Iron Chamber of Memory (22 page)

Well, now he was chained to the ferry schedule. Looking at his watch, he realized he had just enough time to haul his aching body to the boat and collapse into a seat, if he were to make it at all. Going up to Sark House meant catching the evening ferry which meant, in effect, deliberately breaking his promise.

There was nothing he hated more than breaking a promise, even over the smallest things.

He waved his stick at the haycart. It was a modern-looking thing of green metal with rubber tires, shock absorbers and springs, but pulled by a long-maned old nag. A farmer named Beaumont sat on the bench.

Hal wiped his nose, gritted his aching teeth, and said, “When you see Liam, tell him I have taken the ferry to St. Ouens, on Jersey.”

Beaumont smiled, and said in French, “You seem unwell, my sir. Must you travel? I will give you a ride to the dock.”

Hal climbed up behind him, his joints aching. “I don’t have a way to lock the door.”

“There are no locks on the doors here, except in the Seigneur’s House. And that is to stop the ghosts from coming out, not the robbers from getting in.”

The journey was a disaster. He had diarrhea on the ship, and lost control of his bowels, and ruined his pants. Passersby on the street of the port town of St. Helier watched in disbelief and disgust as he limped through the street, stinking, trying to find a hotel. He checked in, had the bellhop take the pants to be cleaned, and then sat on the bed, sick and shaking, while the hours passed. Eventually the bellhop returned, and, when Hal had no money for the tip, the manager arrived, asking him to pay immediately for the room. When it turned out that Hal had nothing, could find none of his traveler’s checks, and that his credit card was exhausted, the manager, in a fine Gallic fettle threatened him with jail, and the bellhop (who seemed to think Hal was a dope addict) threatened him with a beating. Hal managed to make some phone calls from the manager’s office, and send some messages, and get his sister Elaine to wire him some emergency funds.

By the time he was released from the manager’s office, the sun had set. He had missed the ferry back to Sark.

He was also destitute of money for a bus or cab, so he had to walk the five miles from St. Helier’s at the south of the island to St. Ouen’s village in the north. He faded in and out of agony during the walk, which took twice as long as it should have. He was glad for his cane, and, for once, actually made use of it with each step.

At the start of his tramp, in the moonlight, he saw the ruins of the Twelfth Century hermitage where Helier was martyred by Vikings. During the Reformation, that hermitage was closed and rebuilt into a fortress by Queen Elizabeth. And at the end of his long walk, hours later, he saw the silhouette of the La Rocco Tower in the Saint Ouen Bay, illumined by the gleam of the lighthouse, looming like a rook from the chessboard of a giant. La Rocco Tower had been erected during the Napoleonic wars, one of thirty round towers raised to defend the coastline.

The weight of history soaked into the ground was like nothing he had seen in America, no, not even in places like Williamsburg, where he had gone to school before Oxford. He wondered if all these ruins, and fortresses built on hermitages, and warlike towers each were visited by the ghosts of men who defended them in life, and whether their battles were fought over again forever until doomsday.

It was late in the evening, but the streets of the town were crowded, and colored lamps were hanging on wires over the square. Folk in shaggy costumes, wearing masks of fierce animals, were dancing and cavorting in the square. Hal waved at a couple, a boy with a sparkler and a girl with a wineglass, and asked if either knew the way to the Brising Brothers.

“But yes, my sir!” said the girl, red-cheeked and glancing-eyed with the wine. “The shop you seek? He is there, beneath the old windmill. The main street is closed for the procession of relics. You must find the back way.”

“Are they still open at this hour?” shouted Hal over the sound of the raucous music.

The boy said, “You’ve had too much. Are you unwell? Do not drink any more.”

But the girl said, “It is the feast of Saint Guthlac of Crowland! He lived in the stinking fens and swamps where the monsters and devils dwelt. He was friends with the wild animals and had the gift of prophecy. He held the marriage.”

Hal’s head was pounding. “What marriage?”

“Saint Guthlac convinced a Sir Lanval, the poverty-stricken knight exiled from Camelot, to wed rather than to slay the mermaid he caught. Each year we celebrate the marriage of the water-woman to the knight, because she gained a soul. When the church bells rang the wedding, and she stepped over the threshold, her tail fell off, and she became a mortal named Tryamour. All the old families in this parish are descended from her. See!”

The girl pointed to a procession of figures in papier-mâché heads, led by a bishop in a miter of absurd size and proportion. Behind him was a man in white armor adorned with ermines, and a sword of tinfoil, and a woman hidden in her wedding veils. Even as Hal looked, rockets went off, and bells rang out, and the bride threw off her veil, revealing a pretty young brunette beneath, with the wide and expressive features of a Gallic woman. Amid many whoops and rowdy cheers, the bride shook her hips, flourishing the long silly-looking fish tail trailing from her bustle. The bishop touched the tail with his crook, the woman untied the fake tail, and, while the crowd roared, she whirled the tail over her head and sent it flying into the thickest part of the crowd, where women young and old leaped to catch it. The crowd threw rice, blew tin whistles and sent spouts of champagne into the air.

The boy said, “Look there! That is one of the brothers, it is he. Him you seek, is it not so?”

He pointed to a man so short, that Hal wondered if he were a dwarf hired for the celebration. The bald little man was dressed like a burgher from a hundred years ago, complete with watch fob and waistcoat, and sporting with an enormous set of side whiskers. He was walking into a dark and narrow space between two buildings, evidently to avoid the commotion of the beast-bride and her knightly bridegroom.

Hal, leaning on his walking stick a little unsteadily, stepped into the alleyway. Just then, Hal saw a pale, thin hoodlum dressed in filthy rags crawl out from beneath a trash dumpster. The crawling hooligan grabbed the little man by the ankle.

“Hey!” shouted Hal. “What is going on?” He could not believe it was a robbery. The noise and lights from the festival were only a pace or two behind him. Any number of people near the head of the alley would have seen everything clearly.

The pale man looked up, his eyes filled with insane malice. The man’s face was so white, Hal wondered if he were an albino. The pale man had discolorations around his mouth, like bee stings or cold sores.

The pale man stood, and stooped over the little man, licking his face.

Hal took step forward, and raised his walking stick threateningly. “Now, you let go of him!” But the gaunt man looked at him with such a dark look in his eyes that Hal hesitated. Just then, another one of the cramps and muscle spasms that had been plaguing him that day struck his arm. His elbow joint was aching. He dropped the walking stick with a clatter.

Hal drew out the crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck, and held it up. The gaunt man looked like he was trying to stifle a sneezing fit. The gaunt man shuddered and twitched, doubled over, and then suddenly collapsed.

Hal turned, picked up his walking stick, and looked behind him. They were within plain sight of a dozen people in the main road. Why had no one noticed? Why had no one come to help, or even raised a voice? Perhaps the alcohol was stronger or the music louder than it seemed.

The little man was shivering and trying to straighten his old-fashioned clothes. He had fallen, and there was a cut on his neck. He was holding his handkerchief there to staunch the blood. Hal helped him to his feet. The little man said to Hal, “I remember you. Come.”

Hal said, “Shouldn’t we call the police?” He pointed at where the gaunt man had fallen down, but the gaunt man was no longer there.

The little man was already a half-dozen paces down the alleyway. Hal followed, feeling as if he were in a bad dream or was the butt of a bad practical joke.

Twelve steps more, and the little man opened a metal door in the rear of his shop. Inside were glass cases, row upon row, as fine and beautiful as anything Hal had ever seen in the finest shops in London or New York. There were also antiques for sale. Hal gazed in admiration at a suit of black and gold armor refurbished from some museum, inscribed with images from elfin myths of swords and swans and wounded kings, bleeding lances and cups seated among the stars, and an arm clad in shimmering samite flourishing a blade from the midst of the lake waters.

“Yours is scale,” said the little man, “Set with images of the ermine.”

Also here was a second dwarf seated on a stool, a twin to the first, except that his scalp was snowy with hair, and his mustaches drooped like those of Fu Manchu, dangling past his jaw. He had a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, and he was tapping delicately at some bright thing shining in the confluence of several goose-necked lamps.

The first one said, “This is one of our special order customers from Sercq. He saved me from the Great Gaunt Man not a moment ago, at terrible peril to his life and soul.”

Hal said, “Wait a moment. You mean that ragged, starving bum outside your back door?”

The second one peered at him, and his right eye seemed swollen and enormous when seen through the lens of the loupe he had forgotten to remove from his eye. “The Mists of Everness have fogged his wits. He is surely sunken deeply in her charms.”

The first one said, “How are we to know, brother, that things will work out well? We send him to his death. The Gaunt Man is strong, stronger than before! No arms of our make can prevail against him!”

The second said, “The air of Earth beclouds our eyes as well. We must trust in all the things we have forgotten, for the Fisher King would not have sent us into this world unprepared.”

Hal said, “Listen, if you boys have been drinking too much at your little
Mardis-Gras
here….”

“You have lost the count of time,” said the first little man, exasperated. “That was thirty nine days ago. This is the Feast of Saint Guthlac.”

Hal said, “I am here to pick up an order for Lord Manfred of Sark. I’m—I am afraid I don’t remember what it is, exactly. I wrote it down in my book…”

The second little man hopped down from his stool, the tools jangling in his apron loops. “We remember. Come with me, please, sir. Our special order customers must go deeper into the shop.”

He walked between the tall cases of many cut and polished stones set in rings and earrings, broaches and pins. Here were amethysts, and jacinths, chrysoprase as green as grass, peridot and beryl. Yellow chrysolite, red sardius and sardonyx, emerald and carnelian, blue sapphire and purple jasper.

The little man in front of him, with the Fu Manchu moustache, stopped at a blank wall and gestured toward the jewel cases. “You see our approaches are warded. You may tell the Lord of Sark we cherish our duties.”

Hal said, “What is going on? What is this place?”

The little man behind him, the one with the enormous side whiskers, pulled shut a metallic grating behind them, and locked it. He said angrily, “He does not know us. His spirit is corrupted with morphine alkaloid of opium, a witchbrew.”

The second one said to Hal, “We always pay our debts. For the lifeblood of my brother, whom you saved, we should like to gift and grant you with an amethyst stone, whose virtue is to bring sobriety, not only for inebriation but also for over-zealousness in passion. Here is an amethyst taken from the ring of an Archbishop, who threw it in the sea when the Parliament decreed King Henry to be greater than Christ, for His Eminence wished in that hour for the wine to blind his memory.”

“Uh, really, it was nothing.” But the little man thrust a ring onto Hal’s finger, and the purple stone winked like fire. The ache immediately began to throb less and less, and the room spun more slowly.

Without a further word, the first little man slid open a panel in the wall. Behind was a door that Hal was certain he had seen before, perhaps in a dream. His dreams at Wrongerwood House had been so vivid.

The door was made of white metal, brighter than snow, and hexagonal in shape. In the middle was the Seal of Solomon, two opposite triangles crossed. Passages from the Gospel and the Talmud were inscribed in concentric rows along the edges of the door, and the Enochian script in which Noah had written his book of prophecy, the only written language of the world before the Flood.

The two little men now donned thick goggles of smoked glass. The first one took out a key, the twin to the one in Hal’s pocket, which had a silver white lotus inscribed in the bow. There was a loud click as the bolt shot back. The portal began to open. A nimbus of light escaped through the widening crack, and the rush of music beating in a hypnotic fantasia: lute and zither, rebec and bamboo flute, buzzing reeds and sounding brass.

Henry squinted against the blinding brilliance. He stepped forward, and the air seemed as thick and fluid as the bottom of a deep pool.

To his infinite surprise, the two Brising brothers insisted on finding him passage back to Sark that very evening. The first brother gave him a note written in strange letters to a certain fisherman whose houseboat he described with great peculiarity: a small black tug with a squat iron chimney adorned about the prow and stern with the bones of whales and teeth of sharks. The captain’s name was Hezekiah. This captain must have had very good eyes indeed, for he stood on the gangplank to his small steamboat, and read the note in the night, with no lamps nearby, and not even the moon.

He was not French, but spoke in a thick accent of Southern England. “They pay their debts, the sons of Albrecht, sure enough, but are skinflinted enough in collecting them! You have any charms to ward ye? They are worthless. Throw them in the sea. Call upon your name saints!”