The Sword of Straw (8 page)

“Not even Mum?” Nathan said.

“That’s different. I wouldn’t ask you to have secrets from Annie.” Nathan looked a shade disappointed, possibly because having a secret from his mother was, in his view, the benchmark of maturity. “Since we’re being so frank, have you had any significant dreams lately? I’ve noticed a certain…restlessness in you. Maybe it’s your age. You don’t have to confide in me if you don’t wish to.”

“There was one,” Nathan said slowly. He explained about Osskva. “And…I’ve had a few dreams about another world. Not like Eos. More…like some period from history. Medieval, I suppose.” He didn’t intend to mention the princess.

“Hmm.”

“Uncle Barty, do you think I have these dreams because I
want
to, or because something else makes them happen? Or—are they just random?”

“
Do
you want to?” his uncle inquired.

“I—yes, I do. It’s frightening sometimes, but in a stimulating way—an adventure. With this new world, I want to know it better, find out more. Like when you visit another country”—Annie had taken him twice to France, once to Holland—“only another universe is a million times more exciting. I mean,
anyone
can go abroad.” He grinned, looking suddenly very young.

“Indeed,” Bartlemy said, “but remember, any dream you have is not a sightseeing trip. I believe there is a purpose behind your wanderings, though I am not yet sure exactly what it is. Does this new world seem to have any connection with the Grail?”

“No,” Nathan said, “but they talk about a sword. The Traitor’s Sword.”

“Ah,” Bartlemy said. “Well, dream carefully.” It was not the first time Nathan had been told that. “Take the precautions I taught you. Keep the Rune of Finding in your room, and drawn on your arm. Use the herbal mixture I gave you, which helps to bring the spirit home. Don’t get lost.”

“I won’t,” Nathan said confidently.

“He is always confident, Rukush,” Bartlemy told the dog when he had gone. “I hope he is careful, too…The sword. Well, well. There is a pattern developing here. The Grail relics—if I can call them that—were evidently hidden in different worlds, and it seems to be Nathan’s job to retrieve them. At least, that’s what it looks like. He’s clearly on the trail of the sword now. But who gave him this task, if anyone did? The Ultimate Powers? Those who maintain equilibrium throughout the multiverse rarely involve themselves so personally. Or could the knowledge of what he has to do have been born in him, part of the heritage of two worlds? Maybe
this
is the special destiny for which he was created. After all, I’ve never heard of any other mortal—and few immortals—able to move so easily between universes. Objects—occasionally; but not people. People are too perishable. And what of the Grandir of Eos? This evidently fits in with some long-lost plan one of his forebears made to save a dying cosmos, but…Yes, that’s the trouble.
But
.” He added with a sigh: “I wish Annie would tell Nathan the truth about his conception. The time is coming when that information may be essential for his safety.”

Hoover looked at him with an expression both alert and meaningful.

“All right,” said Bartlemy. “I’ll talk to her.”

B
UT
A
NNIE,
when the time came, proved more recalcitrant than ever. “It isn’t just that he doesn’t
need
to know,” she said. “I think it might be safer if he
didn’t
. Suppose I tell him his real father could be a—a being from another universe, a superhuman entity who impregnated me for a mysterious purpose? At least, I expect so, since he obviously didn’t do it for fun. Anyhow, that may explain to Nathan why he can dream himself into other worlds, but then he’ll start agonizing over his destiny, and all that sort of thing, when he should be agonizing over exams—he’ll worry about the father thing—it could distance him from his friends. I don’t mean it would make him conceited, but it isn’t good for any boy to be told:
You’re special. You aren’t like the others. You have a Destiny with a capital
D.”

“I wasn’t going to tell him any such thing,” Bartlemy objected.

“I want him to be just a normal boy,” Annie went on. “The adolescent years are difficult enough without adding otherworldly complications. I know we can’t stop the dreams, but as long as his—his journeys stay in dream form they’re manageable. He still sees them as a kind of storybook adventure, not the main focus of his life. Let’s keep it that way.”

“You want Narnia to stay in the wardrobe,” Bartlemy said. “But Narnia was the kingdom of childhood; when the children grew too old, they weren’t allowed to return anymore. The universes in Nathan’s head are rather different. The signs show his dream journeys are intensifying, not diminishing, as he grows up. Without the knowledge he needs, you may endanger him.”

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Annie said. “I think of it all the time. It’s bad enough worrying if your children are out at night—what they’re doing, who they’re with, all the usual—but I have to worry when Nathan’s home in bed. Barty, I don’t know if I’m right—maybe I’m just a coward about telling him the true story—but I think he’s better off dreaming in ignorance. Once he gets it into his head he’s carrying some huge doom on his shoulders, the weight of it could crush him. Let him walk lightly for the moment. Let Narnia stay in the closet where it belongs. We don’t know who his father was, or what he intended.”

“There are indications—”

“We
don’t know
. We’re just trying to—to second-guess fate. My recollection of…what happened…is closed. Maybe that’s deliberate, to protect me, or Nathan. Anyway, I won’t tell him until I
know
it’s necessary—if it ever is.”

“By then,” said Bartlemy, “it may be too late.”

Annie averted her gaze, and he said no more, sensing the muddle of her thoughts—hope, doubt, dread—unsure of his own arguments, or if he was in the right at all.

Later, left alone, Annie’s mind returned to that sealed door in her memory, and what lay beyond. The anger she had never told rushed through her like a brush fire, so she was shaking with the force of it. She had passed the Gate between worlds—the Gate that opened only for the dead—in a moment of selfless love, seeking one who was gone, and in that moment another had taken her, violated her, sending her back with his seed in her womb and his lie in her heart. It had been thirteen years before she could open the door even a crack and let a fragment of memory through—thirteen years of wondering and secret fear, searching in vain for Daniel in her son’s face and form. Now, whenever she dared to think about it, the anger leapt from a flicker to a flame, all but consuming her. Perhaps that was the real reason why she avoided telling Nathan—because she was afraid he might see it, and misunderstand, thinking it was directed at him. Or because her anger was a thing so deep, so private, that no one must know it was there—no one must see her damaged, betrayed, revengeful—until the moment came when she could let it out, and it would rage across the barriers of the worlds to find the one who had done this to her.

She wondered if other victims of supernatural impregnation had felt the same. Rosemary with her baby; Leda, ravaged by a swan (she had often wondered about the technicalities of that). And Mary, who had been honored and overwhelmed, according to the Bible—but then, Annie reflected, the Bible was written by men. Maybe she, too, had known that instant of raw fury because her body had been used without her permission, invaded by a superior being who thought he was above the rules, and humans were his creatures, to do with as he pleased. Annie had been brought up a Catholic, and, like anyone who lapses from a stern religion, God was real to her, both her Father and her Enemy. Her relationship with Him was Freudian, a matter of love and hate, and somehow the God of her childhood mingled with Nathan’s progenitor, and their betrayal was as old as Time. Gods demanded constant worship and sacrifice, but what did They do for mere mortals? As far as she could see all you got was forgiveness for the fate God Himself had dished out to you, and that only if you were lucky. She lost herself in imaginary conversations with Mary, and in the end found she was trying to pray for the Virgin Mother with her lost innocence, because the reflex of prayer is strong in the human spirit. But she didn’t know Whom she could pray to, because with God beyond the pale, there was Nobody left.

The next day, when Nathan telephoned from school, she asked him: “Are you dreaming again? About—another world?”

“A bit,” he conceded after a pause.

“Take care,” she said, “won’t you?”

“Yes, Mum. There’s no danger, honestly.” Except the Urdemons…

But Annie knew without being told that there was always danger, and it wasn’t in Nathan’s nature to take care.

A
t Crowford Comprehensive, Hazel saw Jonas Tyler and Ellen Carver talking in the corridor after English, and her heart quailed.

“Don’t know what she sees in him,” another girl said, but Hazel knew, and gloried in the knowing, because seeing something in him was her secret, and even Ellen Carver would never see what she saw. The hidden sorrow that he bore, the mystery behind his infrequent smile, and the blue of his eyes. (He smiled more often when he was talking to Ellen, but Hazel told herself that was forced.)

Back at home she looked again at Effie’s notebook, and the hand-labeled bottles, but still she hesitated. There was a poem she vaguely remembered from an anthology she had read with Nathan when she was a child, the usual sort of nursery doggerel, but the underlying horror in it had made a strong impression on her. In it there was a woman or girl, sitting alone and lonely, wishing—and a body came in to join her, piece by piece, starting with the feet and working up. But at the climax of each verse: “Still she sat, and still she sighed, and still she wished for company.” When all the body was there, something unpleasant happened to the girl, Hazel couldn’t recall exactly what, except that it was nasty. Perhaps she got eaten. Anyway, she couldn’t help feeling she was in a similar position.
Still she sat, and still she sighed, and still she wished for company…
Fairy tales, cleaned up for Victorian consumption, might tell you that if you rubbed a lamp you would get a genie who would obey your every command, but Hazel knew better. Wish fulfillment always had its price, and the price was always more than you wanted to pay.

She didn’t trust magic, even if it worked. Especially if it worked. She didn’t trust Lilliat, with her silver-blue eyes and the unnatural breeze in her hair. Lilliat had called her price trivial, but in her heart Hazel knew what was being asked of her, and it was too much. Even for the infrequent smiles of Jonas Tyler. Besides, what was the point of attracting him by magic? One day the magic would fade, and there would be no reality underneath. Or so she told herself, struggling for rationality. (But
one day
was in the future, and for a teenager the future was too remote to touch the urgency of present desire.)

Still she sat, and still she sighed…

She wished for Nathan, to take her mind off things, but Nathan wasn’t there.

The evenings were growing longer now, and she went for a walk in the woods by way of distraction, because there was no witch paraphernalia out there to tempt her. When she was much younger and her father was still at home she used to run to the woods to be alone, sometimes climbing a tree and staying up there for hours, wrapped in the quiet and the privacy of her leaf-bound world. Now that she was older and her father had gone she preferred her bedroom, but today the lure of the woods drew her back. She found her favorite tree and scrambled up into the branches, just to prove she still could. And then somehow it was easy to lapse into her former quiescence, back against the tree trunk, legs crooked, pulling the hush of leaf murmur and wind murmur around her like a cloak. She felt her self merging with the self of the tree, becoming bark and root, sap and acorn, reaching deep, deep into the darkness of the earth, listening to the sound of growing, and burrowing, and the tingle of new life uncurling and groping toward the light. And then she was stretching up to the sky, straining with twig tip and leaf tip to reach the sun. She didn’t know that this oneness with things was a part of the power she feared to indulge; all she knew was that it made her feel peaceful, and somehow complete. The tiny denizens of the treetops came close to her, untroubled by her presence; a squirrel scurried over her thigh.

Presently, she saw the woodwose.

She had met him once or twice before, but only with Nathan, who had been his friend from infancy. She knew he was very shy. He was a stick-thin creature only a few feet high, with a pointy face all nose and the sideways eyes of an animal. His voice was as soft as a rustle in the leafmold; his movements, altogether noiseless. She didn’t hear him approach; rather, she became aware of him, one twig pattern among many, perched on a nearby bough, watching her. Perhaps he had been there all the time.

It was a long while before he spoke.

“Tell Nathan…”

“Yes?”

“
He’s
here. Hiding in woods, skulking behind bushes. Spying on the house where the wise man lives. He kills rabbits with sling-stones and eats them. I don’t know what he wants, but he won’t go away.”

“Who?” Hazel asked, quiet as a breath.

“
Him.
The hairy one from down in the valley, where the old
old
house used to be. You let him out, you and Nathan. He stole the thing, and ran away, but he didn’t go far. He sleeps in a fox’s hole, down in the Darkwood. I think he strangled the fox. Tell Nathan.”

The dwarf, Hazel thought, remembering the curious little man she and Nathan had inadvertently released from his underground prison—someone who, Bartlemy claimed, might once have been the assistant to Josevius Grimthorn. He had stolen the Grail and thrust it back into its native world, though no one knew why.

“I’ll tell him,” Hazel promised.

The woodwose gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment. “He likes to know…everything that happens here,” he elaborated unexpectedly. “I watch. I listen. I wait for him. He doesn’t come now for many months, but I’m still here. Tell him…”

“He has to go away to school,” Hazel said. “Even on weekends he has homework, rugger matches, cricket matches, stuff like that. He can’t always find time for everyone.” She hadn’t seen so much of Nathan that year, and although she knew it wasn’t his fault the woodwose’s words stirred a tiny niggle of resentment. Woody, Nathan had told her, had been his playfellow when he was little more than a baby, an imaginary friend who wasn’t imaginary, tugged from some lost universe in childish innocence for companionship and games, unable to return to wherever he had come from.
We’re Nathan’s closest friends,
Hazel thought,
and now we’re both neglected.

She said: “I’ll come back. If you like.”

Woody considered her offer in silence. “Do you have Smarties?” he asked at last. “Nathan used to bring Smarties.”

“I can get some,” Hazel said.

N
ATHAN HADN’T
dreamed about the princess for nearly three weeks, and he was desperate to find her again, to help her or merely to see her—there was little help he could offer in his insubstantial dream state, but he was sure that soon he would begin to materialize, because that was the pattern his dreams had followed in the past. He saw Hazel that weekend only briefly, pleading homework and tiredness. She told him about Woody and the dwarf, and he was pleased she had formed a bond with the woodwose; somehow, it excused him from having to spend precious time with either of them. Not that he saw it that way—his dreams filled his thoughts, and he wasn’t seeing anything very clearly. He tried to help her with her math, but, sensing his reluctance, she made less effort, and in the end he gave her the answers without an explanation, taking a shortcut because he was in a hurry to leave.

“I need an early night,” he said.

“Are you dreaming again?” she asked, picking up—like Bartlemy, like his mother—the meaning behind the words.

“Yes.” He didn’t temporize, not with Hazel. “I’ll tell you about it another time. I don’t know enough yet. It’s a new place, a new world…”

“Can’t you dream me with you?”

“
No.
I mean, it would be dangerous—you could get trapped there—and anyway, I don’t have that much control.”

You could if you wanted to,
Hazel thought, suddenly convinced of it, and when he had gone she sat for a long time, her mind stuck on a single thought, going nowhere.

Nathan, meanwhile, went to bed early and, inevitably, couldn’t sleep, let alone dream. He didn’t want to risk probing the frontier of his own volition—it might only transport him to Eos—so he sat up reading till the words ran together and he hoped exhaustion would take over, slipping across the borderland into slumber only after what seemed like hours of weary wakefulness. Even then he woke again after a short period when his dreams were commonplace and unmemorable, slept and woke and slept again. And now, at last, his sleep was deep enough, and the portal in his head opened, and his soul poured through.

He dreamed. Not of the princess as he had wished, nor of the city on two hills. He dreamed of the Grandir, the white-masked ruler of Eos: broken visions of him all jumbled together. The Grandir in his semicircular office high above the city, gazing out between the screens at the panorama of sunset, the western sky all fire and blood, and to the east the light reflected in a million windows, so the city sparkled like a monstrous piece of jewelry. A mounted xaurian flew past, unusually close, its hooked wingspan slicing the image in two, its bluish body turned to mauve in the glow. Then the scene changed, and the Grandir was in his secret chamber where the star-globes floated in darkness, compressed spheres of interdimensional space existing both in that world and in others, projecting onto the ceiling, as on a screen, glimpses of alternative universes. One of them hung in the sky above the bookshop, a star hidden among the stars, watching over Nathan and his mother—or spying on them. And then the Grandir was walking down a corridor toward a door marked
DANGER
—it slid back automatically and there was the underground laboratory, and in a huge cage to the right was something so horrible Nathan drew back, not wanting to see it, feeling the horror of it from a distance and struggling to pull out of the dream…

Everything changed. He was in a gray daylit room plentifully layered with dust and shadows—the cleaners had obviously gone with everyone else, taking their brooms and brushes with them. On a table by the window was an enormous open book, the reader’s place marked with a spoon. Nearby, someone silhouetted against the light was pouring things from one bottle into another, from bottle to jar, from jar to bowl. Occasionally the mixture thus produced would change color, or give off a tiny puff of purple smoke, or the sound of birds singing, or an eye-watering variety of smells. A diminutive oil lamp with a naked flame, currently pale green, stood at hand; every so often the man would lift bottle or jar in a pair of tongs and warm it over the flame, whereupon the contents would bubble, or steam, or scream, until removed. As Nathan drew nearer he saw the man had a fluff of thistledown hair and very mobile eyebrows that soared in excitement and plunged in doubt according to the progress of his experiments. Frimbolus Quayne.

Nathan was eager to talk to him but it was no good; though his sinuses smarted from one of the smells he still felt hopelessly insubstantial. Nonetheless, when the door opened he drew back instinctively into the shadows, well away from the window. The woman who walked in—or rather, bustled; she was plainly the sort of person who bustled a lot—was the princess’s nurse, Mrs. Prendergoose.

She started to speak, but Frimbolus held up a hand. “Hush, woman! I am doing something very important. It needs the utmost concentration…” He held a glass jar over the flame and carefully added a single drop of liquid from a vial, which smoked. Inside the jar there was a small—a very small—explosion. When things settled down, what remained appeared to be fluid, lime green, and phosphorescent. “Blinkus!” Frimbolus swore. “Ah well, I didn’t really think it would work. But it was worth a try. Madam, what can I do for you?”

Mrs. Prendergoose didn’t look as though she liked being called
madam
—clearly she felt it had offensive undertones—but she got straight to the point. “I want to talk to you,” she said, “about the princess.”

“What about her?”

“She’s not a child anymore, she’s a young lady—”

“Dear me, is she?”

“—and a pretty young lady, too, or she would be, if she got the chance to prettify herself a bit. Instead—look at her! Her dresses are all in tatters and we can’t get the material here to make new ones—her hair’s always in a tangle no matter how hard I brush it—she sits around in the gloom all day worrying about Urdemons and the state of the kingdom when she should be choosing her gown for a party—she never gets to meet anyone or go anywhere…”

“What do you suggest we do to remedy these ills?” Frimbolus inquired.

“She needs to get away—right away. She could go to her uncle, the duke of Quilp, or those cousins in Marplott—she stayed with them a few years back, and there wasn’t any trouble then.”

“Trouble?”

“You know what I mean, don’t pretend you don’t. There wasn’t none of this business with magic and monsters that’s driving the poor child out of her mind—”

“I thought you said she wasn’t a child?” Frimbolus interrupted.

Mrs. Prendergoose ignored him. “I’m not saying it’s her fault—she’s the sweetest thing in nature, just growing a bit obstinate—but it wasn’t till she started playing around with magic that them Urdemons turned up: you can’t deny it. There’s got to be a connection, hasn’t there?”

“Oh yes, there’s a
connection,
” Frimbolus said, with a wealth of sinister meaning. “That doesn’t mean it’s cause and effect. You’ve been stuffing her head with notions of self-blame, haven’t you? Telling her
she’s
the plague carrier, the imp among cherubim? Thyrma Prendergoose, if this kingdom was properly run I’d see you executed for treason! As if Nell doesn’t have enough to bear, without shouldering a load of guilt that doesn’t belong to her!”