That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (2 page)

She looked down at him.
‘Nothing is sacred,’ she said flatly. She handed back the notebook, in which he immediately resumed writing. She had the impression that he was recording the incident which had just occurred.

‘
Can I quote that? Nothing is sacred?’

She was sorry she had allowed himself to get angry at a magazine hack, of all insignificant people
.

‘
Go ahead,’ she said wearily.

Gwynn returned then, emerging out of the smoke and shadows.
‘Our chariot awaits.’ His gaze taking in the pen-wielding youth, he raised an eyebrow at Vali.

‘
Let’s go,’ she muttered.

Carrying Mona, Vali followed Gwynn up the stairs and out to the yard behind the café. The young scribe climbed behind them, introducing himself to their backs. His name was Siegfried and he worked for
Verbal Nerve
magazine. Perhaps they read it, or had seen it somewhere? He was honoured, in any case, to make their acquaintance.

He was ignored.

Vali welcomed the chilly kick of the autumn night outside. Mona coughed in her sleep. The vehicle was a hooded chaise harnessed to a wretched-looking nag whose ill condition was typical of Sheol’s cab horses. Vali and Gwynn were too busy seating Mona comfortably inside to notice Siegfried positioning himself to get aboard. When he squeezed himself in next to Vali, she found herself at a loss. Merely telling the kid to leave seemed a weak reaction to his bizarre rudeness, and if he refused to go, what could she do? To remove him by force would likely rebound in publicity of the least desirable kind. Killing him without preamble would be crass. She wondered if Gwynn would do anything, but he was still ignoring the boy, evidently regarding him as her guest and her problem. She resigned herself to accepting it as yet another strange and uncomfortable situation to be endured, and gathered up her dignity.

‘
Magnolia Terrace, river end,’ she ordered the driver, a bent and leathery beldam wearing a battered tricorn and a voluminous cloak. The old woman cracked her whip and the horse lurched off at a trot, drawing them across the flagstones and out into the traffic and crowds that filled Sycamore Street from side to side even this late on a cold night.

It was unpleasantly congested under the canvas hood
. Vali and Gwynn had twisted sideways to give Mona more room, Vali’s muscular frame still requiring a good third of the seat. The assorted firearms and blades the three carried made the cramping of bodies even more uncomfortable.

While they were arranged thus, Siegfried
embarked upon a celebrity interview. Mona being still unconscious, he questioned the other two.

How many people had they each killed? Did they enjoy their work? Could they share any special memories? In their respective views, what was the duellist
’s role in society? What did they do in their spare time? How were their homes decorated? What did they think of Mona’s dance with death? The youth fired questions and chased answers with relentless zeal, seeming oblivious to the peril he would be in should one or both of his captive subjects lose patience. Or, if he did understand, he was stimulated by the danger.

Vali responded with monosyllables or silence. With an air
of endeavouring to keep the pest off her back, Gwynn met the boy’s quizzes with answers which, whether true or not, would make good copy. Vali suspected him of enjoying the attention, but her mood didn’t allow her to be amused. He was the one with a public to think of, in any case. It was only her closeness to Mona that made her a target of curiosity these days. Siegfried listened avidly, filling page after page with shorthand notes.

To Vali
, their progress took on the confused, uncontrollable quality of a dream. She started to feel that she had slid into an alternative, stupidly surreal existence crammed with details that were irritating, strange and boring all at once. Battalions of late-night shoppers and party-goers surged under green and red silk lanterns strung on wires across the streets, hurrying as if on missions of great and secret importance. The hag cried out and thrashed the horse, which panted like a demon-beast in front of them, white breath steaming from its nostrils and bones moving like pistons under its skin. Mona’s lovely head lolled, saliva pooling at the corners of her mouth.

They passed
an open yard where a religious lynch mob was holding an auto-da-fé. Hundreds of faces, cheering in rapt hysteria, were washed in orange light from the scaffold, where a human shape was visible at the centre of a blaze. A procession of hooded penitents moved across the road, each pair lashing the shoulders of the pair in front, forcing the through traffic to stop while they passed. The old woman and half a dozen other drivers screamed abuse at the lashers, who kept to their shuffling ritual pace.

The noise woke Mona. Her eyes opened wide and she grabbed Vali
’s arm. ‘I’m dying!’ she gasped. ‘I saw it! I saw Death. I’ve been dreaming. Don’t take me to the house, Vali. Take me to the necropolis. I want to die there, where it’s quiet.’ She looked around deliriously. ‘Where am I? Vali, are you here too?’

Vali
kissed Mona’s flushed cheek and stroked her hair, trying to soothe her. ‘Don’t fret,’ she murmured, ‘we’ll be home soon.’

Mona clutched her hand.
‘No!’ she rasped fiercely, ‘I’m dying!’ As if to make the point she started coughing wetly. ‘I want to die in peace,’ she whispered. ‘Out in the air, under the stars. Take me there, Vali. Please.’

‘
All right,’ Vali said. ‘All right, sweetheart. Driver!’ she shouted. ‘Change of plan. Take us to the necropolis.’

‘
Aye; it’s pretty this time of year,’ the beldam shouted back.

They clattered through the city, a nightmare journey with Mona falling into frequent bouts of coughing. In between these she lapsed into a semi
-conscious state. Every now and then the celebrated duellist would look around glassily and ask, like a child, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

‘
Soon,’ Vali promised her over and over.

Siegfried
wrote it all down.

At last they reached the dry canal, hardly more than a trench filled with vegetation and rubbish, and the ancient metal bridge that was the only approach to the city of the dead. The necropolis covered the hills on the other side with a dark panorama of monumental stonework for several kilometres in both directions. Sheol was old, and needed extensive space to accommodate its many generations of dead. The city proper ended here. Beyond the great cemetery there was only a no-man’s land of weeds and twisted bushes before the drop over the Edge.

The road finished
on the further side of the bridge. Vali gathered Mona in her arms and lifted her out of the seat while Gwynn paid the fare. Together, Vali and Gwynn tried to support Mona between them so that she could walk, but she sagged and stumbled so much that Vali picked her up and carried her again.

Gwynn spoke to Siegfried, who had climbed out with them.
‘It might be just as well for you to go back, all things considered.’

The boy turned up the collar of his coat against the cold, which was sharper than in the city centre, and tugged on
a pair of woollen gloves. ‘Sir, I’m not afraid of a little death,’ he said intrepidly.

‘
Those could be famous last words,’ said Vali, overhearing.

‘
I’m not famous yet.’ Siegfried grinned, pleased at being included in the comradeship of these people. Vali and Gwynn exchanged looks.

‘
They go where angels fear to tread,’ Gwynn said as the cab rattled back over the bridge.

Mona wanted to be taken to St Anna Vermicula
’s tomb. From Vali’s memory, the saint was buried a good half-hour’s walk over the hills towards the barrens. She moved with a swift stride, her friend’s body a burden of long bones and heavy furs.

The necropolis was a city in more than name alone. Many of the greater tombs and monuments were as large as the houses of the living, while individual sarcophagi we
re stacked in tiered enclosures many levels high. Stone stairs provided access for those who wished to pay their respects, or who were simply sightseeing. A group of tourists walking some distance away were visible by their bobbing lanterns.

The silence of the place was a tangible presence in the air, as if it were not merely an absence of sound but a thing with its own substance. There were no trees in the huge graveyard, but soft, short
-bladed grass grew on the paths, muffling footsteps. The night sky was marvellously clear, with a moon in its third quarter and a glut of stars that looked, Vali fancied, like ice-crystals gathering in readiness for winter – or candles burning in reproachful memory for all the drowned hours in a person’s life. But the latter seemed more like one of Mona’s thoughts.

A grey fox trotted past. Mona was quiescent, and even Siegfried seemed, for the moment at least, to have run out of
words both to say and to write. To her surprise, Vali felt the first touch of an unfurling peace.

St Anna Vermicula’s tomb was a colonnaded mausoleum housing a black marble effigy of the warrior martyr, standing on the farthest hillside in the oldest section of the necropolis. The Edge was only a few hundred metres away across the untended land that continued on where the graves ended at the bottom of the hill. It was visible as a sudden curtailing of the earth, with starry space above. On the hillside, the silence was replaced by the wind droning along the sky-coast.

Vali sat on the weathered steps of the tomb, her arm around Mona. Gwynn had lit a cigarette and wandered off. Siegfried, too,
had put himself somewhere out of view. It was possible to imagine that she and Mona were alone in the landscape of marble and weeds.

She fell gradually into a sense of timelessness, as if Time were a woman and she a babe on Time
’s back, and Time had put her down, until she felt as still and untroubled as the tombs themselves and sensed a mysterious familiarity with the stars.

A
s she grew more deeply immersed in this state she came to an understanding that the universe was alive. It breathed with the breath of multitudes, and it did not know loneliness. If it loved, there was nothing of need or desire in its love. The priests of this country would say that the night’s ravine was alive with God, but she couldn’t imagine their God inhabiting that enormous tranquillity. The state of grace flowed without regard for custom or for its own alienness to everything it touched.

Mona stirred, bringing Vali back from her reverie.
She was whispering something. Still feeling calm and strangely adrift – had the stars moved? – Vali bent her head down to listen.

‘
If you like,’ she said, and turned around and called out to Gwynn. He looked up from where he was sitting cross-legged on top of a sarcophagus higher on the hill.

‘
Mona wants to go down to the Edge,’ Vali shouted to him. ‘I’m taking her. She wants you to come too.’

He crushed his cigarette out on the
pitted stone and tossed the butt away to join the others on the ground. Swinging down, he looked across the ragged land towards the cliff. ‘Fine with me,’ he called back. ‘The dead are rotten company.’

The night wind out on the barren margin was a biting cold current that seemed to blow straight down off the stars. But the strip of no-man’s land was, in its way, a place as beautiful as it was exposed. Wildflowers grew among the untidy grasses, and these had the charm of things never cared for or interfered with by anyone, and the lonely stunted and wind-tortured trees possessed the shapeliness of driftwood. Birds came and went here too: wild geese, finches, nightjars, shrikes who had found ideal nests in the thorn bushes onto which they affixed the rodents and smaller birds that were their prey.

Vali and Gwynn made their way down the hill and across the delicate and brute ground, their hair and coats whipping in the wind, Vali carrying Mona bundled in her wrappings of velvet and mink. Siegfried followed several paces behind,
scribbling in his notebook again. More than once he tripped over rocks and pieces of fallen masonry he had failed to see, but he hardly noticed his barked shins and stubbed toes. His hands were trembling with excitement. He wasn’t going to give this article to
Verbal Nerve
. Better publications would want it. He basked for a moment in the vision of a career reporting on the lives of the rich and dangerous, as one who had been admitted into their world. Realising he was running out of paper, he wrote as minutely as he could.