The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

  He risked a quick look above the bench, and saw with a kind of shock that the Grandir was not masked. It was the first time he had seen the man’s face, and he found it strangely disturbing, like seeing your headmaster naked. He received a fleeting impression of dark alien features, a sweep of black hair falling over the brow, the echo of a resemblance to someone. Halmé perhaps, his sister and lover, wedded to him by family tradition—Halmé who was so beautiful that few were permitted to look on her. But no, it was someone else, someone seen more recently. Romandos…no. No, it was Lugair—Lugair with his slanting glance and the trace element of cruelty about his mouth. Nathan ventured another look. In the Grandir’s face, slyness had become calculation, cruelty the coldness of detachment, but the resemblance was there, like a distant ghost infesting his features. Nathan wondered what his name was. Even Halmé had never used it, calling him only by his title. In the dimensions of magic a name could give you power over a person, or so Nathan had heard; if you were Grandir of a whole world that power might be deadly. Evidently this ruler was more prudent—or more distrustful—than Romandos long ago.

  He was doing something with the sword—the Sword of Straw—which he had placed on a circular plinth in the space beyond the workbenches. The wicked-looking blade appeared as sharp and bright as it had when Romandos first tempered it so many ages before. As Nathan watched, a white spotlight shone down on it, perhaps from a source on the ceiling, fixing it in a pool of radiance. Beyond, the laboratory seemed to grow darker. Nathan was suddenly aware of the cage nearby, a cage he had seen in another dream—seen and feared. The front was glass, or some similar material, and there was a blur of darkness pressed against it, a darkness that seemed to pulse somehow, emitting a sense of tormented life. And at the core of the darkness there were two ragged ovals, like holes cut in a blanket, only red.

  They swam against the glass, moving when the Grandir moved, following his every gesture. The pulse seemed to be centered in them, making their redness throb. The rage and menace that they exuded was so strong, Nathan was amazed the Grandir did not appear to feel it. He found he was trembling from the impact of it—or his own horror—but he couldn’t drag his gaze away. He sensed that whatever was imprisoned in that cage was akin to the Urdemons, in some remote way, but whereas they were creatures of fear and illusion, whose substance was fluid, this thing was real and terrible. It might have no shape but the spirit that looked out of those two red holes was as potent and savage as a volcano.

  He missed what the Grandir was doing, until a sudden flare of light caught him off guard, irradiating the whole room. For an instant shadows chased past him and fled, leaving him exposed—he hoped the ruler wasn’t looking his way. Then the dark rushed back, so he was temporarily blinded, and when he looked again the Grandir was standing over the plinth, his arms spread and his eyes almost closed, speaking words of power to bind both spirit and sword. Nathan didn’t understand the words but he sensed the meaning, sensed the vein of fear underlying the elemental’s fury. The spotlight had become a thick white tentacle of brilliance reaching out from the sword hilt, groping across the ceiling toward the cage. The searching end opened like lips, made of light, which seemed to suck at the surface of the glass as it crawled down to the imprisoned spirit. The Grandir’s face was bubbled with tiny sweat beads, but no effort showed in his voice: it remained strong and cold. The incantation culminated in two words, spoken so sharply they cut the air: “Enfia! Nimrrassé!” The glass shattered.

  There was a moment when the blackness appeared to boil outward into the room. Then Nathan blinked—or the world blinked—and it was gone. The shimmering tentacle flexed and bulged; the inky vapor was drawn down it—seething—struggling—red eyes flared and vanished against the sides. The light closed after it, shrinking to a thread, dissolving into the hilt even as the flames of the first spell had done when the weapon was forged. But there was a difference. When the last of the light was swallowed up the sword quivered, as if trying to leap off the plinth. A chill gleam that came from nothing in the room ran up and down the edge of the blade. The Grandir seized the hilt with both hands—as he lifted it there was a snarling noise and for a second it seemed to fight his grasp. Nathan thought he saw the twin flickers of red moving down the sword like reflections in the metal.

  The power of the sword was joined with a new power, an otherness, confined within it, resisting and using it, evil within evil, hot rage in cold. Nathan backed away, filled with a skin-crawling dread he couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t simply the terror of the ancient spirit, but something about what the Grandir had done, something he couldn’t pinpoint, a perception just beyond his reach. Romandos’s magic had been fascinating and fearful, but there was a fatality about this like the long shadow of doom. He remembered his first vision of the Grail, and the dreams that had followed, not otherworld adventures but nightmares of horror and blood. Cup and Sword—two elements of the Great Spell—a spell to save a universe. He was driven to seek them out—but why the baptism of fear?

  He had reached the end of the bench. He could dive for the door, but without the spell to divert him the Grandir would be almost certain to notice it opening. Nathan crouched in the gloom, waiting. Soon, he thought, the dream must end, but it didn’t. He began to feel stiff and slightly cramped even in his insubstantial state. Peering out, he saw the Grandir sealing the sword in some kind of scabbard, made of what looked like leather and stamped with letters and symbols in red. The hilt, too, was covered; heavy fastenings clicked into place. Nathan retreated back under the bench.

  In the cage opposite he noticed a small creature with silvery fur and large eyes, watching him. He was worried the Grandir might register the direction of its gaze, but evidently the animal was too insignificant to attract his attention. Nathan thought it looked sad, trapped in this laboratory of magic and science, the intended victim of some future experiment. He decided that when the Grandir left he would find a way to let it out, and the idea distracted him from both the sword and the dream, so he forgot his restlessness, scanning the cage for any sign of a lock or key panel. And inevitably, once he ignored the dream it crept up on him, and he didn’t even recall the moment when sleep stole him away, leaving the unknown animal to its fate.

  Oddly enough, when he awoke in the morning, that was the part that troubled him most, pushing away his fear of the Traitor’s Sword.

  GATHERING NETTLES in the churchyard at midnight? Hazel stared blankly at her spirit-mentor. It was the ultimate cliché of witchcraft.

  “There aren’t any nettles in the churchyard,” she said. “It’s very well maintained. Anyway, I’d be bound to run into the vicar. He prowls around at night looking for bats and owls—at least, that’s what he says. Mum thinks he’s into wildlife, but we know”—she meant her generation—“he’s hoping to catch someone at it on a tombstone. In any case, you said we wouldn’t really need potions.”

  “I don’t need them,” Lilliat said, her silver eyes slanting narrowly. “You do. I have watched you. You believe in the old ways—your great-grandmother’s ways—not the potion, but the pain. There must be pain. You must pluck the nettles with your bare hands, and suffer—”

  “I’ve done lots of suffering,” Hazel said crossly. “The whole point of magic is that I don’t want to do any more.”

  “It’s a question of tradition.” Lilliat sighed. “Your power is founded on such things. Old wives’ tales, superstition, stories…”

  “I know the story about the nettles,” Hazel said. “It was in a book Nathan showed me when we were kids. Andersen or Grimm. There was a girl whose brothers were turned into swans by a wicked sorceress, and she had to weave them shirts of nettles to undo the spell.”

  “It is a good story,” Lilliat said. “A story of love, and suffering. Where there is love the true heart must bleed.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Oh, very well. But these little rituals are important—you attach importance to them—and if you don’t believe,
the magic won’t work.”

  “I’ll believe,” Hazel insisted, doggedly.

  “You have spent your whole life trying not to, telling yourself it was all fantasy and falsehood. But now you want to believe, because you need the magic—because there’s no other way. But maybe you’ve denied the power too often and too long. Without pain—”

  “No nettles,” Hazel said flatly.

  Lilliat smiled her faint, sweet smile. Hazel thought there were freckled foxgloves at her breast, and yellow celandines, also called aconite, starred her hair. “Nonetheless,” she said, “there are things we will need. A token from the boy you love—a torn fingernail, a lock of hair—and something from the girl you want him to forget.”

  “DNA,” Hazel said. “Is that how it works?”

  “It works from the heart. What is DNA?”

  “I can’t remember what it stands for,” Hazel said, “but it’s like, the formula for who you are. That’s how Nathan explained it to me. It’s in every bit of you—hair, nails, spit. Every cell of your body.”

  “I do not want spit,” Lilliat said distastefully. “Still, you may say it’s this DNA that we need, if it pleases you. I also require something from your friend.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a price. We agreed. Do you remember?”

  Hazel shrugged, a twitchy, uncomfortable movement.

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes. All right. I’ll get a—a token from him, too. But we have to do the love-spell first. If it doesn’t work, then no price.”

  “Foolish child!” The words were soft, teasing or mocking, light as flowerdust. “I have told you, it will work—if you believe. It is a matter for you, not me—something between you and your heart. There can be no power where there is doubt. But I must have the tokens—all the tokens—before we start. That is my only condition.”

  She made it sound like a trivial thing, a minor detail, but Hazel wasn’t deceived. “Would a piece of clothing do?” she asked.

  “Only if it has been long in his possession, and is much worn, and unwashed, and impregnated with his spiritual aura.”

  “I should think it would be,” Hazel muttered, “if it’s never been washed.”

  “I will know if you try to cheat me,” Lilliat went on. “That would not be wise. The price of my enmity is far higher than that of my friendship.”

  Hazel nodded. Nettles, she thought. There are always nettles, one way or another.

  “I won’t cheat,” she said.

  AT SCHOOL on Monday, Nathan kept a wary eye out for Damon Hackforth. He wasn’t afraid of another face-to-face encounter, but he didn’t want his masters to get the impression he was the type who got into fights all the time: it might still damage his chances of keeping the scholarship. It didn’t occur to him that few teachers would suspect a younger boy with a record of good behavior of picking fights with an older and larger boy who was already a known troublemaker. But although he looked over his shoulder more than once that day he didn’t see Damon until he was summoned to Father Crowley’s study just after lunch.

  Damon was there, ensconced in the comfortable armchair where Nathan had slept—and dreamed—the previous week. I met the princess in that chair, Nathan thought, and found himself resenting its present occupant for reasons he knew were illogical.

  “Sit down,” Father Crowley said, indicating the upright chair by the desk.

  Nathan sat.

  “I have asked you here,” the abbot went on, “because I will not tolerate fighting in this school. If you want violent exercise you have rugger, a game you both play, though happily not against each other. That is the only violence that is permitted here. I could talk to you about God, and the Christian ethos—I am, after all, a priest—but neither of you has yet shown the greatness of spirit that would enable you to turn the other cheek. Few men ever do. Christianity is an ideal; we must all fall short. However, ordinary people have to find a way to live in peace with one another, if the world is to survive. Ffylde Abbey is a microcosm of the world—if either of you knows what a microcosm is.”

  “Very small universe,” Damon said unexpectedly. “From the Greek.”

  “That is the literal meaning. Well done: you obviously haven’t wasted all your time in lessons. To be precise, a microcosm is a very small version of the universe. In the larger world, nation squares up to nation, but in the main they prefer to avoid war, since it is costly in both money and lives, and generally detrimental to society.”

  “Like President Bush?” asked Damon.

  “The exception that proves the rule.” The abbot was unperturbed. “Fortunately, in Ffylde Abbey I am running things, not President Bush, and I do not care for war, whatever the reason. Nor do I allow any scope for terrorism. In a universe on the scale of this school, these things are far more manageable. Think of me as a very successful world dominator with the power to crush ruthlessly any individual with military ambitions.” Was it Nathan’s imagination, or did those keen eyes bore into him a moment too long, and with a hidden meaning? “While I cannot compel you to turn the other cheek, I do insist on your shaking hands. A small gesture, but significant. Any resumption of hostilities will be…frowned upon. Do I make myself clear?”

  The boys nodded. Father Crowley snapped his fingers and they stood up instantly, though Damon looked unnerved by his own instinctive obedience. At a word from the abbot Nathan extended his hand. The other boy stared at it for a second as if it were an alien object, then took it in his own. There was a second when his grip was tight and hard—a fraction too tight, squeezing Nathan’s fingers. Nathan expected him to look sullen and reluctant, but his face was oddly blank. He let go and took a step backward.

  “That will do,” said the abbot. “Thank you, Nathan; you may go.”

  As the door closed behind him, Nathan saw Damon resuming his seat in the armchair, almost as if he belonged there.

  “What happened?” Ned Gable asked, at the first available opportunity. Summonses to the abbot’s study were rare.

  “We shook hands.”

  “You and Father Crow—”

  “Me and Damon.”

  “You’re kidding! I bet he was furious. You put up a bloody good fight—if it had gone on a bit longer you might have beaten him. I bet he was chewing his own liver. Having to shake hands with you—! The abbot must really know how to turn the screw on him. Did he give you a pep talk about Christian forgiveness and all that?”

  “Not exactly. He talked a bit, but…”

  “What about?”

  “World domination.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “You know Father Crowley. He wouldn’t trot out all the routine godspeak like—like it was a formula to make things right. He doesn’t do that. He always says stuff you don’t expect. But…I think he does have a lot of influence with Damon. A lot. Damon didn’t want to shake hands with me, but he did. He didn’t even look pissed off about it.”

  “He’s got a real complex about you,” Ned reiterated. “Didn’t I say so all along? He won’t like being made to shake hands, whatever the abbot said. He’ll go away and brood about it and he’ll end up hating you even more. In fact…I don’t think you should be left alone. We’ll have to organize a bodyguard—”

  “You’re nuts,” Nathan said with a quick grin.

  “Who was right last time? Didn’t I tell you he’d start something? Didn’t I? ”

  “Okay,” Nathan conceded, “but I’m not having a bodyguard, and that’s that. I’d look a complete dork. Anyway, I don’t think he’ll do anything now the abbot’s warned him off. And he must be starting his A-levels soon.”

  “He’s started,” Ned said. “He walked out of English lit last week. I heard Mum telling Dad about it after his mum told her. He doesn’t care.”

  “He’s not thick,” Nathan said, recalling the Greek origins of microcosm. “He must care about something.”

  “Getting back at you!”

  That’s Jason
Wicks talk, Nathan thought. Damon isn’t another Jason Wicks.

  Surely the whole business must be over now.

  DESPITE NATHAN’S rejection of the idea, Ned marshaled several of his classmates into a sort of informal protection unit. As a good rugger player and top-scoring batsman Nathan was always popular, but the fight had made him something of a hero, and as the word spread most of the class rallied around. Undercover Intelligence reported that Damon had various exams that week, though it was unable to verify whether or not he actually sat them. He was observed hanging around in the corridor near Nathan’s lessons in an offhand manner that was immediately labeled sinister, and once overheard interrogating a younger boy on Nathan’s whereabouts. A blitz mentality developed, and Nathan found he couldn’t even go to the boys’ room unattended. Two or three boys would be waiting nonchalantly outside, or would knock on the door and hiss conspiratorially “Are you all right?”—as if fearing he might have been mysteriously spirited away. (But then, Nathan reflected, I do get spirited away sometimes, only not, I hope, in the boys’ room.) Ned, who was a James Bond fan, insisted on checking his bedding every night for scorpions.

  “Where on earth would Damon get a scorpion?” Nathan demanded. “This is England.”

  “You can buy tarantulas in pet shops,” Ned said. “Henry Kassim’s got one.”

  “There you are. You should be looking for a tarantula.”

  “Scorpions are cool,” another boy said. “Spiders are so last year.”

  “I thought the one in Return of the King was pretty good,” someone offered.