The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

  “Difficult. A spell of that kind would require something belonging to the princess—a shoe, a glove, best of all, a lock of hair—and that would be hard for him to obtain. Besides, what motive could he have? The sword already has a guardian. The object of this seems to be to empty the city and isolate the king—possibly to obtain the sword. After all, many people were after the Grail—and the sword, too, is a thing of great power.”

  “First we have an entanglement of clues,” Nathan said. “Now it’s a—what’s the collective noun for villains?”

  “Think of one,” said Bartlemy.

  “A congregation,” Annie suggested, her mind running on clerical matters since her encounter with Father Crowley.

  “Cynical,” Bartlemy murmured.

  “A slugfest,” Nathan said. “How do you like that? A slugfest of villains.”

  “What’s a slugfest?” Annie asked. “A feast of slugs?”

  “I suppose so. It’s a good word for villains, anyway.”

  Annie turned back to Bartlemy. “Have we come to any conclusions?” she said.

  “One or two,” Bartlemy said. “A smatter of conclusions, if we’re collecting collectives.” He was looking very pensive.

  When Annie and Nathan had left he found a bowl, filled it with beer, and put it out in the garden. A couple of bits of plank made a gangway up to the rim. The following day he collected the contents, marinated them for a further twenty-four hours in a concoction including some of his rarer herbs, and on the next evening he was ready. He fried them in a light batter, spiced and seasoned according to a recipe long forgotten, and left the results in a bowl on the kitchen table, covered with a cloth. Then he went into the living room and sat for a while, sipping a glass of his favorite dark red liquor. No noise came from the kitchen that a human might hear, even a Gifted human, but when Hoover cocked his ears Bartlemy got up. For all his size he could move as quietly as a cat. He went to the kitchen door and looked in.

  The dwarf was there. He was eating, not greedily, as might have been expected, after long incarceration and subsequently living wild, but slowly, savoring the delicacy. He had seated himself on a convenient stool that put him at the right height for the kitchen table; Bartlemy had left it there deliberately. He was very hairy, with barely a sliver of forehead squeezed in above his eyebrows and a beard that sprouted, like whiskers, on either side of his nose, spreading across his cheeks and bristling out from his jaw. It was a black beard, streaked gray with age and green from his outdoor existence. The hair on his head stuck up in spikes, gelled with mud or sweat or a combination of both. His clothing was so patched and repatched, so mossed and grimed, it was hardly recognizable as clothing at all. He smelled something like a fox, and something like a badger, and a lot like a dwarf who hadn’t taken a bath for several centuries.

  Bartlemy smiled at him, but his visitor looked as if he didn’t remember what smiles were for. “Would you like a beer?”

  There were two tankards on the table, a bottle placed nearby. Bartlemy poured, and drank from one of the tankards. Presently the dwarf pounced on the other and drank, too.

  “You are welcome to my house,” Bartlemy said formally.

  The dwarf gave an abrupt nod. After a minute or two, he seemed to recall the right response. “Thank ’ee.” His voice was a guttural croak, rusted from lack of use, his accent ancient and strange.

  Bartlemy waited, drinking his beer, while the other continued to eat. Eventually the dwarf spoke again. “It’s an age and an age since I ha’ tasted that dishy. Comes good, to taste it agin. A mem’ry of home.”

  “Where was home?” Bartlemy asked.

  “Long gone. My people—long gone. How long? How long since the old spellcracker shut me up?”

  “About fourteen hundred years.”

  The dwarf stopped eating and sat for a while in a sort of frozen stillness. “Evil,” he said. “He was evil, and all his works. He would talk to me like a friend—he didna ha’ too many o’ those—but he bound me like a slave. I was ne’er free to leave, and when I told him…He wa’ messing in other worlds, d’ye ken? No the magic places here but other worlds, beyond the Gate, beyond the Margin o’ Being. D’ye ken?”

  “Aye,” said Bartlemy, slipping absentmindedly into the lingo of the past.

  “May the Dark have him!”

  “It has. He died in a fire, when his house burned to the ground. It must have been about the time he imprisoned you.”

  The dwarf cackled suddenly. “I set the fire!” he declared. “I took the cup, d’ye see? It was a cursed thing, full o’ blood though none had done the bleeding, and I took it to be done with it, but he caught me and buried me in the ground, buried me alive wi’ locks and bars and cantrips to keep me there. He’d put out the fire wi’ a Command, but water’s better nor magic for that, and fire’s a creepy, sneaky creature. Ye think it’s dead but it’s still breathing. Wants only a draft and a spark. I hope he died screaming.”

  “Probably,” said Bartlemy.

  The dwarf returned to his dinner. “O’ course,” he remarked, “if the magister had lived, he might ha’ let me out. He wasna pity-full, but he needed me. Or he might ha’ left me there. The spells rotted, but iron held me. I couldna dig. It was a long dark while just for sleeping and thinking…That boy, what does he want wi’ the cup? What do they all want wi’ it? It’s accursed, evil. You tell them.”

  “Why is it cursed? Did the magister tell you about it?”

  “Listen…The Gate is for mortal men, not for the likes o’ me. Ye ha’ the Gift, I ken, so ye know. Werefolk don’t die like men, we sleep, we wither, but we canna pass through, and men shouldna, until their time. Then there’s no returning, or none that we wot of. But the magister, he got the cup from someone on the other side, d’ye see? That’s power, deadly power, and when I saw it first, it were blood to the brim, and we all know the meaning of that.”

  “The strongest spells use blood…”

  “Aye, and it were a spell—a spell to open the Gate, to bring two worlds thegither. I wouldna be part of it. There are barriers ne’er meant to be broken: it’s a forbidden thing. We ha’ world enough here to keep us all. But now…I’m fourteen centuries out o’ my time. No folk left, no magister…” He shivered, half missing the master who had subjugated him. Even slavery can be a safe, familiar thing.

  “I meant what I said,” Bartlemy reiterated. “You are welcome to my house. My name is Bartlemy Goodman. Will you tell me yours?”

  “Thank ’ee, Magister Goodman. I am Login Nambrok. I must go, I’m thinking, but…this is a rare kitchen ye keep here. I ha’ forgot how good food noses, when it’s cooked right well.”

  “Come again,” Bartlemy said. “The door is always open.”

  The dwarf got to his feet, leaving an empty dish. “One sma’ thing,” he said. “Wi’ those fatworms—”

  “Yes?”

  “A wee tippit more salt?”

  NATHAN WAS more eager than ever to see the princess again, hoping that this time—despite the risks—he would find himself rather more solid, existing on her plane instead of the Urdemon’s. But he didn’t dream on Friday or Saturday, and by Sunday night he was growing desperate. Though his dream journey at school that week had had no awkward consequences, midnight dematerialization in the dormitory was always hazardous, and he had been hoping to dream at home. He didn’t like consciously reaching for the portal—it never worked out the way he wanted—but he felt he had no choice. In bed he closed his eyes and turned his mindsight inward, roaming the dim canyons inside his head until he found the place where everything blurred, a patch of wrongness on the walls of his very self. He focused his thought there, pushing his way into a barrier of nothingness—and then there was the tunnel through space, the planetscapes wheeling away from him, the distant swirl of stars. He arrived—unusually—with no sense of impact, but almost immediately he realized why. He wasn’t solid or even ghost-like, merely an awareness moving through the gloom of an unfamiliar place.
It didn’t look like Arkatron or Carboneck, or anywhere he had been before. It was just darkness, with the dim curves of walls, hollows, and openings gaping and closing around him. I’m underground, he guessed, but not in a building, nor in the desert cave on Eos where the Grail was concealed. Man-made caves, perhaps. A troglodyte colony… Then there was light ahead of him and he emerged into what seemed to be a vast natural cavern.

  The vault of the roof soared far above, dripping with stalactites, pale green and faintly luminous, pointing downward like a thousand spears. They were mirrored in a wide pool that stretched down the center of the cavern; beyond, the walls were coved and ribbed, folded and fluted into fantastic sculptures, lit by pale lamps glowing through thin veils of stone. At one point the wall drew close to the pool, and there was an archway into a lesser chamber, through which Nathan could see a huge rock with a flattened top, like an anvil, and the orange smolder of a fire in a brazier. A man was working there, a giant of a man—Nathan had no standards of comparison, but somehow the man’s giantness was obvious—wearing the sort of clothing that might have been protective or merely ornamental, all layered leather and rippling mesh. He had the lean curving features of an Eosian, with a jutting hook of a nose, jagged cheekbones, and eyes glittering darkly under hooded lid and craggy brow. The man was honing a piece of the same greenish stone as the stalactites, shaping and polishing it using some sort of automatic chisel. The tool glowed blue at the tip and emitted a faint humming noise; sparks trailed from it as it traveled over the stone. It’s the Grail, Nathan thought. This is the first Grandir, and he’s making the Grimthorn Grail. Nathan’s dreams had often jumped about in time, but he had never been carried so far into the past. But it isn’t my past, he reflected; it’s theirs. Now it’s my present. A teacher at his school had said Time was like a vast level plain, and we were moving across it, on a road with no turnings to right or left, no going back. But when you blundered into an alternative universe you could wind up anywhere on the plain, anywhere on the road. This wasn’t what Nathan had hoped to find, but he forgot other considerations in fascination at the Grandir’s task.

  He used several chisels to carve the snake patterns around the rim of the cup, each with a different-colored glow, a different pitch of hum. Nathan had no idea how long it took—perhaps days, or even weeks—he was too busy concentrating on the process, watching the skill of the craftsman-wizard with complete absorption. When the cup was finished he placed it on the anvil and spoke in a clear, cold voice, words Nathan could not understand, yet he knew they were words of power. The Grandir drew a circle around the cup and enclosed it in a cone of flame, chanting all the time, and lights strobed over it, and there were whisperings, and mutterings, and a dark smoke whirled around it and was sucked into the very stone. The Grail changed, becoming opaque, and the fires and lights vanished, and the whispers were stilled, and it stood alone on the anvil, a cold, inanimate thing. The Grandir picked it up, carried it to the pool, and bent down to dip it in the water. When he lifted it, the cup was full to the brim, but the water inside had turned red.

  Time passed. Now the wizard was working on the sword, beating out the metal, which was a silvery color with a strange bluish luster. Stroar, Nathan thought, wondering if it was an element, like iron, or a compound, like steel. Eric had told him once it was the strongest metal and could be tempered until it was sharp enough to slice through a hair on water. The Grandir had acquired a huge stone wheel that seemed to turn automatically, and he used it to refine the blade, while fire flecks spurted and the grating of metal on rock made Nathan’s teeth ache. The Grandir paused every so often to test the edge on his finger, drawing blood, but it was a long while before he was satisfied. Then he laid the sword on the anvil and performed the magic rituals, only this time the flames danced up and down the blade, turning from orange to blue, from blue to white, and were drawn into the metal, until the sword itself was flame. The mutterings had a tinny sound and rose to a shrill crescendo, becoming the hiss of rapiers that cut the air, the scream of weapon on weapon. There was something wicked in the chorus, a kind of glee, like the voice of a thousand swords, crying out: You made us to kill. We kill. With or without you, we kill. The Traitor’s Sword, Nathan thought—the Sword of Straw. It was the last Grandir, not the first, who had trapped the spirit guardian in its blade, but the sword had been from the beginning blood-hungry, spellbound to kill.

  When it was ready the Grandir took it and dipped it in the pool, and the drops that ran from the blade were dark as rubies, uncoiling into a dull stain on the surface of the water.

  The scene changed. Nathan’s consciousness seemed to flick into darkness for a moment, reemerging at a later point in time, and in a slightly different part of the cavern. He was close to the anvil, watching the Grandir placing an iron circlet there, held in a pair of tongs and glowing orange from the smelting. It was shaped like a conventional crown, but the Grandir began to beat out the points, turning them into multiple spikes that he bent and twisted into a form that appeared random, though Nathan was certain there was a specific purpose in the design. He was reminded of the serpentine incisions around the cup, only this pattern was spikier, adorned with thorn tips that the sorcerer chiseled to needle-sharpness. An iron crown, Nathan said to himself, a crown of thorns. A crown of thorns… It shone ice blue in the magic, and shadows from every corner of the cavern were drawn into it. The Grandir lowered it into the pool with the tongs, and the water hissed and steamed around it. When he lifted it out it was cool. He placed it on his own head, and blood ran down his face from the thorn tips, though Nathan didn’t think they cut his skin.

  Another man came into the cavern, a man only a little less tall than the Grandir, with a physiognomy in whose narrow curves there was a trace of what might have been cruelty. His expression changed when he saw the crown.

  “What have you done?” he demanded. “Romandos—”

  “Do not use my name so carelessly, even here.” Their speech sounded faintly archaic to Nathan’s ear. “Who let you in?”

  “The guards know I am your friend; they would not refuse me. But—that monstrosity you’ve made—a parody of the crown of ancient kings…”

  “No parody,” said the Grandir. “The first rulers of empire wore a wreath made from the thorn trees of Callidor, to show they were strong enough to bear pain and the burden of leadership. Only later did the crown become a thing of mere beauty, a symbol of power and vanity. This is a true crown: iron to repel evil spirits, thorn-twined in the form of the king-wreaths of old. You cannot make a Great Spell with a common ornament. Great Spells are woven from truth, and pain, and blood.”

  “Lifeblood…,” said the other, and Nathan wondered if his dark pallor was fear, or eagerness, or a little of both.

  “Indeed, but not yet. All I know is merely a foreseeing. The time will come—maybe in a thousand years, maybe in a hundred thousand—but it will come. The sacrifice is preordained. Our universe cannot endure forever. The Great Spell will transform the very cosmos—”

  “The sacrifice,” the other repeated. “It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people.”

  Nathan thought he had heard that phrase used somewhere before, and wondered if it was multiversal.

  “One man must die to save the world. It is always the way.”

  “And he who performs that Spell will wield unimaginable power…” Nathan could almost hear him thinking, the wheels turning in his head.

  “And bear unimaginable responsibility.” The Grandir removed the crown, replacing it on the anvil. “Whoever he is, he must go into the Spell with a heart of ice and a will of iron, or it will destroy him. The corrupt cannot perform such magics. Remember that, Lugair.”

  “Real power is for the chosen few,” Lugair murmured, but he looked sideways at the Grandir out of narrowed eyes.

  “This is the last of three,” Romandos continued. “They will be kept safe all down the ages, until the hour of doom. It is fated. When the end draws near
, the three will be united in the circle of power, and the blood of the Grandir will release the Spell.”

  “So the Grandir—the last Grandir—will be the sacrifice?”

  “I did not say so. I said the blood of the Grandir, not his life.”

  “But only lifeblood can activate a Great Spell. That we all know.” Lugair was frowning.

  “The answer will become clear, in time. There are many things even I cannot discern for now. Foresight gives you only a glimpse of the road ahead.”

  “I see,” said Lugair, and once again he gave Romandos that sidelong look, which made his face slanted and sly.

  Nathan had become so absorbed, he had forgotten he was dreaming, forgotten that, though invisible and intangible, he was a part of the scene. Suddenly he noticed he was floating over the pool, and below him the surface was broken by spreading ripples, as if his unseen essence had disturbed the water. He hoped no one would perceive the phenomenon, but the Grandir had turned to stare intently in his direction, and then he lifted his hand and spoke a word of Command. A lance of darkness stabbed toward Nathan, catching him in the chest like a punch from a fist of steel—hurling him across the barrier between worlds, out of the dream, out of time…

  He was lying in his own bed, winded, gasping, feeling rather sick. It took some while for the sensation to wear off.

  BACK AT school, Nathan was increasingly aware of Damon Hackforth, elbowing him in the corridors, watching him from the edge of the cricket pitch or behind the wire around the tennis court. The older boy was good looking in a sullen sort of way that went down well with susceptible girls, but Nathan was increasingly troubled by his aura of suppressed violence and the obsession in his gaze. Even Ned Gable remarked on it. “Don’t know why he’s so interested in you,” he said as they finished batting for the afternoon and went in for tea. “He always seems to be around lately, staring at you in that broody way. You don’t think he’s keen on you or something, do you?”