The Greenstone Grail (26 page)

‘I doubt it,’ Bartlemy said. ‘There is obviously some link between our worlds that goes a long way back. It may be chance that Nathan brought you here, but it isn’t chance that makes him dream. I need you to tell me everything you can remember about the cup – and the other items. In our world, the cup is also supposed to be one of several relics – three or four, legend is unclear. Another is a spear, which might be transposed into a sword; I don’t know about the crown. Stories have always centred on the cup. Here, too, it is said to have held the blood of someone holy. There seem to be parallels between the traditions in your world and ours which cannot be coincidence. Do you give the cup a name, or is that secret too?’

‘
Sangreal
,’ Eric said. ‘That is
sangré
, blood, and
grala
, cup, bowl. Is word in language of force.’

‘It sounds,’ Bartlemy said, ‘like the language we use here for strong magics, which is in turn a source for many other languages. Your world may be far more advanced than ours
– advanced enough to be on the verge of annihilation – but there are plainly many basic similarities. Right, let’s have the story from the beginning. It isn’t forbidden to discuss it here.’

Eric told him all he could, but he knew little more than the scanty details he had already provided. The first Grandir had been a ruler of great power and holiness, treacherously murdered by his best friend – an ending he himself had foreseen, though why he had done nothing to avoid it was not clear. In some versions the killer was his own son, or his sister-wife. He had prophesied that eventually mortals would misuse the magic which abounded in their universe, and it would turn into a poison that would destroy them. But he had created a spell which might yet save them, a spell that was embodied in the cup, the sword and the crown: the cup that had held his blood, the sword that slew him and the crown he had worn in life – yet he was slain before he could reveal what the spell was. Why? asked Bartlemy, gently practical. It seemed a particularly ill-timed assassination. Eric shrugged and gestured, looking both tragic and doubtful. It was fate, doom, a grim inevitability. Or maybe it had been written down, in a document since lost, or whispered in someone’s ear and passed on, down the ages, to each chosen listener, until the moment came when they would speak the words aloud. But that moment had come, and no one had spoken. Why should the cup be hoarded in an alien world, by those who did not know its value? Were the sword and the crown here too, or scattered throughout assorted universes? They must be recovered, and returned to Eos, and then maybe the spell would be completed.

‘Perhaps that is why Nathan bring me here, though he not know it. Is pattern, destiny. Cup not safe here. Must be watched, guarded.’

Bartlemy remembered Nathan’s reference to the star shining down on Eade.

‘Someone’s watching,’ he said.

‘Are you – are you quite all right at the moment?’ It was Edmund Gable who spoke, one of Nathan’s classmates and the boy who occupied the bed next to him in the dormitory. They both played in the cricket team and had been good friends almost from the beginning of school.

‘Of course I am,’ Nathan said. Ned looked anxious and unsure, a state of mind that wasn’t normal for him. ‘Why?’

‘You don’t seem to be concentrating in class lately – only a B in chemistry, and –’

Nathan grinned. ‘You sound like Brother Bunsen –’ this was their nickname for Mr Bunyan, the chemistry teacher. ‘Chemistry isn’t my subject. Of the sciences, I prefer physics and biology, you know that.’

‘You used to come top in all of them. Something’s wrong – something weird. I woke up last night and looked at you, and you looked sort of – dim.’

‘Thanks! I’m supposed to look clever in my sleep?’

‘Not that kind of dim. I mean – blurred. Like you weren’t quite there.’

Nathan’s heart jolted so violently it was a minute before he could speak. ‘You must have imagined it. I expect you were dreaming or something. Anyway, how could you see? It was dark.’

‘Early dawn,’ said Ned. ‘There was light enough to see by. Honestly. And I
didn’t
imagine it. You were almost – transparent. Like a ghost.’

‘Well, I’m here now,’ Nathan said. ‘Solid as anything. Feel.’ He held out his arm. ‘If I was a ghost I’d be dead, wouldn’t I? Not about to thrash you at cricket practice this afternoon.’

He brushed the incident aside as best he could, and Ned didn’t refer to it again, but he was horribly frightened.

Until Ned spoke to him, he had completely forgotten his dream. How many other dreams might he have forgotten? Was there information he ought to know, mislaid in his subconscious? And what might he have done, on all those lost voyages? Supposing he dreamed every night? He tried to rein in speculation, tempering his panic with what he hoped was common sense. After all, he remembered the dream now. And surely whatever power it was that let such dreams happen, it wouldn’t cheat him by blanking them out.

The evidence of dematerialization was still more disturbing. Presumably, the more real he became in the dream, the less real was the body he left behind him. As he seemed to become increasingly solid every time, and he could find no way of stopping the process, he began to wonder what would happen if he disappeared completely from the bed in which he slept. Would he ever be able to get back? Instinct told him that his body acted as a kind of anchor, pulling his spirit home; even in alternative universes they were never entirely separate. But if his physical being vanished from this world, perhaps his spirit would be unable to find the way back. He would have to discuss it with his uncle Barty. Somehow, he felt sure, the old man would know what to do. Or if he didn’t feel sure at least he felt hopeful. The relief of having an adult to turn to rushed over him like a sudden warmth, and he headed for his next lesson (French) in a more optimistic frame of mind.

Even so, French didn’t hold his attention. His thought drifted, back into the now-remembered dream. He was back in the chamber at the top of the tower, where the pale globes rotated slowly, suspended in mid-air, emitting a light that went nowhere. The Grandir moved around the room, studying first one, then another, his footsteps virtually soundless
on the dark floor. As the light illuminated so little, Nathan could only see him when he drew close to a globe, then the white mask would glimmer into being as though equally suspended, while his sombre garments made his torso all but invisible. Nathan himself had no trouble finding concealment; all he had to do was keep well away from the spheres. What had Bartlemy called them? Globes of interdimensional space, bound by magic …

The Grandir approached one of the peripheral spheres, spoke the word he had used before, a word not in the common language of Eos. ‘
Fia
!’ Nathan trusted the subsequent flash blinded the man as effectively as it did him, otherwise, if the Grandir had looked in the right direction, he must have been revealed. But the ruler was concentrating on the ceiling. A circular image had appeared, inverted; Nathan guessed it was sea. There was just a breadth of dark blue with a thin strip of sky along the bottom, curving slightly as it was refracted by the sphere. He wondered if it was the ocean he had seen in another dream.

The Grandir obliterated the image with another word and moved on. A different sphere, a different scene. A tumbled mass of reddish rock with what looked like the entrance to a cave, a hi-tech cave with sliding doors emblazoned with a sun-symbol in bronze. Nathan was reminded irresistibly of
Thunderbirds
, but when the doors opened a figure emerged, far smaller than he anticipated, changing the whole scale of the scene into something huge and magnificent, though it was difficult to appreciate it upside-down. The figure wore futuristic clothes of a dull rainbow sheen and seemed to have a shaven head, but he thought it might be a woman. It descended a flight of steps set among the rocks and was lost to view. The Grandir watched for a few minutes while nothing happened. A featherless bird, like a xaurian, dropped out of
the yellow sky and snatched at a snake which stretched its jaws in threat, a spiked ruff extending round its neck. But the Grandir did not wait for the outcome, and the image flicked out.

Several more scenes followed. There was a world of snow where shaggy beings shuffled around, insulated from the cold by a pelt of fur which might be their clothing or their hide. An enormous creature like a mammoth hove into view, surmounted by a carved seat where three more of the shaggies perched precariously. Then there was something that resembled a mediaeval village, with worn thatch on the roofs and smoking chimneys and a young woman in padded leather trousers whose hair was an extraordinary apricot-gold. Then a woodland scene which for some reason made him uncomfortable, a woodland in autumn – but an autumn richer than any he had ever imagined, where the leaves were yellow and flame-red and crimson and magenta, and vividly spotted fungi swelled from every tree-bole. Other visions unfolded in succession: a desert with riders mounted on two-legged reptilian animals winding across it in a long defile; a city on top of a cliff, where bridges and buildings extruded from the rock as if they were part of it; a forest of giant mushrooms, their ragged caps overhanging a house or temple with scarlet pillars and curling roofs. Lastly there was a wide green lake, mirror-smooth and bordered with spiked bulrushes twenty feet high, and beside it a purple-clad man sat on a flat stone in what might be meditation, still as a tree.

These are other worlds, Nathan thought, awe mingling with a strange excitement. The globes are like peepholes in the very fabric of space and time, and I can see through into different realities, different states of being. And these are just a few. There must be thousands of them, millions, perhaps billions, many of them far more alien and bizarre. There could
be places where the world is flat, or the sea is pink, or the most intelligent life form is a talking rabbit. Infinity has room for everything. And everything seemed to him suddenly such a big word, he had never known how big, a huge word, encompassing realms beyond imagination, and galaxies beyond counting, and creatures of every size or shape or form. His mind could not stretch far enough to take it in.

He looked round and saw, almost with relief, that he was still in the circular chamber, and the multi-world visions had gone, and there were only the spheres turning slowly, and the rays of light that never reached the walls. The Grandir was in the centre now, his hands encircling the largest globe, not touching but apparently locating a particular facet. The brilliance flared, and an image appeared above him. Not the bookshop this time but a section of riverbank. It must be near Michael’s house, where they found Effie Carlow. A woman was walking along the path, a dark-haired woman whose face Nathan glimpsed only briefly. He saw the jut of prominent cheekbones, the downward sweep of brooding eyebrows. He was sure he knew her, but it took him a few seconds to remember. Rianna Sardou, the actress and film star, Michael’s absentee wife. He wondered why she was back, now of all times, and what it meant, seeing her walk along that stretch of river – if indeed it meant anything at all. She had a perfect right to come back if she wished to, he told himself; after all, she lived there.

As she went past the long grasses beside the path parted, and a face peered out. A swarthy, warty face half covered in hair, the narrow eyes netted with wrinkles, the expression both sly and somehow desperate. Nathan had only seen that face once before, and then just for an instant, but he recognized it immediately. The prisoner in the Darkwood. He started, twisting his head, trying to see better, but the dream
had begun to slip away, and the picture vanished. There was a moment when the white mask seemed to rotate slowly amongst the globes, as though seeking him out, then sleep engulfed him again.

He emerged from his recollections to find the class had fallen silent and the teacher was eying him expectantly. A page of French prose was open in front of him. With only a little prompting, he began to translate.

Dave Bagot turned up at the house on Thursday evening. Hazel, listening at the kitchen door, heard him say to her mother: ‘Now the old witch has gone you’ll take me back, won’t you? Kicking me out wasn’t your idea. It was all her. She hated men. Evil old hag.’

‘She’s dead,’ Lily said listlessly.

‘Can’t say I’m sorry. I know, I know, she was your grandmother, but –’

‘I don’t want you back. I don’t want you to come back at all.’

‘Don’t be so fucking silly. You’re my
wife
, this is my
home
, I’ve got a right to be here. You can’t turn me out.’ More four-letter words followed, and shouting, and eventually the sound of a blow. He gets to that part much sooner these days, Hazel thought. Her mind whizzed round, Wondering what to do, who to turn to. If only that police detective were still around – but he hadn’t proved much use after all. She slipped out, hearing her mother sob, feeling a tug at her insides which made it hard to go. But she must get help.

It was just after eight when she arrived at the bookshop, rattling the knocker, clutching at Annie when she opened the door. ‘Nathan said, come to you,’ she explained. ‘No – you mustn’t go back there. Dad’s too strong. Find someone. Call someone.’

They found Michael, on his way to the pub for a quick pint. Seeing him, Annie thought for a confused moment that he looked like the answer to a prayer, her knight in shining armour – then she remembered that Dave Bagot was a big man, heavily built, where Michael was thin and whippy, and suddenly she was afraid for him, and terrified for Lily, and all the mixed-up fears made her behave stupidly, stammering and clasping his arm. ‘Call the police,’ he said tersely. ‘No – don’t come with me. Just show me the way.’