The Whispering Swarm (49 page)

‘She is poorly informed. Eight can be strong. But there are nine planes.'

‘Nine planets?'

‘If you prefer. That, however, suggests a simplification.
Nine worlds. Nine personae. Nine names. Nine rules to preserve the worlds. Nine stages of existence. All divides and multiplies by nine. Nine by nine and twelve by three, these decide our history. First we hear and then we find. Nine by six and twelve by nine, these our movements do define. Twelve is the web and twelve the node. How an adept finds the silver roads.'

He seemed to be breaking into rhyme. I was struggling. ‘Nine what—?' I thought nine drinks might help the pain go away. But I was terrible at burying my troubles with drugs. Christina said I had an unsleeping mind. I could never let anything just go. Analysis and understanding were part of my trade. Simple math gave me form. ‘Nine—bowling pins? I'm serious. I'm looking for it—then I can look for a metaphor. Nine monks…?' This was still baffling me. ‘Nine will take the pain away?'

‘No. But it will help you take control of the pain.'

‘Nine trumps?'

‘Ah, now you are referring to your own discipline, not mine. Threes and twelves. The Fool.'

My aunt had told me
:
‘You can't just be the Fool or say you're the Fool. You have to become the Fool.' She meant the tarot, of course. The Fool is instinctive wisdom, God's fool. The Jinglecap, as I'd called him in an early poem about myself
. He will dance for you, not well, but with vigour
. Pierrot. Identifying with the Fool of the tarot was an indication of what I'd like to be, not what I was. My character Jerry Cornelius as Pierrot. Before he becomes Harlequin, the street smart, the cynical. Yet at the same time both Helena and Molly had identified me with the Fool. They never could make up their minds about me.
‘The Fool is the piper leading the band,'
I said. He looked at me and chuckled.

‘Perhaps? Perhaps that's the secret whose answer we all seek. Peering into the fog.' In front of me a patch of dark grey mist had formed. As I stared into it I heard the abbot's gentle, rhythmic voice.

‘Think of nines and threes and twelves. Think of the cards with those numbers. Think of the Fool. The child rides from the sun. The wheel turns. Nine Swords pierce the hanged man. Nine Wands support him. His queen is the Queen of Pentacles. See her?'

It was coming back to me. My queen was the Queen of the Moon. My king was the King of Swords. My knight was the Green Knight
.
I was consumed by memories of that first séance with the abbot. His Cosmolabe. It was still there. He had no need to show it to me. Was this astonishing concoction of alchemy and misguided cosmic theory actually created to reach deep into my inner self? Had I needed to believe I owned a soul before I could see it at all?

If I had been asked how I felt at that moment, I should have said my heart was broken. My heart and my sense of self. I was lost within my own mind. His vision did nothing to stop my sadness. I tried to break the connection by imagining the tarot deck. How could I escape? All I saw in my mind's eye were the cards. The Swords and the Cups, the Wands and the Pentacles became webs and rods and planets and suns whirling before my eyes.

I still heard Father Grammaticus's faraway voice speaking to me.
Radiant Time,
he said.
The Black or Second Aether. A greater darkness lies within the familiar darkness of the void.
‘Here the black sun sits, drawing us all in to its insatiable orbit. But on the other side of that sun are the anti-worlds thrown out by a blazing light bursting fresh. And so it turns, throughout Creation!'
There were so many kinds of light: crystalline, fiery, gaseous, sharp.
He passed his hands through the orrery again. I felt powerless to look at his face.
I saw the Queen of Pentacles dancing with the High Priestess and the Emperor dancing around the Sun. I saw the King, Queen and Knight of Swords form a circle. And in the middle of all was the Fool. The Fool, poor Pierrot, who had let his Columbine dance off with her Harlequin.

Now it came to me. Suddenly the black energy pulsed and coiled between the stars. The silver threads arced and twisted making impossible connections. Heavy drops of blood fell like summer rain. Huge shadows spread to obscure a mass of suns. I was in agony. I screamed. My sickness had become an intense burning sensation. I did all I could to shrink it and rid myself of it.
Gravity is present but invisible, explained by the presence of identical worlds unseen by us.They nest, one inside the other, separated by density and mass. The only clue we have oftenstance is the Dark Flow!

He was teaching me something. Was he hypnotising me? Is that what had happened the first time I met him? Was I learning what he wished me to learn? Should I have listened better? Perhaps if I had been in a different situation I would have done. The science involved was over my head! Was it time I turned to Harlequin in pursuit of my love? I was crying hard now. I gave no further attention to Father Grammaticus. Silver roads? An illusion? Still crying I stood up. I shook my head to rid it of the images. I closed my eyes. Began to sway. My girls. How could I not think of them? I was tired of the pain, of the prospect of a future which no longer contained my girls. It felt like dying.

I came to know what death was. I couldn't tell anyone. I knew what it felt like when people said they were in God's hands. Even now I had almost no control over my thoughts or my limbs. I watched the black tendrils snake amongst the brightness, appearing to absorb it. I saw what looked grey and yellow, like flames flaring and dying. I was outside the galaxy. From Limbo the universe was a rippling pool of many dimensions. Everything had the familiarity of a recently remembered dream. Time had no shape. All kinds of strange, uncomfortable thoughts blossomed into images. Faces leered. Faces cried out, begging me for aid. She was there in a thousand aspects. Faces showed pity, love, pain. I couldn't help them. I had no volition. My whole being, every part, every inch of me, wanted to rest, to sleep. I became unable to move or think. I lost any sense of identity, any memory, any emotion. Yet still Father Grammaticus continued to talk in that calm, cultivated voice. I wanted to escape. I could neither move nor think. I felt myself grow entirely numb. I wept until there were no more tears.

I was dead.

 

38

COMMITMENT

I spent the night at the abbey. I slept fitfully, dreaming of Moll and Prince Rupert as Emperor and Empress in my old tarot deck. While my pain was still considerable I couldn't entirely blame them for what had happened. Rupert was an exceptionally interesting man. He was larger than life, intelligent, well mannered and funny. They made an extraordinary couple. Then why had she wanted to spend so much time with me? She said she loved me. About a hundred times. I'd had good reason to think she cared about me. Had she been setting me up, involving me in Rupert's plot to save the king? Well, she had succeeded. In the morning my head was surprisingly clear. During breakfast, which we all attended at dawn, I asked the abbot if his invitation were still open. I reminded him what he had said the previous evening.

Superficially I remembered very little of what Father Grammaticus had told me either the first time he had showed me his Cosmolabe or on the previous night. Yet it seemed to me I had absorbed the saliencies on a profound, subconscious level. I had heard a lot of weird cosmic notions in my time and his, though perhaps more complicated and elaborately supported, had to be among the weirdest. Barry Bayley had a fascination for barmy cosmic theories. He collected them the way some people accumulated incredibly bad records or movies. The weirder they were, the more they delighted him. But even Barry had never presented me with anything quite like this!

My scepticism was inclined to dismiss pretty much anything which didn't conform to conventional cosmological notions. Admittedly, I had learned nothing at school to explain my experience of the Alsacia. I decided that if I stayed there for a while, with no one to distract me, I might be able to learn a bit more or at very least lose myself in my work.

This was not the first time my natural hard-headedness had led me to storm ahead with a plan into which someone was trying to manipulate me. I went back to Ladbroke Grove. I packed a bag and I told Helena I would be gone for a few days. She said she had no interest in my plans. I kissed the girls and said I should be back soon but if I was gone longer they were not to worry and were to be good and look after their mother.

I returned with the bag I'd packed. The abbot himself met me at the abbey.

I told Father Grammaticus that I remembered almost nothing of what he had said to me the previous evening.

‘You need make no conscious effort,' he assured me. ‘It is in you now. Yesterday, my main hope was to help you find peace and sleep. And, conversely, I did that by bringing out certain innate gifts you possess. Like His Grace, you have a talent which I and most others lack. You will one day travel on the moonbeam roads, which I cannot do. Already you have an instinct for using those roads. I have had to learn patience and accept that I shall never see all you will see. Once I envied that talent. Now I understand what it costs. You are a natural adept. I was not conjured into existence. I have made my own journey and I have been given the lifetime I needed, indeed prayed for, to make it.'

‘An adept? Is that to do with understanding the supernatural?' I had never knowingly travelled on what he called the moonbeam roads. I had only a hazy idea what he meant. In my semitrance state I had seen those silvery strands branching away in all directions. I associated them with the abbot's notions of Radiant Time.

‘As an adept you will gain direct knowledge of things I shall never experience.'

‘The twentieth century?'

He smiled. ‘Much more.'

‘You spoke of Radiant Time. What is that?'

He raised his eyebrows to indicate that he might not be intelligent enough to know. ‘To understand Radiant Time you must first know that creation takes myriad disguises. Our Creator's mind is infinitely more complex and varied than any human mind imaginable. We use machines, made according to His wisdom, to measure, manipulate, imitate and survey His creation. The key to much of this remains, of course, an understanding of Radiant Time.'

‘It
must
have something to do with time travel!' I remembered that strange ride with Moll across the commons, when I had first met her. I had resisted so much memory. Now I was being forced to confront reality—and, for that matter, unreality.

‘And that's why you were so glad to welcome me? Because I could come and go through the gate?'

‘That, and your height.' Perhaps as a joke, he said this at a point when I ducked to avoid a particularly low ceiling. He, of course, was almost a foot shorter than me and, like a few in the Alsacia, found my height amusing. Sometimes I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. ‘Your broad back!' He reached up to clap me on it. For a moment I felt like a favourite horse.

We walked through the abbey to the cell they had allotted me. There had been no problem about finding me space. The abbey was built to accommodate many more monks than the current number. ‘We are particularly suited for guests.' Grammaticus smiled, wished me a pleasant stay and went on his way.

By monkish standards this room was luxurious. The ceiling was a bit low but there was a washcloth, towels, a mirror, water jug and washbasin, two kinds of nineteenth-century soap, a packet of shampoo crystals, a shaving brush and a modern safety razor. The bed was surprisingly comfortable. I took off my clothes to stretch out on it, meaning to rest briefly. I fell asleep almost immediately and awoke feeling well rested and in much better spirits. I had brought a book with me—an early pocket edition of
Paradise Lost,
John Milton's extraordinary epic examining, among other things, faith itself. I had always loved it as I loved Bunyan's
The Pilgrim's Progress,
the first book I had bought with my own money because it contained a picture of a dragon. Thanks to Bunyan I had grown up believing that fiction should have at least two narratives, the surface story and the implied one. The faith of both writers had impressed but never converted me. It was their visionary intellect that inspired me. I was impressed by Milton's intelligence and talent but I was no further forward in understanding his God who was, surely, the ultimately sophisticated Protestant figure, allowing no other manifestation in its hierarchy. The freedom of choice he permitted his beloved Lucifer was precisely zero. Read that and you examine the American soul. Its great dilemma. Torn between seventeenth-century conservatives and eighteenth-century radicals. I made a couple of self-pitying notes in my diary. Then I washed as thoroughly as I could in the cold water.

As I got dressed I thought about Molly and her mother again. I was still astonished by the way Mrs Melody had deliberately revealed my relationship with her daughter to Helena. Feeling the anger returning, I did everything I could to concentrate on my new book. I was again wavering in my intention to throw in my lot with the Cavaliers. I couldn't hesitate any longer. I needed to find Prince Rupert and offer him my hand.

Telling a friar I hoped to be back in time for supper, I left the abbey and headed up towards the square. From The Swan With Two Necks spread warmth, light and cheerful noise. My spirits rose and I entered the saloon bar in some style. Prince Rupert and Claude Duval sat there, amongst their friends and followers. For a moment there was a pause. Then a cheer. Then a louder cheer as my friends greeted me. Good fellows all, willing to die for their cause and die again, especially brave because they never anticipated their own longevity. I was so glad to see them that I didn't care why this was happening or where. Rather than spoil the moment I pushed my way to the bar to order drinks.