“The Whistlers!” Annie exclaimed with a flash of revelation. “He talked about the Whistlers. That was what he meant.”
“Folk thought it bad luck to name the people of Faerie,” Bartlemy said, “so they gave them other names. The Little People, the Good People, will-o’-the-wisps, starsprites, the Whistlers. They would call up the spirits of the dead with a whistling noise like the piping of some unearthly bird. It was an eerie sound to hear on a wild night, a sound to chill the blood.”
“But you can’t have heard it,” Annie protested. “It’s just a story. It isn’t true.”
“Stories change,” Bartlemy said. “Truths change. The gates to the hill are shut, and the hill itself is forgotten, and even the location of the Scarbarrow is lost forever. I heard the Whistlers once, on a night such as I described, but maybe it was only a bird.”
Annie felt a shiver like a cold draft on her nape. She said: “What happened to the girl?”
“She knelt in the graveyard, and she heard the Whistlers, and her hand clutched the cross about her neck. Presently, she saw the souls rising like smoke from those graves where no herbs were laid, and the dancing lights came to her lover’s corpse, though she could see no shapes carrying them, and the spirit rose from his body and reached for her with glimmering arms. But the werelights spun around them, and invisible hands drew him into the dance, and shadow fingers plucked at her dress and pulled her hair, tugging her, turning her, harrying her into their mad fandango, over grave mound and tombstone, out of the cemetery and up the hill, to where the gates of Faerie stood open wide—the gates to eternal damnation. She could not resist, for her cross was torn off in the hedgerow, and the magic had gotten into her feet, and the face of her lover was ever before her, though she could not make him hear her nor catch his hand. But even as they reached the gates his voice came to her, urgent and low: ‘Go back! Go back! It is too late for me, but not for you. I will give my soul for yours. Go back!’ Then he called on Jesus, and immediately the whistling ceased, and all the lights went out, and the hillside was dark and empty. She walked slowly homeward and told no one what had chanced, and the next day they buried him, and she prayed beside his coffin for the soul that was gone. And on afternights when there was magic in the air she would linger on the hill singing her song, but the gates never opened, and the Whistlers did not return, and she knew she would not find him again on earth or in heaven.”
“That’s so sad,” Annie said. “Beautiful and sad. But I don’t believe in damnation.”
“It happens,” Bartlemy said. “But people make their own hell, usually this side of the Gate. They need no gods for that. As for the story, it’s one of those pagan folktales that Christianity adopted when they set themselves up as the good guys. A little truth, a little fantasy, a moral at the end. Who knows what really happened—if anything?”
“Then what does the story have to do with us?” Annie said. “And the woman whom Kal saw—who sacrificed her own child—did she think that would open the gates to Faerie? Did she think the Whistlers would come for him and let her through?”
“That is the question,” said Bartlemy. “And as ever, we are short of answers. But I wouldn’t trouble yourself too much. I don’t see you as the sacrificial type.” He smiled his gentle smile, and she found herself responding, comforted by his mere presence, his quiet common sense. “Have some more cake.”
“SO NOW Hazel and I aren’t speaking,” Nathan said. “It’s idiotic. Just because I made a stupid joke … She’s being completely unreasonable.”
“You didn’t tell her so, did you?” Annie said with foreboding.
“I—I might have. I mean, she was so overreacting—”
“Did you tell her that?”
“Yes.”
“What else did you tell her?” Bartlemy inquired with an air of clinical interest. “You didn’t suggest she should calm down, I suppose?”
“Actually …”
“Actually?” Bartlemy prompted.
“Yes, I did.”
“Good God,” his uncle said faintly.
“What did I do wrong?” Nathan demanded, slightly aggrieved.
“Telling an angry woman she’s overreacting and ought to calm down,” Annie explained, “is on a par with stuffing a lighted firework into a bottle and waiting for it to blow up in your face.”
“But Hazel and I aren’t, like, a man and a woman,” Nathan protested. “Not in that way. We’re best mates. We always have been. After all, we’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“You aren’t kids anymore,” Annie said patiently. “You’re not kids and you’re not adults. You’re stuck in the in-between zone of teenagerdom. Basically you’re just two giant hormones. It changes things—you have to start learning to think before you speak on occasion.”
“Not with Hazel!”
“You said she was behaving stupidly at the party,” Bartlemy remarked. “What exactly did you mean by that?”
“Nothing really. It’s just… she was talking to Damian Wicks. You know. For ages. Damian as in brother-of-Jason-Wicks. He’s a complete prat. All that family are. And she said he was sweet,” Nathan made a face. “I sort of worry about her. She really does have awful taste in boys.”
Annie and Bartlemy exchanged glances.
“I think,” Annie said with resignation, “I need to teach you some of the dos and don’ts about dealing with the opposite sex. Before you get yourself horribly murdered and some poor girl pleads justifiable homicide.”
“I’m not that bad with girls,” Nathan objected. “Nell thought I was all right.”
“You kept saving her life,” Bartlemy pointed out. “That tends to create a good impression.”
“Besides,” Annie added, “you didn’t spend that much time with her, did you? Your dream probably whisked you away before you had a chance to put your foot in it.”
“You seem to think I’m a dead loss,” Nathan said a shade sulkily. “Thanks very much.”
“You’re fifteen,” Annie said gently. “The fifteen-year-old boy who is good with girls doesn’t exist. In fact, nor does the sixteen-, seventeen-, or eighteen-year-old, and so on ad infinitum. The thing is, as girls grow older they suss out how to deal with boys. That’s kept relations between the sexes going so far.”
Nathan managed a grin.
Bartlemy said: “Fortunately for you, you have a wise and sympathetic mother who will undoubtedly offer you a few tips. Pay attention. That will give you a head start. Probably ahead of me—I’ve been around fifteen hundred years, and I still haven’t worked women out.”
Nathan eyed his uncle dubiously, unsure how to react. He found the thought of Bartlemy having any interest in women, or vice versa, deeply unnatural, but he was too polite to say so.
His family read his mind without difficulty.
“We’ll talk about it some more over vacation,” Annie said. Nathan, being at private school, was due to start a break shortly. “You’d better go to bed now. School tomorrow.”
In bed Nathan brooded on his argument with Hazel for a while, puzzling over the general incomprehensibility of female behavior, then his thoughts switched to Denaero and his need to get back to Widewater. He wondered if the same rules applied to mermaids, even though they were part fish, and had a grim suspicion they did. For all he knew, they applied to fish, too. But he still felt somehow cheated by Hazel’s attitude. After all, this was Hazel. His best friend. She wasn’t supposed to be like the other girls.
She wasn’t supposed to be so easily impressed by a prat like Damian Wicks …
He fell asleep without realizing it and slid into a muddle of ordinary dreams. He was marrying Denaero, only she still had her tail, and Bartlemy was pushing her into the church in a wheelchair. She had a veil on but kept refusing to wear the scallop shells he’d provided. Then Hazel swept past in a white wedding dress with her hair up in a butterfly clip the way she’d taken to wearing it lately. “It’s all right, Nathan,” she said. “It doesn�
��t matter about the scallops. I’m going to marry Damian.” She went inside with the prospective groom, and all the church bells were ringing, and Nathan was left alone among the tombstones. Suddenly it was dark, and nearby someone was whistling, or maybe it was a bird, and there was fear all around him …
Dream faded into oblivion. Much, much later, when he opened his eyes, he was Elsewhere.
Not Widewater—the lack of sea was a dead giveaway—nor Eos, nor Wilderslee. In fact, it was nowhere he recognized. He seemed to be on a broad curving platform encircling a cylindrical tower, with different-sized tiers set one on top of another like a stack of irregular plates. It continued upward for many stories, alternately widening and tapering, until it terminated in a conical roof tipped with a spire of gold. The whole edifice was constructed from some pale yellow stone, polished and gleaming like marble. Nathan allowed his thought to float toward the edge of the terrace; beyond the balustrade, he could see only a rose-pink sky dimpled with cloud like a drift of apple blossom. He peered over the stone rail, and although he was weightless and bodiless he felt his mind reel. There was no ground below that he could see, only more sky, and the tower, broadening toward what he hoped was its base. Perhaps a thousand feet down the cloud thickened and pressed against the building, obliterating the view. Nathan pulled himself away, his dream turning back to the tower, where two lines of people had emerged from a double doorway and were ranging themselves across the terrace. They wore deep-purple-black robes, perhaps denoting religion, or rank, or any combination, and under the hoods they had the lean, curved, long-boned faces of Eosians. Nathan was evidently somewhere in the same cosmos, if not on the same planet. He remembered the Grandir’s purple-cowled henchman, and wondered if these men fulfilled a similar role—whatever that was.
The doors opened again, and three more people came out, one of them a woman. Imagen. She wore a long violet gown and her hair was piled on her head in a complex arrangement of loops and whorls and wound with a strip of silk. She carried a cup in both hands—the Cup, the Grimthorn Grail. It looked dull and lusterless in the roseate light. Beside her was Lugair, Lugair the traitor, holding the Sword. Nathan knew it at once. And in front of both walked Romandos, dressed in what looked like cloth of gold, wearing the Crown. Some of the spikes turned inward, pressing his brow, but he did not seem to bleed.
At the very edge of the platform he stopped, facing the sky, and commenced a slow incantation. Nathan knew this was the beginning of the spell, the Great Spell whose long binding was still unfinished. The purple-robed figures echoed the chant in a chorus like the wailing of distant winds. He was reminded of the shaman-priestesses of Nefanu, or the sisterhood of seeresses whom he had once seen in Bartlemy’s magic circle, speaking with many voices though a single mouth. Perhaps there was a special potency in numbers, in the synchronicity of mind and word. As the incantation progressed he lost track of time; he thought hours or even days might have passed, and the blossom-clouds gathered together and mushroomed into a storm, and the towering vapors formed into shapes like great wings sweeping across the sky, and galloping horses with tossing manes blended into billows like waves on the sea. Then the billows dissolved into faces, a thousand faces shifting and changing, men and women, heroes and demons, until at last they all flowed together into one huge face filling half the sky. Romandos. And the chorus called out his name, and the sound of it seemed to be carried across all the worlds, and the pink daylight darkened into night, and lamps flared along the parapet, and meteors streamed past the tower like silver rain. Romandos turned to Lugair and held out his bare arm, and the other man drew his Sword across the bare skin, and Imagen knelt holding the Cup to catch the blood. Nathan felt the emotion seizing on his heart like a clamp, though his heart was in bed at home, and with it came knowledge, and horror.
This is it, he thought. This is where it all goes wrong …
And then it happened. The rhythm of the ritual broke. Lugair raised the Sword and plunged it into Romandos’s breast, and the blood ran down into the Cup and overflowed, splashing Imagen’s arms, her dress, her face. “So be it,” said the first of the Grandirs, and his dying whisper was the loudest thing in all that world. “Not just my blood but my lifeblood. Heart’s blood. The Sword takes what it must… the Cup drinks what it needs. The power has spoken. The spell is sealed. So … be … it.” From the spikes of the Crown, more blood ran down his face in red streams. He gasped a little, coughed, and died. The chorus gave a great wail, no longer like the wind. The clouds opened and rain poured down, extinguishing the lamps. In the dark Lugair let fall the Sword— Nathan heard the clatter as it struck the marble—and one of the purple-robed figures picked it up and thrust it toward him, but somehow Imagen got in the way, and she collapsed into his arms, and the robed attacker was slipping in the wet, and everything was blood and rain.
Nathan’s mind spun away into the dark, thinking: It was the spell. The spell needed Romandos—it needed his life—so it used Lugair. Maybe he was chosen long before the magic was made …
Later, the darkness cleared. How much later he didn’t know; sleep distorts time. This was another terrace, another palace. Beyond stretched a garden where carved dragons wrestled in a dazzle of fountain spray and the sky was eggshell blue. Nearby in a curtained pavilion a woman was admiring the view. Not the view of the garden but the view of her own face, the most beautiful face in the world, shining out of an oval mirror like a vision of Helen. Halmé, Nathan realized, but not the Halmé he had known. This was a girl, young and fresh and radiant with vitality and hope.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” she said. “Am I the truth? Am I the one and only truth for you?”
“The one and only,” said the man on the couch beside her. He was naked under the embroidered coverlet, and the interplay of his muscles might have belonged to the statue of an athlete or a god.
The Grandir—the last Grandir—the one with no name.
He looked unnervingly like Lugair, save that there was neither cruelty nor treachery in his face, only passion and the intensity of his secret will.
“We will have children,” Halmé said. “We will have children now, before it’s too late. A daughter and a son. Beauty and strength.” She stroked his arm, admiring their joined reflections, his arm laced around the slenderness of her waist, the shadow of his face behind hers.
“Maybe,” he said.
“We will,” she insisted. “I feel the fruit swelling inside me, the ripeness and the readiness. Don’t fear for my fertility—there will be children!” She laughed and stood up, wrapping herself in a silken garment that trailed along the ground behind her. Then she stepped out between the curtains and walked along the terrace, lifting her face to the sunset.
Now they have the sundeath, Nathan thought. She cannot look at the light except through a mask.
In the pavilion, the Grandir withdrew his other hand from beneath the coverlet. He was holding a vial so bright it might have been cut from diamond, full of a milky liquid. The air glittered faintly around it, the afterglow of magical transition.
“Alas, my love,” he said, “there will be no children. My seed is precious; I cannot spare it. I need it for other things. One day, when this world is old and dying, I will give you another, but the price is high. Your price. You are paying now, though you know it not. Our son will never be. Your sorrow will outlast Time, and there will be no remedy. But the choice is mine, and I have chosen. So be it.”
The same words Romandos used, when his dying sealed the Great Spell. So be it. Nathan knew that this time the Grandir was unaware of him; this dream journey formed no part of any plan. Yet he sensed a pattern that grew clearer, though he still couldn’t see what it was. He tried to concentrate, to bring the blur of his thoughts into focus, but before he could grasp detail or meaning the dream drifted away, and he was sinking back into sleep.
THE TERM was over, and Nathan still couldn’t get back to Widewater. Hazel came around to the bookshop, asking Annie to ask Na
than something, and Nathan told Annie to tell Hazel something else, and in the end Annie lost her temper and ordered them both to start speaking to each other or she would not be answerable for the consequences. The flare-up made her feel marginally better, as though her pent-up anxieties had found a brief outlet, and afterward, when normal service had been resumed, she gave them some of Bartlemy’s almond ice cream and reflected, a little sadly, that soon the day would come when they were too old for ice cream to melt their differences. Although with Bartlemy’s ice cream, anything was possible.
It was the tenth of December, the day of the Rayburns’ party. Annie went around early with her contribution to the festivities: cocktail sausages from the local butcher cooked in honey and mustard—“You just need to heat them up a bit at the last minute and stick the toothpicks in”—and what she called all-vegetable soup, made with a pint of the liquid from Bartlemy’s mysterious stockpot, which had been simmering quietly for the past several centuries and might contain almost anything.
“It’s probably not for vegetarians,” Annie told Ursula. “Barty says he last remembers putting meat into it in 1973, but he might have added something since and forgotten about it.”
Ursula laughed, on the assumption that it was a joke. “That’s so long ago it doesn’t count,” she declared largely. “After all, when you bury people they turn into grass eventually, don’t they? So whatever it was would have died naturally by now and been transformed into vegetation anyway.”
The Poisoned Crown Page 18
