The Giant's Almanac Page 2

  But it was enough. Immediately, from within the sealed study he heard Mr Ahmadi push himself back from the desk and rise to his feet. And he heard another noise, the sound of hard, powerful claws scrabbling against granite. Fitz didn’t stay to hear more. His eyes snapped open. His arm swung to the floor to retrieve the book, even as his legs, charged with fear, uncoiled down the hallway. He knew he wouldn’t make it to the gallery window. There was no time to waste.

  As he scattered himself down the hallway, round the corner and into the Friary’s grand, central hall, Fitz could almost feel the touch of Mr Ahmadi’s grip on his neck. His words, his strange words, his threatening words, seemed to chase him like a demon or a fury, tightening round his collar. But his mind, calculating, told him that his neighbour was not the most immediate danger; the long iron handles of the Friary’s panelled doors would present no obstacle to the house’s oldest resident, the huge Alsatian Mr Ahmadi had inherited from his father. Fitz had raced Aslan a hundred times, and knew his footing in the halls of that house as well as he knew his own. And he knew, as only a friend really knows, just how quickly the dog would take up the chase, and how relentlessly he would pursue it.

  At the top of the broad and turning stairs, Fitz drew up and inclined his head. He was a hunted animal scenting the air. The moment he reached the ground floor, he would have a choice: to let himself out of the front door, and circle round the back of the big house, through the kitchen garden and orchard; or to reverse, sprint down the back hallway, negotiate the complicated kitchen, and try his luck with the servants’ entry. He imagined both routes, almost simultaneously, with geometric precision.

  He didn’t reach a decision.

  From the other side of the first-floor landing, the door he had yanked behind him was now rattling violently. It wouldn’t hold for long. Fitz wedged the book firmly under his arm, and when the latch finally gave way, he sprang.

  Often he took the steps of the grand staircase two at a time. Today, with one hand gliding on the wide oak bannister, he stretched for three. He calculated, leaping: the curve of the descent would deposit him, with a bound, halfway across the lobby on his way to the front door. Momentum knew this was his preferred route, but, with sudden resolve – hearing fast legs on the steps behind him – he twisted, swinging his legs clear over the bannister and into the back hallway. Through the dim light, between heavy shelves crammed with dusty instruments, he tried to lengthen his pace. The hallway opened on to a high-ceilinged, panelled dining room, framed with more portraits of black-bearded fathers. Every one of them seemed to frown at Fitz as, without a break in his gait, he propelled himself across the surface of the room’s heavy walnut dining table – holding his feet high to be sure his trainers wouldn’t scuff the polished finish. On the other side, as he darted through the doorway, he let it swing closed behind him; this might buy him the second or two he would need in order to locate the back door keys.

  There was no need. The cook had left them hanging, as she often did, on the old disused chimney breast beside the kitchen’s elaborate range. Tonight was her night off, and the cold meats she had left for Mr Ahmadi’s dinner lay, covered, on the broad table that stood between the hearth and the door. Fitz snatched the keys from their hook, tossed the book on to the table, vaulted it, caught the book as it slid off the other side, and just managed to plant the right key in the ancient lock of the house’s heavy back door. For a second he felt gift and magic surging through his body, as if he were an arrow nimbling through a still air, at once both rising and falling. Light lay on the other side of the door, and freedom.

  Then Aslan crashed into the kitchen door. It hadn’t even slowed him – and, unlike Fitz, he could go straight under the table.

  With a heave the boy shouldered open the massive door. There was no time to shut it behind him; everything would now depend on his sprint. Flying across the gravel yard he kept his tread light as a dancer’s, trying not to create the traction that on loose stones might slow him. When he had gained the grass, he pushed his feet more firmly into soil. The skies were gathering with thick storm clouds as the day gave way to red gales, but the grassy lawn over which he now dashed lay firm and dry beneath his feet, and with every pace he added speed. Thirty metres from the crumbling stone walls of the Old Friary stood an ancient stone well – covered, with a stone roof. To either side tall hedges stretched away, impenetrable as thickets, bristling with boring, thrilling thorns. Clambering on to the stonework, Fitz reached high and placed the book delicately on the roof above him. Fast hand-over-hand work took him up the carved wall of the well house, and he just managed to sling his legs out of reach as Aslan ground to a stiff halt, all slather and barking, on the lawn behind him.

  Fitz stood on the roof looking down. There was nothing menacing in the dog’s stance, or in his eyes. The fear that had closed round Fitz’s throat, squeezing his shoulders even as it loosened his stomach, now started to drain from him. He had got away with it.

  ‘Not this time, my friend,’ he said, and smiled at the panting and good-natured dog. He loved Aslan, but with a wariness. He had always shuddered to think what the impetuous Alsatian might do to Mr Ahmadi’s books if he ever managed to catch Fitz in one of their chases. He had seen discarded piles of feathers after a hawk’s sudden plummet from the sky. It didn’t bear thinking on.

  Fitz was about to jump down off the back of the well house, into the strip of wood that bordered this and his own cottage’s garden, when he heard a window opening behind him. It was a delicate sound, barely audible over the rising wind – but even whispers, when dreaded, can cut the air like a knife. The boy froze. For several seconds, nothing happened. Aslan had stopped smearing his muzzle into the dry grass.

  When Fitz turned, he saw Mr Ahmadi framed in the broad casement. He’d swung the window wide after unlatching it, and stood now in the red storm light, his arm still extended. Even from this distance, Fitz could see the starched elegance of his tailored shirt, the heavy wool weight of his suit, and his neatly trimmed black hair. Everything Mr Ahmadi Junior did, he did with precision. It was no accident that he had opened his window just at the moment Fitz had thought to turn his back on the house, just at the moment he was about to drop down into the wood and make a safe escape.

  Somewhere in his stomach, buried deep, Fitz wanted to scream, and run away. But the man in the window seemed the same man as always – precise and severe, but proper, even kindly. He quailed. ‘I borrowed a book,’ he called out. His voice sounded brave.

  Mr Ahmadi said nothing in reply. Larks dared the air between them, and quivered into the hedges on every side.

  ‘I will bring it back,’ he shouted, with less conviction.

  ‘Always you take the wrong ones,’ answered Mr Ahmadi. He didn’t need to force the resonant, deep reed of his voice; it carried. ‘Always you mistake. Always you turn simple things into adventures.’

  ‘Mr Ahmadi Senior said I could borrow any book I wanted,’ Fitz protested.

  ‘A power to do wrong is not the same as an obligation to do wrong,’ said Mr Ahmadi. After a pause, almost too faintly to hear, he added, ‘Quite the reverse. You should read better books.’

  Mr Ahmadi was not looking at him. He was scanning the woods behind the hedge. Fitz thumbed the flimsy cover of this slim volume that he held wedged beneath his arm.

  Aslan, who had been watching the conversation with detachment, suddenly stood up and barked. He had heard something over the wind. As a rule, Mr Ahmadi frowned at Aslan’s antics – when he noticed them at all – but now he seemed to smile. In this way, Fitz heard Clare’s voice before he heard it.

  ‘Supper is on the table, Jaybird,’ she shouted. The soprano tilt of her voice seemed to summon the little birds again from their hidden hedges, and they flurried in the air over the lawn. Mr Ahmadi, the voice on the telephone, the plotter, the murderer, had broken into a wide and benevolent cheerfulness. Fitz felt the last tension drain from his legs.

  With his free hand, Mr Ahmadi carefully shielded the protruding lens of his telescope where it stood against the casement; with the other, he slowly drew the window closed behind him. ‘Bring it back tomorrow,’ he said, almost inaudibly as the window shut and the latch turned into its seat.

  ‘I will,’ Fitz called, almost over his shoulder as he turned and slipped down the back of the well house, scrambling lightly over the cords of dry wood Mr Ahmadi’s gardener had stacked against the winter.

  In the friary garden, even under the riot of a threatening southwesterly wind, even under the severe gaze of Mr Ahmadi Junior, all that it contained was eternal, blessed, a kind of paradise enclosed and shut off from the rest of the world. But beyond the hedge, everything changed, and today more than ever. He felt it the moment he jumped down on to the hollow bare earth of the leaf-strewn path: something awry, some slight shift or turn that made the whole of the wood strange.

  Fitz hesitated to raise his eyes to the expanse of trunks before him; whereas normally he would have passed without a second thought by the wood, or stalked eagerly into it, today his nerves recoiled from it like an alien thing. Maybe it was the strange light of the coming storm. Behind every tree something unknown and invisible today, newly, stood concealed. Within every shadow sheltered some inscrutable and inarticulable fear. Fitz felt a dead weight rise along the top of his spine and creep up his neck. His arms dangled.

  Don’t be stupid. Don’t be a baby.

  He started to cross the little stretch of wood that lay between Mr Ahmadi’s garden and his own, between the friary’s sunken, ancient grounds and the patch of scrabble and vegetables that stretched behind his own cottage. It was at once the long way round and a shortcut, at once familiar and the border of something strange and menacing.

  He hadn’t take
n ten steps when it struck him, more forcefully than before, that something was wrong. The voice of the wind still roaring in the garden seemed, in the wood, instead muted and green. At this time of the year, in this weather, no birds sang. He expected the deep quiet and, at a distance, the lean and moan of the taller trees. What he didn’t expect – he couldn’t put his finger on it for a moment –

  Whispering.

  Ahead, just past the gate to his own garden, a drystone wall ran round a little churchyard attached to a ruined chapel. Once, the chapel had served the family in the Old Friary where Mr Ahmadi now lived, and the toppled headstones that crowded the yard recorded what Fitz had always assumed were their names. Illegible now and crusted with lichens, anonymous and neglected, the stones were the closest thing Fitz had to old friends. Tottering between them was one of his earliest memories, and there were few days, save in the worst of winter, when he didn’t stand for a minute or two among them, or watch them from his window, among the yew trees that now dwarfed and overgrew the derelict building. Tonight he ought to have stopped at his own gate and gone inside. He should have shut it behind him and gone right into the house. Instead he found himself in the churchyard, his hands on a cold plinth of stone, the collapsing weight of the wall standing between him and the whispering woods beyond.

  The evening’s strangeness scared him, and yet he couldn’t quite give it up.

  The blood strained tight in Fitz’s skin like a fist in a glove. He almost expected to see faces peering from behind, or within, the wood’s shadowy trunks. He couldn’t tear his own stare from them. Of course there was nothing – just the familiar moss-crusted texture of the trees, the bark here grey, there brown, coated in the shadow of high leaves, as far as the eye could see. He drew a deep breath, lifting his lungs till they ached against his ribs. With the cool stone under his hand, he thought perhaps he had imagined the noise, that it was just some unusual effect of the storm blowing overhead.

  But there it was again.

  Whispering syllables, dusk-words, a soft sibilance between shifting leaves.

  For the second time that evening, terror raced over the little hairs that velveted his taut skin. There were too many trees before him, too many places where those voices might be hiding. He suspected one, then all of them. His eyes leaped erratically across the scene like a drop of water crazing on a hot pan. His heart, his whole chest, cramped, squeezing the wind out of him. The whispers crawled on his neck. They worked towards his ears.

  ‘Boy.’

  Fitz had been watching the woods, his back to the cottage. Now he spun round, pressing his legs flat against the tombstone, and almost throwing his free hand before his face – throwing it down against his side, instead.

  The man before him was a little taller than he was, a little heavier but not much, grizzled. His short hair and neat corduroy jacket gave him an air too dapper for the woods. His left hand rested on the silver head of an ebony cane.

  ‘Where is your mother, boy?’

  ‘Inside,’ Fitz answered. His eyes darted at the cottage, at its windows. ‘Inside the house.’ The words stole from him and were gone before he could stop them.

  The man peered at him, as if in disbelief. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ he asked. His voice was insistent, near a sneer.

  The wind that gusted along the hedge and through the churchyard swept also through Fitz. He opened his mouth to answer, but had nothing to say. The backs of his legs, stiff against the headstone, wanted to run, but he had almost trapped himself between the chapel and the stone wall, and when he glanced towards the trees the man’s cane shot out, warding him back.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what’s this you are holding so tight?’

  With his cane he prodded at Fitz’s leg, forcing him to move towards the corner of the chapel wall.

  Fitz saw that he had been gripping the headstone hard enough that his fingers, cold in the wind, ached as he released them. It was the only new stone in the yard. He had never looked at it.

  The man scanned the inscription. ‘Another relation of yours, I suppose.’ He lurched forward and grabbed Fitz by the arm.

  Paralysed but for a shaking in the back of his skull, Fitz watched the man’s chin as the words hissed out of him.

  ‘I’m a friend,’ he said. ‘I expect we’ll meet again later.’

  The pain in Fitz’s arm had still not subsided as he watched the man – who certainly did not seem like a friend – disappear round the hedge the same way, five minutes earlier, he himself had come.

  All the tension in his body abruptly recoiled from him. Without thinking about it, he sprang to the length of his legs and sprinted for the cottage gate. This distance of twenty metres, dodging stones and stumps, he could cover in a few heartbeats and in any darkness. He had done it a hundred times, a thousand. He could probably have run it in his sleep. Every root, every patch of dirt, every thin clump of weak and whitish grass he knew, or his feet knew, and they hit the earth like a hail of stones. Before he could make sense of his fingers or their well-practised movement, he had slipped the bolt from the gate, opened the door, let himself through, and shot the bolt again.

  He stood panting, safe, looking out at the wood beyond the garden. In the distance darkness collected between the trunks. If there really had been whispering – surely there hadn’t been, surely it had been a trick of his imagination – but if there had, then perhaps it gathered there now, as shadows sometimes fell together at twilight, murmuring. He looked back the short way he had come, where the ordinary stone well stood at the edge of Mr Ahmadi’s ordinary hedge. The man had passed beyond it; he too was gone, curled and sunk into shadow.

  ‘What was all that noise, my little prince?’ Clare stood out of sight, just inside the door, rummaging in a cupboard for something heavy. Fitz made the fear flush from him before he answered. Forget it. It wouldn’t do to make Clare upset.

  ‘Nothing, Bibi. Just Mr Ahmadi loaning me a book.’ He looked down and was surprised to find the book still in his hand.

  ‘He is such a dear man. Come inside and eat your supper.’

  Fitz picked a blackberry off the cane as he went in, and chewed its hard and bitter seeds with precision, one by tiny one until he had dealt with them all. He swallowed them. He put the book on the table next to his plate, and sat down. He told himself he was going to enjoy The Giant’s Almanac.

  Clare came into the kitchen. She stood next to Fitz’s chair.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ she demanded.

  He froze, his hand on the edge of the table. It was a long way back.

  ‘Fitz?’

  A little amusement played on her face as she turned it towards him. Relieved, Fitz jumped up and kissed her cheek, and then together they ate their meal.

  tabiyya

  ‘Come here, my eyes, and sit down beside me, for I would tell you a story.’

  Though it was afternoon, and nearly summer, the room was dark. Heavy wooden shutters with close slats had been pushed across the enormous windows, nearly covering them. In the two narrow shafts of bright sunlight that still pierced the gloom, brilliant motes of dust sparkled and danced, swirling in an apparent chaos of constant motion. The boy took one of the two little stools that stood by the door, and placed it beside the old man’s chair, far from the swirling motes. He sat down. In his hand he held the shāh, and turned it over again and again against his palm.

  ‘Many years past when I was young like the vine in summer, I made a journey into a far country.’

  The old man’s white beard had been trimmed that morning, but his eyebrows grew as wild as ever with bristling tufts. In his last, weak days, he had grown gaunt, and his faintly purple skin sagged beneath his eyes and in his cheeks. With a careful and deliberate motion, he rearranged the coarse wool blanket that covered his lap and legs.

  ‘I went there to trade, and I brought many valuable things with me for the market: leather and metalwork, porcelain and silk, spices, carpets, and dyed cloths of many colours. A man who goes to the market must be well furnished with many things of many shapes, and hues, and textures, if he is to be noticed at all. The market is so busy, and so full of diversions and entertainments, that a merchant with poor wares can easily be mistaken for one of the many beggars who set up their blankets beside the tables.’