The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three

‘Yellow Pages?’ Annie suggested.

‘Isn’t there – you know – a little man in the village? One of the natives who’s brilliant and inexpensive and does all the jobs round here?’

‘There’s Kevin Bellews,’ Annie said. ‘He’s brilliant but he charges the earth. He only works for City ex-pats – none of the locals can afford him any more. Besides, he’s always on the golf course near Crowford.’

‘The country isn’t what it used to be,’ Ursula mourned. ‘What happened to – to rural innocence, and all those nice dumb yokels in stories?’

‘They got smart,’ Annie said.

It was only after Ursula had gone that she found herself growing uneasy. There was never anything wrong with the plumbing at Riverside House before, she thought. Leaks … leaks meant water.

Water…?

‘Jude’s at uni,’ Hazel volunteered. ‘He’s at least twenty. The next two are at the Tertiary College up the road from Crowford Comp; Micky’s seventeen, Liberty’s sixteen. George fancies her, but she wouldn’t look at him: she’s far too grown up. The point is, they’re none of them our age, so nobody can expect us to be friends with them.’

‘Ageist,’ Nathan said. ‘What about the younger ones?’

‘They’re just kids.’ Hazel was dismissive. ‘They’re still at primary school. They’ve got a different surname – Macaire – it sounds Scottish but I think their dad must be black. They’ve both got dark skin and fuzzy hair.’ Mixed-race children were still an innovation in Ede, though the villagers had finally got used to Nathan, with his Asiatic colouring and exotic features.

‘Coming to think of it, Mum said the little girl was adorable,’ Nathan commented, tolerant of maternal sentiment. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to be so hostile.’ Hazel, he knew, was using the old-fashioned village mentality to shield her own space and the people she didn’t want to share. ‘We should try to be friendly, at least to the two at Tertiary. I can handle the age gap. They’re our neighbours, after all.’

‘I suppose you fancy Liberty too?’ Hazel said.

‘I haven’t seen her. Is she pretty?’

Hazel shrugged. ‘Ask George.’ George Fawn had formed part of a threesome with them when they were younger, though they saw less of him now. ‘She’s thin – long legs – tight jeans. She has this don’t-care attitude, like she’s way above anyone else. Probably ’cos they come from London. London people always think they’re so cool.’

‘Maybe you’ll live in London one day,’ Nathan remarked.

‘You might; I won’t. I’m not clever enough.’

‘You don’t have to be clever—’

‘You know what I mean!’ Hazel flashed. ‘To live in London you need a good job, and to get a good job you need to pass exams, and everyone knows I’m going to eff up my GCSEs. So don’t talk to me about living in London, okay?’

‘I thought Uncle Barty was helping you with school work and … stuff?’

‘Sometimes,’ Hazel said. ‘When I can be bothered.’

‘Bother!’ Nathan gave her a dig with his foot, almost a kick. Best friend’s privilege. He didn’t say: Do you want to be stupid? because he knew that in a way she did, being stupid was her protest in the face of the world, her little rebellion against education and convention, her insurance against any expectations he or others might have of her. I’ll do nothing, I’ll go nowhere, I’ll be no one. I’m stupid. That’s that. He wanted to tell her it was childish but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. ‘What about the witching?’ he asked. ‘Have you done any of that?’

She hunched a shoulder, tugging her hair over her face in a gesture she had still to outgrow. ‘You know I don’t like it.’

‘You tried it yourself last year,’ he pointed out, brutally. ‘You made a complete mess of it, too. Ellen Carver nearly got killed and so did I. Uncle Barty said—’

‘All right, all right, I’m learning it.’ She pushed her hair back again, and some of the sullenness left her face. ‘He taught me how to make the spellfire the other night.’

‘Wow … What did you see?’

‘Smoke,’ Hazel said.

‘Just smoke?’

‘Pictures,’ Hazel conceded. ‘Smoke-pictures. The past, the future – it’s all mixed up and you can’t tell which is which, and Uncle Barty says there are so many possible futures, you don’t know if any of it’s true, so what’s the point of looking? Magic is all shadows and lies: you can’t trust it. Anyway, I saw scenes from your life, not mine – the Grail, and some kind of sacrifice, and people from another world.’

‘Our lives run together,’ Nathan said. ‘But … you’re not supposed to see other worlds in the smoke. The magic can’t look beyond the Gate. Uncle Barty’s always told me that. Are you sure—?’

‘I’m not sure of anything,’ Hazel said irritably, ‘except that I’m hungry.’ They were in her bedroom, and her private store of crisps had run out. ‘D’you think your mum would have anything to eat?’

They went round to Annie’s, and although Nathan pressed her, Hazel wouldn’t be any more specific about what she’d seen.

Annie supplied them with cereal bars (‘I don’t like those,’ Hazel muttered. ‘They’re too healthy.’) and the information that the Rayburns were having a Christmas party the following month, holding open house for anyone from the village.

‘They’re not the Rayburns,’ Hazel said, nitpicking. ‘I told Nathan, the two little ones are Macaires, and the husband’s something else too. Coleman, I think.’

‘Donny Collier,’ Annie said. ‘Boyfriend or husband. Let’s keep it simple – just call them the Rayburns. Go with the majority. Anyway, it looks like they’re planning a pretty lavish do. At least half the village disapproves of them, but I bet they’ll all go.’

Hazel was surprised into a laugh.

‘Stay for dinner,’ Annie went on. ‘It’s cauliflower cheese.’

‘That’s healthy too,’ Hazel quibbled.

‘Are you sure there’s enough?’ Nathan said. ‘I’m not going short – that’s my favourite.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Hazel.

Annie allowed herself a secret smile.

Once in a while Bartlemy had visitors not from the village, strangers whom few saw come or go and fewer still remembered. The man who hurried through the November dusk that year was one such, a tall, stooping figure as thin as a scarecrow, in a voluminous coat and hood that had seen better days, probably two or three centuries ago. Under the hood he had wispy hair and a wispy beard and a face criss-crossed with so many lines there was barely room for them all, but his eyes amidst all their wrinkles were very bright, and green as spring. A dog accompanied him, a wild-looking dog like a great she-wolf, who trotted at his heel and stopped when he stopped, without collar or lead or word of command. She never barked or panted, following him as silently as his own shadow. The man came striding along the lane through the woods on that chill winter’s evening, too late to have got off a local bus, too far from the train, and the dead leaves stirred behind him, as if something waked and watched.

There was a patter of pursuing feet on the empty road. Neither man nor dog looked back, though the hackles rose on the beast’s nape and her ears lay flat against her skull. When Bartlemy opened the door, the visitor said: ‘They are out there. I fear I am not welcome.’

‘You’re always welcome here,’ Bartlemy said, ‘though I could wish you would change that coat.’

‘It has travelled far with me,’ the visitor retorted. ‘It smells of the open road and open sky.’

‘Not quite how I would have put it,’ said Bartlemy. ‘Take it off for once and sit down.’

‘I expect,’ said the visitor, ‘you were just making tea.’

‘I am always just making tea,’ Bartlemy admitted.

In the living room, the two dogs surveyed each other, acknowledging past acquaintance, exchanged a sniff, and lay down on opposite sides of the fire. The wolf-like dog was big, with a wolf’s elegance and poise, but Hoover was bigger, shaggier, shambling, somehow more doggy. They both knew she would have deferred to him if he had made an issue of it, so he didn’t.

‘What brings you to my quiet corner of the world?’ Bartlemy inquired over the tea-tray.

‘I heard it was not so quiet of late,’ said the stranger.

‘You heard … from whom?’

‘I am not too much an outcast to read the newspapers,’ the man said. ‘There was the reappearance of the Grimthorn Grail – a few murders – an arrest but not, I believe, a complete solution. These are matters of interest to people like us.’

‘Indeed,’ said Bartlemy, ‘but that was two years ago. Why come now?’

‘It’s a long walk from the north. I no longer have the power to put wings on my feet.’

‘Your power may be worn out,’ Bartlemy responded, ‘but you can still move swifter than any of us, at need. Don’t fence with me, Ragginbone. You’ve always claimed to be a Watcher: what have you seen?’

‘I saw a peacock with a fiery tail,’ Ragginbone quoted. ‘I saw a blazing comet drop down hail. I saw a cloud … There have been omens and portents, some too strange to be easily read. There is a pattern in the stars pointing to a time of great significance, but whether good or evil is unclear. And more than that, there are whispers among the werefolk, tales of a Gate that will open at last, a loophole in the Ultimate Laws – a chance to snatch at power unguessed. No one knows quite when, or where – or how – but I heard you named, as a guardian, or an obstacle.’

‘Who—?’

‘I cannot be sure. They were voices in a crowd, on a dark street, and it was not a place where I wished to linger. There are many streets in the city, some darker than others, and not all those who use them are as human as they look.’

Ragginbone was not obviously a man of the city, even without his coat, but Bartlemy knew better than to categorise him.

‘Your wanderings take you to strange places,’ he said.

‘There are strange places round every corner, if you walk on the dark side,’ Ragginbone said. ‘Belief creates its own kingdoms, even in this world. As the legends change so do the pathways, but the shadows linger as long as memory, and the shadow-dwellers are always there. Some of them may be coming your way, or so rumour has it. Some may be already here.’

‘Nenufar,’ said Bartlemy.

‘The name I heard was Nephthys, but it is the same. She is old, and cold, and forever angry. Once, men sought to soften her with worship, but she could not be softened, not she. Now, she has been sailed and chartered, polluted and abused, netted and dragged and mined, and the tale of her grievances is the lullabye she sings to the storm. What she may hope for, should the Gate open for her, I do not know, but the drowning of all humanity is in her dearest dream.’

‘You’re well informed,’ said Bartlemy. It was almost a question.

‘I have heard her in the scream of the wind, in the roar of the waves,’ Ragginbone said. It was not an answer. ‘And there are those who flee from her, bringing word of her wrath.’

‘The word on the street,’ Bartlemy concluded. ‘Have you come to offer help?’

‘I have no help,’ the other said. ‘My spells have all gone stale. I came to warn you – and to wish you well.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bartlemy. ‘I need all the wellwishing I can get. Or rather, Nathan does.’

‘Who’s Nathan?’

‘I think,’ said Bartlemy, ‘he’s the key.’

‘I have experience of keys,’ said Ragginbone. ‘Perhaps I should have said, what is he?’

‘A boy. A relatively normal boy, insofar as anyone is normal. Intelligent, resourceful, courageous – but a teenager.’

‘He’ll grow out of that,’ said Ragginbone. ‘Is he Gifted?’

‘Not in the accepted sense. The power of the Lodestone on which Atlantis was founded has never touched his genes. But he has … ability. To be precise, the ability to move between worlds. There is a portal in his mind – he passes it in dreams – in extreme cases, his sleeping form disappears altogether, materialising in another universe. He seems to have little or no control over the phenomenon, but I suspect that someone else may be controlling him – guiding him – even protecting him. Someone from beyond the Gate. He has dreamed of a dying world, of a few survivors on the last planet, one stop from extinction. The ruler there is trying to perform a Great Spell. Plainly, Nathan has a vital part to play, presumably as a gatherer of certain objects. He has already retrieved the Grail, as you have heard, also a sword.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said Ragginbone, after a pause. For him, this was strong language. ‘Great Spells are perilous, and may be millennia in the preparation. Are you sure?’

‘The necessary elements are there. The feminine principle, the masculine principle, the circle that binds. A cup, a sword, a crown. The crown appears to have been mislaid, but no doubt it will turn up in time. Whenever that time may be.’

‘A cup … The Grimthom Grail?’

Bartlemy nodded. ‘I have been wondering,’ he said – changing the subject, or so it seemed, but Ragginbone knew better – ‘about a theory of yours. The Gift, as we know, is not native to the human race: the Stone of Power in Atlantis warped those who lived in its vicinity, giving them the talents their descendants still possess. Longevity, spellpower, the various madnesses that they engender. You have always maintained that the Stone itself was the essence of another universe – a universe with a high level of magic – accidentally catapulted into our own. Supposing, instead, it was just a part of another universe – an entire galaxy, for example – and its presence in our world was no accident …?’

‘In infinity and eternity,’ Ragginbone said, ‘all things are possible. What are you suggesting?’

‘Perhaps our universe was chosen – as a refuge or an escape route – many ages ago, at least in our Time. The Gift may have been given so that certain individuals could perform their part: Josevius Grimling-Thorn, called Grimthorn, who accepted the Grail, and myself, as Nathan’s protector when he was a baby. My role has been very minor; nonetheless …’

Ragginbone was frowning. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said abruptly.

‘It was merely a hypothesis,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I was looking for a pattern in Chaos, but—’

‘You misunderstand me. The theory is viable. That’s what I don’t like.’

‘You mean—’

‘I was thinking of the classics,’ Ragginbone said. ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’

‘I fear Greeks bearing gifts. A reference to the Trojan Horse, a gift whose acceptance by the Trojans led to the downfall of their city.’

‘Exactly,’ Ragginbone said.

It rained heavily that night. In the visitor’s bedroom under the eaves the roof leaked, though it had never leaked before. Ragginbone woke, or dreamed he woke, and saw the steady drip-drip from the ceiling, and the water spreading in a puddle on the floorboards. Presently, a hand emerged – a white cold hand with bluish nails, like the hand of someone who has drowned – and groped round the edge of the puddle, seeking for purchase. The wolf-dog approached and growled her soundless growl, snapping at the crawling fingers, and the hand withdrew, slipping back into the water. The puddle shrank and vanished. The dripping stopped.

‘No spirit can enter here uninvited,’ Bartlemy said in the morning. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream?’

‘The time is out of joint,’ Ragginbone said. ‘The old spells are unravelling; even the Ultimate Laws may no longer hold. The future casts more than a shadow. Whatever is coming, it may change everything.’

‘Keep in touch,’ Bartlemy adjured, seeing his visitor to the door.

‘I will,’ promised Ragginbone. He did not say how. He strode off under a drizzling sky with the she-wolf at his heels, and Bartlemy returned to the sanctum of his living room, looking more troubled than he had done in a long, long while.

Another visitor came to Thornyhill Manor that week, but he came to the back door and would have been seen by no one, unless they had weresight. He was barely four feet high and bristled with tufts of hair and beard, sprouting in all directions as if the designer of his physiognomy had never quite sorted out which was which. His clothing was equally haphazard, rags of leather, Hessian, oilcloth tacked together more or less at random, covering his anatomy but unable to produce a recognisable garment. But the most noticeable thing about him was his smell – the stale, indescribable smell of someone who has slept in a foxhole for a hundred years and thinks bathing is bad for your health.

Bartlemy seemed oblivious to it. He made food for his guest, rather strange food, with ingredients from a jar that sat on an obscure little shelf in the corner of the kitchen all by itself. His cooking gave off the usual aroma of herbs and spices and general deliciousness, but Hoover sniffed suspiciously at a morsel that fell to the floor, and let it lie. While his guest was eating Bartlemy poured two tankards of something home-brewed and flavoured with honey and sat back, waiting with his customary patience.

The dwarf made appreciative noises as he cleared his plate.

‘Ye can chafe up a mean dishy o’ fatworms,’ he remarked in an accent whose origins were lost in the mists of time, ‘e’en though they were no fresh. Howsomedever …’

‘You didn’t come to talk of cooking, I imagine,’ Bartlemy supplied.

‘Nay. Nay, I didna, but there’s no saying I wouldna rather talk o’ food and drink and the guid things in life, instead o’ the dark time to come. Ye’ll be knowing it, I daresay. Ye’re one who would read the signs and listen to the whisperings. The Magister, he used to say to me: There’ll be one day, one hour – one hour o’ magic and destiny – one hour to change the world. I didna care for that, ye ken. The world changes, all the time, but slow, slow. What kind o’ change can ye be having in a wee hour? It canna be anything guid, not to be coming that quick. Aye, and the Magister’s face would light when he spoke of it, wi’ the light o’ greed and madness, though he were niver mad. He didna have that excuse.’

Some time in the Dark Ages the dwarf had worked for Josevius Grimthorn, scion of the ancient Thorn family – once owners of Thornyhill – and a sorcerer rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil. What he had gained from the transaction no one knew, but he was said to have lived nearly seven hundred years and died in a fire in his own satanic chapel, leaving the Grimthorn Grail to the guardianship of his descendants. That guardianship, like the manor, had passed to Bartlemy. The dwarf had fallen out with his master and been imprisoned for centuries in a subterranean chamber in the Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel inadvertently released him. The lingering dread of his old master’s activities still remained with him.

His name, when he remembered it, was Login Nambrok.

‘Did he tell you exactly when this hour is due?’ Bartlemy asked.

The dwarf heaved his shoulders in a shrug bigger than his whole body. ‘He said I would feel it,’ he offered, ‘i’ the marrow o’ my bones. I’m no siccar there’s much marrow left – my bones are auld and dry – but there’s an ache in me like a warning o’ foul weather to come. And there are other signs than my auld bones. The sma’ creatures i’ the wood, they’re leaving – aye, or scurrying round and round like they dinna ken where to go. And there’s birds flying south wi’ tidings o’ darkness in the north, and birds flying north wi’ rumours o’ trouble in the south, and so it goes on. There’s times I think the wind itself has a voice, and it’s whispering among the leaves, but mebbe that’s a’ fancy. And there’s them – the invisible ones – they’d gather down by the chapel ruin, under the leaves, muttering together in the auld tongue, though I doot they understood the words – muttering and muttering the charms that magicked them. But lately …’ He broke off with something like a shudder.

Bartlemy looked a question.

‘There was a hare I’d been following,’ Nambrok said. ‘I’d fancied him for my dinner, and I’d been stalking him a while, quiet as a tree spider, and he went that way. They saw him. Time was, they wouldn’t have troubled any beast, but they saw him and chased him, down the valley and up the valley, chased him till he couldna run further, and then they were on him and crowding in his head, and now the puir creature is madder ‘n March, and bites his own kind, and snarls like a dog when ye come near him. That’s no honest end for a beastie. And ye canna eat a creature that’s been so enspelled. There’ve been others, too … and one day it’ll be man, not beast. It’ll be some chiel walking in the woods, or a dog that sets on his master. There’s no reason to it – nothing to guard – no threat – but …’

‘They’re out of control,’ Bartlemy concluded. And he repeated, more to himself than his companion: ‘The old spells are unravelling. Things are beginning to fall apart …’

‘Aye,’ said the dwarf, ‘and there’s little ye can be doing aboot it, or so I’m thinking.’

‘Maybe,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But we can try.’

Above Nathan’s house a single star shone. The night was misty and the sky obscured, but that one star shone brightly, a steady pinpoint of light looking down on the bookshop, while Nathan sat on the edge of the rooflight, looking up. When the dreams were most intense – when half his life seemed to happen in worlds whose reality was still unproven – he would climb up to the roof and gaze at the star, and that kept him sane. Winter and summer, its position never altered. It had been there now for two years and more, a star that did not twinkle or move along the set pathways of the heavens – a star that could not be seen beyond the borders of Ede – fixed in its place like a lamp to guide him home. His star.

He went to bed, reaching in his mind for the portal that would once more let him through, and dreamed of the star.

It hung in a chamber of darkness at the top of a tower a mile high. Light streamed outwards from its heart but seemed to go nowhere and illuminate nothing, absorbed into the gloom around it. Other stars were suspended round the periphery of the room, pale globes emitting a similar radiance, but it was his star at the centre, turning slowly on its own axis, a crystalline eye of intercosmic space. A lens on another world. Here, his world was the otherworld, the alien country. This was Arkatron on Eos, a city at the end of Time. In this room with no visible walls or floor a ruler thousands of years old – a ruler who had held a whole universe under his sway – gazed beyond the Gate to find a refuge for the last of his people, a way of escape from the Contamination that had eaten the numberless galaxies of his realm. By day, his subjects went robed and masked against the poisonous sun; by night, they slept uneasily, anticipating the End. But in this chamber it was always night. Nathan’s thought floated in the darkness, waiting. Presently, the Grandir came.

If he had a name, no one knew it. Other Grandirs had come and gone, leaving their names behind them, but he was last, and nameless. In a universe with a high level of magic, to know someone’s name is to have power over him: the power of summons, even of Command, if the summoner is strong enough. Like knowing the Prime Minister’s mobile number, Nathan reflected, smiling to himself in thought. I bet he doesn’t give that to just anybody. But the Grandir didn’t tell his name even to his nearest and dearest – if he had them – not even to his bridesister Halmé, Halmé the childless, whose beauty was a legend among her people, though few had ever looked on her face. She went unmasked only in private chambers, for the eyes of a privileged few. As for the Grandir, Nathan had seen his face naked just once, in a dream that plucked him from danger, and the memory of it still made him shiver, though he wasn’t sure why.

The Grandir wore a mask now, a white mask with perfect sculpted features, lips slightly parted to allow for speech, eye-slots covered with bulbs of black glass. He was tall even for a tall race, and his protective clothing either padded or emphasised the great width of his shoulders and the mass of what must be a muscular torso. A cowl concealed both head and hair; gauntlets were on his hands. In the gloom of the chamber Nathan could distinguish few details, but he knew the costume from many times before. He watched with the eyes of his dream as the Grandir moved among the star-globes, not touching them yet somehow controlling their rotation. It was strange to be intangible where he had once been solid, invisible where he had once been seen. He wanted to say something, but knew he would have no voice.