by Clio Gray
‘Kadia?’ he asked, uncomfortably aware of how hot his face had suddenly become.
‘Oh my!’ she said. ‘Oh my, oh my, oh but you must come in!’
And in he went, right into Ullendorf’s old home in Lengerrborn, and out from the familiar kitchen came a familiar figure and Philbert’s throat went tight to see her and he took off his hat and smiled, for there was Helge, statuesque and floury as was only right, smelling of everything that was good. She gasped and put a hand across her mouth, and then rushed forward and grasped Philbert by the shoulders and drew him to her.
‘Oh, my little Philbert,’ she said softly, hugging him close and tight for a few moments before releasing him. ‘Oh my dear child,’ she said, and then began to laugh as Kroonk kroonk kroonked about their legs as she waddled in, heading straight for the kitchen as if it was the one place in the world she had always been meant to be.
‘They took me away that night they raided the Westphal Club,’ Helge was saying, now all were seated comfortably around the kitchen table and Helge had retrieved several strudels and other delicacies from her pantry. There was much to explain on both sides, but it was Helge’s turn to go first.
‘It was a hellish night,’ she went on, ‘an awful night, Philbert, and I’m not even going to try to describe it.’ She shook her head, knowing that bad as it had been it would’ve been a whole lot worse if she’d not been protected by the soldiers who’d initially come to the house to arrest her, her tarrying and delaying them by feeding them up with as much food and wine as she could find. ‘I honestly thought I was going to hang,’ she continued, wiping a few tears from her cheeks as the memories came flooding back of the rancid stink and dankness of the cell into which she’d been thrown, and of the terrible man who had interrogated her, a man who took more pleasure in inflicting cruelty than many of his underlings had stomach for, who believed himself a humourist when he made jokes about the same. ‘And I’m sure I would have been hanged,’ Helge continued, ‘except that a couple of days later Schupo Ackersman had me released into his care, just as a group of soldiers arrived from the fort to take me away. And he said the strangest thing to me, Philbert, when we were back in Lengerrborn. He asked me to pray for him – can you believe it? He told me he’d seen an angel and because of it had been delivered and was going to use the rest of his life putting things right.’
Philbert said nothing. He’d closed his eyes as Helge told her short tale, but now he opened them again, and opened them fully. He could have told her he was that angel and thereby, by proxy, both Schupo Ackersmann’s and Helge’s deliverer, but he did not, because he also knew he was the indirect cause of all that had happened at the Westphal Club and the reason her brother, amongst others, had died. Here it was, stark and plain: the two sides of his so-called destiny laid out like thrown dice – death and destruction on the one hand, deliverance on the other. Nothing great in any of it, all come about by chance, dependent on time and space and being in one place at one moment and not another. Just like everyone and anything else. He’d been singled out by Kwert because he’d been born with a head that grew differently from others and held its own secrets, his taupe a cave in the country of his body into which memories seeped, a cavern run through with tunnels and walkways he could wander at will; hidden pools leading the one into the other, just like the Great Magendie’s reservoirs; spirals of a neverending snail that twisted and turned within its ever-growing shell. And if anything was great about him then it was this: his ability to soak up other people’s stories, all hemmed into the fabric of the walls within his head, his only job to keep them safe and pass them on so they were not lost. He smiled, and took Helge’s hand within his own, and asked only one question.
‘And how did Kadia come to be with you?’
Helge and Kadia exchanged a look, but it was Kadia who answered.
‘I think a lot about you when I am in the Cloth Fair,’ she said, in her imperfect German, ‘and about the man in the cage.’
Philbert drew in a sharp breath. He’d been so astonished and elated to find Helge alive, and Kadia with her, that he’d completely forgotten about Federkiel for the moment.
‘You are my nest of spheres, my prism of light, the heptagon of my days,’ he recited slowly, at which Helge nodded, a smile tugging the corners of her mouth.
‘Quite,’ she said shortly, ‘but let’s get back on track. Kadia came to me because of you, Philbert, and everything that happened at the Westphal Club – God curse the place. It was she who went to the prison and to Ackersmann afterwards to ask after me.’
Kadia looked down at her cornflower blue dress and glanced shyly at Philbert. ‘You give me flowers,’ she said. ‘No one ever give me flowers before.’
Philbert blushed, remembering the poor posy of closed-up Stars of Bethlehem he’d given the girl before he and Kwert left the Cloth Fair almost exactly one year before. He looked at Kadia, and Kadia looked at Philbert. They were both young then, their combined ages barely adding up to the mid-twenties, but they were not so young they didn’t recognise this might be the start of something.
‘I’m glad,’ said Philbert after a few moments.
‘Not half as glad as I,’ Helge was smiling broadly, the look that had passed between this boy and this girl not having escaped her notice. ‘Better a housemaid than a seamstress,’ she added, ‘and better a boy with a big head than a boy who has no head at all.’
They were interrupted at that moment by someone opening the front door and hallooing himself in. Philbert jumped up in alarm but Helge placed her hand on his arm.
‘We’ve not told you all,’ she said, standing as the kitchen door opened. ‘Let me introduce you to my husband, Philbert. I believe you’ve already met.’
If Philbert thought he could be no more surprised by the turn of events than he had already was then he was much mistaken, for in came a man he certainly had met before, though he was greatly changed. He was spruce, plump and tidy and obviously alive. It was Federkiel, having survived the cage and the island and returned to earth with his mind relatively intact. His reappearance was one of many discoveries Philbert made while in Lengerrborn, not the least of which was that his bid to bring Federkiel’s dying declaration of love to Helge had already been delivered by Federkiel himself.
There were many embraces that night at Ullendorf’s Anchorage, many glasses of wine poured and drunk, many tales told that took up their new abode in Philbert’s head. The story of Brother Langer’s rescue of Federkiel was for Philbert the most astonishing. How the man had managed it was beyond his ken, but if ever sainthood was deserved by anyone then Brother Langer had to be head of the queue; and not far behind him would be Schupo Ackersmann, still the Chief Schupo of Lengerrborn, but every last penny of his pay and pension he could spare went into the restoration of Our Lady St Lydia – his route to salvation – Amt Gruftgang spearheading the cause.
The following day Helge took Philbert to witness it himself. He was greeted with amazement and enthusiasm that bordered on adulation, and no matter how many times he tried to explain, both Ackersmann and Gruftgang saw and heard nothing but that Philbert was a Child of God and the instrument of His work, Lengerrborn resurrected and cleansed because of his stepping on its streets.
‘You saved me,’ Ackersmann insisted, ‘and all those people in the prison. You freed them and you freed me, and Amt Gruftgang too.’
Philbert shook his head at these words but there was no changing them, nor the fact that the folk from Lengerrborn were now pouring into the church of Our Lady St Lydia like ants on sugar. Carpenters had volunteered to provide new pews; silversmiths had donated new candlesticks and the vessels needed for mass; seamstresses, Kadia amongst them, had sewn new vestments for the new choirboys who were volunteering by the dozen. The churchyard had been cleared of weeds, the lych-gate now a tidy vista of roses, the board repainted with its shell and dedication, the undercrofts stripped
of liverwort and moss, replastered and repainted. Later on in the year, on Lydia’s feast day, Gruftgang would once again lead his congregation into the spiral maze below the church itself, right to its heart.
‘And it was in Our Lady St Lydia that Helge Ullendorf married her Professor Federkiel,’ said Fatzke, appearing on the scene, ‘with Kadia as Maid of Honour and me as best man, and fittingly they held their reception in the newly decked out Westphal Club, a snub to every solider and every authoritarian who has tried to keep us down.’
Lengerrborn was a different town from when Philbert had first been there; it was as if the entire place had taken a deep breath and revitalised itself. Philbert supposed that having almost half of your eminent citizens shot for no good reason might do that to a place. God knew, he’d had the same reaction, the breaking of death on his shores and all that. He knew more, and that the most of it was the privilege of still being alive and that no soothsayer in the world could give you a reliable indicator of how long you would remain so. Life was life. You could be here one second and gone the next, no way to predict which way the dice would fall.
The day before Philbert left Lengerrborn he went through the shroudways and out onto the shore of the lake and rowed himself over to the Öde Insel. Brother Langer Hansnarrwurst was there, still recuperating from his twice-broken legs, reduced from his former bulk to a thin reed who needed to be rolled out in a chair by Brother Jaspis, Langer’s keeper and carer ever since the rescue of Federkiel.
‘At least I can still witness the glory of the day,’ Langer said, as Jaspis wheeled him around the island, Philbert following. ‘And I have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever I’ve done in this world I’ve done the best of it.’
Philbert smiled. A saint in the making, just as he’d supposed, spewing more wise words than a frog does spawn. Later, they built a fire and cooked the fish they’d caught in Langer’s nets.
‘You read to me once from Kwert’s book,’ Brother Langer said, as the night was drawing in and the fire growing dim.
‘I still have it,’ Philbert said, bringing the Philocalia from his knapsack. ‘Would you like me to read from it again?’
‘I would,’ said Brother Langer, ‘that same passage, if you can find it.’
Philbert didn’t even need to look, for he remembered the words Kwert had found for Brother Langer as if Kwert was still at his shoulder, prompting him on.
Would you go into the abode of goodness, and the tents of the blessed?
Then go into the mountains, the forests, and the deserts.
See the birds flying, feel the breeze through the trees and the soft wind blowing;
Bathe in the streams flowing through the ravines.
For here is a man’s solitude and his strength,
A time away from the ever rolling waves.
‘It’s always been so,’ said Brother Langer, ‘always so. And that is why I will never leave my island. For this is my time away from those waves.’
‘And what about you, Philbert?’ Jaspis asked. ‘What are your plans?’
Philbert smiled and shook his head. ‘I honestly don’t know. Maulwerf told me once to look around, to look ahead, but never, ever, to look back. But I don’t seem able to let the past go – not completely. It all remains within me, within my head, and so I suppose I’ll just travel onwards, gathering more.’
‘Well, if anyone has the head for it then it’s you, my boy,’ Langer laughed.
‘Agreed,’ Philbert nodded. ‘And I wouldn’t be without it, even if I had the chance.’
And that was precisely what Philbert did. He went back to The Anchorage and bade his goodbyes, first standing a while by the big glass window of Ullendorf’s study, gazing out over the streets of Lengerrborn down below, at the roofs he’d once thought looked like a deck of thrown-down cards, and still did. The cats still gathered on the other side of the glass, including that same rat-chewed, stub-eared ginger tom flexing his claws, but his look no longer seemed malevolent to Philbert, rather that this cat was a mirror of himself – both were survivors, both ready for what the world was getting ready to throw at them next.
He was Philbert, the boy with the monstrous head, for whom great things had been foretold. Time to throw himself into the ever-rolling waves, take that foretelling with him and shake it by the throat until it screamed.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank my family and the RLF for their support when times were at their hardest; Tony Sumner and Michael Fraser for their valuable input, and Laura Longrigg – my agent at MBA. Most of all, my thanks are due to Ed Handyside at Myrmidon for taking a punt on this book. Or perhaps I should say coble – he’ll know what I mean.
