Tanglewreck (12 page)

‘Come,’ said Micah urgently. ‘If you fear him, fear her more. Come away!’

Silver and Gabriel were friends.

Back in the Chamber, Micah let them run and play as much as they wanted, and he did not ask Gabriel to find food or help with the daily jobs.

He had not said to Gabriel how disturbed he was by their visit to Abel Darkwater’s house, and then to the meeting in Greenwich. He wanted to protect Silver but he could not allow Abel Darkwater and Regalia Mason to destroy the safe home of the Throwbacks, and he feared for his clan and his kind, as well as for Silver.

But if Abel Darkwater found the Timekeeper …

Deep in his thoughts, Micah hardly spoke to Silver, trusting Gabriel to take care of her.

Gabriel began to teach Silver how to find her way through the labyrinths, and where to come Upground. They told each other stories about their lives, and Silver promised Gabriel that whatever happened, one day she would take him to Tanglewreck.

‘I should be glad to see the place that you love,’ said Gabriel. ‘Nothing matters but those things that matter, Micah says.’

And Silver thought she understood.

In the timeless, ageless space of the Throwbacks, Silver felt happy again, happier than she had been for years. She remembered that with her parents and Buddleia at Tanglewreck, every day had stretched into every day, and she had been free, just like this. She started to sleep on her back, instead of curled up in a ball. She had no sense of how much time was passing – perhaps all of it. Perhaps none.

One day, finding Micah on his own in the Chamber, smoking his pipe, she asked him what he had meant by the ‘Experiments’. His face grew dark.

‘They be alchemists – him and Maria Prophetessa.’

‘That’s the beautiful woman called Regalia Mason?’

‘Yea.’

‘Is an alchemist a sort of magician?’

‘Yea, in sort.’

And Micah explained how hundreds of years ago, science and magic were nearly the same thing. Nobody studied physics or chemistry, they studied mathematics, or astronomy, and they studied alchemy. Astronomers were also astrologers, who predicted what would happen by measuring the movement of the stars. Even Isaac Newton, who studied mathematics, and discovered gravity, was an astrologer.

‘And Isaac Newton, he be a member of a secret society called Tempus Fugit.’

‘Time Flies!’ said Silver. ‘Abel Darkwater’s shop!’

‘Yea,’ said Micah. ‘Many of the alchemists spent all their
lives labouring to turn metal into gold, but some, like Isaac Newton, and Abel Darkwater, and Maria Prophetessa, and a very powerful magician called John Dee, they laboured to make Time.’

‘You can’t make Time,’ said Silver, thinking, even as she said it, how grown-ups were always saying they had to make time, usually for their children.

‘’Tis why he be alive and not dead in the earth,’ said Micah.

‘But you are all alive too,’ said Silver.

‘Yea,’ said Micah. ‘He experimented on us in the lunatic asylum in ways that would curdle your heart, but when we escaped we discovered that we be not dying as Updwellers do. Have you not noticed something about Abel Darkwater?’

Silver thought about his marble eyes, his round body, his shadowy face …

‘He be like us who don’t want the light. If our kind do go in the light, as Updwellers do, we die. Abel Darkwater is cleverer than we; he don’t die in the light, but he can’t be in the light for long. The dark slows death down, like hibernation. Like animals who sleep all winter.’

‘What else slows it down?’ asked Silver.

‘Cold,’ said Micah. ‘You put a piece of meat in your cold safes – fridges, you call them. Yea, in the cold safe it does not decay. In the sun it decays.’

‘Dark and cold,’ said Silver.

‘Yea,’ said Micah. ‘Dark and cold. Come.’

Micah hoisted Silver up on to the warm shaggy back of a
bog pony, and led her through a short maze of tunnels.

Silver hung on to the pony’s thick mane, and felt his warmth on her fingers. Now she understood why Abel Darkwater’s house was so cold. It wasn’t because it was an old house like Tanglewreck; it was to keep him alive. That was why he had no electric lights, and that was why Mrs Rokabye had been complaining so much about the cold – she had complained a lot, even for her. Silver didn’t feel the cold much. They had hardly any heat or electricity at Tanglewreck because their parents couldn’t afford it. Only Mrs Rokabye had electric fires and electric blankets, and even an electric headscarf that she wore in the winter.

‘Behold!’ said Micah.

They had come to a round corral where half a dozen cattle were contentedly munching hay. The temperature was freezing, and a haze of cold hung over the cows.

Silver shivered and wrapped her legs round the pony. She looked up and saw that the opaque natural light and the steaming cold were coming from a perfectly round sheet of what looked like frosted glass. But it was perhaps fifty metres in diameter.

‘In thine own world that be an ice-skating pond,’ said Micah. ‘A great marvel, for it remains frozen the whole of the year, and through your four seasons.’

‘It’s an ice-rink,’ said Silver.

‘We depend on it for our cattle. These cattle be bred by Abel Darkwater in 1805. We keep them in calf for milk, and we eat the calves for meat.’

‘When will they die?’ asked Silver.

‘I know not. None of us knows when we shall die. But that is true of thine own world too.’

Silver and Micah made their way back to the Chamber.

‘Why are you still afraid of Abel Darkwater?’ said Silver.

‘For the chains and the beatings and the blood-lettings and the faintings, and the dissections and anatomies he performed, and the great cold he kept us in, and the darkness where we dwelled before we be made different by him and her, and that he was my Master. He could destroy us still. He does not destroy us for reasons of his own, but I know them not.’

‘Why does he want the Timekeeper?’

Micah stopped as he was walking. ‘Abel Darkwater never must find the Timekeeper. If truly you know where it be …’

‘I don’t know where it be, I mean, where it is,’ said Silver.

‘He must not become Lord of the Universe, for that is his wish and his many lifetimes’ work,’ said Micah, his face grave.

‘How can we stop him?’ asked Silver.

‘He cannot do it without the clock.’

‘But he says I will lead him to the clock!’

Micah was silent. ‘It may be that you must dwell with us for the remainder of your days.’

Silver gasped at this. ‘What, and never see Tanglewreck again?’

‘It may be. If you be the Keeper of the Clock, it be your duty to keep it safe.’

‘But I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS!’

‘That may be the means of keeping it safe,’ said Micah.

Micah was troubled. He had been in close council with Eden and Balthazar, but none could decide whether Silver should stay or go. Finally Micah had decided that Eden must cast the Oracle and read the runes.

‘She learned it from a witch imprisoned in Bedlam – a true witch of ancient line. The Oracle will speak.’

‘When?’ asked Silver.

‘This day,’ said Micah.

That day, if day it was, and impossible to tell, Silver thought about everything Micah had said. What if she had to stay here with the Throwbacks? Live underground for the rest of her life? But the house had promised her that she would return. Yes, but one day, and one day might be a very long time away. And what would happen to Tanglewreck if she never went back? Would Mrs Rokabye inherit it if Silver just disappeared? Mrs Rokabye would never love it. She didn’t even dust it.

But if she didn’t stay, then she would have to confront Abel Darkwater again, and she was frightened of him, and Sniveller, and what they might do.

All these thoughts and more were crowding in Silver’s head when Gabriel appeared with a sack in his hand. She suddenly wondered how old he was. He looked about thirteen.

But Gabriel didn’t know how old he was. The Throwbacks never celebrated birthdays, nor did they follow a calendar or a clock, like Updwellers. Gabriel had been born underground, he knew that, and he was not old enough to have children of his own.

‘Don’t you remember anything from when you were a baby?’ asked Silver.

‘Yea, I remember great horses with manes round their feet, pulling wagons.’

‘And what about cars and stuff?’

‘Nay, not till I was grown nearly as high as a barrel.’

‘Well, what did people wear when you were a baby?’

‘They wore black clothes and tall hats and the ladies wore skirts like bells.’

Silver thought about this. Gabriel was just a boy, like she was just a girl, but he was talking about a hundred years ago, or maybe more. She had seen pictures of Queen Victoria and people in the nineteenth century, but it was impossible for Gabriel to be so old and so young.

‘I must feed Goliath now,’ said Gabriel. ‘Come with me, thou?’

He smiled and held out his hand. Silver took it shyly, feeling how different was the strong square palm to her own small soft hand. He made her feel safe, this boy, with his careful slow ways and the sense she had that he was always looking to see if she was safe.

As they went down the maze of passages, Gabriel had begun to sing in his strange high-pitched voice. Soon the
tunnel began to shake, and when they entered the Feeding Room, where all the animal feed was kept, Goliath was already there, blinking at them mildly through his small eyes.

‘I love thee, Goliath,’ said Gabriel. ‘When I was a baby you did rescue me from the Devils.’

Gabriel opened a wooded pen and started throwing in what looked like molasses cake. Goliath trotted in and began eating contentedly. He was much bigger than an elephant and much stronger too. Silver was a little bit afraid of him, but Gabriel was busy running round his body and clipping out knots and tangles from his thick coat.

‘Mammoths are supposed to be extinct,’ said Silver.

‘He is the only one,’ said Gabriel. ‘He would be lonely without me.’

‘When did he come here?’

Gabriel sat down, as all the Throwbacks did when they were about to tell a story. He began …

‘There was a time before the Throwbacks ever were, called the Great Frost. The River Thames sheeted over like a new land, and the water was so thick-and-fast froze that for a full winter-time, four moons, men and women and their children lived on top of the water, in wooden buildings and in tents, and lit fires that were hot as hell but not hot enough to burn the frozen furnace beneath. And it was a furnace beneath, for under the ice, shapes and apparitions of the dead could be seen.

‘It must have been by an accident of Time that Micah tells us of, yea, that the Mammoth had been preserved deep deep
in the river for longer than any man knew, but the ice-winter brought him slowly slowly to the surface, and a crowd of gentlemen had him dug out in his ice-case and displayed there on the river in all his silent sleeping wintry might.

‘Then, when no one expected it to happen and by chance and by fate, the thaw began one night, and houses and ships and lives were pulled down through the ice into the waters where they say life began. But here life ended and many were lost.

‘The Mammoth in his ice-case began to thaw too, he did, but he did not sink back into the mud where he had lain since the days of Boadicea, great queen of Britain. He awoke with a mighty trumpet, and his massy legs carried him through the torrents of the river, and he hid in the labyrinths of its banks – sometimes seen, as Time melted the years, but he was a superstition and a dream.

‘Then we came, and we found him, and we saved him.

‘There were two men who had begun to dig deep underground – Brunel, one was called, and Bazalgette, the other was called – and they dug pipes and sewers and drains and conduits and passages deep in the earth, and Goliath was seen by them, and they wanted him for their zoo, and they pursued him. But we saved him, and Time went on, and the men died, and others came, but in the new time there was no such thing as a Woolly Mammoth; he was a superstition and a dream.’

Silver looked at the beast and at the boy and suddenly she
felt better. She felt that she could stay here with this strange boy who had become her friend. Tanglewreck and the Timekeeper seemed very far away. Maybe she didn’t have to be brave at all. Maybe someone else would be brave instead.

Somewhere in the tunnels, a horn sounded.

‘Hark,’ said Gabriel. ‘The Council is done. We must go to hear what they have debated.’

‘They’ve been reading the runes,’ said Silver. ‘I’m a bit worried about that. I don’t think I know what a rune is.’

Goliath bent his shaggy head so that Gabriel could pat him between the eyes, then, leaving him eating as slowly as he liked to do, Gabriel took Silver’s hand and they ran back down the passages and into the Chamber.

As Thugger regained consciousness he had the sense of someone stroking his hair, very agitated, and saying sorry all the time.

It was Fisty.

‘Didn’t mean to conk you out, Mister Thugger. I was fighting for me life, after all that rabbit business.’

‘What rabbit business?’ said Thugger, feeling the bump on his head.

‘We’ve been tricked by a rabbit – terrible mean beast, it is, with big staring eyes. It tied me up, but I got one arm free and that’s what I hit you with.’

‘You were born stupid and you will die stupid,’ said Thugger.

‘Elvis is dead already,’ said Fisty sadly, picking up his dog’s ear with his one free hand.

‘He can’t be dead, cos he was never alive,’ said Thugger.

‘He was to me,’ said Fisty sadly, staring at Elvis’s rigid metal body stretched out on the floor.

‘Boo hoo,’ said Thugger. ‘And when we’ve cried over your non-existent dead dog, how are we going to get ourselves out of ’ere?’

‘We can’t. The rabbit has spies everywhere.’

‘I am not scared of a rabbit,’ said Thugger.

‘Wait till you see it – size of a pony, it is.’

‘Gimme yer feet, I’ll cut the twine and we’ll find a way out. Come on, come on!’