Spring (50 page)

The Duck’s clientele, male and female, were drinking from narrow, single-handled flagons. There were three refectory tables, long and wide, where others ate from platters piled high with vittles and dived into bowls of steaming pottage, laughing, talking, shouting, and mopping their mouths and brows with red napkins provided, like the food, by busty, beribboned, Bilgesnipe girls.

‘. . . and Master Brief,’ called Ma’Shuqa, eyeing Jack meaningfully as they were led by Arnold through back rooms to where they were to clean themselves up, ‘someone hove in a short while ago and is waiting for young Jack by the baths. He’s in for a massage he won’t forget!’ Not for the first time, Jack told himself, a great deal seemed to go on which affected him without him being told about it.

The bathing establishment lay behind the hostelry, set among a tangle of huge pipes, some insulated, which came down from the human city above. From the fact that some steamed, and others had spewed calcareous deposits down the walls to which they were fixed, Jack guessed these were part of a water-heating system and boilers which fed human needs above.

They came to a door, marked Mallarkhi Steam and Bathing Company Limited, above which shone a dim red light behind a piece of glass on which were written the words ‘Open always saving Holy Days and April 10th’.

‘Ma’s birthday,’ said Arnold by way of explanation. ‘Her special treat. With the girls.’

They entered a humid foyer where a large muscular attendant clad in a sarong and white vest welcomed them and took money provided by Mister Pike, who seemed well known. They were given a loincloth and thin towels.

The danger of imminent flooding elsewhere had emptied this normally busy and always profitable establishment of its normal clientele and Jack and the others had its steam rooms to themselves. They luxuriated on wooden benches at ever-increasing temperatures, massaged by dark-skinned silent male attendants whose large hands and elbows and feet, but most of all fingers, found out their many aches and pains and soothed them.

The series of treatments came to an end with a vertical plunge into a pool so cold and deep that it made Jack feel for a moment that he had leapt into the void of a pleasant death and glorious afterlife.

It was only as he dried himself off that he realized that for the first time in his life he had exposed to general view the savage burns to his back and neck from the car accident in his youth.

If he expected no comment to be made or attention given he was mistaken.

‘By the Mirror itself,’ cried Brief, who cut a more solid and muscular figure in a loincloth than Jack had expected, ‘I had no idea . . .’

Stort, too, was curious, and even Pike, while the masseur who had earlier attended Jack but said nothing now reappeared and declared there was to be a special treatment for Jack.

He was led into a different room, the others following. It was warm and quietly lit, and an old woman awaited him. She was a healer of some kind, with a face so lined with age but eyes so bright with intelligence and youth that it was impossible to guess her age. She told Jack to lie on his stomach, his scars exposed to the others, while she examined him.

Towels were placed over his head and the lower part of his body, and on the less injured side of his back as well. The couch he lay on had a V-shaped hole in it which allowed him to breathe, but the position and towels made their voices muffled.

She played her fingers over him lightly as a feather, until finding some bump or knot, they paused, grew firm and pressed in to release tension beneath. As she did so she sang a soft song which at first seemed dirge-like, but before long, and because someone unseen played flute-like music, it seemed to him the most beautifully sad thing he had ever heard.

Except he
had
heard it, long ago and he knew that at any moment . . .

He was right.

The beat shifted to something fantastic, rhythmic and exotic.

‘I know that tune,’ he murmured. ‘I heard it when I was very young and I . . . it reminds me . . .’

Her hands were firm on his back, her voice soft in his ear.

‘You know the music, the music knows you. It’ll welcome you back one day no doubt, for it is the tune of all your clan . . .’

‘What do you mean?’ he mumbled, unable to turn his head to look at her.

But his desire to know, though it naturally ran deep, was no match for the lassitude he felt as her touch continued.

Was she massaging him? He was not quite sure.

Was she weeping his own ancient tears? He certainly began to think it felt like it.

Did her touch reach through his hurt body to his heart? He was sure it did.

Did he sleep for a time? He did not stay entirely in the mortal world.

When he finally did awaken, it was Brief himself who said softly in his ear, a hand firmly on his shoulder to keep him still and quiet, ‘Jack, our clothes have been washed and pressed and yours are here. You shall join us for late supper shortly but first the Modor wishes to talk with you. She says to rise gently and slowly, then to dress. Stort will stay with you.’

Jack heaved himself cautiously off the couch, his state of mind so relaxed that he did not much mind that the old woman watched his every move. Stort was his usual self, indifferent to his surroundings and uninterested in whether Jack was putting on his clothes or taking them off.

When he was fully clothed, the woman signalled for Jack to sit. He was glad to do so.

The Modor looked at him and spoke quietly: ‘You’ll feel very tired for a few hours, so you must sleep. When you wake you’ll feel you’ve been bashed all over with staves. Then you’ll feel wonderful for twenty-four hours and then . . .’

Jack nodded and was about to ask what she’d done to him when she continued.

‘You’ve reached a crisis, so expect a rough time. Your old injuries run deep and may never be cured.’

Jack thought for a moment and raised his eyes to meet the piercing stare of the Modor.

‘You said I
may
never be cured. Does that mean I
might
be cured: that my skin and burnt muscles could recover?’

The Modor sighed and bowed her head, eyes half shut. Then she stood suddenly and with a speed belying her age came over to Jack and took his hand in hers. Her eyes were black pools around which a thousand dark wrinkles gathered.

‘Most things can be cured,’ she said, ‘even such injuries as yours. It will take courage and cause pain, more than you can imagine, and who can tell if the healing is worth the cure for all the changes it will bring? But that is the journey of a giant and I can feel his spirit in you and that your wyrd is too strong to be easily swayed. And anyway . . .’

Jack shook his head with frustration and interrupted her. ‘People keeping saying I’m a giant but I don’t even know what that means.’

The Modor chuckled. ‘None of us know for certain what it means,’ she said. ‘But one thing is for certain – you’re a wyrd’s fool at the very beginning of your journey, so don’t linger in Brum at all, or in the Hyddenworld too long, you’re not ready for either yet. And neither is the Hyddenworld.’

Jack wanted to ask questions, about what she was saying, about the tune he had heard being played earlier, about who the Modor was herself, but he felt dazed and very tired. And what did it mean to be a ‘wyrd’s fool’?

‘When you do know what being a giant means – then you’ll find your cure,’ she told him gently.

Jack looked across at her as she moved towards the door.

‘I have other questions . . .’ he said, reaching towards her.

But she was gone, eyes lost in shadows, a smile retreating to memory, an absence as palpable as loss.

‘Who was she?’ Jack asked Stort.

‘Everything,’ said Stort, mysteriously, ‘but most of all . . .’

He murmured a word Jack hardly heard; certainly it seemed to make no sense.

The word was ‘love’.

Jack and Stort rejoined the others in the Muggy Duck where the crowd had thinned to make preparations, Jack was told, for the Chaste Parade next day.

‘Local to Deritend, the way we do it,’ he was told. ‘Forget the nobs up New Brum way, and the roughs in Digbeth, we do it like it should be done!’

‘Do what?’ asked Jack.

But answers were there none, people being too inebriated for lengthy explanations, or their thoughts elsewhere. He was so tired from travelling and the treatments that he couldn’t follow their discussions about floods and insurrection, the mixed arguments about tradition and parades, and Birthday Brides and Knots.

‘Knots,’ he asked her. ‘What knots?’

‘Only one,’ came the reply. ‘You’ll see’.

Much later, after two in the morning, members of the Mallarkhi clan began to arrive, bent on enjoying the day to come.

Ma’Shuqa Mallarkhi reappeared, declared them ready for bed, and cheerfully steered them into the small room with a long palliasse across the floor which they had to share. They lay down, blew out the candles, listened to the rain outside, and fell blissfully asleep.

I
t was the thump! thump! thump! of the steps on metal that woke Katherine from her nightmare to a real-life one.

She knew they were coming for her so she leapt out of bed, ran out of the cell and realized almost at once that when she turned right she was running straight towards them. Too late. She came face to face with Sister Chalice, who grabbed her arm and snapped at her as if she were a child, ‘I
thought
I heard someone being naughty!’

Sister Supreme was there also, along with two even larger Sisters.

‘Ah, good morning Sister Katherine,’ said Supreme, with a fixed smile. ‘I am glad you have been able to stretch your legs a little. Glad, too, that no foolish thoughts about escape came to your mind, for you can be assured that if you were to venture into the dark and dangerous corridors hereabouts we would not be able to rescue you from certain ruination. Aren’t you glad, therefore, that we found you before it was too late?’

Katherine opened her mouth to protest, but decided against it.

She pretended instead to be sleepy and confused. The Sisters surrounded her and led her on up the corridor, the way they themselves had come, and then up some old, cast-iron stairs. From above she could detect the sound of laughter and the smell of perfume.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she managed uncertainly.

‘We’re going to a party, my dear, but first we must prepare you. You look so hideous as you are. Your hair is naturally too wild, of course, but that is easily fixed. Your body is also too thin for your height, but a little padding will soon put that right.’

‘Padding?’ exclaimed Katherine.

‘Padding and other such female artifices may help you get chosen. You would not wish not to be chosen, believe me, for you are too delicate, too spirited, to endure the base attentions of some of the lower Fyrd. Worry not, Sister, for before long you will look exactly like one of us. Aren’t you pleased at the thought?’

‘No,’ protested Katherine, ‘you all look so artificial and horrible.’

This only made them laugh more.

‘Come on, my dears, let us have some fun turning this duckling into a swan!’

She found herself ushered into the same softly lit chambers she had arrived in the night before. It was full of Sisters in various stages of applying make-up and adorning themselves for some special occasion.

‘What are they getting ready for?’ she asked.

‘Lord Festoon’s birthday party, of course. Just think, each one of us here might become the Chosen One.’

‘Chosen for what?’ said Katherine uneasily.

‘Drink this my love.’

‘No!’

‘But yes.’

Someone grabbed her shoulders, another her arms, and a third clasped her head tight. A glass of fragrant liquid was put to her mouth, then her nose was pinched tight. She held her breath as long as she could, but eventually was forced to open her mouth just to gasp for air. The moment she did so, they tipped the liquid down her throat, and the next thing she knew she was swallowing it.

They held her tight until, against her will, she felt herself relax and even begin to smile.

‘Time now to attend to your hair, my dear,’ said Chalice, turning to someone else. ‘Sister Mary, what can you and your scissors do with this atrocity!?’

Katherine heard herself laughing helplessly as she watched a pair of scissors come snapping through the air towards her, held in a hand most beautifully manicured.

‘Relax,’ soothed a voice gently. ‘The worst was over yesterday, this is just a final trim.’

Katherine laughed again, a strange, wild, giggly kind of laugh.

‘
Relax
,’ the voice purred.

‘I already am,’ she was horrified to hear herself say.

J
ack woke in the dark, fuggy room provided by Ma’Shuqa Mallarkhi feeling disorientated. He had lost all sense of time and for a moment had the disconcerting feeling that he had lost something else as well. The silence beyond the heavy drape tacked across the window told him what it was.