Authors: Jeanette Winterson
Battle of the Sun (10 page)
T
he Dragon was busy.
The Dragon was the Moat and the Moat was the Dragon, but the Dragon was also not the Moat and the Moat was also not the Dragon.
Confusing.
A Dragon is a very confusing creature. But the Dragon himself is not confused.
The Dragon was busy filling the Moat with what might have been water, and was but wasn’t. Not water to wash in or water to drink. This was no common or ordinary water; it was the only water in the world that could free the Sunken King.
The Dragon had this water in three enormous wooden barrels, and he carried the barrels one by one to the Moat.
He poured in the first barrel, and the Moat filled with this liquid; blue like mystery.
He poured in the second barrel and the Moat filled with that liquid; red like blood.
He poured in the third barrel and the Moat filled with a liquid that was clear like thought.
But when the three liquids from the three barrels mixed
together they made a Water that was seething, troubling, boiling black and sulphurous and stinking. This fourth Water was the Water the Dragon wanted.
The Moat was filled.
W
edge had but half a brain, yet it was a brain that could work twice as hard when he wanted it to.
Wedge knew that with Jack locked up and the Magus preparing for the Opus, he would have all day to hatch the Egg and win the power for himself.
SHE would be occupied with the DOG.
He had to make sure though that Jack could not escape and Wedge knew that Jack was very good at escaping.
Wedge mused on Jack’s capacity to escape, and reasoned it thus: ‘If there is a door, then Jackster opens it. If there is a lock, then Jackster springs it. If I imprison him where there is neither lock nor door, then escape he cannot.’
And with that in mind, or half in mind, Wedge marched Jack into the kitchen and opened a hatch in the wall, where there was a small sturdy platform hanging by four ropes.
‘Pull yourself up, Jackster!’ said Wedge. ‘Go on with it!’
Reluctantly, Jack began to pull. Up he went, up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up until he thought his arms would break.
At the last second of his strength, he tumbled out through a second hatch, into a small sealed turret room. There was a window but there was no door.
Down below, Wedge deftly released the ropes that secured the pulley, and the platform shot back down, fast and furious, and Jack, panting and staring down the shaft, saw that there was no way out.
He heard Wedge’s voice, faint and far off. ‘The Magus will come for you, Jackster, never fear!’
Below, below, Jack heard the faint hop-hop of Wedge departing. He looked around him.
The turret room was comfortable and furnished. Once upon a time someone had used this room for sleeping – there was a small heavy bed by the wall; and for reading – the round walls were lined with books. An armchair had been placed by the window, but the wood was wormy and the leather had long since dried and torn away. No one had been here for a very long time.
Jack looked out of the window. In the nest of the Phoenix he had been high up, at the top of the house, or so he had thought, but here was so high that the clouds floated in through the window like white smoke, and only sometimes, when the wind blew them away, could he see anything below.
Below was much below, another country called Below. The Thames was so far underneath his gaze that it looked like a silver thread drawn through a dark cloth, and not like a mighty river at all.
He could not climb down and he could not use his iron tool because there was no door, or if there was a door it was not one that Jack could find by any ordinary investigation.
He leaned sadly out of the window.
And that was when he saw someone else leaning sadly out of the window two turrets away. It was a girl. It was the girl in the Book of the Phoenix.
I
n the kitchen, Max slid out from his hiding place behind the woodpile, and seeing that Mistress Split was still snoring on her truckle bed, he used his paw to pull open the heavy kitchen door and set off by himself through the Dark House. He was a dog. He knew where he was going.
First, Max slid like a silent shadow into the library and ran to Jack’s mother, and jumped up on the table so that he could lick her nose.
‘Max!’ said Anne. ‘Do you know where they have imprisoned Jack?’ Max wagged his tail, and jumping down, he went softly to the door into the laboratory, where his quick ears could hear the Magus giving orders to the boys to chop and fire and stoke and fill.
Then, turning his friendly intelligent face to Anne, to reassure her, Max set off again through the house.
He went up the stairs and put his nose round the half-door of the Creature’s chamber. Sure enough, there was Wedge, with the coconut in front of him, and a very large hen.
Max ran at top speed up the turning stairs until he came to the boys’ chamber, where he knew he would find Crispis.
Yes, there he was, sitting disconsolately on the edge of his stone bed, swinging his thin legs. He was talking to a flower pot, where, just starting to grow, was a sunflower.
Max barked and Crispis got up and came over to pat the dog. ‘Where’s Jack?’ asked Crispis. ‘I wish I was an all-seeing eye so that I could find him.’
But Max was an all-smelling nose, and he knew where Jack was, and he wanted to show Crispis. Tugging at the boy’s jacket, running a few feet, then tugging again, Max made Crispis understand he had to follow him.
Crispis was quite frightened to be leaving the chamber without permission, but then, he thought, he was usually frightened, whatever was happening, so this was probably all right. But he took his sunflower just in case.
Down they went, creeping past the Creature’s chamber, and in one brief half a second half a glance, Crispis saw Wedge on top of a large brown hen and the hen on top of a small brown coconut.
W
hat’s your name?’ called Jack to the girl, but every time the girl replied, her answer was caught ‘ by the windy clouds and carried away.
But Jack knew she was the Captive.
And he knew she was the Golden Maiden.
But he wanted to know her name.
In the laboratory, the Magus had made ready. The fearful heat of the furnace had caused some of the boys to faint, and Robert was reviving William and Anselm with water. The two giant alembics bubbled and boiled and filled with steam. The Magus ran from one to another, drawing off a silver liquid that immediately hardened into a solid silver ball. Yet when William dropped one of these small round balls it splintered into a thousand tiny replicas of itself, like ball bearings.
The Magus cursed, and sent the boys on their hands and knees to find and collect the tiny drops of mercury.
‘The Spirit Mercurius is essential to the Work,’ shouted the Magus over the boom and boil of the alembics. ‘Lose no part of him, for he is liquid and solid, matter and mind.’
Round and round the laboratory swooped and dived the
Eyebat, but often it threw itself at the skylight, making chattering noises, like a cat when it sees a bird.
And beyond the laboratory, silent and motionless as ever, were the stone boys.
‘Make ready,’ said the Magus, ‘and leave me. The Work is begun . . .’
And the Sunken King turning and turning in his tank like a child in its mother’s womb.
And the Dragon that held the Cinnabar Egg like a world that holds a star.
And the Dark House waiting like a baleful thought.
And now, and now, and now.
‘Woof,’ barked Max at the foot of the shaft. ‘Woof. Woof, Woof.’
Up above Jack heard, and ran from the window and looked down. But it was such a long way down.
‘What are we going to do?’ said Crispis. ‘I wish I was a bird and then I could rescue him.’
Crispis sighed and put down his sunflower, in its pot, on the floor, in the shaft. Then, for no reason that he understood, he went to the vast stone sink that stood in the kitchen, and drew off a jug of water from the water barrel kept beneath. Mistress Split snored on.
Crispis went back to his sunflower and watered it. And it grew – about two feet, all at once.
‘Oh!’ said Crispis. And he watered it once more, and it grew another two feet, and now it had begun to grow its way up into the shaft and up it went, and up it went and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up.
And Jack suddenly realised that something was coming towards him, and he stood back, and watched, amazed as the sunflower grew into the room.
But it did not stop when it reached the room. What the sunflower did was this: it grew over towards the window, and then and only then, when its top was in the fresh air and the white clouds, did it stop growing.
And then, like the sun itself, the sunflower sprung a great golden head and shone so bright from the window, that a woman polishing a copper pot in the street miles below, saw the light of it beaming, and looked up. ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘the sun so visible, twice in the sky at once! Certainly strange happenings there must be in some place.’
And she hurried inside.
Jack didn’t hesitate. Testing the sturdy stem of the plant just once, he shinned right down it at such a speed that his head went dizzy, and in a few seconds: there he was. Landed in the kitchen on his bottom, and Max standing on him and licking every bit of him and Crispis dancing for joy.
‘It was the Dragon’s sunflower!’ he said.
Jack felt in his pocket and gave Crispis another of the six remaining seeds. ‘Keep it safe in case you need it again,’ he said, and Crispis nodded solemnly and stowed the seed away in his stocking top.
The boys were just tiptoeing across the kitchen when Mistress Split woke up with a vast yawn. There was half a pause of hesitation, then Max bounded into her arm, and in the bounding and the ‘Boojie Boojie Boojie!’ that took up the next half minute, Jack and Crispis slipped out of the door.
‘Where’s Wedge?’ whispered Jack.
‘He’s trying to hatch the coconut you gave him. He’s got a hen the size of a pig,’ said Crispis.
Jack smiled and nodded. Now they had a chance.
Light and silent, the two boys went straight into the cellar.
T
here was the Sunken King, now so faint a presence that he could hardly be seen dissolving in the water.
‘It’s time!’ said Jack. ‘You must come with us now.’
The Sunken King turned his face, and Jack could hardly hear him as he spoke.
‘Pull the plug, Adam Kadmon, but know that I shall die very soon if what you say is untrue. Once outside of this place I have but a short time.’
The plug . . . Jack searched frantically around until he found what looked like a plug in the side of the tank. With all his strength he turned it and pulled it but it was stuck fast.
He heard a familiar voice, like fire rolling down a mountain.
‘How so, Jack Snap, how so? Are you not here yet? I am ready. I am here.’
Jack walked round to the back of the tank. The whole wall of the cellar had been demolished, and in place of the wall, like a wall, but not a wall, was the Dragon himself.
‘Bring him to me, Jack. The Bath is prepared.’
‘I can’t pull the plug!’ said Jack desperately. ‘Will you help me?’
‘That was not part of our bargain,’ said the Dragon. ‘You must come or not come.’
Jack nearly yelled at the Dragon, but he stopped himself and his anger. The Magus . . . anger . . . if Jack felt anger or fear he would betray himself to the Magus like everyone who had come before him, like everyone in the Dark House.
Jack looked around the damp bare cellar. Then, without a question or a hesitation, he ripped the flare from its bracket on the wall and swung it with every ounce of his strength at the glass tank.
CRASH!
He swung again, and again, using both arms, his arms and shoulders taut.
CRASH!
The tank shattered into pieces and the water flowed out in a deluge. Jack thought he would be drowned, but the moment the water escaped the tank, it was not water at all, but something silver and shining and it seemed to disappear. Whatever it was, it wasn’t wet.
Jack ran forward into the shattered tank and bent to pick up the Sunken King, who was light as a bone, and white as a bleached bone.
Jack had the King across his shoulders, and he carried him, weightless like a bird, and he stepped forward, out through the cellar and to the moat.
Where the Dragon was waiting.
‘How now, Jack Snap. Into the moat with him, for that is your Bath.’
The smell was overpowering – like rotten meat and horse dung and dead rats.
Jack looked into the moat. He was horrified. This was no bath, this was a boiling, bubbling, seething mass of black mud and filth. The King would be killed.
‘It’s a trick!’ shouted Jack. ‘You have tricked me!’
And suddenly Jack saw himself standing alone, bearing a burden that, light as it was, he could not carry, charged with a task it was impossible to complete, confused by other people, without help. A boy, he was just a boy, twelve years old, and in front of him was a dragon who had hatched inside time as though time itself were an egg, and here was the Dragon, ancient and wily . . .
Jack lost heart.
And in the moment that he lost heart, the Magus in the laboratory sprang to his feet, and with a rush and a roar, it was as a phoenix that he flew, flew, flew, from the upper skylight, now circling over the moat, fierce and dark and massive.
‘Throw the King, Jack Snap!’ the Dragon spoke.
‘Adam Kadmon, obey!’ It was the feeble voice of the King speaking, and hardly knowing what he did, Jack threw the King, who seemed to be made of white feathers and hollow bones, into the moat.
The Phoenix made a dive, and Jack ducked just in time to avoid its beak, but its cruel golden feet caught his arm as he folded his arms over his head for protection. Jack felt as though he had been burned.
As the Phoenix made its fearful arc in the sky, Jack looked into the moat and saw the Sunken King desperately flailing his arms and crying for help. By now, he was covered in black filth, and hardly visible.
He’s drowning
, thought Jack, and then he didn’t think at all, took the biggest breath of air he could, and flung himself into the stinking stench.
Jack sank. The slurry in the moat was thick and sucking, like quicksand. It was all his nightmares, all his fears, and it was black without end.
Jack swept his arms about blindly, and found the King. He pulled the King to him so that they were one body, arms and legs wrapped around each other, and with all his strength, Jack kicked up, trying to bring them into the air.
And then a very strange thing happened.
As Jack’s head split the gluey surface of the moat, the Sunken King smiled at him. And Jack saw the face of a young man, a strong man, with clean red hair, like a sun.
The thin body Jack held against his grew stronger and fatter; he could feel real legs and real arms, and he had the sensation that these real legs and real arms were his own legs and arms. He held the King, only their heads above the moat.
‘Adam Kadmon,’ said the King. ‘That is our name. Take my ring.’ And he pulled a ring from his finger and placed it on Jack’s finger.
The moat began to change. First its texture thinned from thick to running. Then its colour changed from black to clear, and Jack looked down, and it was as though he was in a running river with nothing to hide. Fish swam.
‘The Phoenix and the Fishes,’ said the King, ‘the Tree and the Wind that blows in the Tree.’
Jack didn’t understand, but these were the last words of the Sunken King, for he began to dissolve, not as he had in the tank, in formless despair, but because he was becoming something else. And the something else he was becoming was Jack.
Jack was alone in the clear shining water. He swam to the edge and hauled himself out. The water ran from him in silver showers, and in the puddles it made were balls of silver.
The King’s ring on his own finger flashed and caught the sun.
‘How now, Jack Snap,’ said the Dragon.
‘What has happened?’ asked Jack.
‘You have absorbed the powers of the old King,’ said the Dragon, ‘because you are the Radiant Boy, the one who is to come.’
‘To come where?’ said Jack. ‘I don’t understand.’
The Dragon flicked its purple tongue. ‘Understanding will follow. But first you must become what you are.’
There was a rush of flaming wings. The Phoenix landed right in front of Jack, its eyes like rubies, its wing-feathers flames.
The Phoenix spoke. ‘You found the Cinnabar Egg and you freed the Sunken King. I underestimated you, Jack Snap.
Now you cannot be my assistant, for you have become my rival.’
‘I want nothing to do with you,’ said Jack. ‘I want to leave this place for ever.’
‘It is too late for that,’ replied the Phoenix. ‘You have chosen.’
‘That is so, Jack Snap,’ said the Dragon. ‘You have chosen.’
‘Now one of us shall defeat the other,’ said the Phoenix, ‘and the one who is defeated shall never live again. Do you accept this challenge?’
‘No!’ said Jack.
The sky was dark and thundery. The Dragon was purple and green. The Phoenix was red and gold. Jack was as silver as the silver water in the moat.
He heard a voice he knew, yet didn’t know, saying his name.
He turned round. It was the girl from the tower. The Golden Maiden. The Captive. She was wearing strange clothes that he had never seen before, but her face was not strange, it was strangely familiar.
‘Jack! You have to accept the task that is given to you.’
And Jack remembered again the story of Arthur and the sword in the stone, and he remembered the stone boys, and his mother, already half-stone, and this stone house, heavy, imprisoned. Something had to be set free, some better power than the one that ruled this house now.
Jack looked at the girl under the thundery sky. She was smiling, but her eyes were serious, as serious as stars.
He turned to the Phoenix. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will, and yes.’