The Giant's Almanac Read online

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  MOTHER’S 1. Forget it

  2. The jewel

  3. Michaelmas daisies

  4. The shãhanshãh

  5. Dilaram

  THE HERESY 6. The Heresy

  7. Dina

  8. The case

  9. The Disillusioners

  10. The Sensorium

  11. Nightwalking

  12. The blank eye

  13. The Incoherentists

  14. The Black Wedding

  15. The Kingdom of Bones

  THE KINGDOM 16. The Game of Kings

  17. Navy

  18. The Giant’s Almanac

  19. The diver

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Andrew Zurcher is Bruce Cleave Fellow in English and Drama at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and he writes widely on the works of Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare. His debut novel, Twelve Nights, was published in 2018. The Giant’s Almanac is his second novel.

  @andrewzurcher

  Also by Andrew Zurcher:

  Twelve Nights

  For Davara

  To the nobleman Khwaja Kalan, who held the fortress at Kabul, the emperor Babur wrote in 1528. He was on campaign far to the south, near Etawah, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, India. Dismounting in a strange land, he called for a melon, cut it, and wept as he ate it. How, he asked his friend, could one forget the pleasures of one’s home? How could one forget both melons, and grapes?

  Author’s Note

  Every word has a history, and most of them are ancient. Just as the water poured into a cup has reached that cup only after circling the skies in a cloud, only after raining from that cloud upon the soil, only after seeping through that soil to trickle into a river, only after running down that river to pool in some reservoir; so a word reaches your mouth, or your hand, only after thousands of years of arduous travel and continual exchange, crossing frontiers and propagating by the whispers and songs and poems and conversations of thousands on thousands of people we have never known, and can never know. At last it comes to you, a scribble on a page or a fleeting thrum sounded on the air: its being so light, and the time of its use and sense so brief! There are few lives so fragile as that of a word, and few histories so miraculous. And yet words are all around us, impossible and fecund and every one of them a marvel. Tens of thousands teem in you, only waiting to serve your need – that is, to express yourself, to say what you mean. Like pilgrims, or like birds on impossible migrations, they have reached you still on the wing, and your speech is but the flitching of their feathers as off, still flying, they pass into the future.

  Among many words that I cherish, there is one I love most – perhaps because over the course of its journey it has acquired so many meanings that have to do with journeys, with the past and with the future. It is a word that has rubbed shoulders with mathematics, and with distant stars, with longing and with the seasons, with love, with generals plotting wars and with farmers planting fields. Almanac: this word came into English from the Latin spoken across Europe in the Middle Ages, and from French, but it had in turn been borrowed from Spanish, and the Spaniards had themselves had it from Arabic – that is, the Arabic spoken by the Muslim conquerors who occupied Spain between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries. In Spanish, in French, and in Latin an almanac was an astronomical calendar used for making astrological predictions; farmers turned to almanacs for advice on when to sow their seeds, or breed their livestock, and lovers, and merchants, and sailors loved, and traded, and set sail according to the almanac’s recommendations. But the Arabic word spoken in Spain, al-manak (‘the calendar’), had itself come from some other source, possibly the Syriac term lĕ-manhay, ‘the year to come’, or perhaps the Classical Arabic word al-munāk, ‘the place where the camel kneels’, thus ‘the stopping place’, or ‘the end to the day’s travel’.

  I like to think of people long ago – people just like you, and me – reaching at evening the end of their day’s tiring journey, and gathering beneath the constellations and beside their kneeling camels to pass the night in talk, in song, in planning for more days yet to come. It was from these people, nestled among their tired animals with their eyes upon the stars, that this plotting and keeping of space and time, the almanac, first arose. It is the map of the heavens, the guide to life, and the end of the journey, still whispering of the desert, and of the sky, of light and of night, of setting out and – at length – of coming home.

  MOTHER’S

  * * *

  1

  Forget it

  Hanging from a corner of the roof, his hands like claws all muscle strapped to the leaden drainpipe, his now aching heels ground into the old wall’s gritty mortar and still more gritty, crumbling brick, Fitz would normally have taken a wide view of the garden around him. Most days, he climbed the Old Friary half just for the privilege of this moment, the space of three or four deep, steadying breaths in which he could feel himself, though only a boy, the lord of it all. To one side, flanking his own humbler cottage, within the compass of the tall hedge, was the orchard where Clare once stole, she said, at evening for apples. To the rear of the Old Friary stretched the stately lawn, scored on either side by arcing beds of cadent roses. And beyond the gable to which he clung, beneath a red western sky, stood the ancient great maze cut from privet, its frustrating paths one of his earliest memories, its plan like the map of his own palm one of his most enduring. All of it – the orchard, the rose lawns, the maze – lay beneath him now, the disregarded petty kingdom of the house.

  Had he paused to think, Fitz would have thought about the house: this house, this great house, that was almost his own. He would have thought it strange, maybe, to find himself breaking into a place so familiar. After all, he might have gone in by the front door. Often in the past he had gone in by the door. He had a key, given him by Mr Ahmadi Senior, with strict instruction to visit the library every day. But since Mr Ahmadi Senior had died, and his son and heir had come to live in the Old Friary, since everything had changed, Fitz had tended to climb the drainpipe. Something about Mr Ahmadi Junior unsettled him; where his father had been slow, kindly and gentle, his son by contrast strode into every room with an abruptness, a restless immediacy that made Fitz jump. He seemed always about to step out from behind the door, always ready to deliver one of his mordant rebukes. So different from his father, and yet, somehow, alike, the son had slipped into his father’s place as a knife might a wound. As Fitz hung from the edge of the roof, digging his heel hard against the ancient brick wall, he might – had he thought about it – have made a resolution to avoid Mr Ahmadi Junior altogether, and evermore.

  But today his hands and feet seemed to climb by themselves and, oblivious to the grounds around him, blind to the house and to the man who sat at its centre as a spider tends its web, Fitz had only one thought on his mind. He certainly wasn’t intending to borrow a book. Instead, tucked inside his shirt, close against his skin, lay the crisp, rigid square of an envelope. Where his body hung, slung against the wall, it seemed to arch instinctively away from the paper’s cool surface, from the sharp corners that dug into his flesh when he moved. As for the letter within the envelope – he wished he had never read it. He didn’t want anyone else to see it.

  Above all, he didn’t want Clare to see it. Ever.

  Fitz kicked his right foot against the hard brick wall. He was here. For a second the pain in his leg surged into, and joined with, a flush of something hot and vital that rose in his neck and swept down his back and hips. It was the sharpest, fullest feeling of presence.

  For every presence, an absence. For every end, a beginning. For every height, a depth. The words of his old neighbour thrummed
in his ears. Every zenith, my eyes, has its nadir.

  Now he was losing his footing. Fitz turned to the heavy stone casement of the second storey gallery. Capped with an alcove almost entirely freestanding in cut stone, it had been added long after the friary was first built. Its high windows were always locked, but like most things that surrendered to the ingenuity and persistence of an eleven-year-old boy, these locks for the right fingers had a trick to them. Anything – even an impossible thing – can be open to you, if only you have a method. Fitz swung his left foot on to the ledge, heaved his body round the drainpipe and stood on the ledge. He pressed the warped iron pane, slipped his finger against the catch inside, then swung the window silently open. Like a cat he sprang to the floor, the pads of his feet making no more sound on the floorboards than water slipping into water.

  Fitz was going to lose the letter in a place where it would never be found. When you come into my library, any library, you leave all the cares of your life behind you. You shut them out. When you are in the library, you are safe.

  Mr Ahmadi Senior had been right enough about that. The library made Fitz feel safe. But it wasn’t the books, exactly, or the quiet afternoons which, undisturbed and lost to the world, he passed in reading at the decorated walnut table, beneath the room’s high windows. What made him feel safe were his words. Zenith. Nadir. Algorithm. Albatross. He recited them, often, like an incantation to ward away spirits, threats and curses, and when he had once run through them he circled back and pronounced them to himself again. Now, stepping down to the wooden boards of the gallery floor, each step was a syllable, each pace another. He stalked silently up the gentle slope of the long gallery floor. His gaze he focused on the little stairs that led from the far end of the gallery to the main hall and staircase, and beyond the stairs to the library. As he passed by, intoning his words with religious care, he dared not look to either side, where on his left and on his right hung grand portraits in full length and dress of the family’s illustrious ancestors: men swathed in strange, sumptuous fabrics, their hands resting with comfortable assurance on heavenly orbs or mariners’ instruments, on the hilts of swords, or smartly tailored in the long, formal clothes he knew marked them as Janissaries, elite soldiers of a vanished empire. Their precise moustachios, their beards and weapons and tools all placed just so, their unremitting eyes, and, above all, their likeness – these things, these things and so much more, so drilled into Fitz each time he had looked at them, that he had begun to think that their places had been reversed, that he was the portrait, and they the harsh critics who had come to inspect him.

  Onwards: making no noise against the little steps, no noise on the cut marble landing at the top of the grand staircase, no noise in the corridor that led to the south wing of the Old Friary, he pressed towards the library, holding his breath only as he crept past old Mr Ahmadi’s study – where, perhaps, his son even now sat behind the antique desk, working beneath the countless small cupboards that opened on the wall above, like eyes, in which every odd thing had its home.

  Fitz padded softly into the library. His breath was still, his pulse calm, each beat of his heart a syllable. Zenith, nadir. Now, reaching for the wooden steps, he repeated those syllables again. Now, climbing to the top of the steps and turning to the highest of the room’s shelves in the greatest of its fine, carved oak cases, he said them yet once more.

  Albatross, the diver.

  Fitz ran his index finger along the leather spines of Mr Ahmadi’s ancient library. The top shelf held the smallest volumes, but notwithstanding their size, he knew they were just as precious as the taller, more imposing folios below. Perhaps even more precious. For the last several minutes, climbing, stealing through the house, ascending the steps, drawing through the air with his hand, it was as if Fitz had been making a single motion, extending his body in a long sweep as a dancer might, to this perfected gesture.

  His finger stopped.

  Beneath it, in a gap that should have held a wider book, leaned a little card-bound volume. Its cover, a faded yellow, was spotted and on its back a little mouldy. Fitz had lighted on it, pulled it from the shelf, and found himself holding it before he meant to. From inside his shirt, buttoned close against his chest, he drew the thin, folded sheet in its plain white envelope, holding it by thumb and forefinger as if it were a snake or spider, or any venomous thing.

  He remembered the letter’s short words well enough without reading them.

  ‘It is now past time. He is not your child. I will come for him.’

  Fitz shuddered once, then thrust the letter into the gap, a white shadow cast into a dark recess of ancient, tanned leather. For a moment he watched it, willing it to be still and not to spring back, to fall into his hands as it had that morning. In the shadow between two books, deep within the shelf, he could still make out the simple address on the envelope, the curt and aggressive strokes that were the start of Clare’s name. It had never been meant for him.

  He didn’t care. In the silent audience of his own thoughts, his words repeated: zenith, nadir, algorithm, albatross.

  He was safe. More importantly, Clare was safe. Very soon he could forget all about it. He could look away, and forget it. It would be over.

  Fitz took a deep breath. He turned to the little book in his hands and thought he might borrow something from the library today, after all. It was a thin and a beaten book, a sudden and impulsive and an ignorant choice. That pleased him; but he didn’t stop to open it, to swim as he usually did with big strokes of his eyes across the title and the first pages, taking in those delicious opening words like sugar on the tongue in the late afternoon. He had simply dived in and snatched it; now he clutched it hard to his side, and slipped down the steep wooden steps to the floor. The act was done, the mission nearly ended; now he needed only to cross the landing and the gallery, slide down the drainpipe, and cross the garden, and that letter, those terrible words, would be out of his life for good.

  From down the darkening hall came the sound of a muffled voice. Something about its tone made him freeze, straining to hear. It wasn’t anger, but an edge more serious, a tension that stopped only just short of cruelty. He crossed the library to the door, caressing the floor with the pads of his feet as a dancer might, or a cat before pouncing, and listened again. He could almost make out the words: intermittent, animated, punctuated by long pauses. It was Mr Ahmadi Junior, speaking on the telephone.

  Fitz wouldn’t remember, later, the delicate steps with which he crept down the hallway. He wouldn’t remember the careful placement of the balls of his feet on the dead and silent centre of every floorboard. He wouldn’t remember the gloom shed by the far window, where the gathering storm outside drizzled in its failing light. He was drawn as if in a dream by a thread, and his gaze lay along that thread focused and intense, ignorant of any other sight or sound, any other touch. He might have floated.

  ‘I remember very well whose son I am!’ barked Mr Ahmadi. The sudden clarity of his voice, roused with impatience, broke Fitz’s trance. His left hand shot out, by instinct, and gripped the frame of the study door. The door itself, thick and solid, stood firmly shut before his face. No one had heard him. He steadied himself.

  ‘That’s just the problem,’ Mr Ahmadi continued. ‘That’s just it.’

  There was another pause, then some muttered words, too low to make out. Fitz strained his ears, tightening his jaw and leaning towards the door until his forehead nearly rested on its deep-grained panel.

  ‘I will kill him if I must,’ Mr Ahmadi said. The words hardly carried into the hall, if they did at all, no more than syrup through a cloth.

  Fitz started back from the door as if electricity had surged suddenly through it. Had he heard what he thought he had heard? His heart leaped and stuttered.

  ‘Anything –’ Mr Ahmadi continued – ‘to keep him out of play.’

  The hallway whirled in the stillness that followed. Fitz, planted on his feet, felt as if he had been plunged into the d
epths of a great and current water, whose swells waved through him in irresistible shocks of surprise and nausea. Though he feared to make even the smallest movement, he had the impression that his legs, stamping wildly for purchase around him, staggered. His hands, still at his side, seemed to be swimming in the air. The skin bristled along his neck and shoulders, and pricked down his arms. A burning, painful feeling grew in his chest, and he realized that he had been holding his breath; for fear of gasping, he held it still.

  ‘I will kill him if I must.’ It couldn’t have been that. He must have misheard. Fitz closed his eyes, preferring blindness to the juddering spasms that had begun to shake his field of vision. Forget it. I heard him wrong.

  But there was no mistaking his neighbour’s next words. They sounded from the study clear as the peal of a bell.

  ‘I must go,’ Mr Ahmadi said. ‘He’s here now. I saw him from the window only a few minutes ago.’

  For a second or two, nothing happened. Then, from within the study, behind the great mahogany desk Fitz had glimpsed so often while passing down the hallway towards the library, Mr Ahmadi Junior set the bone-handled, antique receiver down in its cradle. Fitz heard it settle into place, and then the familiar, extended crackle of dry wood stretching its limbs as Mr Ahmadi leaned back in his spindled chair.

  Every nerve in Fitz’s body, acute and sensitive, seemed to prickle. He choked with agitation on the air, his jaw thrust forward like that of a fish snagged on a drawing hook.

  And then his fingers twitched, and he dropped the book.

  He had forgotten that he was holding it. The Giant’s Almanac: fifty or sixty pages, manuscript, card covers, written in a free and open hand. It was almost nothing. It hardly slapped the floor when it hit. It hardly made a sound. It hardly dented the silence.