Corbenic (11 page)

Cal edged past them. “Maybe . . .”

In the kitchen he drank glass after glass of water down thirstily, while around him three men chopped and cooked and stirred the great steamy spicy-smelling pots that held the Company's meals. Squeezing out, he wandered into a dim, dark-paneled room lined with books, and sank gratefully into a chair. His legs ached and his shoulder felt as if someone had tried to twist it off, but he felt good. For a moment he even ignored his spoiled clothes. The Hawk had said if he worked hard enough he might be able to fight in the Christmas event at Caerleon, a big thing, with great crowds and a fair and a mock medieval feast afterward for all the Company.

He was happy for at least two seconds. Then the thought hit him hard. Christmas. He'd have to go home for Christmas. For a moment he sat there; then he got up quickly and crossed to the bookshelf, looking for anything that would take his mind off her, her voice on the phone, her new hair color.
It looks so good, Cal, I can't wait for you to see it. I've cleaned the house, Cal, just like you like it. I can't wait to see you, Cal.

There was a road atlas. He pulled it out and flicked the pages rapidly; then, more steadily, turned them over until he found the page with Ludlow on it. With his finger he traced the line of the railway, sitting on the arm of the chair, knees up, the book carefully balanced.

Leominster. Ludlow. Craven Arms. There was no station in between. No Corbenic. Not only that, but there was nowhere of that name all along the line, no village, no church, no hotel. He dumped the book and thought for a few seconds, then picked up the phone and dialed.

“You are through to National Rail Enquiries,” a voice said brightly. “This is Alison speaking. How may I help you?”

“I want to know about trains to Corbenic.”

“From?”

“Chepstow,” he said at random.

There was a moment's silence, a few clicks of the keyboard. Then, “Could you spell that, please?”

He thought back to the dripping sign on the dark, lamplit platform, and said, “C-O-R-B-E-N-I-C.”

“I'm sorry.” She didn't sound it. “There's no station of that name listed.”

“It's near Ludlow.”

“I'm sorry, sir, no. Perhaps you've made a mistake?”

He nodded, then said, “okay. Thanks.”

Putting the phone down he brooded silently. Until a voice said, “That castle is not to be found in this world.”

Cal jumped. Sitting in the chair opposite, his eyes bright and crazy in the sunlight, was the ragged tangle-haired man they called the Hermit.

Merlin.

Chapter Twelve

The sword requires a magic spell, yet I fear you have left it behind.

Parzival

H
e was eating what looked like half a cooked chicken, cracking the bones open in his hands, tearing off scraps for the dog. Cal couldn't work out why he hadn't seen him there before.

“What do you mean?” he asked after a while.

“The Grail Castle is not a place. It is a state of mind.” Merlin smiled his wolfish smile. “Little apple tree.”

“Have you been there?”

“I have been there.”

Cal leaned forward, intent. “When?”

But a sudden distant light was in the man's eyes. “A sweet apple tree,” he whispered, “growing by the river. Who eats its magical fruit now? When my reason was whole I lay at its foot. . . . I have wandered fifty years among lawless men. After wealth, after the songs of bards I have been so long in the Waste Land not even the devils can lead me astray . . .”

Cal waited. But that seemed to be all. After a few moments Merlin pulled off more of the chicken meat and chewed it calmly.

Cal tried again. “Do you know how I might find that place again?”

The Hermit looked up sharply. “Do you want to?”

Startled, Cal said, “Well . . .”

“You must wish to. With all your heart. More than life, you must wish it.” Suddenly Merlin tossed the carcass to the dog and came out of the chair with a terrifying speed; he grabbed both Cal's wrists and held them tight, staring into his eyes. “And you must stop lying.”

Cal tried to pull away, but the grip of the greasy hands was like iron. “I don't know . . .”

“. . . what I mean? I see into you, wise fool. I see you have been hurt. All your life you have been wounded; you bleed, and you resent her for it. You will punish her for it.”

“No . . .”

“You lie to them. To yourself. I know. I too have slept alone in the woods of Celyddon, and I know.”

The broken nails were cutting Cal's wrists. Rigid, he said, “Let me go.”

Merlin opened his hands with a strange smile. His hair was a tangle over his eyes; the smell of him filled the room. “I see you,” he whispered. “You are in a small dark cupboard, filled with rubbish. You have locked the door and you are sitting against it, all crouched up. You are not crying, but rocking back and forth. You are ten. You have a slap mark on your face. You have terrible thoughts in your heart. . . .”

Cal stood instantly. He went straight for the door and had almost reached it when Merlin said, “The way back to the Grail is long and hard. You had your chance and you didn't take it. Did you not notice, Cal, did you not see, how the Fisher King has your own face?”

Cal stopped. He put both hands out and pushed against the doorframe on each side of him, letting his breath out slowly, because it hurt him, like a sudden stitch, a stab wound. Panic crashed through him like sweat, like a chorus of voices.

When he looked up he saw Shadow. She was staring in concern. “Have you hurt yourself?”

“No,” he said hoarsely.

“You look awful. Go back in and sit down.”

“Not with him. He gives me the creeps.”

She turned him around. There was no one else in the room.

Cal stared a moment, then crossed to the chair and looked down at it. No smell, no chicken bones. Not a dent in the cushion. “He was here.”

“Who?”

“Merlin. The crazy one.” He turned. “Does he live here too? Is he part of the setup?”

She sat, pulling her black hair through her fingers. “Yes. At least he has a place out in the woods; he calls it his ‘moulting cage.' Hawk says it's full of feathers, and there's a pig there that he talks to. But I haven't seen him around for a while. He comes and goes. He's . . . not like the rest of us.”

“Not if he can disappear into thin air he's not.” But already the old, terrifying doubts were rising up in the corners of his mind, like shadows—what if he'd imagined the whole thing, talked to himself? What if these were the voices?

He turned abruptly. “Let's go outside.”

They walked along the back lane of the farm, and leaned on the gate to the meadow, watching Hawk ride down and thunder lances against a swinging target that flung itself around to try and strike him on the back with its flailing ball and chain.

Cal said, “Tell me about him.”

“Hawk?”

“Merlin. I don't mean the old stories—who is he? Really?”

Shadow smiled behind her cobweb. “Cal, when these people join the Company, they join it. All I know about the hermit is that there was a battle, some terrible slaughter, and a friend of his was killed. Now don't ask me if it was a real battle or if it was some reenactment that went wrong, because it really doesn't matter in the end, whatever you might think.” Ignoring his groan she went on. “He had some sort of breakdown. Went off and lived wild in the woods for years; Arthur had given up hope, but he just turned up one day and started building this den of his, this cage. He lives there most of the time, though he goes off on strange journeys.”

“He talks a lot of odd stuff.”

She tapped her black painted nails on the worn wood and laughed shortly. “Don't we all. But they say he's a prophet. That he knows what's to come and what's been. You have to look for the sense in what he says. Once he told me, really seriously, that the whole Company was his, not Arthur's.” She turned, curious. “Did you really see him?”

“I thought I did.” He caught her look and changed it to, “Yes. Of course I did. He went on about some apple tree.”

Shadow laughed. “If it's not the tree, it's the pig.” The dinner gong rang, whacked by one of the sweaty men from the kitchen; catching Cal's arm, Shadow pulled him toward the barn. “You'll get used to him. It's not easy, I know, being around someone like that.”

As he queued for the hot soup and the greasy dollop of meat he thought bitterly that he knew far more than she did about people
like that
. He wished he could talk to her about his mother. But then he'd have to tell her she'd got it wrong, and he couldn't. He liked the idea that she thought Thérèse was his mother. But even that had its dangers. “Cal's half French,” she said, at some point in a conversation he wasn't listening to. He looked up, off guard, swallowing the hot soup in a painful gulp.

“Do you speak it at home?” To his horror it was Gwrhyr who asked, the one they called the Interpreter.

Cal took a hasty drink of water. “No,” he said.

“Pity.”

Cal grinned, embarrassed, noncommittal.

Hawk and Shadow were staying over at the farm for some sort of gathering that night. They were annoyingly secretive about it. “Don't tell me,” Cal said sourly, feeling the edge of the newly sharpened sword. “The Knights of the Round Table gather to feast. I've been looking for that piece of furniture ever since I got here.”

Hawk snorted. “It exists, laddie. But not like you think.”

After the archery practice Shadow drove him over the hill to the Chepstow bus stop. Glancing at the clean shirt he'd borrowed she grinned. “I heard about Kai.”

He scowled, silent.

“You're really anxious about keeping clean, did you know that?”

“No, I'm not.”

She glanced in the mirror. “Yes you are. I saw you re-arranging Hawk's books the other day. Tall ones at one end, small ones at the other. He was cursing later, trying to find something.”

“I like order. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Not if it doesn't get to be an obsession.”

“If you knew what my house was like . . .” He'd said it before he could stop himself.

Shadow laughed. “Yes, well I've been there, remember. Talk about neat!” She grinned. “I think your father thought he'd catch something from me.”

The van swung around a corner. Desperate to change the subject he said, “You're not really one of the Company yet, are you?”

“What?”

“You're like me. You're new. I can tell by the way you talk about them. And don't tell me Shadow's your real name.”

She was concentrating hard on the narrow lane. Too hard. Finally she said, “No, it isn't. I was traveling on my own, out toward Gloucester, and I got into a bit of trouble. Got stranded on a road, late at night, nowhere to go. It was raining, and I was a bit scared to hitch a lift, to be honest, and I didn't know where I was going anyway. Didn't care.” Her hands were tight on the wheel. He knew all the signs. “I was wet and cold and . . . well, anyway, I'd had it with everything. Then this van pulls up. With sunflowers painted on it.” She grinned. “I was crazy ever to get in. I mean, total stranger. But you know Hawk.”

He nodded, trying to imagine it. There was a lot she hadn't said. “So you'd left home?”

“Yes.”

“They let you? Why?”

“Let's just say I couldn't get on with things at home.”

She was the one sounding irritated now but he wanted to know so he waited till they stopped at the junction and said, “What sort of things?”

She glanced at him. On the wheel her hands looked oddly small, the crystals on her nails glinting. She wore frail black lace gloves with no fingers. “Look, Cal, I don't want to talk about it. Let's just say we don't all have the cozy little setup in Otter's Brook.”

And then it really was hard. Not to blurt out that she'd never seen anything like Sutton Street, that he could tell from her voice that she'd been to some good school and probably had a pony and an au pair and lived in a nice little suburban place in Somerset. That she'd never had to run the house at seven years old, shopping and cleaning and holding her mother's head while she was sick and hiding the knives and hiding the bottles and all of it from the social workers and the teachers. But he kept quiet, so that when she dropped him off she said, “See you next week?”

“Sure.” He opened the van door, and as he got out she said, “I wish you'd tell us what makes you so unhappy.”

He stared at her in shock. “What?”

“Hawk thinks so. So does Arthur. And it's not just about Corbenic, though that has something to do with it.”

He stepped back quickly. “Don't be daft! I'm fine.”

For a moment she looked at him, then leaned over and pulled the door closed. Through the open window she whispered, “Merlin was right about us both hiding.” She touched the painted web on her cheek. “This isn't permanent. It can come off. But I'm not sure if yours will.”

On the bus, all the way home, he brooded, obsessively picking at a tiny frayed thread on his sleeve. What was he doing with these people! Getting dirty and sweaty and learning junk about medieval warfare! He must be mad! Who did they think they were, talking about him like that, behind his back, discussing him? Hot, he looked at himself in the grimy window and swore he wouldn't go back. He'd find other friends, he thought, or do without, because they weren't anything like him. He liked things clean, and new and expensive, and he couldn't understand why he wanted to be part of their crazy setup. It wasn't him. Surely.

At the Chepstow bus station he bought some takeaway food, the cheapest he could find, as if to punish himself. While he was waiting he put the sword under one arm and stood by the window looking out into the street, ignoring the loud kids that came in, hating their tasteless clothes and filthy sneakers, hating them. Then the sword dug in his ribs, bringing him back from his annoyance.

There was a poster on the window. It was old, and people waiting had frayed its corners, and the adhesive holding it had softened so much that he could peel it off and it lay limp in his hand.

MISSING FROM HOME
, it said, and there was a name, Sophie Lewis, believed to be in the South Gwent area, and an address in Bath, and a photograph of a girl in a smart school uniform smiling shyly, her light brown hair curly, her teeth in an ugly brace. For a whole minute Cal looked at it. Then he reached in his pocket and found a pencil; slowly he took it out and shaded the hair black and straight. The sodden paper tore softly; he held it together, coloring the lips a darker shade. Then, carefully, thoughtfully, he drew a cobweb over one side of her face.

“Your order, mate,” the shopkeeper shouted.

Cal squeezed the paper to a tight ball and dropped it in his pocket. Some people, he thought angrily, didn't know they were born.