The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three

‘No it isn’t,’ Hazel argued. ‘Stupid people think too. It’s the thinking that makes them stupid. Like that guy in the play. He stuck his sword in a curtain and killed a harmless old man because he thought he was someone else. Hamfist, Prince of Denmark. Stupid.’

‘I don’t go around sticking swords into people,’ Nathan said. ‘At least, only once.’ He had picked up the Traitor’s Sword – the sword of straw – and slashed at the Urdemon of Carboneck, but killing a demon, he felt, wasn’t the same as killing a person. ‘Anyhow, that was self-defence. I didn’t have much of a choice. The point is, maybe I found it easy to be brave, because – subconsciously – I thought I was sort of looked after. And now I know I’m not … well …’

‘You were brave from the start,’ Hazel responded. ‘You couldn’t have felt looked after then. If you’re more scared now, you’ll just have to be braver. You’ll manage it. You’re a brave kind of person. As long as you don’t start thinking about it.’

She hadn’t told him about the gnomons. Bartlemy had said he would set the trap that weekend. Hazel had already decided that if she didn’t think about what she had to do she wouldn’t worry, and if she didn’t worry she wouldn’t panic, but the effort of not thinking was taking its toll of her. She knew she wasn’t as brave as Nathan but that only meant she had to try harder. Nathan’s self-doubts she regarded as trivial – yet it was strangely reassuring to find that he, too, was having to cope with the possibility of failure and fear. Somehow, it made her feel better about her own secret terrors.

‘No thinking,’ Nathan said. ‘Right. I’ll – um – bear that in mind.’

‘And don’t start being clever,’ Hazel added, throwing him a dark look. ‘I can’t stand that either.’

‘Sorry,’ Nathan said. ‘Am I treading on your inferiority complex?’

‘I don’t have one,’ Hazel snapped. ‘I don’t do complexes and stuff.’

‘Oh really? Then why—’

But that was the moment when Annie put her head around the door with an offer of tea and cake, and the downhill run to a juvenile squabble was averted.

Since the accident Nathan had been on painkillers to help him sleep at night, and his dreams had stayed inside his head. The drugs, he suspected, affected his sleep patterns, making it impossible for him to stray outside his own world, but as the concussion had made him sick and the bruising had left him too stiff to move he had been feeling far from adventurous. However, he was strong and resilient, with quick powers of recovery, and that night he decided he could do without the paracetamol, though he didn’t mention it to Annie. It was hard to get comfortable – his shoulder still twinged at any awkward movement – but eventually he drifted into sleep, and through sleep into dream.

Only it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.

He was diving into deep water, hurtling down and down through an endless gulf of blue. The seabed rushed towards him like a moving wall. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. He tried to close his eyes, to brace himself for the impact – but there was none. No impact, no eyes. With an exquisite surge of relief he realised he was only an atom of thought, a bodiless observer whose horrifying plunge had speed but no substance. He slowed as the sea-floor drew near and found himself gliding above the level sand which stretched away in every direction, featureless as a desert. He guessed it couldn’t actually be all that deep, since he could still see in the blue dimness, and high above there was the glimmer of the sun’s rays, reaching down through the water. Something like a cloud passed overhead, a huge shadow blotting out the far-off daylight. A ship, he thought, gazing upward – but no, this was Widewater, it must be, where the land had been devoured by sea and there were neither people nor ships. Yet it looked like a ship, a vast, deep-bellied tanker hundreds of feet long. Others followed, five, six, eight, one far smaller, another little more than a dinghy. Not ships: whales. A pod of whales far larger than any in our world, sailing the ocean like a convoy of giant galleons.

His thought floated up, passing between them, emerging into a world of sky and sea. A golden void of sunlight hung all around him. The backs of the whales arched out of the water, rising and falling like slow waves on their way to the horizon. Below him he heard a strange echoing boom, like the music of sea-trumpets blown in the deeps, and knew they were singing. He thought, on a note of revelation: This is their world. Nothing here can hurt them. All of Widewater was their kingdom.

Around the rim of the sky, clouds were piling up, great thunderheads swelling visibly, rank on rank of them, like mountain ranges marching across the sea. The sun was swallowed up; a wind came scurrying before the storm, whipping the waves into restless peaks. But the whales did not vary their pace, heaving and sinking to the same steady beat. A dark rain came slanting down; thunder-drums drowned out the whalesong. Purple lightning stabbed at the wave-caps, foiled by the salt water. A stem of cloud came writhing downward, sucking the sea into its vortex, until sea and sky were joined by a whirling cord as thick as a giant’s arm. The water seemed to be flowing up it, feeding the storm-heart.

Then Nathan saw the Goddess.

He could not tell if she were solid or phantom, vapour or water, but it made no difference: she was terrible. Her upper body seemed to spout from the wavering column of the tornado, filling the sky, a pale cloudy shape with billowing hair that mingled with the thunderheads and lightning eyes. Her arms were stretched wide as if to draw the whole ocean into her embrace; the storm flowed from her fingertips. This was the Goddess who had eaten the islands, destroying all human life, who had made Widewater into a sea without a shore – the Queen of the Deep, ruler of maelstrom and tempest, an elemental with no soul and no heart, made of rage, and power, and greed. Even as he was, without form or substance, Nathan feared her.

Not just because she was a goddess. Because he knew her …

She bent down over the whale-pod; he seemed to hear her voice like a giant whisper on the wind. Lungbreathers! The whales dived, eluding her cold grasp – all save one, the larger of the two calves, who hung back from curiosity, or because his reflexes were too slow. Her long fingers spanned his back, and the sea plucked him away from the others – away and away – sucking him into the storm, rolling him in the waves, spinning him into the tumult of the tornado. Nathan followed, drawn in his wake, closing his mind against the nightmare of engulfing water …

Long after, or so it seemed, the sea was calm again. The morning sun shone down through the water onto a coral reef flickering with smallfish. The young whale was coasting along its border, now far from family and friends, seeking the currents that would lead him back to the north. Then Nathan saw the fin cutting the water, just one at first, then another, and another. Following him. Circling. Nathan didn’t want to watch any more, but the dream would not let him go, not till the sea exploded into a froth of lashing bodies, and the red came, pluming up through the foam. Then at last it was all over, and the sea was quiet, and the finned shadows flicked and circled, flicked and circled, while the stain thinned like smoke on the surface of the water, vanishing into a vastness of blue.

Nathan sank out of the dream, and once again he thought he was drowning, plunging into a darkness without air or breath. He struggled in a growing panic, fighting against the familiar asphyxiation – and then he was in bed, breathing normally, and there was a hand on his forehead. A hand that felt unnatural, cold and leathern-smooth. A hand in a glove.

The hand was withdrawn, and when it returned it felt like skin. Nathan’s eyes were shut, but a picture formed in his head: the Grandir in his protective clothing, with his white mask and black gauntlets. It was an oddly comforting image. He found himself thinking about skin, human skin, the softness of it, its coolness and its warmth, the intimacy of its touch. Only a flimsy layer between hand and brow, between sense and senses, between heart and heartbeat. Animals had hide and scales and fur, feathers and down, protection and insulation. But humans wrapped themselves in a tissue-thin covering so transparent the blood-vessels showed through, so fragile it might puncture on a leaf-edge or a blade of grass, so sensitive it could feel the lightest pressure, from the footstep of a fly to the breath of a zephyr. Yet humans in their vulnerable skin were the most deadly predators in all the worlds …

It occurred to him that these thoughts didn’t come from him – they were unfamiliar, alien thoughts, which seemed to stretch his mind into strange dimensions. The Grandir’s thoughts, flowing from the touch of his fingers into Nathan’s head …

He opened his eyes.

A face was bending over him, a face that he had seen only once before, yet he seemed to know it well. A dark curving face with a metallic sheen on the hooked cheekbones and the blade of the nose. Hooded eyes, and beneath the hoods the glimmer of hidden fires, like glints of light in a black opal. Behind the eyes, deeps of power and thought, a force of personality that could re-shape the cosmos. But for now, it was all focused on Nathan. There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows that seemed to convey both anger and gentleness. The Grandir’s spirit was larger than that of other men; he could do many emotions at once.

He said: ‘You fear the water, don’t you? It is waiting for you in your dreams, but you fear to go there, to be overwhelmed by it – smashed against the rocks, crushed into the seabed. I have read the fear in your heart where there was none before. You must face it, and face it down. There are things you have to do, even in the dark of the sea.’

‘What happens if I become solid?’ Nathan said. ‘I won’t be able to do it. Whatever it is. I won’t be able to breathe.’

‘You must find a way. Your folly has made your fear – the risk you took, when no risk was necessary – and for what? For what?’ The frown intensified; for a moment, anger supervened. ‘To impress your peers! To vindicate the one you call friend! They are nothing – less than nothing – but you matter. You have no idea how much you matter. And you might have been killed – for a gesture! An instant of bravado!’

The hand had left Nathan’s forehead to stroke his hair. For all the Grandir’s fury and frustration, his touch was soft as a caress.

Nathan said: ‘Everyone matters.’ He was trying to hang onto that.

‘You don’t understand. One day – but not yet, not yet. You must take care. No more folly. No more rashness.’ Voice and face changed. The hard curve of his mouth appeared to soften. Almost, he smiled. ‘You are just a boy – so young, so very young. It is long and long since I had contact with youth. I had forgotten how it shines – how valiant it is, and how defenceless. You have tasks to do but your youth will find a way. You will go back to Widewater. I will care for you – when I can. But I cannot always save you. Remember that …’

Nathan said sharply: ‘Did you show me the whales? And the Goddess?’

‘These are things you needed to see—’

‘Who is she? I thought – I knew her.’

‘She is Nefanu, Thalasse, Queen of the Sea. You know her double, the witch from the river. But the spirit in your world is far less in power, though not in hunger. She would make Earth her kingdom, a desert like Widewater, landless and bare. She seeks to open the Gate and draw power from her sister-spirit, her other self – but that is unimportant. She has no part in my plans. It is Nefanu who dominates your task.’

‘But how can I face a goddess?’ Nathan demanded, trying to sit up.

The hand restrained him.

‘Only do what you must. Perform the task ordained for you; no more.’

‘What task?’

‘You know what task. Enough questions. There may be a time later, but not now. Now, Time is running out. My world is running out. Do your part. All my trust is in you …’

The dream was receding, almost as if the Grandir was thrusting him away, back into sleep, into his own universe. He knew a sudden fever of urgency – if he could only find the right questions maybe he would learn the answers at last. (One day, the Grandir had said.) He was groping blindly between worlds, fulfilling some obscure destiny that no one would ever explain – a pawn in an inscrutable chess game, a puppet on detachable strings. He knew it had to do with the Great Spell – with the Grail relics that he alone could retrieve – but there was still no answer to the great Why? Why was he born with this bizarre ability to travel the multi-verse – an ability he could not even control? Why was he sent on this unknown quest? Why him?

He tried to speak, to protest … but the Grandir’s face was slipping away, curving into the swirl of the galaxy, glimmering into stars. Darkness followed, and a sleep without dreams, and he woke in the morning to the pain in his shoulder, and the ache in his head, and a tangle of thoughts to unravel.

Annie brought him tea in bed, a rare indulgence which, as she explained to him, would run out as soon as his bruises unstiffened.

‘I’m not really stiff now,’ he said provocatively. ‘I could get up easily.’

‘No you don’t.’ She scrutinised his face, noting the sallow tinge to his complexion and the shadows under his eyes. ‘You look as though you’ve slept badly. Did you take your painkillers?’

‘I don’t like taking pills all the time.’

‘Yes, but the doctor said you’re supposed to take them at night for at least another week.’ She sat down on the bed, her exasperation changing to anxiety. ‘Have you – have you been dreaming again?’ And, after a pause: ‘Those dreams?’

He shrugged. Nodded.

‘For God’s sake.’ Annie fumbled for the right words, not wanting to hear herself fussing – knowing fussing would do no good. ‘You’re not fit enough yet …’

‘I don’t need to be fit. I wasn’t there physically; just in thought.’