The House of Storms (27 page)

Time, above all, was an alien element. Even as the channel grew alive with increasingly elaborate vessels and the wooded earth seethed and divided itself into clearings, the land remained aloof. Then, more of its trees were felled, and its grasses were grazed by grey-white beasts. The stones and timbers which the other creatures laid upon it grew more elaborate, climbing upon each other into fortifications which briefly almost mimicked the cliffs of the cove in their grandeur before, as always, they fell away. The land gave and the land took back, and the land remained unchanging even as it changed. Nourished by flesh and faeces, washed by the rain, heated by sun and splintered by frost, burrowed by worms and beetles, eroded from beneath by the sea and haloed by gulls, all the things which came and went did so in their own inexplicable ways, but still the land remained.

It was called Inver-Durnock by now, in some variety of sound and spelling, and the valley, like all valleys in that part of the world, was known as a combe. From that, the name of Invercombe grew, and seeped into the headland as well, although Durnock Head stood so large and proud that it kept its own name. At this time, had the land been aware of it, the beasts called humans discovered more about the substance which their ancestors had once crudely extracted from their heat-crackled stones. They called it aether, and they used it to construct the most elaborate yet of the heaps of stones which had guarded the head of the valley. Decorated with bright enamels, cosseted with spells, spanned by the long, delicate ribs of beams and arches of the first fellings of the fabulous new trees which the Guild of Foresters was now growing, the house became a miniature of the aethered wonders of London and Bristol and Preston and Dudley. It rose, proud itself, although as light as shadow-chased sunlight to the land’s regard—mere windless air. Still, the aether which suffused the house from its keyplate to its highest chimney carried echoes of the same consciousness which the land possessed beneath, and these echoes caused it to experience something resembling curiosity.

Slowly, although to the land nothing seemed slow, it and the house mingled, and then spread also into the gardens which, aether-infused themselves and greenly hungry, enlarged in increasing elaboration across the valley. The Ages, for the little they meant, came and went. A white Temple of Winds arose on the spot on Durnock Head where upright stones had once bared their teeth. House, garden and land were dimly conscious of a new profusion; a calling of wills which it saw no particular reason to dispute. It was aware, certainly, of a gathering complexity. This, too, it welcomed, inasmuch as it welcomed anything. It breathed now not only to the rise and fall of seasons and the clamorous sea, but also, in a shadow-light evanescence, to the manifold tides of life, purpose and machinery.

The valley became a stepped garden, fed by pools from the River Riddle. Above it, a waterwheel churned, and flour was ground from the new golden fields of the west, and bread was baked in the ovens beside it and borne fresh to the house. Wines filled the cellars which the new builders rediscovered and enlarged. Instead of arrow-slits and cannon, frail swallowsnest balconies of curlicued iron leaned towards the sea. Invercombe had always been a pleasant place to arrive at, and a difficult one to leave; generation on generation, a family was happy there, feeding the fish which grew to incredible size in the stew pond, or walking walled gardens at night to the fantastic glow of the moonivy. Perhaps it was
too
happy there, for, as the First Age became the Second and telegraph lines and railway tracks spread across the country and the cities swelled under their palls of smog, its influence began to fade. Gaslight never reached Invercombe, and the nearby grandmasters and mistresses who called on the place smiled and exchanged glances as they flicked the dust from their chairs and decided to perhaps not come again. Invercombe grew wilder in its ways. Its tall chimneys grew nests, and smoked intermittently like tall old men in hats. There was drink and suicide. The family faded, and Invercombe finally drifted into the accounts and inventories of the Great Guild of Telegraphers. Coloured sunlight still fell through the magnificent hall windows, but it snagged now on streams of dust.

Age changed to Age. New technologies came into play. One summer, men arrived, and Invercombe resounded once more to the sound of spells and hammerings. It was nothing like the grand days, but it was light and it was life. For the first time, as well, Invercombe found itself re-energised by a substance called electricity, and then connected along tiny wires which looped across the countryside to a consciousness which was both greater and yet part of its own. The men soon went away, and the talking reflections which they had gathered of themselves in mirrors faded, but Invercombe was no longer alone. Granted on lease to Greatmaster Ademus Isumbard Porrett of the General Guild of Distemperers as compensation for a marriage contract on which it had reneged, its roofs were remade and its chimneys straightened. At night, Invercombe’s windows gleamed as they had never gleamed before, and in daylight all shadows were banished. Then the valley was warmed by a weathertop, which expressed the land’s will as much as it did Greatmaster Porrett’s as it battled grey skies and fought back rain. Fogs might sweep down the Bristol Channel, but all that lingered over the stepped floral gardens and specimen trees was the same delicate mist you might find hazing the background of a Renaissance painting. On hot summer’s days, when weather was made perfect and the light grew as burnished as the aethered brass which had drawn it, Greatmaster Porrett endlessly strode the weathertop’s iron gantry as he gazed along the estate road for a sign of the arrival of his lost bride.

Beyond Invercombe, England grew sleek and prosperous. This was the Age of the telephone and the gramophone, it was the Age of boisterous new rhythms and dance crazes borne over from the Fortunate Isles on the sweet winds of trade. Spices and chocolates; the mally and the jag; werrysilk dresses weighted at the hem to fall sheer as water and almost as clear; excavations in Egypt; ambitious new settlements on the wild mainland of Thule. The zoos were filled by monstrosities, and scandal became as fashionable as cartouche wallpaper, and fashion was everything, and money was everywhere, and the parties were endless. This was the Age of Light, when the streets of the great cities glowed as they had never before; when trams sparked and ghost-visions of cinematographs flickered on the screens of the picture palaces which supplanted the music halls of old. Motor cars became as common as carts, and the complex telegrams of old which had had to be sung guildsman to guildsman, haft to haft, were replaced by the telephone. It was the Age, too, of information and money, of the clever machines which bore the commerce of the nation with a speed and accuracy with which no human brain could compete, and to which Invercombe, through the tiny turning of the small intelligence of its own reckoning engine, sang along.

Greatmaster Ademus Isumbard Porrett was found one winter’s morning by the last of his servants, standing frozen to the gantry to his weathertop, staring down the estate road for the guest his icicled eyes still seemed to believe would come, even though it was known that she had been dead since almost the start of the Age. He was buried in its grounds to his own instructions in an unmarked grave, and Invercombe reverted to the Guild of Telegraphers. Once more, it lay forgotten, if not quite entirely neglected. A skeleton staff was established. Sometimes, to the scurryings and workings of the creatures which the house and the land still did not understand, mists were summoned, or seas were calmed, on nights when tiny craft flitted like water-beetles across the estuary. Things changed, and time passed, but everything remained essentially the same.

Then, the house sensed a new stirring as the cold of a particularly long winter, which it felt now in the damp bones of its old stones, began to abate. The arrival of two new creatures seemed to be the trigger for all this activity, although it still knew little of cause and effect. It knew little, as well, of the ties which kept these busy beasts apart or together, and understood only that the larger and older of many species—those which flew and those which burrowed as well as those which put stone upon stone and spell upon spell—fed and protected the smaller and newer of their kind, and often killed other species in order to do so. So in many ways it found little that was unusual about Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell, and yet it also sensed that she was unique, and the stones and the land spoke to her as they spoke to all of Invercombe’s residents, not because they cared that she heard or wished to communicate, but because they could not help but sing.

The summer was a warm one. Invercombe basked and exhaled. The gulls on the cliffs of Clarence Cove hatched their eggs and glutted themselves on sprat, and the one of the creatures which had come to the house near to death recovered, and spent much time with another of its kind which had been born nearby on the shore. To Invercombe, the weight of each incident was the same. Then came the pinprick instant of a lost aether delivery, and Invercombe was emptied once again, although the telephones that long winter rang with word that the Age of Light was ending, that east was turning against west, and even Invercombe began to sense a slumberous change.

I
N THE BEGINNING WAS THE SONG
, and the song was all and the song was everything. Klade, happy though he always told himself he was, sometimes looked back on these unremembered days of his earliest childhood as a time of lost content. Slowly, within the song, he’d become aware of individual voices, presences, shapes. Ida’s hands, which were rough and giving. Then Silus’s voice, and the white shape of his face. Walls and ceilings, and light spinning through windows, and the clear image and scent, perhaps his first true memory, of Blossom standing over him above the bars of his cot, swaying and weeping and crying and singing through the broken petals of his face. For Blossom was the song as well, and the song was neither happiness nor sadness, nor was it hunger or warmth, but it was all of those things, and it was the rucked feel of his sheets as well and the Farmers lowing each evening to their cattle across the thistled fields. The song was the rubbery taste of a teat pushed into his mouth, and the hot gush of need which followed, although Klade knew that that was a later memory—something he’d made up himself in the times when he’d begun to explore Big House in which he lived, and opened a spill of bottles in Kitchen.

He was growing, changing, and time was passing, but the song was always there. It was bigger than Big House, or Garden, or the Woods into which he must never stray, for that was also where the Shadow Ones dwelt, and the song there was at its brightest and fiercest.
The song is you, and the song is us,
Ida would murmur in the way she had, which was different to sound or seeing.
You, Klade, are the Chosen.
Blinking. The dark geometries of her face.
And so are we …

Chosen. Rambling amid the seedheads in Garden, picking the silvery bark off the trees, Klade swilled that word around his mouth just as he did the pebbles from the bed of the Impassable Stream which he sometimes sucked for their slick coolness.
Chosen,
he was
Chosen.
He liked the feel and taste of that.
Chosen, Chosen, Chosen …!
And so was this sun and so were these clouds, and so were the tiny mud-grey fishes which slipped away from his fingers in the stream. The water sang as well as it slipped sweetly cold through his fingers, and he sang with it, and laughed through the pebbles with which he’d filled his mouth. Standing up, he could see Big House, the crooked finger beckon of its chimney and the greyed panes of its windows. Garden wavered, delicious with the scent of nettles, and here came Silus with his white face and the odd draw of his lips which made trembling shapes in the air like the waft of the clouds. Klade tried to perform the same trick himself, but found that his mouth was still blocked by the hard glinting coolness of those pebbles.

The song changed and lifted him. The song pumped his back. The song was a spew of stones. Time, then, was passing inside the grainy windows of Big House, which he was on no account to lick with the swollen thing inside his mouth called a tongue and which Ida didn’t have. Then there were voices—winter voices, although he knew it all went back to the singing river and those pebbles. This, he’d now been firmly told, was to touch something. This, he’d been told, was to listen. This was taste, which again was different. And this, Klade, is colour, and this, Klade, is scent. There are your hands, fingers, which you must use rather than your mouth to explore, although the fire he was squatting before on his three-legged stool in Big Room had no fingers and was still touching him with warmth. The fire was good, but at the same time the fire was dangerous, and he was to sit here, but no closer, as he listened to the winter voices wafting through the door.

Even his name—Klade. Whenever has anybody been called such a thing?

That was Ida, whom he could hear with or without the door being open because she had no tongue and the sounds she made came only in his head.

‘Blame Blossom if you like—it was just the first noise he made. But he’s unique. Why on earth should he have a name that’s been used by someone else?’

But we’re making him too unique. You’ve seen how confused he gets. Things he can and cannot hear. We should never have said yes and gone to Saint Alphage’s …

‘You’re talking as if I had a choice, Ida. Whatever it was that Alice Meynell wanted, she certainly wasn’t going to let Klade grow up and live an ordinary life. You haven’t met her, Ida—not close up. She’s …’ Here, whatever Silus was saying—and he’d been striving recently, Klade had noticed, to use his mouth to say as many things as possible even though he found it awkward and it made a warm rain on your face—drifted into song, and the song was lost to him, as dark and strange and dangerous and enticing as the flames of this fire.
We can’t give up on him, Ida …

But it’s just—I sometimes despair. Even though I love him so deeply. And even if we have no choice.