‘They blamed the boy and his dreams,’ said Solon.
‘Of course they did. And they gathered at the well, deciding that something had to be done about the boy. The angry villagers marched on the miller’s cottage, wielding pickaxes and fiery torches, leaving the miller with no choice. He exiled his only son to the wilds of the Scottish forest.
‘The boy journeyed across the Highlands until one day he stopped to fill his water pouch at a rocky shore. There in front of him was the recognizable outline of an island. The island of the silver-winged stag. He was able to fend for himself there, for the island was rich in fruits and the soil moist and fertile. Over time, the boy became a man. And when he did, he built a fortress, establishing the monastery on the island of Auchinmurn: a safe haven for those who dream and the things they dream about.’
Solon gaped. This was the story of the first monk of the Order of Era Mina.
The old monk paused, staring distractedly at the fire blazing in the hearth.
‘What happened to the white peryton in the boy’s dream?’ asked Solon at last.
The old monk leaned towards the boy. The fire spat and crackled between them.
‘It returned to its island and looked across the divide. It watched in grief as what remained of its twin’s shadow crawled into a hollow in the earth at the centre of the smaller island ... and disappeared.’
Outside Brother Renard’s tiny cell, Solon heard the screech of gulls. He thought of the winged stag’s mournful cries. His peryton.
‘The white stag ached with loss,’ the old monk whispered. ‘So one night it flew high into the heavens above its twin’s island, Era Mina, beating its silver wings so fast that it sounded like swarms of bees.
‘And across the water in a thatched hut, the sleeping boy heard it call to him in his dream.’
TWENTY-SIX
There was a loud rustling in the trees outside the old monk’s window. A snapping of branches, then mumbled voices and running footsteps.
‘Someone’s been listening to us!’ exclaimed the old monk. His panic played like the tight strings of a lute in Solon’s head. ‘See who is lurking out there. This story is not for everyone’s ears. Even among my brothers, there is a small number who would do their worst to get their hands on this manuscript. Especially before it is completed.’
‘Why do they want it before it’s completed?’ asked Solon, confused.
‘This book and Era Mina hold the keys to everything I’ve been telling you!’ Brother Renard’s voice rose an octave with agitation. ‘Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying, my boy? The darkness! The black peryton’s shadow! It is seeping towards us!’
Solon unlocked the shutters and flung them open. A rush of sea air whooshed into the room as he squinted against the late afternoon sun, searching for the eavesdroppers, looking first in the trees beneath the window and then farther in the distance to the water’s edge.
He thought he saw two hooded figures hurrying away.
He dropped down from the stone sill and pulled out the key hanging around his neck on a ribbon of leather. ‘I must go,’ he said as he prepared to unlock the door. ‘But I’ll return soon.’
‘But the rest of what I must tell you cannot wait,’ said the old monk fretfully. ‘I may not have much time left.’
‘What I have to do cannot wait either. I’ll return as soon as I can.’
Solon pulled the heavy door shut and turned the key, dropping it back underneath his tunic. He leaped down the stairs, careening clumsily off the walls in his rush to get outside and down to the cove after the disappearing figures. At the door, he unlatched the hook and charged out into the fading daylight and the thick canopy of the forest.
He made his way quickly to the water, dodging round brothers working in the fields and gardens. The monastery’s numbers had held steady at thirteen for as long as Solon could remember. Most of the work of the farm that surrounded the monastery was done by the monks themselves, with help from one or two men and women from the villages. The two monks tilling the kitchen gardens stared curiously after him, and a brother drawing on a bench near the Abbey’s stables greeted Solon with a wave as he sprinted past.
At the water’s edge, Solon hopscotched along the rocky shore, but he had lost them. Disappointment flooded through him. He slumped on the moss-covered rocks.
‘Lost your best friend?’
Solon whipped round in surprise. The stranger was tall and thin with shiny black hair swept off his face, a jagged scar running through a trimmed dark beard and blue-grey eyes that gave his face a generous expression. His robes were cinched tightly round his waist as if he was wearing someone else’s habit, an odd-looking striped scarf looped around his neck.
He reminded Solon of someone, but the young man could not put his mind to it. Perhaps he had seen him in the monastery. Solon knew all the monks personally, but he was ashamed to admit that he had been neglectful of the other men who kept the day-to-day tasks of the monastery and its lands running smoothly while the monks were copying, illustrating and binding books: labours of love that could take as long as a year at a time.
‘I trust you won’t give me away?’ the stranger asked. His accent was that of a native Scot, but one who had learned to soften the guttural sounds of his consonants. His enunciations had a similar rhythm and pitch to the Abbot, who had travelled to places across the oceans. ‘I come here when I can, and paint all over the island.’
‘No, sir. Secrets are fully safe with me,’ replied Solon.
The man had clearly been washing paintbrushes in one of the tidal pools. Solon stared curiously at his pots of inks lined up neatly in compartments inside a wooden basket with a long leather strap. He lifted out one of the pots. It was shaped like a mug, but Solon could see its contents clearly.
He held the vessel up to the man and tapped it. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s called ... glass,’ replied the man.
He seemed uneasy. Solon strained to read his fears the way the Abbot was able to do with the old monk, but picked up nothing ... except a prickly drift of disquiet.
Setting the vessel back inside the basket, Solon ran his fingers quickly across the lining of the case: a light, soft fabric. The basket and its insides were nothing like the ones his mother and his sisters made from rushes and seaweeds, which always smelled of herring no matter how many herbs they soaked the weeds in. This basket smelled of flowers and fresh air.
‘What are you doing down here?’ asked Solon.
‘Ach, lad, I’ve been capturing the monastery and the islands on my paper— I mean, parchment. I paint landscapes.’
‘Landscapes?’ Solon understood the meaning of the word, but it was base and vulgar as subject matter for art. Why waste your gift on a scene that was visible to the eye every day?
He looked at the man’s work perched on the easel. Unable to restrain himself, Solon let out a long whistle.
The stranger had captured the monastery in the fading daylight in thick strokes of colour like nothing Solon had ever seen before. The rows of spindly fir trees were no more than tall strips of differing shades of green inks, the rocky cliff a patch of grey, the water bright splashes of blue with spots of white dabbed upon it, the part-built tower outlined in black, and the sun a pink line on the horizon; but when taken together, when seen in their entirety, the inks blended, and the painting looked like the man had held a mirror up to the scene in front of him.
‘It is beautiful,’ said Solon in wonder. ‘It is as if the light reflecting on the water has been transposed to your parchment.’
He looked into the man’s eyes, then back at the luminosity of the painting. ‘Are you a member of the Order of Era Mina?’
The man cocked his head. ‘Era Mina?’
‘It is the name for the Order of monks who live here. Many of them are Animare. They ... we have faculties to ... to enliven our art, to add to its brilliance.’
‘Era Mina ... Animare! Of course!’ The man laughed, a d
eep throaty guffaw.
Solon took a step away from the stranger, his flesh suddenly chilled. ‘Who are you?’
Before the man could answer, Solon lost his footing on the damp moss, fell backwards and cracked his head on the rocks.
After checking that the boy was still breathing, the stranger made sure Solon was as comfortable as possible. He stared down sympathetically.
‘I do hate to leave you like this, my young friend, but time is of the essence,’ he said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Abbey
Present Day
When Matt was younger, he’d often sneaked out of bed early on Saturday mornings before Em woke so he could have some time alone in the flat with his mum. After a while, he felt that Saturday mornings belonged only to him and her – until his mum had been blackmailed into working for an international art-forgery ring, and their Saturday mornings together were abruptly brought to an end because she had to paint.
After that, Matt stopped rising early on Saturday mornings.
Now everything had changed again. No matter what everyone at the Abbey was doing together to find Sandie, Saturday mornings were Matt’s time to investigate what had happened to his mum – on his own.
Jeannie was in the kitchen making scones when Matt came downstairs. Without saying a word, she handed him a glass of milk and a plate with one of Matt’s favourite handheld breakfasts on it – two flaky wheat biscuits with chocolate spread slathered between them. Weeks ago, he and Zach had come up with the idea of creating breakfasts that you held in one hand while you played video games with the other.
‘Mind ye don’t leave a trail of crumbs in all the books,’ Jeannie warned, as Matt headed off, plate and glass in hand. ‘Or I’ll be hearing from Mr R.’
Inside the huge library, Matt set his plate on a table next to a cabinet with glass doors and shelves packed with over-sized leather-bound books. The cabinet held mostly old maps and prints that no one had looked at for years.
With its smell of old books and lemon polish, this room was one of Matt’s favourites. It fed his obsession with old maps of the islands and ancient drawings of the Abbey, and held a wealth of both – thanks to the fact that all of the Calders in the past had been avid book collectors. Some of the drawings and maps that he’d recently been checking out were still spread across a table in the middle of the room. The walls were covered with books and, where there wasn’t a shelf, art. Carvings of local birds covered the great wooden doors. Sometimes when Matt caught his grandfather deep in thought or lost in one of the library books, the bulbous puffin in the middle bobbed its head knowingly.
Busts of all the Calder ancestors who had lived on the island and owned the Abbey were carved in white stone and set into a series of small niches evenly spaced along the high stepped ceiling. Em thought it a little creepy that their ancestors were always watching them from above, but Matt found them comforting. His favourite was the guy with a scar down his cheek. He always saluted him when he entered the room.
Matt unlocked the glass cabinet, sliding the door open as far as he could. Then he shifted the biggest of the map books on to the floor under the table. As he lifted out a ragged folder of prints, the corner of the folder caught the edge of his plate. As if in slow motion, the plate and glass of milk began to topple off the end of the table towards the precious stack of maps underneath.
Matt flung the folder away from him like a Frisbee. He lunged at his falling breakfast, catching the glass in time and just saving the maps from a soaking. But he was too late for the plate, which clattered to the wood floor.
While he was on his knees brushing crumbs on to a folded sheet of sketch paper, a burst of colour caught his eye. It was from one of the prints that had fallen from the folder when he’d tossed it.
Balling up the paper, Matt dunked it into the bin across the room. He flipped through the prints as he returned them to the folder, searching for the one that had caught his eye. Most of them were impressions from medieval woodcuts, images of the monastery when it was founded. One showed the Abbey’s ancient catacombs, and there were a number of etchings of the face of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, a few sheep and lots of haloed angels. He dismissed all but the sketch of the catacombs, which he rolled up and slid into his pocket, and an original painting of the Abbey.
This painting was quite unlike the others. Taking it over to the light table, Matt set it on the white, translucent surface and turned on the light. Looking at the picture in this way meant he could see the details of the artist’s strokes and – the part that always made Matt’s pulse quicken – anything that had been sketched or painted underneath.
There was nothing underneath this one. It was an Impressionist scene, and reminded Matt of William Turner’s paintings of the Thames and its ships. This artist had titled it Skinner’s Bog. Matt knew the spot: a putrid marsh beside a couple of standing stones high up on Auchinmurn which were reputed to have mystical powers. The artist had painted from the edge of the bog, capturing the western façade of the Abbey in the distance, with the bay a band of blue-grey between the two islands and the rising sun a pink line on the horizon.
Matt took a magnifying glass from the light-table drawer and examined the watercolour brush strokes more closely. They had been applied quickly in the classic Impressionist style, and there were places where the colours had bled into each other more roughly than in other parts of the painting. The picture itself was the shape of a sheet of notebook paper. A whiff of rotting fish seeped out of it, a mixture of seaweed and Jeannie’s pickled-herring sandwiches.
The smell shifted an idea in Matt’s head, and he spotted what was wrong with the image. The tower on Era Mina wasn’t there.
He knew from his research that the tower had been completed in 1263, and as such it was one of the oldest standing Celtic structures in the whole of Great Britain.
The Impressionists produced their new style of painting in the mid-nineteenth century. So how had an Impressionist captured the Abbey and the islands as they had been before 1263? There would have been no photographs to copy. All Matt had found in his research was a series of woodcuts depicting the history of the monastery. There had been no woodcut of the buildings.
A shot of adrenalin spiked Matt’s pulse.
What if he and Em were not the only Animare whose powers were strong enough to time-travel through art?
The picture was most definitely worth hanging on to.
TWENTY-EIGHT
A crusading knight on a black stallion, a Templar cape with its signature red cross rising and falling behind him, was riding straight for Em as she ran for her life, trying desperately to escape his reach, breathlessly sprinting through a labyrinth of hedgerows and tangled paths. But no matter which direction she turned, the knight was always in front of her, always charging at her through a smoky white veil, the black horse’s eyes fiery points of red.
Em woke up in a fright. Gasping for breath, she recognized after a moment of terror that she was not being chased, but was in her room at the Abbey, safe in her bed.
Grabbing the book fanned out on her pillow, she chucked it on to the floor.
‘Stupid Ivanhoe.’
Simon banged on her bedroom door. ‘The dock in thirty minutes,’ he called. ‘You three are on beach clean-up for your dangerous stunt last night.’
‘Why so early?’ mumbled Em.
‘It’s not early. So if you want breakfast before you get to work, you’d better hurry. Jeannie’s not going to wait for much longer.’
Em staggered towards her bathroom, surprised that the clock was already showing 10 am. She got dressed slowly and headed for the stairs. The still-life with the modern goblet had been taken off the stair wall.
‘Where’s the painting?’ she called down to Simon.
‘Your grandpa has it,’ Simon said, looking up at her from the foyer. ‘We’ll discuss that painting and your time-hopping after you’ve cleaned up the beach. There was a storm last night, so there should be lots
for you to do.’
‘Ugh!’ said Em.
Over a late second breakfast of sliced bananas on toast, Matt explained what he’d discovered in the library, spreading the picture out across the table in front of the others.
‘Maybe this artist’s a time-traveller too,’ he said, tapping the painting. ‘An Impressionist painting of a medieval scene that no one’s seen since the 1260s? It’s obvious!’
‘Oh man, it smells like something’s died on that,’ signed Zach, cupping his hand over his mouth.
‘Gross,’ said Em, pushing the last corner of her toast away.
‘The beach won’t clean itself,’ Simon called from the garden. ‘Let’s go!’
Matt shoved the canvas under a table placemat and grabbed his coat. ‘It’ll be okay until we get back,’ he told the others. ‘You know Jeannie will stop for ‘a wee blether’ with her friends in Seaport. We’ll be finished on the beach before she comes home. Last one to the water’s edge does tonight’s dishes.’
When they were bundled up against the autumn chill and the wind from the Atlantic, they raced each other across the sloping lawn to meet Simon on the dock. Matt won easily, but Em thought it was only because Zach was in pain from the thrashing.
At the end of the jetty, Simon passed a bin bag and a pair of rubber gloves to each of them, sending them off along the beach to pick up tourist rubbish and storm debris that had washed ashore the night before.
‘Can you imagine how long it would take to clean up the banks of the Thames in 1871?’ asked Matt, as they stuffed bags with beach rubbish.
‘Would you please let that go for a while?’ said Em. ‘I’d like to not always be in trouble with the adults in our lives.’ She glanced at Zach. ‘How’s your back?’
Zach was walking stiffly, not picking up much rubbish.
‘It hurts,’ he signed wryly. ‘Skin feels tight when I bend. Some of the cuts are itching, too.’
The Bone Quill Page 7
