Read Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi Online
Authors: John Grant
Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (9 page)
She leant down to tie her laces, and saw a small piece of torn-edged paper, like something he might have been using for a book-mark, sticking out from under the bed. She didn't know what made her pull it towards her for a look, but she did.
There was a piece of rhyme on it:
see LoChi
girl-child LoChi
her back bends not for the heaviest load
she is
starwatcher
she is
cloudrider
she is
she who seeks to the ends of roads.
"Are you ready yet?" called Ian from below.
~
All along the railings on the West Street side of the St Leonard's churchyard someone had stuck up bills advertising a
ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
º GRAND START-OF-SEASON DANCE º
º ALL WELCOME º
º COME AND BE REELY KRAZEEE!! º
ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
"That's for us," said Joanna, nodding as they passed the first one. She'd said nothing to Ian about the piece of paper she'd found. Now that she knew he was one of them – one of the same league as the Gilmours, whatever that was – she was guarded by the knowledge almost as well as if he'd been her knight on white armour, the way he'd pretended to be. She'd brought the paper with her, but now she crumpled it up and threw it away, letting the wind catch it.
He noticed nothing.
"You're not crazy, Joanna," he said coldly. "You're not crazy at all."
They passed the end of the railings and turned right into Ham's Lane. The windows of the Crafts Centre were blank darkness, but there was a light on behind a plain blind upstairs. Greta was still up and about, or perhaps she was reading in bed. Somehow Joanna couldn't imagine Greta reading in bed.
On impulse, she turned to look towards the vicarage. There was an upstairs light on there as well. In the bright frame she could see the bulky silhouette of the Reverend James Daker, looking out. Watching them as they went by.
Ronnie Gilmour must have told him they were coming. Young Joanna Gard and the gay from up the street who's putting the trimmings on the insanity we've all spent so much time creating for her.
But the trouble with your schemes is this, my beloved enemies: I found that rhyme under Ian's bed, and it told me that all his talk about you lot being the wrong sexes was just so much bullshit. I know a set of balls when I bump into one: Steve's never a Stephanie. And all the illusions you've been creating for me, using whatever magic it is you have access to – they all fell tumbling down like a card-house as soon as the breath of Ian's duplicity touched them.
It was dark down Ham's Lane, darker than it should have been. Acting her part, Joanna clutched Ian's arm tightly. She was expecting an owl to hoot, just like in the movies, but the night air was silent. Above her she could see the stars, almost as clear and many as there had been on Dartmoor.
As they came out of the end of Ham's Lane onto the playing-fields, the full Moon emerged in sudden splendour in the middle of the night sky, casting silver shadows everywhere. The naked goal-posts were like geometrical diagrams; the trees in the distance seemed to have been lightly touched by a mist of mercury.
And in the centre of the playing fields, about fifty yards away, stood a group of people.
Or wolves.
They were standing upright, like human beings, but the moonlight picked out the silver of their shaggy fur.
"The Gilmours," Joanna said. "They're letting me see them at last."
The wolves remained motionless for a few seconds, long enough to ensure that Joanna could be looking at nothing else but them, and then they began to dance.
No human being could have reproduced the shapes these creatures made with their bodies and the air. Time and again Joanna had the illusion that there were no animals there at all, merely some slowly boiling mass of metallic liquid. Their bodies seemed to blend into each other, fusing and separating and fusing again, all in time to some stately, silent rhythm.
Beside her, Ian began to hum. It was a tune that she'd never heard before, but she recognized it immediately: it was the melody which had been written by the dark angels billennia ago, the melody for the Wardrobe Folk's song about the Girl-Child LoChi.
She began to sing it, amazed by the clarity of her own voice in the stillness of the night air. But the words she sang weren't the ones she'd discovered in the fiery world ruled by the Insane God Qinmeartha and later read on the scrap of paper in Ian's bedroom. Not quite.
see LoChi
girl-child LoChi
her back bends not for the tiniest load
she is
cloudshredder
she is
shapeshifter
she is she who forbids the ends of roads.
"That's wrong," she said, when the short song was done. "Those aren't the true words, not the words the Wardrobe Folk have."
"The song isn't theirs," said Ian, equally quietly. "It reached them only by mistake, and it was corrupted by them. The version you sang is the real one, the one sung by the Insane God Qinmeartha."
"Him!" she hissed. "You are
his
creatures?"
"We
are
him," said Ian. "We are almost the whole of him. We are all that there has been of him since the universe was very young. What the Wardrobe Folk tell each other is not a lie, for they do not know its falsity: but it is an incompleteness."
"You've been tormenting them for billions of years – the Insane God Qinmeartha has! Is it any fucking wonder they slip up on a few things?"
"No, not at all. And we, Qinmeartha, do not blame them for their imperfection."
"
Blame
them!" She twisted her arm away from his. "And I was the one thinking I was going crazy! Either you people think you're an insane god, or you actually
are
an insane god! Either way sounds pretty fucking nuts to me!"
"We
are
insane," he said, grabbing after her. "We are the god. But we are not forever insane. And we are not insane
here
."
She halted. "What do you mean by that?" she said. "`Here'?"
"In this facet. Your near facet."
Still the wolves – no, now that she had become more accustomed to the moonlight she saw that they didn't really look much like wolves at all – still the silver-grey creatures danced. They, if there was more than one of them, had picked up the song from Joanna's lips, and slowly chanted it, over and over, as they moved among each other's bodies.
"I don't know what the bloody hell you're talking about," she said tiredly. "What new line are you going to try to feed me, Piper? That you're the Second Coming? Or is that too tame for you?"
"You see only the one facet of reality," he said urgently, pulling her towards him; this time she didn't resist. "There are two. Each mortal being exists in both of them, the near and the far, always, although the two segments of every individual mortal are each unaware of the other's existence. That is what happened when the rival gods drove me mad: the fragile balance I'd built up between the two facets was destroyed. It had been my intention, in creating the universe and those who dwell in it, that the two facets should become united in my mortals, so that they would experience the entirety of the reality I had also created for them. It is a glorious reality – wonderful!"
"You remind me of a small boy crowing about how clever he's been with his Lego," she said acerbically. "It's all so really great, Mummy, only it keeps falling down."
"This is not something to be mocked!" cried Ian. The noise was enormous. The stars seemed to tremble in their paths. "We are the god Qinmeartha, and we shall not be mocked by our creations."
"You're mad."
"Am I? What do you see over there in the moonlight?"
"I'm not certain what I see. Alsatians out late, playing on the grass."
"If we did not need you so badly ..."
"Need me?" Joanna laughed in derision. "You're going a bloody funny way about getting me, buster."
"Need you for our completeness. To restore our sanity. Haven't you started to wonder about the meaning of the song the god Qinmeartha composed about the Girl-Child LoChi? What type of human song does it remind you of?"
They were walking slowly together towards the dancing shapes. Joanna hadn't noticed this until now. A tiny part of her wanted to turn and run, but its voice was very faint and she ignored it.
"A love song, I guess," she said. "It's more like a love song than anything else I can think of."
"The rival gods were not content with ridiculing Qinmeartha for his insanity in creating the universe of mortals, and the dual reality with which he had blessed those mortals. They also seized a part of him, and hid it away from him, so that without it he would truly lose his sanity. This was the portion of him that encompassed his moderation and his humility: lacking it, he became like the other gods, fierce and merciless and absolute. In his insanity he perpetrated terrible crimes against his own creations, but ever he sought the missing portion of himself so that he could become once again the fecund god of creation, as he had been."
They were very close to the wolves – to the Gilmours – to the creature(s) that formed the lusts of the god proud to be called Insane until he became indeed so. Ian – Ian? – was intoning the words as if they were a well learnt ritual.
"The sundering of his wholeness was greater than any agony a mortal can feel, and the lack of his stolen fragment was intolerable beyond even that. The pain drove him – not his requirement for wholeness. Everywhere he went through her far facet of his creation he could find no trace of his shard – except for its name, the Girl-Child LoChi. His disappointment was greater than skies and seas, and he wrote it between the stars, turning all to fire.
"And then, after too many cycles of the universe had gone by, he turned his thoughts to the
other
facet he had made.
"And he found you there."
They were close enough to the dancers that Joanna could feel the tiny disturbance they made in the air.
"He killed my aunt," she said. "He killed old Jas. He killed others before them."
"Those people are not dead," said the Insane God's voice. "I drew their entirety into your far facet. They are alive there."
Horrified, Joanna pushed the being from her.
"You condemned them to that?" she screamed. "You threw Aunt Jill into the cauldron of the Wardrobe Folk's world?"
The splinter of the god held its hands up to her.
"Only for a short time," he said. "Only until you are rejoined with us, Girl-Child LoChi, so that you can put curtains of clouds across the sky and thereby bring shadows back to their world."
"A short time!" she spat. "A short time in that place is an eternity. You want me to help you, so you go about torturing the people I know?"
"It was the only way I knew to draw you to me. I borrowed the nightmares of my creations in your near facet, and I used the vitalities of the beings in your far to spark those nightmares into form. I controlled my insanity as best I could – I had to if I were to persuade you of the truth of my need."
"Then I reject you!"
The dancers froze.
"I reject you for your cruelty, Qinmeartha."
"But it is not
my
cruelty. It is the cruelty of my insanity, brought upon me by the rival gods."
"As you worked to bring insanity upon me."
"It will not seem like insanity when we are whole once more."
"You shall never be whole. I shall never consent to rejoin you."
"Girl-Child LoChi ..."
"I am not the Girl-Child LoChi now! I am Joanna Gard. I am the niece of Jill Soames – that same Jill Soames whom you have condemned to everlasting hell. I am not a god: I am a mortal. I am greater than any god."
"Then we must take you," said the voice of Qinmeartha the Insane God.
The sea of hot fur engulfed her.
9: She Who Seeks to the Ends of Roads
So they found Joanna Gard on the Ham's Lane playing fields the following morning.
Emptied.
The Beach of the Drowned
1
It's still only September, but there's a sense of Halloween in the air and old Eric's taking full advantage: he plays his cards right, he'll not have to buy himself another pint tonight and he'll go rolling home. With his tufts of gray hair and his face that looks like it was made for one of those old
Readers Digest
ultra-high relief maps, he has a physical appearance tailor-made for the part of the storytelling ancient who holds tavern patrons spellbound on a wintry night, and sometimes, like tonight, he makes the most of it. The grockles are gathered eagerly around him, with their lagers-and-lime and their brightly coloured, too clean anoraks. Outside in the darkness a gull squawks incongruously, perhaps having been displaced from its roost for the night. A car honks at another as they negotiate past each other round the sharp bend at the end of what's grandiosely called The Promenade. A kid passes the window of the Star & Anchor with a boombox clamped to his ear. From the back room there's the clack of pool balls. But what you hear is old Eric's voice as he begins skilfully weaving a spiderweb that will snare his audience until he's extracted from them all the free beer a man can drink.
Old Eric's voice, and always the rolling thunder of the sea.
He's the only man I've ever met who actually has a wooden leg just like Long John Silver's in the movies. That helps.
Me, I'm sitting at the bar with my hand wrapped round the handle of a pint of Wadworth's 6X and an open book spread in front of me, trying to make out I'm not listening to his tale even though I know it'll be a while before I turn the next page.
"Round these parts," Eric is saying, "the Wreckers was active. There was a gang of 'em active right here in Tadscombe, led by a one-eyed man called Black Bill Bartlemaine. A fearsome man he was, taller than two and with shoulders broader than he was tall."
It's a lie, naturally. Not about the Tadscombe Wreckers, who did indeed lure an unknown number of unfortunate ships onto the rocks around here, plundering what they could and massacring or marrying the luckless passengers, and not about them being led by Black Bill Bartlemaine. But I've seen a contemporary sketch of Black Bill and he had a full complement of eyes and was certainly no giant: he looked if anything more like an accountant than a pirate, a man you could imagine keeping a wife prettier than you'd expect moderately happy. Still, caught up as much as I'm pretending not to be in the old man's story, the embroideries don't seem to matter.
I know where his tale is going, of course, because I've heard it plenty of times before. But not from this teller's lips. For all I know he could be only a couple of hours old, born when I walked in through the door of the Star & Anchor shaking the cold from my clothes as I groped toward the firelight and the somehow even warmer dimness of the bar.
Yet I've seen a picture of Black Bill Bartlemaine.
"There came the night," says old Eric with relish, "when the wind was howling like a banshee out of the pits of Hell and the waves was roaring special high, like wat'ry mountains crashing to the shore, they was. It was a night in mid-September, just like tonight is, and there was no moon in the sky, nor stars, just dark clouds scudding as if Satan hisself was their master. The sea was a wild, unchained animal that night, it was, and no light disturbed the blackness out over the stormy waters ... no light save one."
He gazes at his empty tankard like Hamlet at Yorick's skull, and one of the grockles silently picks it up and creeps to the bar with it, his head turned back over his shoulder as if to say he's not really leaving the fireside circle.
"That light, although there was none in Tadscombe as could of told you this 'til later, was the light of the
Mary Boone
, a ship set sail from Plymouth and blown eastward off her course. Laden, she was, laden with families hoping to carve out for theyselves fresh lives in the New World across the ocean – laden with them and all they worldly ownings. Think of the bright hope in those young hearts, my friends. Think of the expectancy as the
Mary Boone
pulled away from Plymouth docks, the expectancy and the trepidations all at once, for they knew the ocean could be stormy and the nights would be always dark.
"And they were right to trepidate, those folk, for they were barely gone from the shore when the storm struck 'em. The skipper of the
Mary Boone
, a man named Furlock, he should have turned his prow back for Plymouth, but the rumour was he'd weighed anchor not moments ahead of an angry husband, and so he decided to try to keep his course, even though his masts creaked and his sails cracked like cannon in the gale. How could he have known that the next ...?"
It was a bad night, all right, by every account. There were nearly a hundred souls aboard the
Mary Boone
, who was built for forty. Furlock was a raving drunk who should have never been let in charge of a seagoing vessel, but in those days who was there to say otherwise? He'd crossed the Atlantic three times before without mishap except to any valuables his passengers had trustingly stowed in the hold, but no one was making complaints about the thefts. With a crew like his, the emigrants were lucky to arrive in the Americas with their throats unslit. It was a murderous age. More than one captain had made a prosperous career, before ending it dangling from a rope in Plymouth, by sailing over the horizon and then feeding his passengers to the fishes.
Ill luck and alcohol brought the
Mary Boone
near the coast at Tadscombe, where Black Bill and his vicious gang saw the distant light and began flashing their own light in response. Some say Furlock was in league with the Wreckers, and grounded his ship deliberately on the merciless rocks of Tadleigh Point, but that's a calumny. He fought as bravely as a drunk man could to protect his crew and his passengers, and three of Black Bill's boys died at his hands among the crashing breakers before Captain Furlock took a knife in his pickled liver and fell dead into the heaving black water.
"As he fell," says Eric, "that Cap'n Furlock grabbed out at whatever he could, and what he caught hold of was the front of Black Bill's jacket. He gripped it in a death grip, he did, his fingers like talons, and he tugged on it with the power of ten. Black Bill did his best to escape that fearsome clutch, but his foot slipped on the seaweed of the rocks, and into the water with Furlock he went. Few noticed the splash amongst the fighting and the shrieks of the dying. By the time they could reach the place, Cap'n Furlock was gone as if he'd never been, and Black Bill Bartlemaine with him.
"What the Tadscombe Wreckers could not know was that one among those sailing on the
Mary Boone
was the second son of Lord Kinneston. The lad had taken to the cloth, and was on his way to the Americas to convert all the heathens to the ways of Christ. When his lordship heard what had happened he had a wrath in him the like of which hasn't been seen before or since, and he went pounding all the way to London and the King to say the perpetrators of this crime must pay for what they done. His Royal Majesty pulled himself off his Royal Mistress long enough to command a detachment of soldiers and a hanging judge to descend upon Tadscombe, and before the month was out the Tadscombe Wreckers – aye, and a few more besides, were swinging in Exeter for the crows to pick."
Eric falls silent for a moment. There's a crackle from the fire and everyone jumps.
"But that wasn't the last they saw of Black Bill Bartlemaine," continues old Eric after a pause that's perfectly timed. "Not by a long chalk it wasn't. And when he came back to Tadscombe it was to tell a story of where he'd been that would strain the mind of any Christian gentleman. Where he'd been, you see, was ..."
Eric puts down his mug, which is, miraculously, empty once more, even though he'd surely never interrupted the flow of his story long enough to take more than a sip from it, and pushes back his chair. As he staggers off toward the gents at the back of the pub, another of the grockles obediently picks up the glass and makes for the bar with it. A young woman among the party giggles nervously. Her boyfriend or husband lights cigarettes for them both – who's going to report them when there's a copper smoking his pipe as he plays the fruit machine? But none of the grockles says anything much, unwilling to risk breaking the spell Eric has cast before he returns from taking his pee.
Soon enough he's here again. As he settles himself into his seat he glances at his refilled tankard and nods a sort of impersonal gratitude to the company at large. He's fleecing them for beer, but he's being courteous about it.
Once he's ready, he looks around their expectant faces glowing in the firelight, waits for an especially strong gust of wind in off the sea to rattle the window panes, and eases back into his story.
"Black Bill came limping out of the setting sun on a winter's eve near ten years later, he did, with his eyes downcast, his beard a tangle of barnacles and seaweed, and one arm missing at the shoulder as if it had been pulled right off of him while he was still trying to use it."
The old woman among the grockles – the grandma of the pack, brought along by the others because they couldn't find anyone who'd take her and they could hardly just leave her at home on her own, now could they? – sucks in her breath at this. Maybe she had a husband lost his arm in the War, or something. Whatever, old Eric's description has clearly touched a nerve in her.
"Nobody recognized him at first, just thought he was a mad wastrel man of the type as sometimes comes by even the best reg'lated of communities. Some was for driving him off, but a nice young widder with a soft heart and a bed as had been cold for far too long, she took him in and pampered him and fed him hot broth and the like until he could recover his wits. And when that day came, he told her the most marvelous story – the story of the beach where the drowned men go."
I tune out the old man's words as my mind fills with images of a bright summer's day, of the sunlight sparkling on choppy waves, and of Naomi Fredriksen's deliciously too-short white shorts ...