The Poisoned Crown (47 page)

“The Spring Solstice?”

“It was spring, yes … In ze pagan days, zey make ze sacrifice, so ze corn grow tall. For us, it almost
Pâcques
—Easter—when
Sainte-Marie
must see her son die. Always, zere must be blood … I find ze place, ze hill zey call Scarbarrow, and I kill my son—my beloved Nathaniel. I
cut his throat, but ze ozzer head—ze demon head—still speak, still cry to me—so I kill him, too, I kill him twice, and his blood run over me, ze blood to open ze Gate, and bring me to my lover again …” Only now did she start to tremble, her small body shaking like a leaf in a gale. Hazel, cold with the horror of it, thought she could hear bones rattling together under the skin. “But ze Gate is shut—it is shut! He does not answer me—he does not come! I kill my son—
his
son—and he does not come to me! I nevaire hear his voice again … I call to him, and call to him, but he is gone …
Sacré Dieu de merde
, he is gone …”

Hazel found she, too, was shaking, though not in sympathy. Bartlemy took her hand.

“Ask her,” he said, “if she was
told to
kill the boy.”

“I do not need to be told. I
knew.
It is ze ritual, as old as Time. In a great cause, zere must be ze great sacrifice. Zere must be ze sacrifice of
love.
For ze strongest magic, zere must be blood … to open ze Gate, zere must be blood …”

“Where was the Scarbarrow?” Hazel said.

“South. Zere were woods … I have no map, I follow ze heart. Always, I follow ze heart. And now I have nothing—nothing. Nothing for all time. My power is all worn out… I live on and on … wiz nozzing.
Rien de rien de Hen
…”

“Why don’t you let go?” Hazel said, slightly startled by Bartlemy’s final question. “In death, the Gate would open for you, if not to the god you once sought…”

Another spasm gripped Margolaine; sputum dripped from her mouth. “I kill my son,” she said, “for nothing. I think now it is not ze god who wait for me beyond ze Gate. Maybe it is ze Devil… I feel him zere, sometime, waiting for me—waiting … I will not go to him, not while I can hold on to life. Inside zis body I am still strong, stronger zan Death. I will nevaire let go …”

Hazel released her without thanks, with no courtesy farewell. She wanted to find words of pity, but she felt none. Only disgust, and the bigness of her fear, hanging over her like a cloud.

“Some people make their own hell,” Bartlemy said. “There is nothing you can do for them.”

“Nathan,” Hazel whispered. “He wouldn’t… Annie wouldn’t…”

“No indeed.” The circle was extinguished, the electric lights turned on. The room was a room again, not an isolated cell floating in the dark. Bartlemy bent to put another log on the fire. “Annie is hardly a mad sorceress seeking power beyond the world. I think the pattern became deformed, in Margolaine’s mind, just as her child was deformed. And I fear she was not the only one. But Annie opened the Gate through love, with no thought of self, and so Nathan was born whole, and the pattern is clear—though we cannot yet see where it leads.”

“Is it true—about the sacrifice?” Hazel said, her hands writhing in Hoover’s shaggy fur. She felt it was true.

“Yes. But in the old days it was the king who died, not the prince. That was what kingship was all about.”

“It’s different now,” Hazel said shakily, “isn’t it? We don’t sacrifice our royals. Well, not much …” She tried to laugh.

Bartlemy poured her a drink—the dark red drink he brewed himself, sweet and spicy, warming her with its own heat.

“You did well,” he said. “And we may have learned something useful. That is worth a few horrors. Still, I had hoped to discover where the Scarbarrow lies …”

“Do I tell Nathan?” Hazel asked.

“It’s up to you.”

But she didn’t think she could.

T
HE SNOW
thawed, refroze, thawed again. The temperature inched up a degree or two. The spring flowers kept their heads down, staying in the comparative warmth of the earth. Nathan got a cold that went on his chest, and Annie decided to keep him home for a week or so, feeding him one of Bartlemy’s tonics and lots of good food. Sometimes she could almost fool herself that their relationship was back to normal, unless she steered the conversation too close to the wrong subjects, when he would instantly withdraw from her behind a barrier of stillness and minimal communication. Hazel came to see him, and George, who caught his cold, and Michael and Liberty Rayburn, bringing a carrot
cake from their mother and a couple of CDs they had downloaded specially. By the Sunday, Nathan announced he was well again and ready to go back to school.

“Keep him home a few more days,” Bartlemy said for Annie’s private ear. “Tuesday is the twenty-first. This may be the night we’ve been waiting for. Whatever he has to do, it’s better he should do it from here.”

“I’m not staying indoors,” Nathan objected when Annie told him he wasn’t going back to Ffylde just yet.

On Monday he wrote a history essay and went for a walk with Hazel.

“It’s the Solstice tomorrow,” she said. “Supposing … something happens?”

“Nothing ever happens,” Nathan said. “Nothing’s happened for ages. I look for the Grandir nearly every night, but I can’t find him. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.”

Hazel thought:
Should I tell him
—
about Margolaine, and the boy with two heads?
But she couldn’t summon up the courage.

They walked through the woods on that cold gray day, talking little. Afterward, Hazel would always remember that walk, and the things she had not said. The countryside was blanched by the long winter into every shade of pale: the grass was barely green anymore, the earth barely brown, the tree trunks colorless in the drab daylight. The whole world looked like an invalid who has stayed in bed too long, growing weaker and sicklier, hoping in vain that one day someone will throw open the curtains and let in the sun.

“Anyway,” Hazel said, out of the blue, “it will be spring soon. That’s what the Solstice is
really
about.”

“How do you know?” said Nathan. “Just because it was spring last year, and the year before, doesn’t mean it will come again. Some people think We’re heading for another ice age. We’ve done so much damage to our environment. It’s like the Contamination on Eos. We’re only small-scale yet—just one planet—we may be extinct before we can take it further—but damage is what humans do. They could have taught us something, the Grandir’s people. We might have learned from their mistakes.”

Hazel shivered, though there was little wind.

“It
will
be spring,” she insisted doggedly. “The day after tomorrow, it will be spring.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, something happened.

Nathan opened the portal more out of habit than hope—if
opened
was the right word. He would find the weak spot in his mind and pour himself through it, into another world—but although he now felt he could control the transition, he never knew which world he would be in, or where he was going when he got there. When his dreams had arrived at random they had seemed to have a goal, he had felt he was progressing, following some sort of plan, even if it wasn’t his, but since he could dream to order the journeys felt purposeless, a vain ramble through a multiverse that meant nothing to him. The desperate search for his father had become the wanderings of a lost vagabond in the space—time continuum on a quest that would never be fulfilled.

He was not quite sixteen; his patience was limited and his attention span short. Nearly three months of nocturnal meanderings seemed almost interminable.

That night he was back on Eos. More twisty corridors, strange cellular rooms fitting together like bubbles in a lava lamp, a winding stair, not a spiral but a snake, uncoiling itself down a wide shaft studded with windows with the usual view of sheer buildings and intersecting sky, though there was no air traffic anymore. At the bottom a long passage like a tunnel burrowed straight through the heart of the complex— whatever complex he was in—with an archway at the far end filled with light and color. He was reminded of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and the little door into the garden. But there were no gardens on Eos. He began to walk down the tunnel toward it, but it was a long way, and he broke into a run, and as he drew nearer he saw it
was
a garden, or a visual trick—there were green leaves, and flowers, and a light like the sun before it was poisoned—before it wiped out all the leaves and flowers for good. When he reached the arch there was a door of glass or crystal; he pushed it open and stepped through—and he was in the garden, it was real, it was alive, though the flowers were like none he
had ever seen. Daffodil-trumpets a foot long, blossom-tassels in cream and gold, puffballs of milky petals emitting wafts of pale pink pollen … Somewhere above there was a domed roof that filtered the sun or gave off some light of its own, the light of spring in worlds where the seasons still turned, and spring always came around again.

The garden was circular. Paved pathways converged on a central point, where there was an arrangement of fountains with slender spools of water crisscrossing in an elaborate interplay. And there was the Grandir, sitting beside the fountains. Waiting for him.

He wore no mask or hood, and his customary black clothing had been changed for white. White jacket, white leggings, white boots. He seemed to glitter faintly in the spring light.

“You’re my father,” Nathan said.

The Grandir didn’t hug him or even take his hand. On Eos, people very rarely touched.

“I would have told you,” he said, “if she had not. It was time for you to know. Sit down.”

Nathan sat.

The Grandir said: “Have you any questions?”

Of course he had questions—so many questions they were filling his mind and crowding one another out, and somehow he couldn’t get a grip on any of them.

“Forgive me,” the Grandir went on. “I have never done this before. I have lived almost fifty thousand years in earth time, ruled worlds beyond count, journeyed my own universe at thoughtspeed, done things no other man could do—but not this. This one thing. I have never talked to my son. It is difficult for me, too.”

“We’ve talked before,” Nathan said. “Twice.”

“We had no time then,” the Grandir said, “and you didn’t know the truth. Now we have time, as I promised you. Not much, but a little. Time to talk, here at the end of the world. Father and son.”

Do you love me?
Nathan wanted to ask.
Are you proud of me? Am I the son you hoped for?

Do you love me?

“I’ve got the Crown,” he said.

“I know.”

“Should I bring it here? With the Cup and the Sword?”

“No. The rest of your task is both simpler, and harder. We will come to that shortly. You have done well—beyond my expectation. I could have wished you had resisted the urge to interfere in the worlds where you found yourself, but you have the instincts of a ruler—the desire for justice, order, peace—and you have always showed both courage and resource. You imperiled yourself, and your task, but I helped where I could, and you survived in the end. You are my son indeed—the son I have not deserved. I betrayed Halmé that you might be born. She knows the truth now, and she will forgive me, but her heart burns. She is the most beautiful and beloved of all women; it is hard for her to come to terms with such a treachery, no matter how desperate the need.”

Nathan stammered: “Why—why did you—how did you—”

“I needed a son who could open the portal—a son born of two worlds. I chose your world, your planet, when it was in its infancy; it resembles Alquàrin in the early days, the place from which my people came. But earthfolk had no natural magic, so I gave them a Gift—I performed a Great Spell when I was very young. You cannot imagine the power—almost, it destroyed me. An entire galaxy from my universe, crushed—imploded—into a fist of stone, cast into your world to change it forever.”

“The Lodestone,” Nathan said. “Atlantis …”

“Yes, I believe there was a place called Atlantis. But that was not the point. I wanted to engender your birth—to ensure protection for you, whenever you came—to prepare your planet for its destiny. Unfortunately, earthfolk appear to be unsuited to such power, incapable of handling it rationally. They are, perhaps, still too primitive; your civilization, after all, has barely tottered into the nuclear age, which for us is so far in the past we no longer think it worthy of recollection. If you had seen my cosmos in its heyday!—but the way we lived would have been beyond your understanding. To travel the galaxies at thought-speed, to communicate mind-to-mind, to select and control every aspect
of your existence … But the Contamination destroyed it, in less than a millennium, and now there is little left. A few fragments of thaumotechnology, the dregs of a vaster world. This is the last garden that will ever be. There were stories once of a Paradise at the beginning of Time. This is Paradise at the end.”

Nathan said: “It’s beautiful,” because it was expected of him. And it
was
beautiful, it was the most beautiful garden he had ever seen, but…

“The Gift,” he pursued. “You were telling me … about the Gift?”

“Indeed. It was not a success. Initially I looked among the Gifted for your mother—twice, I tried with sorceresses of your people, powerful for their kind, but the passage between worlds was too traumatic. The children were born deformed, and in the end the women went mad; there was nothing I could do for them. Then the spells showed me another, with no Gift, but with the power of her own heart—a love strong enough to open the Gate for the instant that was all I needed. It seemed extraordinary to me that in a race so backward, so savage, so sickly and short-lived, there might be such love. It was desperate indeed to hazard so much on a creature of such frailty. But I had waited long—longer than you can imagine—and my world was already starting to die. Although my seed was potent, there was only sufficient left for one final attempt. I had sent the Ozmosees to your world; I used them to engineer an opportunity. The moment came, and I took it, and when you were born I knew I had not gambled in vain. I had selected the wizard Bartoliman already; he has the Gift but has used it in moderation and has retained power over his own self, if at the cost of his power over others. I sent you and your mother to him so he might be your guardian in my stead, gathering you all in the vicinity of the Grail. And I watched over you as you grew up, though you did not know it. I saw the shape of your mind, the temper of your spirit.”