Silvertongue (15 page)

“W
here’s Edie?” said the Gunner, looking around the crowd of spits, all still talking at once in a series of more or less heated arguments. No one heard him. So he pulled his pistol and fired a round into the sky.

“Where’s the girl?” he said to the sudden sea of faces that all turned toward him.

“Damn,” swore the Officer, looking around. The Gunner met the Queen’s eyes over the top of the crowd.

“I thought she was with you,” she said, looking troubled as she scanned the crowd from the higher vantage point of her chariot.

“Why are we worrying about a girl . . . Ow!” said the Lionheart, almost completing the question before the Queen caught him a sharp smack on the side of his crowned helm with the shaft of her spear.

“Because she matters, you battle-addled buffoon. She matters in all this!”

“I was just asking,” he mumbled, straightening his crown. “There’s no need to be violent.”

The Queen’s daughters were running around the perimeter of the crowd, looking at the well-trampled snow.

“Any tracks?” said the Queen.

“Too many,” said the closest.

“Where’s the Raven?” asked the Officer.

“What raven?” said the Lionheart. “Ow!”

A wigged figure on a horse had smacked the other side of his helmet.

“Who are you that would strike a king!” shouted the Lionheart, turning to see who had dared to touch him.

“Another king, fool,” sighed the other, shaking his gloved finger in his face. “And if you can’t concentrate, for mercy’s sake, keep quiet.”

The Lionheart noticed several other kings and a couple of very frosty queens glaring at him, distinctly unamused.

“This is an outrage,” he muttered. But only very quietly.

The Queen and the Gunner and the Officer had come together at her chariot.

“If she’s gone with that damned Raven . . .” said the Gunner.

“The Raven is not damned,” said the Queen, “but it is fated. The girl wanted none of this.” She swept her hand around the crowded ranks of spits gathered in front of them. “In truth she only wanted one thing, ever since she found that heart stone.”

“Her mother,” said the Officer.

“Thinks she’s still alive,” agreed the Gunner. “You think she is?”

“I don’t know,” said the Queen. “But all that matters is that
she
does, and she must have gone looking for her.”

“Or the Raven’s led her astray,” scowled the Gunner. “George is going to be well bent out o’ shape when he finds we’ve lost her. Right. Search party. I’ll go east. She was talking about the Black Friar.”

He pointed up the Embankment toward the City. The dark wall of the ice murk rose in a sinister gray mass above the rooftops.

“I’ll go north; my daughters will go east and south,” said the Queen, jerking the reins on her horses.

The Officer put out his hand and gripped them. “No,” he said. “Sorry. You have to stay with me. Send your girls. But I need you.”

“What?” said the Queen, bridling. “You dare to command me?”

“Yes,” he said. “Sorry and all that. But someone’s got to take charge of this lot, and if I start issuing orders, there’s just going to be even more bloody chaos.”

“But . . .” she said.

“No ‘buts,’ Your Majesty. Just a large dollop of the old noblesse oblige, I’m afraid. You’re the ranking queen here. You just stand behind me and grip anyone who bloody argues.”

The Queen absorbed this, and then nodded. Her daughters ran off in different directions. The Gunner raised a hand and headed along the Embankment.

“Good luck,” said the Officer, and turned back to the Queen. “Ready?”

She nodded. He stepped up onto the front wall of her chariot, and they both turned on the crowd, which had started bickering again.

“Right!” bellowed the Officer. “Eyes front, all of you!”

His parade-ground bark cut through the noise and made every head turn toward him. He drove straight into the moment of silence before it closed again.

“First thing we’re going to do is move our position. All of you, up there, Trafalgar Square, around the column, move now.”

“Who are you to give us orders?” barked a king with wobbly jowls and a too-tight uniform dusted with medals and ribbons.

“He is the Officer. A soldier by profession, not by accident of birth,” said the bearlike bald man in the long overcoat. He jabbed a thick cigar at the king. “He was made to give orders. Whatever foul axis of darkness we are now facing, we would do well to listen to real soldiers.”

“Well said, Bulldog,” said the Queen, stepping up next to him and looking around at the other spits very pointedly. “You will all listen to him or answer to me.”

“May I ask why Trafalgar Square?” said the king, trying to regain a little face.

“More room to see ’em coming on the ground, and the High Admiral can be a lookout in the sky,” said the Officer. “No more questions. Move now.”

E
die watched the small girl who would one day be her mother reach under the bench to get the trapped chocolate wrapper.

Even though the child could not see or hear her, the urge to make contact was unstoppable. At some fundamental level of being, like was calling to like and demanding to be heard.

She reached out to stroke the cheek only inches away from her.

She couldn’t touch it.

Just couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried. No matter how desperately she wanted to. Her hand just skated away.

She gasped and tried again. Her hand just reached a point where the forward motion was deflected by a force that felt exactly like the one you feel when you try to push two strong magnets together at the same pole. At a certain point you can’t get them any closer. They can’t touch. They just slip apart, repelling each other.

Edie watched as the girl reached for the wrapper. She saw her hand touch a stone sticking out of the grass.

And she heard the girl choke.

She saw her face go pale and her eyes jolt open. She saw her start shaking violently, trying to tear her hand away from the stone. And she saw the child’s mouth drop open in horror, chocolatey saliva pooling onto the grass in front of her in an unnoticed loop of drool.

“Let go of the stone!” shouted Edie.

The girl, of course, couldn’t hear her, but Edie knew exactly what was happening.

She was glinting.

The girl’s breath was coming in shocked sobs now. Her small body was vibrating with the terror of what was flowing through her from the stone.

Edie had never seen anyone else in the grip of what she still felt was her curse. Knowing the agony and incomprehension gripping the small child, and not being able to help it, was unbearable.

“Put it down!” she yelled impotently. She gritted her teeth and threw her arms around the thin rib cage of the girl and tried to pull her out from under the bench, away from the stone. It was like trying to squeeze a wet bar of soap, or an ice cube. She couldn’t get a purchase on her, and the girl just didn’t feel her at all. She certainly didn’t move. Tears began to streak down the girl’s face as she started shouting at whatever abomination she was seeing: “No . . . no . . . no . . . !”

Edie felt answering tears of frustration in her own eyes. She stopped trying to tug the girl, and dived under a bench next to her, determined that if she couldn’t get the girl to let go of the stone, she’d take the stone from the girl.

“It’s okay!” she gasped. “It’s not you, it’s the stone, it’s okay!”

She touched the stone.

It wasn’t okay.

A juddering flash sent a skull-splitting knife of pain straight up her arm, over her shoulder and neck, and buried it in the back of her head as her eyes now jolted wide and she glinted what the seven-year-old next to her was seeing.

“Oh God,” said Edie. “They’re all dead.”

The past came at her in the juddering time-slices that it always did when she glinted; and though the scene changed with each burst of pain, and the light that punctuated it, the pit didn’t.

The pit was a vast hand-dug quarry, intermittently shrouded with smoke from the bonfires that reeked and billowed along its edge. The low roofs of a much earlier London were occasionally visible through the shifting vapors. It was a London of half-timbered houses and stooped shambling figures in early medieval dress. The figures at the edge of the pit moved and changed with each slice of time, but the pit didn’t change.

It didn’t change at all.

It just filled up.

Bodies were dropped in the pit in ones and twos, sliding off handcarts or planks or even doors that were used as stretchers. Great horses pulled solid-looking wagons through the murk, axle-deep in the mud at the top of the pit, loaded down with the dead.

Piles of dead were stacked like firewood and then tipped in. Men, women, children. All shapes and sizes and ages. Some were clothed, some wrapped in shrouds, some gray and helplessly naked. Many had blood streaking from their mouths, and on the naked ones there were great boils clumping in certain parts of the body. All went over the edge, all tumbled down the side of the pit, all landed with a slap or a thump, and then lay unmoving on a jumbled layer of earlier corpses. Hollow eyes stared slack-jawed and sightless at the hellish bed on which they’d been carelessly flung for their long rest, until another load was dropped into the pit and covered their final indignity with a new blanket of the freshly dead.

Black-cowled priests patrolled the edge of the pit, hurriedly blessing the departed by the cartload, one hand carving quick crosses in the air while the other held herb-stuffed rags to the mouth and nose.

Edie’s eye caught movement in the pit below, and for a ghastly moment she knew that some poor soul had been thrown in alive and was trying to swim upward and break into the air from beneath a sea of corpses. And then she saw it was not a person but a dog, and that it was tugging at something, something that looked like a child’s . . .

She never got to see what it was because the butcher yanked his little daughter out from under the bench, and the stone was jerked out of her hand as he laid her panicked twitching body on the grass, and the glinting stopped.

“Sue!” he cried. “Sue!”

His friends clustered around, red-faced and beer-fuddled.

“She’s having one of her turns!” he shouted. “Give her some bloody air!

“She’s going to swallow ’er tongue,” warned one of the other butchers. “Here.” He pulled a pencil from behind his ear.

The father grabbed it and jammed it into the little girl’s mouth. She bucked and tried to spit it out.

“You’re choking her!” shouted Edie, but no one could hear or see her.

“I dunno what to do,” said the father, swearing under his breath. “It’s getting ridiculous. . . .”

His hands held the girl flat to the ground. Edie could see he was trying to shake the alcohol out of his head, and wasn’t doing anything but trying to calm the girl, but she could also see that the girl was now feeling trapped, on top of the shock of what she had seen.

There was a crunch and a snap as the girl bit through the pencil and spat the pieces out.

“There was dead people, so many dead people, and I thought I was going to fall in, and they were all dead . . .” she choked.

“Shh,” said the man. “Shh now.”

“But . . .” she said.

“No,” he said, smoothing his hand over her mouth and cheek. “Get your breath. Don’t talk.”

Edie saw what no one but the girl saw, because the man’s face was looking down, and all his friends could only see the back of his head. She saw the flicker of fear and the accompanying flush of embarrassment.

Edie had been where the girl was, and had seen that flicker in other faces. The flicker that meant “Don’t be a loony, please don’t let anyone else know you’re a loony who sees things. Not yet. Not in front of my mates. Just wait ’til we get home. . . .”

He snatched a cigarette from a pack of ten and stashed the pack back into his pocket as one of his friends leaned in and lit it for him. He sucked nicotine and nodded at the little girl staring up at him with wide wet eyes.

“Just wait until we get home, eh?” said the butcher. “You had a turn.”

“Too much sun.” One of the men laughed as the others began to drift off, now that the fit had passed and nobody was going to need to call an ambulance.

“Yeah,” said the father, and he clean-lifted the girl into his arms. “Too much sun . . .”

And the last Edie saw of the little girl who would one day be her mother was a tiny hand flopping alongside a ribbon of dark hair as the butcher carried her away, cigarette smoke eddying around the side of his face.

“’Course there wasn’t any sun when she had that barmy fit at Christmas, was there?” said one of the remaining friends quietly.

“Nah,” said another. “Poor little spazz-ball. She’s gonna end up having that electroshock like her old mum, I reckon.”

“Can’t call her a spazz-ball,” said the other one, slapping him across the head.

“Ow!”

“Shut up and get the next round in,” said the slapper. “You’re a disgrace.”

“I know.” The other one laughed. “Mind you, maybe she seen a ghost?”

“No such thing,” said the other.

“I know. But look where we are.” He pointed up at a street sign. “Charterhouse Square. Biggest plague pit in London under there.”

They both turned and looked at the innocent patch of grass for a beat.

“Everyone around here knows that,” said the slapper. “She’ll have heard her dad talking about it.”

They looked at the green for another beat.

“Yeah,” they both said at once.

And turned away, walking toward the other drinkers at the curb.

Edie stood alone, feeling that a great salty wave had washed through her, leaving her empty and sad and somehow scoured out and unsure what she would do next.

She felt a tug on her arm. The Raven pulled her away toward an open shop door on the other side of the street. Edie felt so empty that she let the bird lead her. Halfway across the street she turned back and stared after the girl, now a distant figure in the arms of the butcher as he carried her home.

The Raven pecked her insistently.

“I can’t,” she said.

It hopped up and pecked her ear, hard.

She hardly noticed, eyes watching the tiny white thing bouncing in time with the butcher’s steps, knowing it was her mother’s hand sticking out from under his arm.

“She’s so little,” she said, her voice choked with despair and impotence.

It was a hand that would grow and one day try to smooth away Edie’s cares and fears in the way Edie had just failed to do.

“She’s so little. . . .”

The butcher turned a corner in the distance and disappeared. Edie turned to the Raven. The Raven nodded twice and jerked its head sideways, as if saying, “Come on, then.”

She followed its slow flap into the shop, which turned out not to be a store at all, but a men’s barbershop.

It was a small two-chair barber’s. The barber was shaving a customer and talking about football, raising his voice above the tinny red radio propped up on the shelf in front of him, next to the combs and scissors pickling in a great blue jar of Barbicide.

Neither barber nor customer could see Edie, or the great black bird that flew in ahead of her and perched on the back of the free chair. Edie sat in the chair, unnoticed. She looked into the mirror and saw that it was doubled to infinity in a matching mirror on the wall behind her, the blue disinfectant and the red transistor gently arcing away in ever decreasing versions of themselves like a cheery two-tone rainbow.

The Raven flew over her head and into the mirror, and Edie stood up on the footrest of the barber’s chair, reaching out after it. As she followed the bird, the last thing she noticed was a smooth-voiced man singing out of the red radio about how much he loved the sound of breaking glass . . . especially when he was lonely.

Edie felt lonely as she fell into the mirror.

Lonely.

Sad.

And suddenly and inexplicably doomed.