Spring (46 page)

As the hours progressed from dawn into mid-morning that day worried citizens watched the levels rise with growing concern. Levels were not yet near the point where the river would run back on itself, but if the rain continued this way it was only a matter of time before serious flooding would begin, probably sometime in the course of the afternoon.

So it was that as Katherine succumbed to the soporific enticements of the Sisters of Charity, and thus slept off her fatigue, the state of things among Brum’s normal citizens was bordering on collective panic.

Yet strangely, as another night advanced with no let-up in the rain and a mounting sense of imminent calamity, many of the richest and most influential members of the New Brum community, who ought to have been worried by the rising waters, were concerning themselves with something else entirely. They were pampering their sleek and well-fed bodies in fragrantly oiled baths, and debating how best to adorn and bejewel themselves ahead of one of the biggest social events of the year – the birthday celebration of their High Ealdor, Festoon Avon or Lord Festoon, as he grandly styled himself – on the morrow. This was not a fixture in the social calendar they could easily get out of.

Yet the truth was that in all its long history, Brum had never witnessed such a sorry, corrupt, perverse individual in that great and historic office, nor one apparently less capable of guiding the helm of a great commercial hydden city. In the view of his many critics, there was no surer sign of Brum’s final descent into decadence during the years since the Fyrd had taken over its administration than the awful fact that he was now this great city’s figurehead.

This was a tragedy all the greater because of the six great families who had most put their stamp on the city, two stood out head and shoulders above the others: the Avons for good, the Sinistrals for ill. Now the Sinistrals ruled the Hyddenworld and Brum from Germany, while their puppet Festoon shamed his own family name in Brum and was the laughing stock of the Fyrd worldwide, a figure of fun and japery, the joke of comics and the sorry butt of ribald songs and tawdry theatricals in every language known to hydden.

His first sin was gluttony.

He had started young and it was said that he had abandoned the nourishment of his mother’s breast at the age of only five months in favour of sweetmeats, which he had consumed on a massive scale ever since.

He was so vast in bulk that he had trouble rising from his chair without help; so unfit he could barely climb three steps without running out of breath; so indolent that he spent vast sums on servants to do everything for him, or on machines to perform functions that required exertion. The Sisters of Charity were effectively his servants and his chairs were made to be wheeled so he might avoid unnecessary exercise.

He covered his rotund frame with shapeless perfumed silks, voiles and damasks, soft fabrics from the east, as if he was – which he sometimes imagined himself to be – an emperor from Araby.

But clothes and sweet scents were not the only thing on which he had wasted his vast inheritance since he had taken possession of the ancestral estate and the Fyrd had made him their puppet and amiable plaything.

He had spent his fortune in spectacularly self-indulgent ways – with endless expensive fripperies, vast quantities of rich food, exotic entertainments, as well as priceless lotions, manicures, pedicures and massages, along with musicians and entertainments of every kind – and anything else that his sudden whims and appetites might desire.

It was truly said that what had taken his careful ancestors two hundred and fifty years to steal from Brum, and the world beyond, he had given back in twenty-five, the number of his living years.

That he had survived the vicissitudes of fortune under the Fyrd, who had brought down so many other members of the leading Brum families, he owed to two things.

First was the very obvious fact that one so young and seemingly naïve was a threat to no one at all, and therefore an ideal figurehead, easy to control and manipulate.

Second was his indisputable charm and ability to flatter the humourless Fyrd without appearing in any way deceitful. He pleased easily and was easy to please, and the Fyrd generals who took over the city’s administration, one after another, since his appointment as High Ealdor at the age of just fifteen, ten years before, had found him the perfect partner. He was indeed clever and well-connected enough to know who was who among the hydden, how to flatter each of them, whose palm to grease, whom to exert his charm upon, and when to employ the stark threat of a visit from one of the Quentors, the inquisitors whose job it was to execute the orders of the Fyrd high command.

The contract was simple: in return for allowing Festoon to indulge himself with his own dwindling fortune, the Fyrd got all the benefit of his local expertise.

There was however one aspect of this comfortable arrangement that puzzled the Fyrd as much as it did the rich and the notable of Brum, who regarded Festoon with a mixture of embarrassment, shame and contempt. This was the fact that, for all his excess and wasteful extravagance, he enjoyed huge popularity among the ordinary folk of the city, whether they lived in New Brum or Old.

For them he embodied a quality which had never been satisfactorily defined, least of all by the denizens of that city themselves. It might be called ‘Brummishness’, which is the ability to poke fun, more or less with impunity, at whomsoever they pleased in a witty, droll and often unspoken way.

There was the sneaking suspicion among Brum folk, never spoken aloud nor even hinted at, that Festoon’s excesses and grotesqueries were aimed in some subtle way at the Fyrd themselves who, being what they were and coming from the culture that they did, could never quite get the joke.

It was a possibility bolstered by a very simple practical fact: while his forebears in the Avon clan had built their vast wealth at the expense of the poor folk of Brum, and in particular those who lived in lower Digbeth and the slums of Deritend, their last scion, the inheritor of their ill-gotten gains, seemed intent, through his extravagance, on giving them back in one single generation all the wealth that had been stolen from them throughout many.

For who grew fat on Festoon’s spending, apart from himself? The butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers, and all such traders and artisans he continuously employed – all of them hydden, all from Brum, all those folk whose arts and crafts, under the direct domination of the Fyrd in any other city in the Hyddenworld, would have died away to nothing and been replaced by the dull uniformity that characterized their alien breed.

But in Brum they flourished like never before, and by them, and the families they supported, Lord Festoon was seen as a much-favoured and popular lord and master of them all.

So most certainly, though Festoon might merely be a puppet, a fool he was not. That was a fact he disguised very well as he downplayed his considerable intelligence and learning on matters cultural and historical, and his willingness to spend his wealth not just on himself but on the arts and sciences as well, for it pleased him to patronize any whose skills and creative talents might bring a return of glory to his fading city.

But those few who knew him well, and whom he trusted, understood something else. He had an obsession, and one he self-deprecatingly claimed he would climb a mountain for, even in his obese condition, just to satisfy. He would, indeed, have relinquished his position and his remaining wealth for it, perhaps even his life.

The thing Lord Festoon most wished in all the world was to gaze upon Beornamund’s unrecovered piece of the Sphere, which held the colours of Spring.

To this end he had formed a collection of artefacts, archives, and much else besides, of items from all over the Hyddenworld which had anything to do with Beornamund, or the Peace-Weaver, or the legendary pendant of gold, inset with three of the four gems of the seasons, that she was said to wear.

In this he was given a start by the modest collection begun by his great-great-grandfather, Raster Avon, who had possessed the wisdom and foresight to bring to Brum, in the heyday of its development, the greatest architect of Araby, and a wise philosopher, namely ã Farouñ of blessed memory.

It is well known that among the most extraordinary of that sage’s creations in Brum was the elusive Chamber of Seasons, to which very few apart from Lord Festoon and his chef, Parlance, enjoyed access. Festoon himself, when he was well enough and had sufficient strength to climb the steps and negotiate the complex corridors necessary to reach the Chamber, would go there to indulge in reverie and to meditate; and Parlance would arrive simply because he had been summoned to take instruction from his master.

It was Festoon’s genius to order his extraordinary collection so that its different items were housed according to the season they represented within the Chamber – or, more accurately, in the sequence of chambers, each of which represented one of the different seasons.

Festoon believed that he himself was a direct descendant of Beornamund, and it was this fancied connection which drove him endlessly in pursuit of the lost and last piece of the fabled Sphere.

So it was that very often, when he was not indulging in public entertainment and feasting, he spent much time and effort in reading ancient tomes brought to him from the city archive, which might help him pursue this quest. As a result he was both friend and supporter of Messrs Brief and Stort; and when news of some discovered text or artefact came to their ears, it was Festoon’s habit to send the dependable Pike and Verderer Barklice off in search of that item, since clearly he himself was in no condition to go.

Festoon lived in – or rather beneath – a landmark building that was very well known to hydden and human alike – a building so prominent in Brum, in fact, that it offered proof of the original business genius of his ancestor Raster Avon to have grabbed it for a home when it first became available for hydden occupation.

The London and Birmingham Railway Company and its partner the Grand Junction Railway could never have imagined when they built the Curzon Street Station in grand neoclassical style in 1838, that within a few months of its opening the latest scion of the Avon family would be moving in. And that there, after importing leading architects and artists from Araby, he would create one of the greatest hydden buildings of all time which, apart from the mysterious and private Chamber of Seasons, included amongst its many glorious spaces the extraordinary Orangery whose warmth and humidity, so necessary for cultivating citrus fruits, was brilliantly engineered by a subversion of the city’s early steam boiler systems and daringly restored in the 1930s by the dour genius Archibald Troop, a designer famed for having entrapped the venting systems of nearby New Street Station and thus saved the Orangery and its rare specimens in the nick of time.

By Festoon’s generation, all that remained of what had once been the most elegant rail depot in Englalond – whose railway lines once fanned out eastward across a vast acreage – was its colonnaded entrance building.

Raster’s infamous bully boys had secured as much of the footings of this building as was possible, thus gaining control of miles of already half-forgotten conduits, drains, access ways and culverts in and around New Brum. In this way was created not just the base of the Avon business empire, but also room for its steady expansion under Raster’s successors.

Such was the foundation of the glory days of the Avon family.

But the strong seed of the past had turned to something impotent and sterile: the branches and shoots from the mighty trunk that had once been were now withered and dry, and all that was left of the trunk itself was the vast but seemingly rotten bulk that was Lord Festoon.

During those long days of rain when Katherine and Jack arrived in his city, Festoon was in no way exercised by the dire threat of the rising levels of river and canals. It was the eve of his birthday and, though every watercourse in Brum was overfull and rushing to discharge its load and flooding was imminent, he did not intend to lose sleep over the fact.

True, he listened briefly to the drumming of the rain and the sluicing of the pipes, considering matters carefully, but then, throwing all that aside with the careless comment, ‘It is out of my hands now and I shall not let it spoil my feast!’

He had long since decided to break with tradition that year and hold his feste in one of his inner sanctums, the splendid Orangery created in Arabesque style back in Raster Avon’s time by the lute-playing genius ã Faroün.

This extraordinary architectural fantasy, whose drapes shimmered exquisitely according to the cleverly directed winds and draughts of passing human traffic far above, and whose strange glass-and-metal panels, designed to reverberate to the shunt and hiss of steam trains overhead, were now responding subtly to unseen human cooling systems and Festoon’s private band of percussionists, was one of the glories of modern Brum.

Festoon loved it and sometimes, in the privacy of the night, it was his habit to go there alone, lock the doors and jump and pirouette elephant-like to the rhythms of the music in the place, imagining himself to be a delicate nymph rather than the grotesque obesity he actually was.

An invitation to celebrate his birthday in this rarely viewed Orangery was Brum’s must-accept ticket of the year, and everybody that mattered was coming, bar a few misogynists.

He had all but retired to his vast, soft bed when it occured to him that a conversation with Parlance, his personal chef and Master of Cuisine, might be sensible, to check all was in order for the day to come.