The Greenstone Grail (11 page)

‘Shouldn’t think so. Unless the Grafs had it done. Funnily enough, my chum at Sotheby’s was talking about that. If the cup’s two thousand years old, might really be a candidate for the Grail legend. On the other hand, if it was made in the Dark Ages …’

‘Exactly.’

‘Doesn’t make any odds to me, though. Belongs to the Thorns, whatever it is.’ An obstinate look settled about her mouth, erasing some of the humour. ‘Must get it back,’ she muttered to herself.

Nathan, finding he could move again, fidgeted in his chair, extending a hand to ruffle Hoover’s fur.

‘Still want to help me out?’ Rowena Thorn asked him. ‘Not as good as buried treasure, looking for a piece of paper, but it might mean treasure for me. There’d be a reward in it, promise you that …’

‘It’s okay,’ Nathan said. ‘I don’t want a reward. I’ll look anyway.’

‘Good man. Teach you the right stuff at Ffylde, do they?
Better than the comprehensive at Crowford, any day. All they seem to do there is take drugs and beat up the teachers.’ As Hazel and George were both there, Nathan knew this was an exaggeration, but he didn’t say so.

‘He gets his principles from his mother,’ Bartlemy said gently.

Rowena Thorn set down her teacup. ‘Better be off,’ she said. ‘Thanks for everything, Bartlemy. You’ve always been a good friend.’

‘You don’t mind my living here, do you?’ he inquired curiously. ‘Your ancestral home …’

‘Good heavens no. Hardly a mansion, is it? The Thorns never had the money for that. Just inconvenient, hell to maintain – never dared ask you about the plumbing. It isn’t as if I ever lived here myself. No sentiment involved.’

‘You never owned the cup, either,’ Bartlemy pointed out.

‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘I told you. That’s a matter of blood.’

At supper that night, Nathan told Annie about the cup of the Thorns – it didn’t appear to be a secret – or as much as he was able to tell, without talking about his vision, or the dreams of blood. Hazel was there; George came later. They both absorbed the story with enthusiasm and determined to search for the missing injunction. ‘D’you think it will be, like, a piece of parchment?’ George said. ‘A scroll or something, yellowing and with spiky writing.’

‘It’s fifteenth century,’ Nathan said. ‘I think they had paper in the fifteenth century. When did what’s-his-name invent the printing press?’

‘Caxton,’ Annie said, ‘in the fifteenth century. There was a lot going on then. Would anyone like some ice cream?’

Not surprisingly, everyone did. ‘Have you ever had a book
here as old as that?’ Hazel asked when the ice cream had been shared out.

‘No. I had a seventeenth century two-volume history once: that was the oldest. Anything from the fifteenth century would probably be in a museum. Does Rowena have any idea what this document looks like?’

‘Don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘We’ll just have to go through absolutely everything at Thornyhill.’

‘If your Uncle Barty doesn’t mind …’

‘It could be hidden in a book,’ Nathan pursued. ‘Secret papers very often are.’

‘But – Thornyhill is full of books!’ Hazel exclaimed, daunted. ‘It’ll take forever.’ Suddenly, the prospect of finding a missing document didn’t seem half so interesting. ‘Perhaps Mr Goodman won’t want us rooting around there. He might prefer to do it himself …’

‘Is there a reward?’ George asked.

‘Yes,’ Nathan said, looking rueful, ‘but I told Mrs Thorn we wouldn’t want it.’

‘
We
didn’t,’ George and Hazel chimed simultaneously.

‘You have to find it first,’ Annie pointed out. ‘
Then
you can worry about the reward. Are you sure it’s actually at Thornyhill?’

‘It must be,’ Nathan said. ‘Please don’t make things more complicated. Anyway, Mrs Thorn thought so.’

They retreated to the Den to discuss the problem further, until Hazel switched to the subject of a forthcoming party which she wanted Nathan to attend with her. ‘There’s going to be a disco,’ she said.

‘I don’t like discos,’ George offered. ‘They’re stupid.’

‘You only say that because you’re too scared to ask anyone to dance,’ Hazel said with devastating penetration. ‘Please come with me, Nathan. Not as – as my boyfriend or anything, just for … moral support.’

‘You – with a boyfriend!’ George guffawed.

‘No reason why Hazel shouldn’t have one, if she wants,’ Nathan said. ‘The thing is, next Saturday I was meaning to start searching –’

‘Not in the evening,’ Hazel said. ‘We could look for the injunction in the afternoon, and
then
go to the party.’

‘Okay.’ Nathan was not inspired by discos. He hoped, now they were teenagers, Hazel wasn’t going to start acting too much like a girl – or at any rate, like other girls. ‘Will there be drugs and people getting beaten up? Only according to Mrs Thorn, that’s what goes on at Crowford Comprehensive. It’ll be an awful let-down if it’s just dancing,’ he smiled.

Hazel giggled. ‘Jason Wicks got caught trying to sell Es last term,’ she said. ‘But it turned out they were his mother’s pills for cleaning her contact lenses.’

Maybe I could use drugs to control my dreams of the other world, Nathan thought. Maybe if I took sleeping pills …

But he hadn’t had one of those dreams for some time.

His friends left around eleven, and he climbed up to the skylight and sat on the edge, gazing up at the unknown star. He had still been unable to trace it on any chart, and a couple of weeks earlier his astronomy class had spent an hour on top of a tower at Ffylde studying the night sky, but there had been no sign of it. The star was there for
him
, watching him, a single pale eye effortlessly camouflaged among the constellations. He knew he should be afraid, but it was difficult to feel fear when the night was so beautiful, and the star-sparkle so magical: he could almost imagine it was benevolent, the eye of a secret guardian or kindly angel, not merely watching but watching over him, watching out for him, keeping him safe. But why would he need to be kept safe, and from whom (or what)? And why did he feel that it was all connected – the star, the dreams of the
other world, and the cup of the Thorns – the whispering cup – the Sangreal?

‘Nathan!’ his mother’s voice carried from downstairs. ‘Bedtime!’

‘I’m thirteen,’ Nathan objected, sliding off the window frame. ‘I’m too old to have bedtimes.’

‘You’re positively ancient,’ Annie called, ‘and you still need your sleep, especially during the term. Come down now.’

‘Coming.’

In bed, he drifted comfortably into sleep, at ease despite the problems niggling round the borders of his thought. And then some time in the night the mists of slumber withdrew, and he was in the light. The light of the other world, a burning sunset with streaks of cyclamen cloud above a puddle of molten gold that spilled along the rim of the sky. He saw it from the top of a tower so high that it must be the tallest in the city; spires and pinnacles glinted far below him, sparking fire from the sunglow; on an adjacent segment of roof he made out two xaurians tethered, tiny at that distance; another wheeled in the gulf of air between. Further down, he saw the city lights coming on as dusk deepened, window by window, lamp by lamp, creeping upwards out of the shadows until every building was ribbed with beads of glitter, and the moving flecks of far-off skimmers flashed eyelights of green and blue and neon-pink. Then somehow he was inside the tower, descending what appeared to be a liftshaft. He floated through closed doors along the gallery he had seen before with the twisted pillars, and into the semicircular room. But now the night outside was altogether dark, and screens covered most of the curving window. The man in the white mask – ruler, dictator, president, whatever he was – sat at his desk with his back turned. A woman had come in. There was something shocking about her
appearance, but it took Nathan a minute to realize what it was.

Her face was naked.

‘There may be some lingering daylight,’ the man said, without looking round. ‘You shouldn’t walk around unshielded.’

‘The light is gone.’ Her voice was cool and differed from that of the xaurian rider and the purple-cowled hologram in one essential: it was not subservient. Nathan found himself seeing her in profile and thought: She is very beautiful. Her hair was hidden under a white head-dress, like some kind of wimple; she wore a long white tunic and trousers, and her skin had the pale golden hue associated in our world with Orientals. The lines of her cheekbone and jaw reminded him of pictures he had seen of the head of Nefertiti, though her neck was longer, slightly too long for an ordinary human, and as she turned towards him he realized the planes of her face were subtly different, though it would have been hard to explain in what way. A millimetre here, a millimetre there, and the whole visage was somehow distorted, though its beauty remained undiminished. But then, Nathan reflected, maybe our faces would look that way to her – as if a fractional adjustment had produced that impression of wrongness, of something out of kilter. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘what does it matter? I have little fear of death, even the sundeath, the shriveller of all that lives. The slow hours weary me, and my breath galls. I would welcome Death, if I could find her.’

‘Don’t be in such haste to destroy your beauty,’ the man said, turning now to gaze at her. ‘It still gives me pleasure to look on it, and there is little enough cause for pleasure left.’

‘To be beautiful,’ she said, ‘it is necessary to have a world to be beautiful
in
. You wrote a letter to me once, in the far-off days of youth and hopefulness, saying that creation itself was for my benefit.
The earth, the moons, the sun, the sea
were made only to frame your loveliness
. Now, the earth is foul, and the sun poisons the sea, and the three moons of Eos turn red. Without creation, without a place to be, I am nothing. You are so clever, Grandir: make me a world to live in.’

‘I cannot make worlds,’ he said, ‘even I, but maybe … I can take one. Have patience awhile, Halmé, and hide your face from the daylight a little longer. I will find a world for you, ‘I promise.’

The woman called Halmé went to the window, sliding one of the screens aside, and Nathan saw she was right: there was a huge moon, not quite full, hanging in the sky, and it was red, and eastward another moon-sliver had the same blood-stained hue.

‘Close the screen!’ said the man. ‘The moon is too bright. It could be dangerous.’

The woman obeyed, but slowly. The more he looked at her, the more beautiful Nathan found her; it was as if his sight was adjusting to her different facial proportions, and now the women of his own world would look forever wrong to him. He watched her leaving: she moved swiftly and very gracefully, the white ends of her wimple fluttering behind her. Halmé was her name, he was certain, but Grandir, he thought, might be a title, like Lord or Excellency. He was thinking about that when the scene changed.

The masked ruler was climbing a stair. The stair moved, like an escalator but in a spiral, twisting round and round inside a cylindrical shaft, and the man was stepping briskly upwards, perhaps impatient of its slowness. At the top was a circular chamber with no windows: the architects of this world evidently favoured curves in construction. The only light came from a number of clear globes, some smooth-sided, some facetted, which appeared to be suspended in mid-air, though as Nathan drew closer he saw there were no threads
or wires supporting them: they simply floated, motionless or in orbit. A pale radiance came from the heart of each, yet it illuminated nothing in the room save the globes themselves. The man moved to the centre of the chamber where a slightly larger globe with many faces revolved slowly in one place. Lances of light emanated from it, sinking into the darkness, never reaching the walls. The man stretched one hand towards it without actually making contact and murmured a single word: ‘
Fia
!’ A white dazzle flooded the room, so that for an instant Nathan was blinded, even though it was only a dream; then the glare retreated back into the globe, and Nathan saw a picture appear above it, as if projected onto the ceiling. At first it was difficult to make out, since he was looking at it from underneath, but then he realized it was a roof – he could see tiles – with a square hole in it, an open skylight, and a boy and a girl emerging into view, staring and pointing, pointing out of the picture, down at the globe. It was a minute or two before he understood. He was seeing himself, himself and Hazel, looking up at a star that didn’t belong …

He awoke much later with the dream still fresh in his mind. It was still dark, and he got up very quietly and stole downstairs to the cupboard between the shelves, and climbed the ladder to the Den, and opened the skylight, and there was the star, only he knew now it wasn’t a star, it was a globe that shone both in this world and the other one, a watching eye for a man whose face was never seen. A guardian angel – a manipulator – a menace. Nathan didn’t know, and the only way to find out was to dream on. Or maybe it was all pure fancy, a story invented by his subconscious mind to explain something he couldn’t comprehend. For if it was true why – why in all the worlds – would a ruler so powerful, so desperate, clearly facing some cosmic catastrophe, be interested in
him
?

He closed the skylight, descended the ladder, went back upstairs to bed. But the question followed him, nagging at his mind, keeping him from sleep: the unimaginable, unanswerable
why
.