and an open top.
‘Lower the light.’
Menavino refused to come closer to the coffin, so I took the lamp from his trembling hands and set it on the edge of the wall. The flickering light illuminated the box, revealing a small dried body clad in bright woven robes, brown skin stretched tightly across a skull that still displayed a luxuriant head of brown hair. Her eyelids were sewn shut with gold thread, and her lips had shrunk back to reveal rows of perfect tiny teeth set in leathery gums. Her head was resting on a deep pillow of saffron velvet. It was, in its way, a beautiful corpse, its lack of ostentation imbuing it with an air of peaceful dignity.
‘My lady,’ said Trebunculus softly, bowing his head. ‘Oh, my poor lady.’ He raised his sad eyes to mine. ‘I think I cannot bring myself to touch her.’
‘Perhaps we won’t have to.’ I picked up the lamp and lowered it over the side of the coffin, carefully studying everything I saw. A few personal items had been included beside Eliya’s body: some tortoiseshell combs, a tapestry footstool, the octagonal onyx table topped with carnelians. These gemstones were identical in size and colour to the jewel that Rosamunde had pressed into my hand. Laid at the corpse’s tiny feet were some gold-embroidered slippers, an oval mirror, and some kind of stringed musical instrument. I thought about Eliya’s death, her poisoned agonies mistaken for birth pains, and my mind began to form an idea.
‘Doctor.’ I raised the lamp out of the sarcophagus and looked for a place to set it safely. ‘Who chose the items that would be buried alongside Eliya? Doctor?’ But the doctor was not by my side. Hearing a sudden scuff of boots, I looked about and saw Menavino being dragged off by a pair of shadowy figures. In my surprise, I dropped the lamp on the ground, extinguishing its flame. Before I could speak, a broad hand clamped itself over my mouth and an arm locked itself around my waist, hauling me backwards out of the chamber.
We were taken back through the gates and released into a tall grey room, cool and windowless, illuminated by high balsam-burners, where we were lightly chained. This was General Bassa’s interrogation quarters, and the General himself was waiting for us there. His corpulent form was constricted within the crimson work tunic of his regiment. He was leaning over a disgruntled leopard in a cage and dangling pieces of goat’s meat through the bars.
‘I don’t know what to do with you, Trebunculus,’ he said. ‘You’re always creeping about, poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. This time you’ve gone too far.’ The doctor, Menavino and I were arranged against the far wall of the room. The doors were guarded by palace Nubians, presumably the same ones who had removed us from the burial vault.
The General was, it was said, prone to fits of melancholy. You never knew when one would come. He left the leopard cage in the corner and paced across the floor, then stopped suddenly and leaned forwards until his forehead touched the wall, looking for all the world as though someone had left a cello lying out of its case.
‘What to do, what to do.’ He pushed himself upright and swivelled his beady eyes in the doctor’s direction. ‘You have committed a treasonous offence. I’ve a mind to have you and your meddlesome friend garroted, and have your heads mounted on sticks above the garrison where your eyes can be pecked out by the royal lyre-birds.’
‘I do not think such an action would be appreciated by the Sultan, General.’ The Lord Chancellor was standing in the doorway. Bassa gave an angry shrug of the shoulders and strutted back to his feeding plate. He tore off a piece of meat and gave it a desultory flick into the cage.
‘I am sorry, Doctor,’ Peason apologised, stepping forward. ‘The military mind. Our General sees no subtleties in the lexicon of courtly intrigue.’ He turned to the leader of the Sultan’s army. ‘I understand that nothing was touched. There was no desecration, merely trespass.’ Behind him scuttled a small hunched figure, running through the shadows as quickly as a crab. I knew then that Scammer, the Lord Chancellor’s spy, had informed his master of our night escapade. But how had General Bassa’s men known about us?
‘Bah! I recognise the laws of the land, Peason, and I see when they are being trampled by those who do not accord us with honour.’ The leopard pressed its muzzle against the cage and licked its lips, waiting for another tidbit. The General tore off a strip of dripping meat and dangled it through the bars. ‘Entering the burial crypt is a sacrilegious act.’
The Lord Chancellor swept past us with a crack of his cloak. ‘Think, General. The kingdom is so close to unity once more. The Princess Rosamunde is now my daughter-in-law. Maximus has been welcomed into the royal family with open arms. Your army is to be reunited with our state. No harm has been done, and no-one needs to know. We cannot allow a small—infringement—such as this to endanger all we have worked for.’
‘Not to punish these three would make a mockery of our laws. I must demand some kind of reparation. What were they doing in there?’
‘How did you know we were in the chamber?’ I countered. The doctor cast a fearful look at me for speaking out.
‘Keep your silence, ajnabee, unless I address you directly,’ barked the General. ‘If you want to keep your head.’
‘Let him speak, General.’ The Lord Chancellor smiled wanly at me in what I took to be encouragement.
‘We meant no disrespect, General. The Sultan himself asked the doctor to teach me the ways of your kingdom, and I explained that I could not possibly learn more without seeing the honour you accorded your dead. The highest civilisations are marked by the manner in which they respect their ancestors.’
General Bassa looked at his pacing leopard, then back at me. ‘Hmm. Is this true, Doctor?’
‘Most certainly,’ said Trebunculus, following my lead. ‘It was necessary for us to visit the burial vaults in order to fully explain our history to the boy. If you want him to bring us scientific advancement, he must be entirely cognizant of our ways. Science, dear General, nothing further can be achieved without it. The boy will yet prove himself useful.’
‘And just what can we expect him to do?’
‘He will do anything we want, won’t you, Kay? He doesn’t want to cause any trouble.’ The doctor smiled nervously at me.
‘I will certainly do whatever is within my power,’ I said.
‘Then you must fulfil the promise you made to the Lord Chancellor.’ The General’s smile revealed a mosaic of pointed yellow teeth. ‘Bring us something from your world. Something that will grant our army scientific superiority.’
‘And you will release us without a word to the Sultan?’ asked Trebunculus.
General Bassa returned to his leopard cage and watched the animal sniffing the air, then tipped the last of the meat in, flecking the walls with blood. ‘I will release you, but the Sultan must be informed of your actions.’
‘He trusts me,’ said the doctor. ‘I have cared for his family since I was little more than an apprentice. I live for the honour of his patronage. It is my whole world. If he should choose to banish me…’
‘Then you must accept your punishment. It is the law of the land.’
The Lord Chancellor shook his head sadly. ‘General Bassa is right. The Sultan must be told. He alone can decide your fate, Doctor. In this matter even my hands are stayed.’
‘But you can speak to him. Explain that I only act for the kingdom’s good, explain that I mean no harm.’
‘Indeed I shall, Doctor, you may take no fear in that. But remember that many a kingdom’s downfall has been caused by a subject who meant no harm. Have your men release these chains, General.’ Septimus Peason approached, studying my face with his strange yellow eyes. ‘And as for the ajnabee.’ His no
strils flared with faint distaste. Gone was the respect he had accorded me at our earlier meeting. ‘As the General said, there must be something given in return. I think now the ajnabee will bring us the science he promised.’
Chapter 25
Winter’s Angel
Three things preoccupied my mind: how I could trick General Bassa, what I had seen in the burial vault, and how I would ever be with Rosamunde again. But once I had returned to Cole Bay, life there found new ways of turning aside my intentions.
Cole Bay General Hospital never tried to hide the fact that it dealt with pain and loss on a daily basis, and brooked no nonsense from its mostly elderly patients, who were angered or at least bewildered by their sudden change in fortune. The watchwords of its operational procedure were hygiene and efficiency. The matrons had no time for mollycoddling. The doctors were blunt and precise. They told our next-door neighbour Mr Harrington that he was going to die, and if he hadn’t lost the will to live before he’d attended the appointment, he certainly had by the time he caught the bus home. Any man who laid his best suit and tie on his bed before dying had to be fairly sure of his expiry timetable.
I was more familiar with the chest X-ray department than most of the doctors. I’d passed many dismal hours slumped in the waiting room, which comprised a curtained section of corridor, three green metal cubicles and a folded stack of floral open-backed shifts, their cotton thin with overwashing. Melancholy old ladies in NHS wheelchairs sat with their hands pressed against grey foreheads. Others misunderstood instructions, anxiously asking passing strangers about travel arrangements, or forgot their dates of birth when questioned by orderlies, or simply wandered off after being told to stay put, like disobedient children, then reappeared to find that they had missed their turn. I was always the youngest person there, cajoled by nurses who were more used to loudly lipsynching their requests to the terminally confused than dealing with teenagers.
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