The Giant's Almanac Read online

  The boy heard that the old man’s voice was growing weak. He went to the table that stood in the light, and from a glass pitcher poured a cup of water. The cup was black and of a high glaze, set with a ring of lapis lazuli just beneath the rim. He handed it to the old man, in order that he might drink.

  ‘If he is fortunate – and I have always been fortunate – a merchant spends his days trading away all the things he has, for money. In the morning I would set out my wares on the tables in the market, carefully positioning each thing to its best advantage: the gold in bright shadow, just beyond the light of the sun when in the long afternoon it fell full upon my stall; the spices where the breeze might wanton with them, coyly, both offering their scent to passers-by, and snatching it away again; the carpets flat, one set upon the other, so that the coarsest lay above and the finest below, tempting but resisting the eager touches of my customers. There is an art to laying out merchandise, and I was such an artist: not a day passed but I cleared my tables, in every city I visited. I became very rich.’

  The old man took a drink from the cup with the ring of blue stones.

  ‘It was my custom in those days always to keep moving, to buy wares at a cheap rate in one place so that I might sell them at a higher price somewhere else. But one day when I set up my tables in the market of a new city, I had the fortune to meet another merchant whose stall was set beside mine, and when the day’s trading had ended, and my tables as usual were bare, he laughed, saying I had given away all my worldly possessions, and invited me to his house to eat with him. I was proud, and pecunious, and I thought I would enjoy helping him to load his mules – for he had many goods at the end of the day unsold – and I eagerly desired to eat freely what he would freely give me, rather than part with a single dinar in the purchasing of a scanty meal.

  ‘This merchant lived in a modest house in the city, neither poor nor opulent, but the homely gifts of his friendship were many and offered without stint: ass’s milk and sweet dates, spiced lamb and eggs baked with herbs, flatbreads, sweetbreads and candied peels – more, my eyes, than I could eat, and I was well satisfied. When we had pushed away the meal and sat together in the cool part of the evening, the merchant turned to me.

  ‘“Brother merchant,” he said, “your trading today has reminded me of a story that is known to everyone in this city but which I think you, as a foreigner, will not have heard. I would like to tell you this story.”

  ‘In those days I was as eager to gather stories, my eyes, as I was to buy new wares, and I urged my new friend to continue.

  ‘“There was a great king from this place, who became king over many kings. It was his custom to pass the winter in feasting, and the summer in campaigning, fighting wars to extend his kingdom and to bring riches back to his city. At the end of one long summer, he returned from campaign, bearing in his train a mass of treasure the likes of which no eastern or western monarch had ever seen, more than historians, more even than poets could begin to describe. My words, brother merchant, cannot do justice to such wealth. With this treasure he planned to make his capital city the centre of the world, a city more fragrant and luxurious than ancient Babylon, grander and more elegant than Rome, more famous for learning than Athens or Alexandria, a city to rival Carthage, Persepolis or Tyre or Antioch. He had sent before him orders to his masons and artisans, to construct a palatial temple surpassing the scope and beauty of any building ever constructed. To his temple he summoned a thousand kings and emirs, the princes of the lands lying between the Bosphorus, the Asian steppe, the great eastern gulf, and the deserts of Egypt. These princes would he feast in his temple, and they would acknowledge him the shāhanshāh, the king of kings.

  ‘“This conqueror rode to the Feast of a Thousand Kings upon his favourite stallion, alone, without his guard, dressed in a common soldier’s garb and bearing at his belt only his sword, for during the feast the kings his vassals were to confer upon him his rich robes of state, with all the ornaments of power and rule. He alighted on the steps of his new temple, and was about to enter the great hall when he was stopped by a beggar – by a little boy, no more than twelve years in age. This boy stood on the steps in his rags, holding in his hand the brush with which, for a few common coins and a great number of painful kicks, he had cleaned the feet of the kings as they had arrived to take their seats for the feast.

  ‘“‘Great king,’ said the little boy, ‘great king and lord of land and sea, pardon my insolence, and suffer me to speak the space of a single breath.’

  ‘“The king was irritated by the child’s forwardness and thought at first to strike him, but the boy was at once so humble and mean, and yet so well-spoken, so lowly and yet so courteous, that he paused; and that pause saved his life. For the boy told him that every one of the thousand emirs had borne into the temple a dagger strapped to his leg, concealed beneath his gown. Only the beggar boy, grovelling in the sand and dirt upon the steps as he ran his brush over their feet in exchange for copper coins, had noticed these weapons. By these daggers surely the princes intended some harm to the king of kings, and not to crown him but to kill him.

  ‘“A few simple orders were quickly given, and the king entered the temple as planned – to the smiling faces and the loud cheers, but to the hollow and the faithless hearts, of his subject lords. Walking the length of the hall, and taking his seat on the throne set highest above the expectant audience, he called for the servers to carry in the feast – a thousand men bearing a thousand platters, to be set at once before a thousand revelling kings. Glasses were lifted and a salute began to rise. But at the signal – for these men were not servants, but soldiers, trained and obedient – the platters were uncovered to reveal not a sumptuous feast, but shackles. Before they could rise to defend themselves, every prince seated at the feast found his neck bound in a collar of iron. They had entered the hall as kings, but they would leave the hall as slaves.

  ‘“To each of the soldiers who had served him on that day, the king granted a kingdom for his service. But to each of the kings who had sought to betray him, he gave a punishment. Their beards were shaved, and their royal garments exchanged for coarse cloth. Their sandals with buckles of beaten gold the king caused to be cast upon the fire, and from that day they went barefoot. Chained by the collar one to the other, they were beaten into the desert, and set to work in a secret place building the king’s tomb.

  ‘“Meanwhile the king sent forth a decree that the beggar boy who had saved him, whose sharp eyes were even sharper than those of the shāh himself, should be his heir. And his decree was that the shāh’s temple full of treasure should be his inheritance, along with the allegiance of a thousand petty captains, who had won kingdoms only by this boy’s sharp eyes, his faithful heart and his bold tongue. But the boy could not be found, though the king had his decree proclaimed in every city where the sun falls upon the sand, though he caused the decree to be carved in stone and set up in the markets of a thousand kingdoms. Year after year, growing old, the king waited; year after year, growing old, he was disappointed.

  ‘“At last, after many years of fruitless searching, the king found that all of the joy of his heart had dried and was consumed, like water in the desert, leaving only the salt trace of his tears. On that day, from the desert, came the thousand kings who had become his slaves, each still chained to the other, to say that his tomb had been completed. Then the king ordered that his treasury, containing all his gold and silver, the fine cut jewels as numberless as the stars in the night sky, the rich hoard of metalwork, of carving, of stuff in horn, and leather, and coral, or worked from the bones of great whales and from rocks fallen from the sky – all this, that was to be the inheritance of the beggar boy, he caused instead to be borne into the desert by the kings who had betrayed him, and buried in his tomb. And it is said that the slaves who buried the king’s hoard in the desert also buried themselves with it, in shame at the lives that they had lived, and at their faithless hearts, so that no man knew where the king’s treasury lay concealed, not even the king himself.”’

  The old man’s voice had dwindled, in this telling of this story, to almost a whisper. Now, with a shaking hand, he held out his cup to the boy, who took it to the pitcher and filled it. When the old man had drunk again, he set the cup down on a little table that stood by, and closed his eyes for a while.

  ‘It is very important to me, my eyes, that I should tell you this story, which the merchant told me in my youth, and which I have always carried with me, through all of my life after. I would like you to remember it, and think of it, as I have done. But I am very tired, and I cannot go on today. Come again tomorrow, and when we have played a little of our game, I will tell you more.’

  The boy stood, and closed the shutters against the light so that the old man could sleep. He raked up the glowing embers in the hearth, so that they should keep their warmth for many hours after, and he pulled the table, with its great chessboard still open, carefully into the corner. Around him, a thousand ancient books stood on a hundred wooden shelves, their covers closed, all dark, all quiet. He pulled the door closed behind him, and made his way silently down the great staircase, across the hall, and out of the house.

  2

  The jewel

  Fitz woke in the night. At first he wasn’t sure where he was; then he recollected this was a sensation he often had, when he woke in the night – in his own bed. He fanned his arm beneath his pillow, feeling for the book he had earlier stowed there. The Giant’s Almanac. Taking it between his thumb and fingers, he squeezed its covers hard.

  I know where I am.

  He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, before the light had faded – what light there was, under the heavy black anvil of clouds striking northwards at dusk from the sea
. Clare had been tidying his clothes away into his little chest while he read his book, a book nothing like the old books he usually read. Mr Ahmadi’s tall, Victorian volumes were not so much covered as cased in leather, their spines ribbed and tooled with gold, books with two or three title pages framed by elaborate and ornamental architectural designs, hand-coloured like the illustrated plates tipped in at regular intervals between their stately laid sheets. These books he carried back to the cottage not as a conqueror might in triumph his captive, not as a pirate spoil, but like lamps digesting genies. Sacred, splendid, solid, they asked reverence, and Fitz read them with devotion. This book was different. Light, slender and shabby, to its narrow spine a slip of paper had been glued where the title, scrawled in pen, was almost illegible. Inside the covers, if anything, matters were worse – and better. It wasn’t a book at all, but a kind of manuscript or journal, every chapter drafted in the same loose, sloping hand. While Clare arranged his few clothes, Fitz hadn’t hesitated to take the book to his bed and slide it under his pillow.

  ‘Mr Ahmadi Junior was very angry with me today,’ he had told her. He was impatient to tell her everything about what he had heard – or thought he’d heard – and about the man in the woods, and the whispering and –

  ‘Nonsense,’ she had answered, her hands full of his three shirts. ‘Mr Ahmadi loves you, Jaybird. He’s just a little fussy about his father’s books.’

  ‘I know. I think he was cross because I saw him at his telescope again.’ Mr Ahmadi had a habit of allowing his antique spyglass to drift towards the cottage next door, and Fitz liked to make mischief by implying that the man in the grand house was deeply in love with his impoverished lady neighbour. This little lie, lie though it was, was safer and kinder than going through the real events of the afternoon. It was an unspoken rule of the house that Fitz should never under any circumstances talk with strangers, and any kind of danger made Clare – though she tried to hide it – intensely distressed.

  Clare had snorted while wrestling the drawer back into the chest. ‘Don’t start telling tales.’

  ‘You tell so many stories,’ Fitz had said. He had already been half asleep, snugly tucked against the warm inner wall of his room.

  ‘I tell so many stories,’ Clare had agreed, ‘and every one of them is true.’

  As he had fallen asleep, Clare had told him his favourite story, the story of how she had come to be his Bibi: how she had been standing by the shore of the sea, weeping, when she had noticed his little basket floating on the waves; how she had plucked him from the water and hung up his little blanket on a gorse bush to dry against the wind; how in the basket she had found by his side a great ruby, the size of her fist, along with a delicate bone-handled brush, and a letter – a letter that revealed he was a little lost prince, a letter that spoke of a deadly enmity between two brothers, the one a just king and the other a villainous usurper, how the villain had triumphed and the good brother had been driven to despair, how the villain had sought the prince’s life, how his mother had roused him in the night, and dressed him, and hurried with him wrapped in her arms through the city, to the shore, and how – even as the howl of dogs and the tramping feet of horses had sounded in her desperate ears, even as the searchers had found her and were drawing their swords from their scabbards to cut her head from her shoulders – she had launched his helpless little body on to the waves with a prayer.

  And Clare had told him the rest of his favourite story, that his mother, the young queen, had loved to brush his infant head with the soft bristles of the bone-handled brush, that she sent with him the great ruby that was once the king’s, and that she had prayed to all the genies of the earth and sea and sky that they would guide and shelter her little boy upon the waves to the waiting arms of his new Bibi. And she told him that a tempest must have swept him across the oceans as if under full sail, and carried him for thousands of miles past strange and terrible coasts, past jungles that trailed their hanging vines longingly into the salt sea, past cliffs of granite and chalk on which the tides crashed and were crumbled, past cities and great trading ports, past nations and creeds and wars and through the lives of millions upon millions, past colonies of seabirds and the nurseries of great whales, through forests of bizarre seaweed and the wrecking and contorted reefs of colourful corals, until he drifted on a clear blue day on to the shore here, in England, not half an hour’s walk down the shady lane from Clare’s own tiny cottage.

  ‘Am I really a prince?’ he had asked her. The questions were part of a litany, a time-honoured ritual that they both loved.

  ‘You are, you are,’ Clare had answered, hushing him. ‘Such a ruby as your mother sent, as big as your fist and as red as wine, could only be the gift of a king.’

  ‘And where is the little bone-handled brush now, Bibi, that my mother sent with me?’

  ‘It is here, my little prince, it is here,’ said Clare, and she had stroked his hair with the five fingers of her white hand, sliding them through the thick strands and tufts of ink, lightly rubbing the delicate skin of his head. And she had sung to him his favourite song, a lullaby which like a great and gaudy jewel always crowned the little ritual of reminiscence.

  ‘Over the sea, the green, green sea,

  beyond the swelling throes,

  where sun and spray at last agree

  with gold to pave the skies, and rose,

  though the hour be late

  still does he wait –

  he waits there still, my prince, for me.

  Be gone, you winds, into the west,

  be gone, you sailing stars,

  be gone, bright moon, unto your rest,

  be gone all longing, strifes and jars:

  though the hour be late,

  still will he wait,

  my prince, my peace, and all, my best.

  Upon an island all of stone,

  within a golden hall,

  there lies my true love’s burning throne

  with pearl and lapis crusted all.

  A kingdom he

  will give to me

  when I am his, and he my own.’

  And Clare had kissed him, and said to him the words she had always said to him every night, her arms enclosing him, and the warm green scent of her hair draped round him: ‘I will keep you safe forever.’

  Now his room lay dark around him, and he was alone. Now, outside the low window, on the other side of the room, the wind was howling in the hedges. He could almost feel it running its rough hands under the slates of the roof above, unsettling them, pushing for a way in. Every few moments it seemed to stamp at the single-paned window, like an impatient visitor, its blunt force knocking the whole casement flat against the wall that held it. The violence of it made him shiver.

  Fitz drew the duvet over his head and reached his hand down into the corner, where the bedpost met the wall, for the little lamp he kept hidden there. Mr Ahmadi Senior had given it to him one afternoon, not long before he died, with strict, conspiratorial instructions to conceal it from Clare. A child should read in the night, Mr Ahmadi Senior had said. When your dreams rise to the surface, like silt stirred in the quiet pools between light and light – that is when you must read. Read as if your life depended on it. The torch wasn’t the sort of thing you could buy at the shop. It wasn’t much of a torch at all. Oblong, about the size of his fist, it lay in a case of tough, leathery hide scribbled about with geometrical figures. The strap from which he hung it, on his bedpost, also fastened this cover; releasing it, the leather case fell away easily to reveal a luminous, perfectly polished, crescent-shaped jewel set in a heavy stone wedge. This rough chunk of stone, blacker than the night, sat solidly wherever you placed it, as chunky as granite. From the milky and phosphorescent jewel that stood a little proud of its surface, almost hanging in the stone as the new moon does above the sea, arose a glittering light. It didn’t extend very far, and it wasn’t very bright – but here, beneath the huddled covers, close and warm, it was enough to read by.