The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

  “As you say. However, all information is valuable. Is there anything more you can tell me about him?”

  Pobjoy hesitated. “Your nephew, Nathan Ward…” There was a certain constraint in his manner. He was still uncomfortable at the mention of Nathan’s name, not least because in his view any individual, once suspected, was suspect forever, and he found it hard to change his mind-set.

  “What about him?” Bartlemy’s tone, as always, was mild.

  “I heard he was at Ffylde Abbey. Scholarship boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “So’s the problem child. Damon Hackforth. Should have thought they’d expel him, but apparently not. I expect Daddy’s buying the school a new wing or something.”

  “Ffylde Abbey is fundamentally a religious institution, remember. Perhaps they feel they cannot abandon the stray lamb—they want to bring him back to the fold.”

  The inspector, cynical from experience, made a sound something like a snort.

  “Don’t dismiss the possibility,” Bartlemy said. “I’ve seen things that would surprise you.” And, on a note of irony: “You do not know the power of the light side.”

  But Pobjoy missed the allusion. “I ought to be going,” he said, finishing his tea. The cookie plate was empty.

  “Next time,” Bartlemy said, “you must stay to lunch.”

  NATHAN WAS accustomed to his uncle’s cooking, but habit didn’t take the edge off his appetite. He, Hazel, and their friend George Fawn were devouring roast lamb with teenage enthusiasm the following Sunday and talking about Jason Wicks, the village’s aspiring thug, when Bartlemy inserted his question.

  “Do you have any problems of that kind at Ffylde?”

  “The teachers keep a close eye on things,” Nathan said. “They try to stamp out bullying before it gets really nasty.”

  “No school bad boys?” Bartlemy persisted. Annie looked thoughtfully at him.

  “There’s Nick Colby…he was caught insider trading. He overheard his father talking about a merger and bought up shares for half the class.”

  “Did you get some?” George asked, awed.

  “He’s the year below me.”

  “Anyone else?” Bartlemy murmured.

  “Well…Damon Hackforth, in the sixth. He’s been in trouble with the police. We’re not supposed to know, but of course everybody does. There was a rumor he’d be expelled. He’s always having long talks with Father Crowley. I expect they’re trying to reclaim him—some of the monks are very idealistic.”

  “Do you think they’ll succeed?” Bartlemy asked.

  Nathan made a face. “Don’t know. I’ve never really had anything to do with him, but…he gives off very bad vibes. You can feel it when he walks past. A sort of—aura—of anger and aggression. Worse than Jason Wicks. Ned Gable’s parents know his parents, and Ned says they begged the school not to chuck him out. They must be pretty desperate about him.”

  “They care about him, then?” Annie said, flicking another glance at Bartlemy.

  “I expect so.” Nathan was still young enough to assume that parents generally cared about their children. “He’s got a sister who’s an invalid. Ned says Damon’s jealous because she gets all the attention. She’s very ill—something they can’t fix, where she just goes on and on deteriorating. Muscular dystrophy, maybe. Something like that. She’s in a wheelchair. Ned says she’s very pretty and clever.”

  “How awful,” Hazel said, thinking of a girl who had everything she didn’t, trapped in a wheelchair, wasting away.

  “Awful,” Annie echoed, thinking of the parents, with their violent, mixed-up son and dying daughter.

  “Stupid,” said George, “being jealous of someone who can’t even walk.”

  “Good point,” Bartlemy said. “Most of the unhappiness in the world is the direct result of stupidity—of one kind or another. Who’s for baked apple?”

  Afterward, when Nathan, Hazel, and George had left, Annie said: “So what’s your interest in this boy Damian?”

  “Damon. Did I say I was interested?”

  “You didn’t need to say. I could see it.”

  “I don’t know that I am interested in him,” Bartlemy said. “I might be interested in his father.” He told her about his conversation with Pobjoy.

  “Is it going to start again?” Annie whispered. “Like last year?” She was remembering a man with a crooked smile who had been nice to her—a thing made of river water with a woman’s face—a very old corpse in a white-cushioned bed. And the secret she had never shared with her son, the secret of his paternity…

  “You’ll have to tell him,” Bartlemy said, as though reading her mind.

  “That’s for me to decide.” Annie’s tone was almost tart. “He doesn’t have to know yet. Perhaps he never will.”

  “That’s just it,” Bartlemy sighed. “He ought to know. It’s important. It may be relevant.”

  “To what?”

  “Trouble,” Bartlemy said. “Like last year.”

  As the light failed, Bartlemy moved round the living room, drawing the curtains. He was alone now except for the dog, who stood by one of the windows, staring through the latticed panes with cocked ears and a faint stirring of the hackles on his neck. When Bartlemy joined him, he thought he saw a movement outside—the branches of a nearby shrub twitched, new leaves shivered as if in the wake of something, but whatever it was, it had gone too swiftly for him to have even a glimpse of it. “Something small, I think,” Bartlemy mused. “Smaller than a human.” Hoover glanced up at his master, his shaggy face alarmingly intelligent. “Well, well,” Bartlemy said. “I see.”

  When the darkness deepened he swept the hearth and laid a fire that wasn’t made of coals. Presently pale flames leapt up, casting a flickering glow that played with the shadows rather than dispersing them. Bartlemy threw a powder on the flames, which smothered them into smoke. The chimney was blocked and the air in the room thickened, till the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy began to speak, soft strange words that swirled the air and shaped the fume, sucking it into a kind of cloud that seemed to spin inward upon itself, until there was a shifting at the core, and the smoke cleared from an irregular space, and in the space was a picture. At first it looked like a television picture, only the definition was far better, but as it developed the perspective changed, until it was no longer smoke-deep but profound as reality, a peephole into another place. Sound followed image, and a draft came from it bearing the scent of roses. Bartlemy saw a woman in a garden cutting flowers. The garden was beautiful and the woman well dressed, but when she lifted her head her face was pinched and sad.

  Then the picture changed. Smoke-magic is wayward, unreliable; it can be encouraged but not controlled. The scenes that passed before him were fragmented, their meaning often obscure, with no logic in the sequence, no connecting thread—though Bartlemy knew that much later some connection might be revealed. After the garden the vision darkened. He saw a man whose hooked profile jutted beyond the overhang of his cowl, lit only by a furtive candle glimmer, head bent toward another and whispering, whispering, while his auditor, a dwarf with more beard than face, listened with dread in the twist of his brows. Bartlemy knew this must be Josevius Grimthorn, ancient warden of the Grail, who had died fourteen hundred years ago, and his henchman (or henchdwarf), a creature long imprisoned beneath Thornyhill Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel, exploring in the valley, had accidentally freed him. Then came the cup itself, a chalice of polished stone, glowing green in a dim recess, and what appeared to be a gallery of those who had sought for it. The Jewish collector, starving in Dachau—the grandson of an SS officer, drowning in a rainstorm—an old woman, older than she looked, tangled in river weed—a greedy academic, clutching the wheel of a car, driven mad by phantoms who had eaten his mind. All insane, drowned, dead. And then those who had survived: Eric Rhindon, the purple-eyed exile from an alternative universe, Rowena Thorn, last descendant of a vanished family, Julian Epstein, the
badger-haired man from Sotheby’s—and Nathan, who had brought the Grail back from another world so it could return to Rowena, its rightful guardian. And now Bartlemy held it in trust at Thornyhill, the house where her ancestors had lived, until the moment came for which it had been made—whenever that moment might be.

  There are three elements to a Great Spell: the female principle, the male principle, and the circle that binds. The Cup, the Sword, the Crown. Relics from a different Time, a different cosmos, forged endless ages ago and hidden away—the Cup in this world, the Sword and the Crown none knew where—guarded by alien forces—until in the city of Arkatron on Eos a ruler thousands of years old should find a way to complete the Spell and save his people from destruction…

  But the smoke-magic could not pierce the walls of this world, nor reveal the purpose of the Ultimate Powers—if there was one. Bartlemy saw only the kaleidoscope of quick-change images, the clues that led and misled. A blue-eyed schoolboy with a soft mouth, and Hazel watching him, covertly, from behind her hair—a star that wasn’t a star, looking down on Annie’s bookshop—a phantom in a mirror, too vague to have form or face but slowly solidifying, gone before he could make it out. And then they were inside the bookshop, and a man with an anxious forehead was leafing through a book, a very old book with handwritten notes at the back, in an ink that wasn’t black but brown with age. An ink, Bartlemy thought, that might once have been red. The man bought the book—Bartlemy heard Annie’s murmur of thanks—and the picture followed him out of the shop, and down the street, and somewhere in the background there was a little sound like a sigh, the released breath of an archer who sees his arrow hit the bull’s-eye at last. But there was nobody there to breathe…

  Lastly a dark figure in a dark room, long-robed, his back to the watcher, presumably Josevius again. He was dribbling powder through his fingers to form a magic circle. There was a hiss—“Fiumé!”—and a gleam of fire ran around the perimeter. And then came the muttered rhythm of an incantation, and a slow pale form coalesced at the circle’s heart. The magister, Bartlemy thought, summoning one of the Old Spirits—the Hunter, the Hag, the Child, the One We Do Not Name—in the deal that cost him his soul. But Bartlemy had used few fire crystals, and as the last one crumbled to a smolder the image faded into smoke. He unblocked the chimney, and the air cleared, and Hoover came and rested his chin on his master’s knee.

  “Well,” Bartlemy said, “was that helpful, or wasn’t it? Do we know anything we didn’t know before? Or—at the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld—do we only know things we don’t know?” The dog made a whiffling noise. “Who was the man in the bookshop? Would Annie have any idea? It might be worth making a little drawing, and showing it to her. It’s a pity I’m not a better artist, but my creative skills are usually confined to the kitchen. Still, I can always cheat. Magic is about cheating, after all.”

  Hoover gave a short, sharp bark.

  “Yes,” said Bartlemy. “I take the point. If I can cheat, so can others. I’ll bear it in mind.”

  He poured himself a glass of something that smelled of raspberries and blackberries, of cinnamon and cardamom, of Christmas cake and summer spice—but most of all of alcohol. When he had taken a sip or two he remarked with uncharacteristic force: “I wish I knew what the hell was going on.”

  Hoover thumped his tail by way of agreement.

  THE SUMMER term had begun badly for Hazel. Math, never her favorite subject, had taken a turn for the worse, and although Nathan usually helped her with it he was busy with his own commitments and somehow, when they did meet, they always had better things to talk about. George was quite good at understanding math, but less good at explaining what he understood about it. Now she was floundering in a quagmire of incomprehensible numbers, struggling with the feeling, long familiar to her, that there was no point in trying to think during lessons because it wouldn’t get her anywhere, so she might as well give up before she started. Her own stupidity made her angry, and she turned the anger outward on others. She was used to the idea that Nathan was cleverer than her—Nathan was cleverer than everybody—but it was galling to find herself taking second place to George, whom she had always slightly despised, in a friendly sort of way.

  But far more serious was the Jonas Tyler situation. Of course, he didn’t know she liked him—they’d only ever exchanged a few words; she didn’t want him to know, or anyone else—but that was beside the point. She’d seen him twice talking to Ellen Carver, not ordinary talking but the low-voiced, intimate kind of talk that people do when they are close to each other, and Ellen’s friend Sarah said he’d asked Ellen out to a coffee shop. Jason Wicks, already six foot two, went to pubs and terrorized the older villagers of Eade by drinking beer on street corners and throwing the cans into people’s gardens, but Jonas, though he probably drank beer, only did it in the privacy of his own home. Nonetheless, to Hazel a coffee shop represented a possible venue for seduction—the seduction, that is, of Jonas by Ellen, rather than vice versa. She spent her math lessons brooding about it, and went home on the school bus sitting alone, wrapped in silence. Safe in the lair of her bedroom, she fought with frustration and inchoate rage, feeling herself ugly, undesirable, with a brain that wouldn’t work and a body that let her down. She remembered her great-grandmother—Effie Carlow, with her raptor’s eye and witch’s nose, living in an isolated cottage, frightening people, frightening Hazel, drowned in river water after a spell too far. You, too, have the power… She didn’t want to be like that, she didn’t want to be old and mad and scary, dabbling in charms and cantrips and other illusions. But the thought of Jonas with Ellen was gall and wormwood to her—it seemed to her, in the blackness of her heart, that she had nothing to lose.

  She got out the bottles she had already selected, Effie’s notebook with its peely cover and scratchy writing, the beeswax candle she had bought the day before. Effie’s notes said nothing about a candle, but Hazel felt it was appropriate. (In Buffy, Willow always lit candles when she was doing magic.) She ought to go into the attic—Effie had used the attic sometimes—but the lock was broken and anyway, she had once seen something there she didn’t like. The bedroom was her place, private and secure. She wedged a chair under the door handle and cleared the dressing table by dint of shoving things onto the floor, fixing the candle in place in front of the mirror. Then she remembered the matches were in the kitchen and had to unwedge the door to fetch them. Finally, she was ready.

  She had drawn the curtains but it wasn’t dark and the candle flame looked dim and unimpressive, a tiny gleam against the many-colored chaos of her room. The theme music from Lord of the Rings filled the background; she had hoped it would be suitably atmospheric. In fact, atmosphere seemed to be lacking. She read out the words Effie had penned, fortunately in block capitals for clarity, unfortunately in an unknown language with no guidelines as to pronunciation. Words—as far as she could tell—intended to summon a spirit to her assistance. There was something about drawing a circle, setting boundaries to confine the spirit, but the clutter of her bedroom offered little scope for magic circles, and anyway, she looked on this as a trial run, believing nothing would happen. She had faith in science, in Nathan’s alternative universes, but not in magic, despite experience. Not in her magic.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried the words again, attempting a French-style pronunciation that seemed to go well with them. Her French wasn’t great, but it was better than her math. Her voice sounded more confident now—if nothing was going to happen, it was safe to be confident about it.

  The candle flame stretched out into a thin spool of brilliance. The room seemed darker, even if it wasn’t. Behind the flame, the mirror clouded. Hazel became aware of her heartbeat, pounding at her ribs. Thought stopped; she couldn’t tear her gaze from the mirror. Mist coiled behind the glass, slowly resolving itself into a face—a face that wavered at first, as if unable to decide how it should look, then settled into a slim, pale oval, with silver-blue eyes and si
lver-blond hair that fanned out in an intangible breeze. A face curiously resembling one on a magazine cover that stared up from the floor—but Hazel didn’t notice that.

  “You have called me,” said the face in a voice that echoed strangely for a second, then grew low and soft. “I have come.”

  “Who are you?” Hazel whispered. She had once seen the spirit with whom her great-grandmother had had dealings—the same malignant water spirit whom both Annie and Bartlemy had encountered—but it had looked nothing like this.

  “I am Lilliat, the Spirit of Flowers,” said the face, and scattered petals seemed to flutter through her fanning hair, and pale blooms opened in a garland about her neck. “What is your wish?”

  “Do you—do you grant wishes?” Hazel stammered, doubting, incredulous, trying to quell the leap of hope inside her. She was no fairy-tale heroine, rubbing a lamp to get a genie. This was the real world (or at least, this was a real world) where rubbing a lamp gave you nothing but a cleaner lamp.

  Lilliat laughed—a laugh as silvery as her hair. “Sometimes,” she said. “It depends on the wish—and the one who wishes. You are young for a witch, very young, but there is power in you. I can feel it. Green power, new and untried. Between us, we will try your power. What do you wish?”

  “There’s a boy,” Hazel said, too quickly, rushing into the fairy tale before it could evaporate. “I want him to—to notice me. To like me. Me and no one else.”

  “Yes…” Lilliat closed her eyes, though it made little difference. The lids, too, were silver-blue. Sparkles danced on her eyelashes. “I see him. He is dark, very dark, with hair as black as a crow’s wing and—”

  “Wrong boy,” Hazel said hastily. “That one.” She pointed to the photograph she had placed beside the candle.