Twelve Nights Read online

  Kay looked at them, a bit more nervously now. She still had no idea what was involved in being ‘removed’ or what an ‘author’ was, and she was about to ask when Flip suddenly prevented her by adding quickly, ‘But of course we can’t remove you, you being an author and all.’ He smiled brightly and looked at Will.

  Will looked puzzled. ‘We can’t?’ he said.

  ‘No, we can’t,’ said Flip with finality.

  Kay broke in abruptly. ‘But what is –?’

  But just then, more abruptly still, from the bunk below, Ell gave a loud yawn, murmured something only partly intelligible, and turned heavily over in her sleep. They had all forgotten her. After a moment of what looked like panic in the two wraiths’ faces, only Kay was left in a slight agitation, anxious lest Ell should wake up and get removed herself.

  Flip, cool again, seemed to understand her worry before she voiced it. ‘It’s quite all right. According to the order sheet, which is always correct, neither your mother nor your sister can see us or hear us – I mean, really see us for what we are. Had they received our calling card, they wouldn’t have noticed it. They’d have thought it a blank scrap. Had they heard our voices, it would have been the wind moaning. If they’d bumped into us, they would have persuaded themselves that we were other people entirely, or perhaps that they had imagined us. It’s a trick in the way you look at things, or the way you get others to look at things.’ With one long, elegant finger he tapped his temple at the corner of his eye. ‘Only witnesses can really see us.’

  ‘And authors, obviously,’ Will added.

  ‘Who are you?’ Ell asked sleepily from the bunk below.

  Now, Kay thought, the wraiths really were stunned. They stood so rigid that they bumped their heads on the ceiling.

  ‘Was this on the order sheet?’ Will asked.

  Flip shook his head. Very slowly they let their eyes sink to the lower bunk, then inclined their heads and dipped their shoulders; and soon they were both doubled over, staring intensely at Ell. She was rubbing her right eye with her right fist. Her strawberry curls bobbed softly about her round, plump face as she herself bobbed slightly, still waking from a deep sleep. She yawned again, and propped herself up a bit higher on her elbow.

  ‘Are you visiting Mummy?’ she asked, looking back and forth from one to the other. ‘Is Daddy back? Is Kay here?’

  Kay was here; in fact, she was already on the bunk ladder, and it wasn’t two seconds before she was beside her little sister, her right hand and the tooth already firmly dug in behind them in a wad of duvet, as before.

  ‘This,’ said Flip, ‘is unexpected in the very extremest sense.’

  ‘This is downright creepy,’ agreed Will.

  ‘If we go with you,’ Kay said quickly, ‘can we get our father back?’

  Flip had already started to shake his head, and was about to explain about the irreversibility of removal, when Will cut him off abruptly.

  ‘That’s something you’d have to take up with Sergeant Ghast,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure he would be only too happy to discuss it with you. And we could have you there very quickly.’

  Flip began to protest. ‘Will, she’s a child, and it’s a day’s flight, and Ghast –’

  ‘No, Flip. In all our years we’ve never left an author behind – and this one is something special, or I’m not a phantasm.’

  ‘What’s a phantasm,’ Kay blurted. It wasn’t even a question.

  ‘A wraith. An appearance,’ Will said. ‘Something or someone that appears. Someone who is both there and not there.’

  ‘So you’re not really here?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Will answered.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Flip with an exasperated shake of his head. ‘I’m off.’ He strode to the window and levered his long body between the curtains. They heard him slide across the short slope of the roof, then swing down to the ground. His footsteps crunched away across the frosty grass.

  ‘Fine,’ said Kay decisively, ‘we’ll go. But I keep the tooth.’

  ‘What tooth? Go where?’ asked Ell. ‘Where are we going, Kay?’

  ‘To find Dad,’ she replied. Just then the window, off its latch, swung in a gust wildly against the metal frame, then back out into the wide, black, icy night.

  ‘Bring him before me.’

  ‘As you order it.’

  ‘Let him not speak. We shall hear no tales tonight. Tighten the bridle.’

  ‘It is done.’

  ‘See, all of you, what it is to give up your life to fond hopes and foolish dreams. Look how time hangs on him like a ragged cloth. The dirt of it crusts on his skin. And when you cut him – watch, all of you; watch how he bleeds. There is nothing so frail as blood, nothing so delicate. It rises and it falls. Its passions are unpredictable. It deceives the mind with visions. It binds the heart to its wild fantasies. Blood is a weakness.’

  ‘But the wound –’

  ‘It is not mortal. Truss him, you two, and take him to the Imaginary. It will amuse me to think of him lying there, feeble and all but forgotten. If I think of him.’

  ‘As you order it.’

  ‘Let it be an instruction to you.’

  ‘It will be.’

  ‘A moment. Remind me. By what name do our enemies call him?’

  ‘They call him the Builder.’

  ‘So they do. The Builder. Let him build in the Imaginary what castles he can. Bind him tightly.’

  The Knights of Bithynia

  A few houses down from their own, their little hedged-in lane gave way over a wooden stile to a spread of flat fenland, and Kay and Ell followed the loping strides of the two wraiths on to the frosted stubble. In the slow going of the garden and the tough brake and briars at the end of the lane Kay had been dropping between sleep and wake; now the sharp, frosted air of the fen hit her like a blast, and she looked, hunting and alert, for her sister’s hand. Ell was still stumbling a bit, groggy and delicate after nearly tumbling from the low roof outside the back window. Kay dragged her on. Scrambling over a slick stile, she thought she had lost the wraiths completely; but then, ahead, a burst of something caught her eye – a low orange flame, it looked like – and she heard Flip’s impatient voice.

  ‘Come on!’ he hissed. ‘No time! It’s almost dawn!’

  It only broke on her, as they came in closer and the dark of the sky seemed to engulf them entirely, that they had stepped into the shadow of something enormous.

  ‘Quick – hop up and into the basket,’ Will said, putting out a hand.

  In another sudden burst of orange flame the entire scene was illuminated. Kay felt a surge of excitement and terror: the two wraiths had tethered a giant hot-air balloon to the frozen ground, and its massive lifting envelope towered above them in the cold and settling damp of the early morning. Kay’s eyes were drawn by the burst of flame into the interior of the balloon, into the seemingly endless curve rising into the air. Ell had stopped dead and was pulling back on her arm.

  Flip, by contrast, was all motion, scuttling around the balloon and hauling up the stakes that had kept the basket at tether. ‘No time, no time,’ he was feverishly muttering to himself, punctuated by heaves of effort as he dragged up at the long metal stakes or pushed down on the handle of a complicated-looking contraption he had fetched from its hook on the edge of the basket.

  ‘We really are short on time,’ Will said insistently, now from the more-than-darkness left by the extinguishing of the flame. Ell was still dragging backwards. ‘We need to make height by dawn, or we’ll be noticed. Come on,’ he said, now putting both his hands out over the lip of the basket to the two girls, ‘and I’ll help you up. Plenty of room in here.’

  Taking Ell in a warm hug and burying her face in the soft-brushed texture of her fleece, Kay promised that she would take care of her. Then she lifted her up towards Will, climbed easily into the basket herself, and sat down hard on the floor, shutting her eyes against the quickly advancing light that would have shown her – had she tur
ned her head – the end of her lane, the houses pale in the pre-dawn and the streetlights – one, two, three – stepping back to where their mother lay still asleep in her warm bed. Christmas morning – had she turned her head. Kay gritted her teeth. She could hear Ell sobbing, and then felt the weight of her burying into the pit under her right arm. Flip must have been lighting the burner again, because she could feel on her face the heat and light of the huge flame, and hear the rush of the gas. And she could hear him winding winches and tightening the various halyards and straps on what sounded like a thousand cleats. Then, suddenly, there was a jolt, and she heard Flip call out from close by, ‘Almost!’ And then there was a crash and a lot of grunting as the two wraiths hoisted themselves into position in the basket. Then silence.

  For an instant Kay felt nothing but the tension in the whole frame of the balloon – the buoyancy of the bag above, straining to fly free of the cold earth, the hot charged air surging up into its envelope, the creaking in the thick, ancient-looking wooden boards of the basket floor as they seemed to be nearly torn asunder between the cables above and the last taut lines below. Just for an instant.

  Kay only noticed that she had been holding her breath when it finally exploded from her – as the balloon broke from its last mooring and sprang into the air. Ell cried out into her side, and shook. Or perhaps that was the shuddering of the basket itself as it throbbed, then leaped into the slack of the cables, then settled again, making the whole balloon lurch sickeningly even as it shot up into the sky. Kay gasped and gasped. She squeezed her eyes tight shut again, braced her leg against something hard and drove herself into the solid wood behind her. And then, after what seemed like a single unbroken and very tense moment, during which they might as well have been falling as rising, she felt something warm covering her lap, and she dared to crack an eye open.

  ‘Here, pull this up to your chins,’ said Will as he tucked a heavy blanket round them where they huddled on the boards, under the hang of the basket’s rim. The air rushing into their faces, even from their sheltered spot, was well beyond freezing; as cold as the questions that lay chill in Kay’s mouth. She quickly drew the blanket up to and over their faces, putting her arm round her sister. Questions could wait.

  She found it steadying to watch the two wraiths where they stood, out of reach, talking just beyond her hearing about comfortable things. Neither smiled, but their cheeks carried a composure and their eyes a lift and alertness that made their unheard words dance with welcoming possibility. Ell lay quiet, then asleep in the crook of her arm, and still Kay watched Will and Flip, the former with his lively, lithe limbs and slender, bow-like spring, the latter more solid but spry, a chunk of chestnut to Will’s soaring lime. All the while the basket rose, at first quickly, but then, the gas slackening, far more slowly, bobbing into the currents of air that began to throw it eastwards. When the lurch and tumble of the ascent had at last wholly settled, Kay heaved herself into a squat, tucked the blanket around Ell carefully and stood up.

  The day was coming on fast, or maybe it had simply become lighter as they climbed in the sky. In any case, the whole of the basket around her seemed suddenly to trip into the dawn. All around it dangled tools of every kind: wrenches, handles, mallets and hammers, tinderboxes and thick metal bars, long stakes and hoops, coils of rope in about twenty different thicknesses, extra hooks and clasps, spare cleats palely gleaming against the intermittent bursts from the wick, buckles and hasps, rings, a collection of keys, buckets of sand, and everywhere – of course – bags of ballast in various sizes. Kay could see the taut ropes running over the sides of the basket where Flip had, in the short time since they had taken off, already thrown out ballast. The thought of the bags swinging freely, then dropping through the air below the basket made her think of the height at which they must be travelling, and she felt suddenly queasy. Home would be vanishing below them, behind them. Christmas. She turned back to the centre, fixing her eye on the floor, and tried to mark out the little things – Flip’s sandals with their fine latticing of leather straps; a little wooden capstan with its iron handles at the bottom; and the dense console of instruments suspended from the main ring, hanging before Will in the very middle. Kay could see what looked like dials, which she guessed gave information on their altitude and speed or direction, their position. There were a few levers, and then, beside a long grey tube, the important nozzle that Flip kept adjusting, which must, Kay thought, release the gas into the balloon, taking light from the pilot flame burning on the wick.

  So it did, she thought as it burst into orange flame. She would have jumped back, had there been anywhere to jump to. Flip caught her eye and smiled.

  ‘Do you want to see the ocean?’ said Will brightly.

  In a couple of hesitant, slightly unsteady steps she had joined the two wraiths at the wooden rim, crouching low into her own caution so that only her shoulders cleared the basket. She steadied herself, and then looked out.

  Ahead – what was it? – slightly north of east, her father had told her – she could see the sun just about to crest the horizon. She couldn’t tell if it was land or sea there, because it began to gleam and glare with its clear light; but there was definitely sea almost directly beneath them, green-grey in the paleness, with a strip of sheer white as it broke against the narrow sands of the Norfolk coast. Around and behind, the dark flats of the fens lay silver in the frost and early mist. Little houses broke up the fields, and every so often a line of streetlamps glowed orange for a while, and then sputtered out. Off to her left Kay could see the lights of a town paling in the onset of dawn, with a bit of coal smoke rising here and there – or at least she imagined it might have been coal smoke.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said after a while. ‘Are we going to another world?’

  Will stood beside her, hunched over with his elbows spread and his chin resting on the backs of his long fingers. He didn’t look at her, but out into the long, level distance to the north-east, watching the sun break from the emerging line of the horizon. He was silent for a long time, but Kay knew that he had heard her so she kept her mouth shut. By the time he answered, Ell was tentatively poking her head under Kay’s left arm. The girls listened carefully as the land and ocean resolved and unfurled below them. It roared.

  ‘So far as I know,’ Will said, the suspicion of a grin turning up the corners of his mouth, ‘this is the only world there is. No,’ he continued slowly, as if to himself, ‘it’s not so much where we’re going as how we are getting there.’

  Kay must have appeared baffled by this, because, after glancing down at her face, he tapped his hand thoughtfully and percussively against the rail on the edge of the basket. Kay watched him. He looked out as if at the distance, but also as if he were seeing something; something that hung in the empty space around the balloon. His eye darted in every direction, sometimes pausing for a moment but always moving on with the predictability and pattern (which is to say without either) of a butterfly in a summer garden. His gaze hovered and darted like a bird. It seemed almost to be touching things, so delicately, so deliberately did his pupil swivel, stop, focus and hold its position.

  Below them the sea lay ridged and stippled, a booming voice calling silently from the bottom of an enormous well. Ell was silent, but had slipped her arm out of the blanket that still hung draped around her shoulders, and held her sister close by the waist. Kay felt her touch now, still insistent with fear or anxiety, and thought about home slipping away behind them, the glowing streetlights being absorbed into the lesser brilliance of a cold December day, her mother just beginning to turn over in bed, wondering why it was so quiet in the house, so late in the morning. Christmas morning. And all they had left her was a single scribbled note.

  ‘In the old days,’ Will said, halfway through a breath, as if just taking up where he had left off, ‘we used to travel by sea. Out of Bithynia you could sail nearly anywhere, though of course it took time, more time than now, and naturally that meant we had to be
much better organized. These days we rush. We tend to make more mistakes. But then, we have more to do, too.’

  From the other side of the basket Flip snorted, still sore, Kay reckoned, over that misplaced final page of the order sheet. Turning, she watched him through the rigging and gear where he paused over the board of meters and dials. He was mothering them, his face and attention completely fixed, his fingertips from time to time lightly brushing them. From the side she noticed his long, childlike lashes, a bloom of red around his cheekbones, his smooth skin, the impatient but somehow amused expression on his face. His crumpled, folded form seemed at one with the complex density of dials and levers positioned around him, as if he were their instrument as much as they were his. Kay thought with pleasure that the balloon was flying him home, and all he was doing was letting it.

  ‘But where are we going? Bithynia? Where’s that?’

  ‘No, not to Bithynia,’ said Will, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. ‘The place we are going, in the mountains, doesn’t have a name.’ Then he brightened slightly. ‘But we’re going there in the right way. By the air, through the air.’

  ‘By the air, through the air,’ Flip intoned from a couple of metres away. He didn’t look up.

  ‘But why not Bithynia?’ Kay couldn’t let it drop, not after the events of the previous night. Not after Andrea Lessing. She looked directly at Will, holding his gaze. He didn’t dare avoid her.

  ‘Because the Bride is gone,’ he said simply, and got to his feet, keeping low but shifting quickly over to help Flip, who needed no help. Kay was certain she wasn’t going to get any more than that. Nobody ever said more than that, more than those two words – the Bride, Bithynia, Bithynia, the Bride. Unbidden but unavoidable, the memory of raised voices in the kitchen, only a week before, clanged in her head. It never went anywhere. Bracing her shoulders against the cold air, Kay gritted her teeth and slumped down into the shelter of the blanket to join Ell, who quickly clipped her around the chest, holding her tight. Her eyes closed and, with the gentle swaying of the basket, Kay began to drift into a lightly nauseous doze. It was through this haze, at some distance, that she noticed Will taking up his answer again; groggy and warm, she listened, trying to catch the slow trickle of words.