The Greenstone Grail (6 page)

‘Yes. I wondered … if they were there waiting. There’s something not quite right in that place. Not creepy, just rather peculiar. A feeling as if – something was out of kilter. I think it has to do with Michael’s wife.’

‘Rianna Sardou … A theatrical name. A name for a witch. I believe she looks like one, too, at least on screen: all darkness and glamour. A storybook witch. But stories can lie.’

‘Do you think there’s a connection between Rianna and –
them
?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know why they pursued you in the past, or why that pursuit resumed today. As I said, I don’t know any of the answers, but I can think of another question.’

‘What’s that?’ Annie could think of several.

‘Why don’t they ever catch up?’

Annie shivered. ‘
Don’t
! I thought – something
touched
me, back there in the lane …’

‘Nonetheless, they didn’t catch you. They followed you for months, all those years ago, and they didn’t catch you. Why not? They are far swifter than humans. They hunted you with darkness and terror, but you always eluded them. Are they chasing you, or simply watching you – spying on you? Or else –’

‘Can we not discuss it any more?’ Annie pleaded. ‘At least for now. I want to sleep tonight.’

‘You can stay at Thornyhill, if you wish.’

‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here. This is my place.’

In bed later, she lay awake a long time, but no movement stirred the curtain, and the night was empty and still.

Nathan dreamed. Not the now-familiar nightmare of the cop, with the hissing snake-voices and the taste of blood; this was a dreamscape he had known since early childhood, once vague and surreal, now increasingly vivid. A city. A city at the end of Time. Towers soared up a mile or more, multi-facetted, topped with glass minarets reflecting sky, and spires whose glitter caught the sun. Far below, the ground was unseen beneath bridges and archways studded with windows, flyovers, walkways, suspended gardens. Airborne vehicles cruised the spaces in between, leaving con-trails in their wake
that shimmered for a little while and then vanished. And occasionally there were creatures like giant birds, with webbed pinions stretching to a vast span and bony beaks, their human-sized riders hidden behind masks and goggles. Nathan had always enjoyed these dreams because often he travelled in one of the vehicles, looping the towers and diving under the archways, until he went spinning through a hundred dimensions of the dreamworld and tumbled at last into his own bed, waking exhilarated from the thrill of the ride.

This time, it was different. There was a huge dull sun, just risen, glimpsed moving through the gaps between buildings, climbing ponderously towards the open sky. The topmost towers and minarets had already sprung into glittering life and floated like islands of light above shadowy canyons where the dawn had yet to penetrate. Nathan was gliding through the air, an awareness without substance or being, looking through oval windows into an interlocking maze of rooms, all empty, like a termite mound with no termites. The city was enormous but there appeared to be few people and those all far away, too far to see clearly, moving singly or in twos and threes, but never in a crowd.

Presently, he found he was drifting beside one of the birds, but from close up it looked more like a reptile, its beak a pointed muzzle and its wings taloned, its long tail tipped with a spike. Its skin looked hard and had a slight gloss to it, as if it were made up of very tiny tightly-packed scales, steel-blue in colour and sheened with the early sunlight. The rider, too, wore blue, clothed from head to foot in some kind of metallic mesh, his hood close-fitting, with a slit for the mouth, a nose-guard, and opaque goggles covering the eye-holes. His saddle was very high in the pommel, the reins attached not to a bit but to iron rings which pierced the flesh at the corners of the creature’s mouth. Nathan thought it must be very
painful but he noticed the rider used only the lightest touches to steer, barely perceptible to the observer. The creature had an extreme fixity of expression even by animal standards; it took Nathan a little while to realize why. The eyes, set under bony ridges, had neither iris nor pupil: they were blood-red from edge to edge, lidless and locked in a perpetual stare.

The flight was very fast, faster than the skimmers, though the wings beat only at intervals; a whisk of the tail acted as a rudder. They came to land very suddenly on a rooftop platform where another hooded figure, this time in a plasticized suit and heavy gauntlets, took the reins while the rider dismounted. The gauntleted man – assuming it was a man – tethered the creature and fed it from a bucket of things that squirmed. Nathan followed the rider to a species of cylindrical kiosk and stepped through a sliding door into what was plainly a lift. They descended a short distance and emerged onto a long gallery with a high-coved ceiling and rows of pillars down either side, not straight but warped and twisted into irregular shapes like distorted trees. There were no windows but a pale glow, like an echo of daylight, came from the ceiling. At the far end they passed into a semicircular room whose curved wall, in contrast to the gallery, was all glass, though shielded in places with translucent screens. There was very little furniture, just a unit which might have been a desk and a couple of chairs. The automatic door closed behind them. Beyond the arc of the window, the sun’s rays were reaching down into the deep places of the city.

A figure stood with his back to them, gazing out. He was taller than the rider by a head, though Nathan had thought the rider exceptionally tall. His silhouette showed wide shoulders, booted feet a little apart, arms presumably folded. He had an aura of power and great stillness. Long after, Nathan
would remember this moment, this dream, more vividly than any other moment in his life before, but at the time he did not know its significance, nor guess. The rider waited, saying nothing. Eventually, the man turned.

He wore a black hood, but his face was concealed by a mask of something that looked like Perspex: white as alabaster and moulded into a semblance of human features. The mouth-slit opened between sculpted lips, the nostril-holes pierced an aquiline nose, the enlarged eyes were leaf-shaped, protected by bubbles of black glass. Like the rider and the man on the roof, not an inch of skin was exposed, not even a hair. When he spoke, Nathan understood him; it was only afterwards he realized the language was not English.

He said: ‘Well?’

‘It’s worse,’ answered the rider. ‘Dru didn’t want you to know. He’s afraid Souza will be cut off.’

‘It must be. There is no choice.’ The man’s tone was cool, all trace of feeling carefully extracted. ‘We will cut off the whole of Maali, from Ingorut to Khadesh.’

‘An entire continent?’ The horror in the rider’s voice was imperfectly suppressed.

‘Yes.’ The white mask expressed neither apology nor regret. ‘The contamination will spread beyond Souza in months, perhaps weeks. We have to act now. Our Time is running out.’ And again, with peculiar emphasis: ‘All of Time is running out.’

‘Is there any hope?’ asked the rider.

Behind the mask, Nathan imagined the man smiled. ‘Hope is a chimera,’ he said. ‘I do not clutch at chimerae. I made my plans long, long ago. There is no hope, but there
are
plans. We will hold to them. Now eat, and rest. You have flown far. Is your xaurian tired?’

‘No, sir. He is strong.’

‘Good. I will summon you later. You will go with the Fifth Phalanx to Maali. You know the coast.’

The rider made a brief bow, and withdrew.

The white-masked man moved one hand in a strange gesture, murmuring a word Nathan could not hear. An image appeared in front of him, life-size, three-dimensional, evidently made of light. It wore a purple cowl and a mask patterned with whorls and lines.

‘Souza is contaminated,’ said the white mask, briefly. ‘Instigate cut-off for Maali.’

‘The whole of Maali?’ said the purple cowl, evidently shocked. His voice crackled, like someone telephoning on a bad line.

‘Of course. Send the Fifth Phalanx and one of the senior practors. Raymor will go with them. He knows the terrain.’

Purple cowl hesitated, as if considering a protest, but refrained. Then he too bowed, vanishing at a gesture from his master.

The man walked towards the window again, resuming his contemplation of the city. Nathan saw him from close up, his chin sunken, the white shapely features gleaming in the daylight, the black bulge of the eye-screens revealing nothing. But behind the mask he sensed a mind at work, an inscrutable intelligence, vast and complex, and focused on a single path of thought, a plan, a goal – whatever that goal might be. Nathan had never before imagined such a mind – a mind so powerful that he could
feel
it thinking, he could sense the surge and flicker of suppressed emotion, the dreadful urgency beneath the calm of absolute control. Its proximity frightened him and he tried to draw away, pushing at the dream until it began to break up, and he was plunged into a long dark tunnel of fading sensation. He lost himself in sleep, but when he woke at last the dream was
still with him, clear as truth, and the memory of it didn’t grow dim.

It was perhaps a fortnight before he returned there. He knew it was the same world, the same dream, though the environment had changed. He was with a rider again, possibly Raymor, though now there were many of them, flying in successive V-formations of thirteen, the infrequent wing-beats of the xaurians almost exactly in unison. Below, the dull glitter of sunlight moved over a huge expanse of sea, stretching from horizon to horizon. He could see the ripple effect of endless waves, and here and there a dimpling of white as breakers clashed in a volcano of spray. Soon, a strip of coast appeared, rushing towards them, growing swiftly. He saw grey cliffs falling sheer to the sea, and beyond an uneven plateau, treeless and bleak.

The phalanx swung left and began to follow the shoreline. On the foremost xaurian he noticed there was a second figure seated behind the rider, dressed in red. What he was doing Nathan didn’t know, but his hand moved in a series of intricate gestures, and the air on their shoreward side thickened into a haze, like a veil dividing them from the land. The cliffs were barely visible now, plunging downwards to a broad inlet spanned by many bridges and surrounded by a sprawling port. There seemed to be boats on the water, and occasional skimmers wheeling insect-like above. One veered round and came towards them, but the veil grew denser even as it approached, and when it hit the barrier sparks ran along its sides, igniting into flame, and it spiralled down into the ocean like a dying firework. The red figure went on with its ritual: Nathan was close enough now to hear the murmur of a chant. Glancing to seaward, he glimpsed another boat, far outside the barrier. Two xaurians broke away from the outer wing and headed towards it. Nathan
couldn’t see clearly what happened, but there was a spurt of fire on the boat, and then it had vanished, and the waves rolled on unbroken.

He didn’t like the dream now, for all the exhilaration of the flight. He felt as if merely by watching, by being there, he had become a part of it, a mute participant in some terrible misdeed. He tried to pull himself away from the phalanx, and found his thought was falling, dropping like a stone towards the sea. And then his dive slowed to a glide, brushing the wave-crests, just above the place where the ship had gone down. There was someone in the water, presumably the last of the crew: he saw the grey hood bobbing up and down. The person had no lifebelt, no inflatable jacket; he wouldn’t last long. The xaurian riders, knowing that, had left him to his fate. Even though the drowning man had no visible face Nathan felt his terror, and the need to help grew inside him, strong as rage, until he thought he would burst with it. He drifted lower, reaching out, feeling the slap of cold water on his skin, seizing the flailing hands with a grip that caught and held. Then they were jerked out of the dream with a violence that made Nathan’s stomach turn, landing painfully on a beach of stones. A beach at night, with breakers crumbling on the shingle, and upflung sheets of foam, luminous in the darkness. Nathan released the clasping hands and sensed himself withdrawing, sliding backwards into oblivion. The dormitory bell roused him, hours or minutes later. He sat up, conscious of discomfort, and found the sleeves of his pyjamas were damp.

That Saturday there was a rugby match against another school. Nathan scored two tries, helping the Ffylde Abbey team to victory, and went home late and on a high. He had been planning to tell Bartlemy about the dreams but somehow, when it came to it, he distrusted his own imagination,
and was not yet ready to expose himself to anyone’s disbelief. But on Sunday he could see Hazel, and confiding in her was second nature to him. (Not George, he decided, without asking himself why. Just Hazel.) In the morning, he and Annie sat over a late breakfast, listening to the local news on the radio. A projected housing development, a missing person, the risk of flooding in the area. ‘A man discovered three days ago on the beach at Pevensey Bay is believed to be an illegal immigrant. He was dressed in waterproof clothing which covered him from head to foot, suggesting he may have swum in from a boat. He speaks no English and so far his nationality has not been established. Police think it unlikely he was alone and are asking local residents to be on the lookout.’

Annie noticed Nathan had stopped eating his cornflakes. ‘Are you all right?’ she inquired.

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ He resumed his breakfast, but with less enthusiasm. After a minute, he asked: ‘What will they do with him? Will they – will they put him in prison?’