Stoneheart (7 page)
All may touch me when I am soft, none when I am stone.
Lose me and you will falter—yet if I am taken, you will find courage anew.”
The moment the Sphinx began to talk, George closed his eyes. He just concentrated on what he was hearing. He thought of different kinds of suits: business suits, diving suits, suits of armor, tweed suits, lawsuits, sailor suits—nothing made sense. It just didn’t. It was like the crosswords his father used to do, clues within clues, cryptic like a code that only grown-ups understood. His father used to try clues on him, and he hardly ever understood the answers, even when he explained them to him. There were words that meant secret things, other words that meant you had to take words to bits and use their letters to make new words, and lots of shorthand winks at the puzzlers that the regulars would get to help them on their way.
He could see his father laughing at some particularly clever clue when he’d solved it. He could hear him saying it was simple if you remembered that words could mean more than one thing, saying you had to read the clues again because they might not mean what you first thought, saying that sometimes they were there to send you down the wrong alley.
He opened his eyes. The Sphinx’s smile was especially annoying. He closed them again. Suits—what other kind of suits were—And then it hit him like a bright flash, and he was talking before he had finished the thought.
“Hearts. Hearts! You’re a heart.”
His eyes opened fast enough to see the surprise ripple between the two Sphinxes. The Gunner gaped at him.
“Heart?”
George knew he was right. It all fell together as he spoke, and he felt something like clean air blowing through his mind.
“I am a suit no men may wear
—that’s ‘suit’ like suits of cards, so it’s got to be clubs, spades, diamonds, or hearts.
No man goes without me?
Well, it’s got to be a heart, because if you don’t have a heart you’re like a thing without a battery, you don’t go at all.
What’s got by me shall be well known?
Easy—if you’ve
got
something
by
heart, you know it
well. What lies at me?
i.e. what
lies
at the heart of something—
is the reason for things
…”
He could feel the Gunner looking at him in amazement. More than that, he felt elation sweeping him onward, his mind becoming faster and clearer as the rest of the riddle almost seemed to solve itself as it tumbled out of his mouth.
“All may touch me when I am soft, none when I am stone? A soft
heart is easily touched, but a
stone
heart isn’t affected by anything; it’s untouchable! If you
lose
heart, you
falter,
but if you
take
heart, you get your courage back. Heart. The answer is heart. You have to answer my question!”
He realized he was jabbing his finger at the front Sphinx, like he was in charge. It didn’t feel particularly wise or polite, but it felt good.
“You want to know how to stop the taints killing you?”
“Yes. I answered your riddle. You
have
to tell me!”
The Sphinx sat back on her haunches and looked at her sister. The sister spoke.
“Your remedy lies in the Stone Heart, and the Heart Stone shall be your relief. To end what has begun, you must first find the Stone Heart, and then you must make sacrifice and amends for that which was broken by placing on the Stone at the Heart of London that which is necessary for its repair.”
George looked at the Gunner. The Gunner looked at him.
“What’s the Stone Heart?”
The Gunner shrugged. They both looked at the Sphinxes. The Sphinxes looked enigmatic.
“What’s the Stone Heart?”
If a cat can shrug, that’s what the Sphinx closest to George did.
“We answered your question. If you don’t understand the answer, maybe you should have asked a better one.”
All the good feelings that had been washing through George seemed to stop and start to curdle all at once.
“That’s not fair!”
“We’re not fair. We’re Sphinxes. Now go away.”
The second Sphinx looked a little shamefaced as it turned away and headed for its plinth. It was the nicer of the two.
“You cheated!”
“We answered your question.”
“But…”
“But you didn’t answer mine.”
There it was again. That gravelly little voice. The Sphinxes turned back. George turned. So did the Gunner. Edie was standing right behind him.
“He’s right. You cheated him. So now answer my question.”
The Sphinxes got that cat with a terrier look again.
“We don’t have to.”
“Yes, you do. You’re Sphinxes. Answering questions is what you do. You’re just nasty about it. Both of you.”
“Both of us?”
It was the not-nice Sphinx. Edie stood her ground.
“We’re both the same, are we? You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. No. Hold on—that’s a trick, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” The Sphinx smiled.
Edie nodded. She walked toward it. George wasn’t sure what was going on, but he got the strong impression that the Sphinx was controlling the urge to shy away from the approaching girl.
“You asked me if you’re both the same. I think you mean that to be your question, so I get it wrong before I even know you’re doing one of your riddles and you don’t have to answer my question. I think that’s a twisted sphinxish way of tricking people.”
“You have a very suspicious mind, little girl.”
“Thank you.”
Edie walked up one side of the Sphinx, then down the other. Then she walked over to the other one and did the same. Then she smiled.
“You look the same. But you’re different. You"—she pointed at the nicer of the two—"you are perfect. You’re smooth. Unlike you"—she walked up the side of the other one and pointed to its side—"you’ve got holes. Something has put holes in you.”
George squinted. She was right. There were small jagged holes in the flank and foreleg of the bronze body. The Sphinx looked down at itself.
“Very clever. Very sharp. But I’m afraid that wasn’t my question.”
Edie shook her head.
“We both know it was. But if you want to cheat, ask me another.”
Before the not-nice Sphinx could answer, the nice one spoke.
“How did we become different?”
The other Sphinx turned on its haunch and hissed in something that might have been anger but was also close to alarm.
“No! She’s a glint. She’s a
glint!
She’ll—”
The two Sphinxes were suddenly eyeball to eyeball, tails writhing in slow irritation with each other.
“I know. But the girl was right. You were cheating. That’s not being an enigma. That’s lying. Let her answer. You have become too taintlike of late, sister—”
“Do you wonder I have turned against men after they made me as I was, then marred me as they did, as they did when—?”
“No, sister, enough. Let the girl tell us, if she can… .” The damaged Sphinx held herself still as Edie walked up to her.
“What’s happening?” asked George.
The Gunner looked at Edie running her hands along the huge flank of the bronze Sphinx. Her hand stopped as she found a hole. He turned away and reflexively pulled his collar up, like a man expecting a sudden squall.
“Mind your shoes.”
George couldn’t take his eyes off Edie. Her hand disappeared inside the Sphinx.
“There’s a hole.”
The Sphinx stared at her, unimpressed.
“A hole isn’t
how.
A hole is
what.
You told us I have holes already.”
Edie closed her eyes. A small shudder passed through her.
“Wh—?” began George. Then it happened.
Edie stiffened. There was the sense of a silent detonation at her epicenter—the blast wave of whatever was happening to her blew her hair out in a fan, and before it had a chance to fall again, all the leaves on the trees blew flat and the street garbage blew away from her in a three-hundred-and-sixty degree arc. George opened his mouth.
Edie screamed. Her back arched, her eyes screwed shut, her mouth opened wide, her neck tendons snapped tight as violin strings, and a sound that wasn’t a just sound ripped into George’s head. He threw his hands over his ears to protect himself. It didn’t make a difference. The scream was stuck inside his head and just seemed to get louder and louder as it echoed around with no way to escape.
Edie felt the past slam into her through her hands like a massive electric shock, as if the metal of the statue had been storing the memory of pain and horror deep within it, waiting for her to touch it and receive the full power of it in one distilled jolt.
Her eyes snapped open. Then shut. Then open. Again and again. And as they did, she saw the past in fast juddering time slices, some freeze-frames, some slow-motion fragments of light and sound. Every time she closed her eyes to escape the unbearable pain that the past seared into her, she found an intolerable pressure built up in her head, and she knew it would burst if she didn’t open her eyes and let the past in once more.
And what she saw in the jarring slices of her vision was this:
The Embankment was different. The road was thinner. The trees shorter, and some were in different places. The modern office blocks were gone. The bridges were not as they are now. People stood looking up into the sky. It was bright day. The city did not roar with the sound of thousands of unseen motorcars growling through its entrails. The people wore the long skirts and formal coats of the early twentieth century. A nanny in a uniform was smiling as she tried to fasten the bonnet on a laughing child. A newspaper seller was shouting something about the “British Expeditionary Force” and Flanders, though he stopped shouting and swore when he saw the thing everyone else was looking up at loom into view over the tops of the buildings.
A long slow rocket shape hummed overhead, whirring propellers pushing it between Edie and the sun. It was almost dreamlike in its slow immensity.
People stopped shouting and just stared at it. In the sudden calm Edie could hear the clopping of a horse approaching as a hansom cab came out of Adam Street—the cabbie lowering his whip as his mouth fell open at the sight above him. She heard him swear softly, “Bloody hell. A zeppelin!”
Then small dark dots fell slowly out of the belly of the zeppelin, and time broke into fragments again. But like shards of glass, the fragments seemed to cut deep into Edie’s brain and increase the pain tenfold.
She saw the dots get bigger. Closer. Resolve into bomb shapes. She saw a woman scream and a man throw her to the ground, covering her body with his.
She saw the newspaper seller jump over the edge of the Embankment, down into the Thames.
She saw the first bomb hit the road.
She saw the flash.
She felt the blast rip her lips back off her screaming mouth.
She felt the blast heat sucking into her lungs.
She screamed louder.
She saw the holes blown in the side of the Sphinx.
Saw a child’s bonnet blow into the iron railings of Adam Gardens.
Saw the man and the woman blown into the top of a tree.
Saw the horse in two parts, slowly pinwheeling twenty feet into the air; wet bits of it, that should never be seen, ribboning apart in a hideous mind-scarring arc.
And then it stopped.
And the present was back.
George and the Gunner were bent double, shielding themselves. The screaming noise suddenly stopped scouring around George’s head. He convulsed as the rising wave of nausea hit him, and he threw up for the second time that night, a thin spatter of bile all over his feet.
The Gunner tried to force his face out of the pained grimace it was stuck in.
“Told you to mind your shoes.”
George sat down on the pavement. Every joint was aching, and the nausea had changed to something like ancient dread or deep sadness, or the memory of both. Edie was staring at her hand. She sat down suddenly, a plan her body had decided on without consulting her mind.
“That was—bad,” George managed to say.
The Gunner nodded. He looked as shaky as a solid bronze man can look.
“She’s a glint. I told you.”
Edie was looking up at them from across the pavement. Behind her, the Sphinxes were dragging themselves back onto their plinths. They still looked like big cats. But now they looked like big sick cats. The Gunner rubbed his face.
“Glints are people bad things happen around. Glints can make even the stones weep.”
Edie looked at the Gunner. Then at the Sphinxes.
“Why?”
The closest Sphinx stopped and looked at her.
“How can you not know what you are? Everything knows what it is.”
Edie pulled herself to her feet.
“I thought you answered questions. Not asked them. A bomb put holes in the one of you that’s damaged, right? Now answer my question.”
“You want to know why glints can make stones weep?”
The Gunner stepped forward, between the girl and the crouching giant cat.
“No.”
Edie pushed him aside. George was struck by the fact that such a small girl could make such a big statue move out of her way. In fact, he’d later wonder if the Gunner hadn’t sort of shied away from her hands pushing at his knees.
“It’s my question. I earned it,” she spat fiercely.
“But—” began the Gunner.
“No buts. No more buts or waits or go-aways!”
She punched her finger at the Sphinx’s face.
“Answer my question!”
T
he Sphinx settled back on its haunches. The one behind it rumbled a growl like distant thunder. Its tail lashed lazily and was still. Edie put her finger back into a fist and buried both her hands in her pockets.
The Sphinx still facing her—the nice one—looked like it had returned to its normal unmoving state. Edie kicked at the plinth.
“Hoi. I’m still here!”
“Scarcely,” sighed the Sphinx.
“What do you m—” began Edie.
“If you keep interrupting you’ll miss the answer, won’t you?” the Sphinx whispered, raising an eyebrow. Edie closed her mouth. She had to do it twice, but eventually it stayed shut.
“You are here. I can see that. But to know what a glint is, to truly comprehend, you must see things on a longer scale. And on a longer scale, you, him, all
people
are scarcely here at all. Compared to the life of stone or metal, you’re as important as a splash of rain that falls in a summer shower, and then dries out and is gone. What people do passes, but the rocks remain. Not forever. Just a lot longer than people. And the rocks remember.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Rocks can’t remember. Rocks can’t think—”
“Do you want an argument or an answer?”
“I want an argument that makes sense.”
“Glints bring the spark of what happened out of the rock.”
George suddenly understood.
“You see the past!”
Edie turned on him as if he had somehow betrayed her.
“I don’t! I mean, it’s not, it’s—” Edie stuttered.
“It’s more than that,” said the Sphinx softly.
George felt his mind spinning wild, but it spun on a center, and that center was the conviction that he was right about Edie, that he knew her gift.
“But you
do
see the past. When it’s happening, when you did that thing, when everything went, you know, sickening like you’ve been kicked in the stomach, when your hair stood on end—”
Edie shook her head angrily.
“I don’t know what ‘thing’I do. I don’t think
I
do anything. Something does it to me!”
“But you were just there, and your hair kind of blew out and—”
“Look! I wasn’t ‘there,’I was, I was—”
Surprisingly it was the Sphinx that came to her rescue.
“She was ‘then.’Bad things that happen leave a mark on their surroundings. Good things, too. But people respond more strongly to bad. And glints, when they touch stones that have a mark in them, channel it. The past plays through them again.”
George, in the midst of everything, found himself enthralled by the idea.
“That’s so—amazing! What’s it like when you—”
Edie cut him off tersely.
“Terrible.”
The Gunner looked over their heads.
“It’s a waste.”
Edie looked up at him.
“What do you mean, a waste?”
“Using your question to ask them about it. I could have told you that. Any spit could. But you had your precious question and now it’s used up.”
The Sphinx looked at them with a cat-that-got-the-cream smile. George found himself hating it.
“So we just answer another of its riddles, and get another question.”
The not-nice Sphinx lashed its tail and turned on them.
“It doesn’t work like that. You get one question each day.”
Edie looked on in silence as George took this in.
“And you don’t have a day. Not to wait. Not to live, probably.”
George felt panic drop the bottom out of his stomach again. The Sphinx’s voice had a mocking triumph in it that he didn’t like one bit, mainly because it sounded so sure of itself. He turned on the Gunner.
“What does she mean?”
The voice of the other Sphinx came over his shoulder.
“Ask the shaveling.”
George spun on it.
“The what?”
Something was happening to the Sphinx. He realized it was retreating back into motionless, blank bronze. He asked again, urgently: “The what? Please, the
shaveling?
What shaveling?”
The Sphinx’s eyes lost life and dulled before them—its voice retreated too, as if it were coming from farther and farther away.
“The dark shaveling. What is to be known, he knows. …”
And as an echo of a whisper, before the sounds of the traffic still hammering past them on the Embankment drowned everything, George was sure he caught, on the edge of his hearing, the other Sphinx’s mocking whisper.
“And much that is not to be known—not by you, thing of flesh, little rain splash, so shortly here, so soon gone… .”
George looked at Edie. Edie looked at the Gunner. The Gunner shrugged. Edie looked unimpressed.
“You don’t know what a shaveling is?”
The Gunner shook his head.
“Do you?”
Edie shook hers. They both looked at George.
“Someone who shaves?” he tried.
“Oh, nice one,” said Edie. “Someone who shaves. Can’t be more than about four million of them in the city. You going to ask them all?”
The Gunner grimaced at her and stretched out a kink in his shoulder.
“Don’t give him grief, you’re the one should have asked about the Stone Heart.”
“Why?” said Edie, looking up with an intensity that stopped him stretching and made him look, unexpectedly, uncomfortable.
“Because we need to know what it is, don’t we, missy? Because we’re in big trouble and—”
Again she cut him off flatly.
“What ‘we’? Is there a ‘we’ here that I don’t know about? Because all you’ve done since I found you is try to lose me and tell me to stay away. That’s not being ‘we.’That’s being ‘you.’And I don’t think I owe ‘you’ anything.”
“But—”
“And don’t call me missy.”
The Gunner swallowed something. George wondered whether it was frustration or something closer to fear. Then he found himself wondering why—whichever it was—that Edie provoked such a reaction in the large soldier.
“But you were going to ask, weren’t you? That’s why you answered their question… .”
George joined in.
“You did. You were going to ask, he’s right—”
Edie swiveled her eyes without moving her face, and George, caught in the flatness of her gaze, knew exactly what it was about her that perturbed the Gunner. Her eyes, when they were like this, were not particularly human, or if they were human, they seemed so old that no human could have lived long enough to own them. They were eyes that had gone elsewhere and seen awful things and come back different. He realized that the flatness of her gaze was not dullness. It was as if her eyes were worn or bleached out by too much weather.
“I was going to ask. Then I changed my mind.”
“But why?” asked George.
The Gunner exhaled in frustration.
“Never trust a glint.”
Edie stood her ground. “You going to start asking everyone who shaves, then, hope that you find the right one, the one who can tell you about your precious stone heart thingy?”
“No,” said George, bridling. “I’m going to find a dictionary and look ‘shaveling’up.”
“Good,” said the Gunner unexpectedly.
“You saying a dictionary’s a good idea?” asked Edie incredulously.
“Dunno,” said the Gunner cheerfully. “But it’s a good thing he’s having ideas and not just panicking or pissing and moaning. Because, unless you missed all that the Sphinx said, whatever he’s got to do, sounds like the clock’s running. Come on.”
George jogged to keep up with the Gunner, who was crossing the traffic and heading away from the river.
“You know where we can find a dictionary? A bookshop maybe, or—”
“I got no idea where we can find a dictionary, son, but I can do us one better.”
“Better than a dictionary?”
“Yeah. I know where we can find a man what wrote one. Come on. Mind that taxi.”
George hopped up on to the curb as a cab whined past, narrowly missing him. He looked back. He couldn’t see Edie.