Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (11 page)

    Mother Grundy was uneasy, and that was a bad sign in itself.

    Just after eight in the morning, a crust-maker’s apprentice named Gavin met Mother Grundy on the lane out of the village. Gavin, like many pie-men, was simple. He suffered a mild mental infirmity that meant he was blessed with several personalities, but he was good people.

    Gavin shifted his pie-tray to his left shoulder, and tipped his cap to the woman as she strode past.

    “Fine morning, Mother Grundy,” he suggested as she strode past.

    “Not in the least,” she answered.

    “Where are you off to, then?” he added.

    She paused for a moment, and fixed him with a lancing stare.

    “The City,” she told him, and then continued to march away down the misty lane between the spinneys of ash and lime.

    Gavin hurried on into Ormsvile Nesbit to spread the news. Mother Grundy was going to the City. Not only was that unheard of, even a simple pie-man knew it was possibly the worst sign there ever could be.

The signs spread across the turning globe, as fast as the line of daylight crept around. An hour before Mother Grundy had even plonked down her pail under Nettie’s rotund udder, the signs were already reaching more distant regions of the Unity.

    In the cypress-groved hills above La Spezia, where everything looked like it had been done in egg-tempera on stuccoed wooden panels, the first light of dawn grazed against the pumice-pink walls of a lone tower that stood at the crest of a wooded slope like a finger of Battenberg cake topped off with an icing of chunky red tiles.

    One strand of light entered the tower through the single slit window near the top, and found itself slalomed and bent unexpectedly by a configuration of polished lenses and mirrors, finely set in a skeletal frame of stripped yew. The light twisted, refracted, reflected, sidestepped, dropped, levelled out, cornered sharply, gasped in alarm, and finally shot vertically down onto a horizontal plate of oil-buffed glass.

    Giuseppe Giuseppo leaned forward in the chair he had set by the plate an hour before dawn, and watched the column of light, slowed by its tortuous path through the apparatus, drip like neon honey onto the smooth surface. It twinkled into intangible ingots of photonic gold, and then settled gently into a fanned-out specimen of the captured spectrum.

    Giuseppe Giuseppo blinked his sleepy eyes for a moment or two, and then looked more closely.

    At least two members of the spectrum were missing, and three others were in the wrong order.

    He rose from the high-backed chair, and reached out to adjust the setting of the device, but withdrew his fingers from the brass handles at the last moment, and sat down again for a closer look. Giuseppe knew he had adjusted and re-adjusted the settings to the point of obsession the sunset before. Nothing had disturbed his apparatus in the night, the lenses were all clean and the wood unwarped.

    It was the light that was wrong.

    Giuseppe swallowed hard, and hurried across to his study desk. He lit a lamp, and leafed through his book of tables and notes, throwing aside blueprints for wide-bodied gliders, bathyscaphs, retractable quills, airbags and roll-bars for racing landaus, methods of refrigerated food preservation and golfball embossers. After a few minutes’ scrambling, during which the genius outpourings of over a decade spilled onto the floor in a thick drift of parchment, he found what he was looking for, stuffed between an essay on “The Potentialities of Telephony” and a treatise he had composed on the “Elektrifikation and Harmonisation of Gauges” for a system of railed omnibus that hadn’t even been built.

    It was a book, quarto in size, bound in dark and patchy kid-skin, and held shut by a loop of black ribbon. With reverential fingers, Giuseppe slipped off the ribbon, turned open the cover, and began to skim through the vellum pages of tight, precise ink-script, cursing as he always did in such moments; that clever-clever mirror writing was so difficult to speed read.

    There were, perhaps, two dozen copies of Leonardo’s
Prin
cipia De Tenebrae
extant in the known Unity, and no reason to suppose any existed outside its territories. All, except this one, were in the possession of cardinals and senior divines of the Church, and all, except this one, were incomplete, printed editions. This manuscript draft, in the Master’s own hand, had been in Giuseppe’s family since the Re-Awakening. The story went that the old Master had given it to Giuseppe’s forebear Niccolo for safekeeping when Niccolo had been apprenticed to him as a paint-mixer. The Church, Giuseppe was sure, would rack him, spit him, draw him, eighth him, burn him as a heretic, demolish his tower, torch his vineyards, and contract out plagues of locusts on all his friends and relations if they knew he had a copy. Much had been surmised over the years about what the Father of the Arte had “edited out” of his manuscript before committing it to print. Many were the rumours of an unexpurgated manuscript somewhere on a dusty shelf in a gloomy corner of a forgotten library in the back end of the Unity. After all this time, few believed those rumours could be true.

    After a few moments struggling and squinting, Giuseppe called the Most Important Book in the World a very rude name, and stormed downstairs to fetch his shaving mirror.

    When his housekeeper, Maria, arrived an hour later, she found Giuseppe in the tower room, under the distracting swing of the pendulums, packing such items as a scroll-butt snaphaunce revolver into an open valise.

    He barely looked up as she entered, but gestured to a drawstring purse of coins on the desk beside him.

    “Go to the port quickly, please,” he told her. “Find me a berth on the next merchantman bound for England.”

    She began to object, but cut it short as he turned to look at her. She didn’t like the look of the look.

    “How long will you be gone?” she asked instead.

    “If I don’t come back,” he replied, “I doubt you’ll notice.”

So the ripples spread.

    Five hours after Mother Grundy had set the pail beneath Nettie, the dawn finally arrived, out of breath, through the evergreens of the Senenoyak forests and twinkled off the shore-waters of Lake Tenantochook.

    The sky was as clear blue as only a sky can be, and by anybody’s standards, seemed the biggest, handsomest, fittest sky in the whole world. Rakish, adolescent mountains, capped in serious ice, and bearded with emerald goatees of fir and spruce, struck muscular poses against the fierce blue, happy and proud that they were not yet tainted with a paleface name.

    Beneath their taut shoulders, the lake, which would have been a sea in any other part of the world, was transparent green, like bottle-glass. Salmon cut through its clarity like chromium torpedos. Grizzlies the size of fur-upholstered garden sheds prowled the shoreline, being mythic. Wolves, grey as slate, large as ponies, padded through the forests, and sang to the setting moon. Snow-hooded eagles with beaks like halberds and wings like top-gallants waited patiently for the chance to symbolise monumental capitalist democracy, and caught salmon the size of sofas to pass the time.

    Tatunghut
⁸
watched the light approaching, and reached into his pouch-bundle for something reassuring, but found only tobacco leaves, a sucking pipe, part of a dried sidewinder and a beaver’s tail.

    He pulled a thick blanket around his shoulders, dragged back the drop-hide door, and crept out of the lodge, heading for the lake-edge.

    The calls of the loons sounded ill at ease to him. From his people’s encampment, dogs woke and growled and yapped distractedly. Tatunghut looked down at the water that lapped around the toes of his moccasins, glad he had chosen to wear the ones with the fur side inside and the caulked side outside.

    Something unwelcome was edging across the Land of his Ancestors, something insidious and cunning that carried the

unmistakable scent of manitou.

    Chinchesaw strolled down across the beach to join him, hands on his hips, breathing in the morning breeze through a cheerful smile.

    “You’re up early, Tatunghut,” he said.

    “Bad wind,” replied the long-limbed shaman, gravely.

    Chinchesaw nodded sympathetically. “Too much buffalo, I expect.”

    “No, no,” said Tatunghut, holding up a hand that had been known to divert storms and flummox cougar. “Something bad is stirring. Far away, across the Great Water, in the Distant Place. Something bad.”

    Chinchesaw considered this for a few moments. As far as he and most of the Senenoyak People cared, the strange, hairy, rough-voiced men who came across the Great Water in wooden islands from the Distant Place deserved as much badness as could be sent their way. They were full of vulgar customs, crude habits and dubious ethics, and could kill you from four bow-shots away with a piece of lead the size of an alfalfa sprout. What’s more, they could not be deterred from the belief that the Senenoyak and their neighbours in the Plains and the Uplands wanted to exchange things for strings of glass beads. However, Chinchesaw knew Tatunghut. He knew how seriously the shaman took the unseen workings of the manitou.

    “You’re not thinking of going there, are you?” he asked, nervously.

    “Going there?” asked the shaman.

    “To do something about it. It’d be just like you, Tatunghut, going off on a wild vision quest to fight the demons that plague another people. The Distant Placers can face their own problems. Don’t you get tangled up in their affairs. Besides, they’re an ugly, smelly lot.”

Tatunghut managed a smile.

    “Rest assured, brother, I won’t go,” he said. “It is too far, and even if I did go, I would get there too late. It is a task for their shamans. I just hope by the Great Spirit that they have noticed this Badness in time.”

    “I’m sure they have,” said Chinchesaw in encouragement.

    “Maybe,” Tatunghut said, sighing deeply. “They seem so dull-witted and insensitive. Maybe they are unaware of the stirrings in the Spirit Plains.”

    The wind coursed across the lake, tugging at their plaited hair. Chinchesaw brushed a few loose strands of hair out of his kohl-edged eyes.

    “They do have shamans,” he said. “I’ve heard talk of them. They call them” The young brave was silent for a moment as he searched for the word.

    “Kardenowls,” he said at last. “These Kardenowls will know what to do. You mark my words. Don’t you worry about it.”

    “I suppose so. It’s just” Tatunghut paused. “I have such a great reservation.”

    Chinchesaw brightened.

    “Well, quite,” he said. “So why on Earth would you want to leave it?”

⁸
In the Senenoyak language, Tatunghut means literally “Runs With Scissors”. Chinchesaw, on the other hand, means “One Hand Clapping”. He had had his name changed by deed poll from “Wahanoka” (“Swarthy Caribou”) at the age of twelve because he fancied something a little more interesting, and was tired of the older boys “accidentally” calling him “Wohonako” (“Does It With His Horse”).

As the varied thoughts of Ormsvile Nesbit, La Spezia and Senenoyak turned towards it, London woke, coughed, scratched its arse, and got up.

    Carters, drovers and pedlars rattled and hacked despondently across the wooden bridges into the City, and were greeted by an offputting and rancid smell (something like past-it eggs or retired fish or a very, very blocked privy) that had welled up through the streets in the night, and refused to dispel.

    The markets were unusually quiet that morning. Everybody was breathing through their mouths, and no one felt much like calling their wares. Pulling himself from his sacking bed at the back of the Rouncey Mare, Boy Simon felt like going to church for some unaccountable reason. His head still rang with the echoes of a night full of terrible dreams. Unfortunately, he found the doors of St Dunstan’s locked, since the parson of St Dunstan’s was still abed after too much porter at the Saint’s Day feast the night before. Once again, though indirectly, drink thwarted the old drover’s attempts to clean up his act, and so he meekly turned on his shabby heels and arrived back at the tavern for first orders.

    Talk in the tavern was low and morose. Most of the regulars had only just got back after a night in the cells and a morning at the Assizes, and most of their reserves of beermoney had gone on fines or bail or bribes. Those in the know reckoned that Sublime Lore lay at the root of all the problems. “Magick stink” they called the ripe fog in the street outside. There had been word of “wicked business” over in Battersea during the night. Someone mentioned “The Beast” and “The Last Days”, and someone else grimly misquoted the Revelation of John the Divine. Another round of frothy porter and fruity musket was ordered and consumed. Someone hypothesised about the result of the coming Saturday’s match.