Arcadia (41 page)

Often, when travelling through the countryside, he would stop on a hilltop at evening and stare at the beauty of the valley below. Or he would pause as he passed a ruin of great antiquity and wonder aloud what its history was. Later, one remembered him in a library, running his fingers over the leather of an old manuscript, looking at it in a way that was not easy to interpret.

One day he went to a town where there was a difficult dispute to resolve. The mayor had married his daughter to a lord ten miles away. The marriage had been settled, the dowry agreement signed, but then an argument had erupted. The lord said the girl was bad-tempered, lazy and offensive. He would not repudiate her, but demanded more money to keep her. The mayor refused, saying the agreement had been freely made. So the lord sent her back, but kept the dowry, as she was still his wife.

The dispute caused ill-feeling between the town, which was angry at the insult, and the lands around. Blows were exchanged, local farmers assaulted as they came into market. So it was the scholar’s first duty to resolve the matter when he arrived. He listened (as was his habit) to those involved, and many who were not. He asked penetrating questions and decided that all were equally at fault. Such was his reputation and his secret pride that he did not listen to his fellow who was with him, but reached his decisions alone.

Here was the judgement: the girl was indeed rude and offensive to her husband, but this was because he was a dolt, well-meaning but stupid. The girl’s father had filled her with vanity at her beauty and importance, so had made her unwilling to see the good in others. And the lord was incapable of seeing what a lovely creature he had, although unworthily, been allotted as his wife.

All should apologise. The father should pay the extra dowry, but give it to the poor of the lands around, and the husband should give an equal amount.

The mayor of the town was a cunning fellow. He pretended to accept the judgement, with fine words of praise for the scholar’s
wisdom, but secretly he was furious. He invited the scholar to his house and gave him food and wine. Then he brought out a great treasure, a small picture of ageless antiquity. It was his, and had been in his family for longer than anyone could remember, he said.

The scholar wondered at the object, which was more beautiful than anything made by the hand of man that he had ever seen, and the mayor knew that the scholar coveted the beautiful thing for himself.

‘It is yours, as thanks for your wisdom,’ said the mayor. ‘Or rather, it would have been. For now I have to pay the extra dowry for my daughter I will be a poor man, and will have to sell it to the highest bidder for whatever I can get for it.’

The next day the scholar gave his judgement. He found in favour of the mayor and condemned the lord for his actions. He took the little picture, wrapped it in his baggage and left the town.

But it was not the mayor’s to give. It was the most precious possession of the town, and as soon as its loss was discovered there was much unhappiness. The townspeople searched the baggage of the scholar’s clerk, found the picture and arrested him.

The scholar immediately returned and confessed what had happened. He said his clerk had been innocent, and that he had taken the picture as a gift.

Then he left the town and went wandering, no longer a scholar, but a beggar until his dying day.

*

Jay had chosen well; at the end, it took some time before his audience – small but appreciative – came out of the reverie the words had induced in them. Rather than showing off, he had taken a simple tale, one which had been translated into the spoken language so that Callan could understand it. This was not the place for a virtuoso display. It was not a first-level telling, nor a second, nor even a third; indeed, it fitted no proper category that he knew of.

It was not as he had imagined his first telling. He had thought it would be in a formal setting, after weeks of preparation and coaching and rehearsal, to make sure every vowel, every weighting, every intonation was correct, that the movements of his hands and body fitted the words he spoke, emphasising but not distracting. It was to have been in a grand hall, advertised in advance, witnessed by his friends, his teachers – and those who were there to sit in judgement. On it his future reputation would have depended. Many failed through nerves, many more were sick beforehand and collapsed afterwards. It was said to be the single most terrifying event any man could endure.

It could not have been more different. He sat, rather than stood; his audience was two people, rather than two hundred. They wanted to hear the story, not to spot his mistakes. At the end, they didn’t even need to applaud. He loved it, once the nervousness passed. He adopted a tone that was conversational rather than declamatory, only rarely raising his voice, sometimes almost whispering the words. Occasionally he did drop in a few sentences of the old language, for emphasis, but only when the meaning was obvious. They loved the words, loved the story, loved him. For the first time in his life, Jay felt what it was to be respected, to use his skill to obliterate the loneliness of life. He became the story, and through it he merged with his audience, by instinctively responding to them.

Neither spoke for a long time after he finished, but just stared dreamily at the fire, smiling occasionally as they recalled passages. Then, roughly, Callan pulled himself together.

‘Sleep, my friends,’ he said. ‘We have a hard day’s work tomorrow, and I intend to make you remember just what hard work is.’

‘I will sit awhile, if you don’t mind,’ Jay said. ‘I will sleep soon enough.’

Kate had pitched Callan’s little tent some way off; he didn’t like sleeping by fires, he had said, and never felt the cold. He went, leaving the warmth to the soft house dwellers. Jay scarcely noticed him going. Nor did he pay much attention when he felt
her settle down beside him and gently knead his shoulders. She said nothing, but laid her head on his shoulder so he could feel her hair against his neck.

‘Now I understand what Henary sees in you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter tonight. Now you must rest. We are all transformed by the forest, no? I the servant, you the Storyteller, Callan the master. Soon enough I will again be the great lady, and you will be a simple student, and he will be but a forester once more. The magic will fade. Then we must talk. But not now. Now your servant Kate will soothe you to sleep. So lie down, my master Jay, and rest.’

He lay down, and Kate folded him in her arms and held him close, stroking his hair and kissing his forehead until the oblivion of sleep took him over.

36

The three people standing in Lytten’s porch were a mismatched bunch, and none of them looked particularly comfortable, despite the effusive welcome they received.

‘Do come in! So lovely to see you!’

‘Are you the lady I talked to on the phone?’

‘I am indeed. You must be Sergeant Maltby?’

‘Yes, ma’am. This is the man here.’

‘You don’t mind waiting while we have a chat with him?’

‘Ah, no. Glad to help.’

She nodded at her new visitor, who was staring at her in a way which many would have considered rude. She led him to the kitchen at the back of the house, shut the door, gestured for him to sit down and then sat herself on the other side of the table, cupped her face in her hands and studied him calmly.

‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘Alexander Chang. What a surprise! After such a long time, too. What brings you here?’

She could see that he was still in a state of shock. He recognised her, but she was so much older; he hadn’t taken that into account.

‘To find you, of course, Dr Meerson,’ he said.

‘Call me Angela. No point standing on ceremony here, eh?’

‘Do you have any idea the trouble you’re in?’

‘Nothing like the trouble you’re in.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You have been arrested as a suspected Soviet spy,’ she said, shaking her head in barely suppressed delight. ‘When did you get here?’

‘About a week ago.’

‘What have you been doing since?’

‘Getting my mind back. I didn’t realise …’

‘Yes, nasty, isn’t it? I was off my head for the better part of a year. It’s the implants. Without them, you’d be fine. So why now? I got fed up waiting years ago.’

‘Why would anyone think I’m a Soviet spy?’

‘You’ve just been exceptionally unlucky. No point explaining it; you wouldn’t understand the complications. At the moment they are wondering whether to lock you up, accidentally push you under a train, or send you back to the Soviet Union. This would, no doubt, be a great surprise to the Russians, who might just shoot you themselves to be on the safe side. Answer my question. Why now?’

‘It was the only link we could find. The reference in that article.’

‘What article?’

‘The one Lytten wrote on Shakespeare.’

‘I didn’t know anything about that,’ Angela said.

‘I was sent to check. It has implications for how they use your machine.’

‘Use my machine?’ she said. ‘They can’t use it.’

‘They can if they figure out where you hid the data.’

Angela thought for a long time. ‘I think we need to have a little understanding here.’

‘What?’

‘A little help for you, a little help for me.’

‘You scratch my backside, I’ll scratch yours,’ he said proudly.

‘Not quite,’ she said.

*

The door opened and Lytten came in. He glanced at the new arrival, then grunted and ignored him. ‘Half an hour,’ he said to her. ‘Then they’ll be coming to take him away. So we won’t need tea.’

Chang looked worried as Lytten disappeared once more.

‘Interrogation.’ Angela smiled, and shook her head sympathetically.

‘That sounds bad.’

‘Torture, beatings. Possibly a painful execution. Have you ever been in unbearable agony for days on end?’

‘No.’

‘The dark side of the age,’ she explained. ‘They can’t just fiddle with people’s brains, so they have to be more crude. Electrodes on sensitive bits of the body, that sort of thing. Pliers. We don’t have much time, so we need to get going. Use my machine, you say. They can’t. I wiped everything.’

‘You blacked out most of Europe and killed nearly ten thousand people.’

‘Did I? I didn’t mean to. I was in a hurry.’

‘You don’t sound very upset.’

‘What can I do? I will fix it in due course.’

‘Can you?’

‘I think so. Not that it matters at the moment. They can’t use the machine. As I said, I erased the data.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No. I found two pages of your work in the Tsou script. A security man has been sent off to try and recover the rest of it.’

‘That’s simply not possible.’

Chang smiled. ‘Got you worried, eh? It’s true. It was buried in an article by this man Lytten, published last year. That and the reference to you in the article I found …’

‘That’s absurd.’

‘Here I am. And you, too.’

‘You say it may still exist?’

‘Yes. Hanslip assumed it was some devious fraud on your part. He still thinks that you are hiding with renegades and have concealed the data somewhere. I’ve been sent here just to make sure, and a security man called Jack More has been sent after the data.’

‘More? I remember him. Tall, strong, out of place. All dark
and dangerous. I’m not convinced, though.’

‘The article says that the document was known as the Devil’s Handwriting and dates from the eighteenth century. There is a possibility that it is in Lytten’s papers, which went to some library on his death.’

‘When does he die?’

‘1979.’

‘Oh, poor Henry! At least he will miss Mrs Thatcher. He’d hate her.’ She thought for a moment about what she had heard so far. ‘Have they used the machine? Apart from sending you.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think they can. Someone said they’d have to recalibrate it after sending me, and couldn’t without the data.’

‘I wonder,’ she said after a moment, ‘if that is connected to the difficulties I am having with the universe in the cellar.’

‘The what?’

‘I’ve made a universe in the cellar,’ she said with a modest blush. ‘A prototype, little more than an outline, really, but a jolly good one. Except that I can’t shut it down. I was assuming it was a glitch, but maybe not.’

She now looked pointedly at her watch. ‘Oh, dear, time’s nearly up. They start with fingernails, you see,’ she explained kindly. ‘That’s what the pliers are for. It’s not very nice, but much better than what follows.’

‘Dr Meerson …’

‘Angela,’ she reminded him. ‘Or you can hide in Anterwold.’

‘What’s that?’

‘My universe. I really need someone to find out what it is. Perhaps to get a girl back as well. You could keep out of the way for a bit; until the coast is clear, as they say here.’

Chang’s mouth sagged. ‘I can’t go through that again,’ he said. ‘Not so soon. I just can’t. Don’t even suggest it.’

‘Rusty,’ Angela said. ‘The pliers they use, I mean. It will only be for a few hours. By the time here, I mean. You’ll be a bit longer there. Besides, remember: you work for me.’

‘What exactly do you want?’

‘I need to know the connection between Anterwold and here. What lies between them, historically speaking. What it is.’ She glanced at the clock again in a meaningful fashion.

‘Then what?’

‘I also need to know if the defences are holding. I built it to be static. Nothing should happen, because any event has a cause and a consequence. So I placed limits on them. I need to know if these still work, or whether the girl has broken them.’

‘What girl? What are you talking about?’

‘Rosie. A friend of Henry’s. She accidentally went into it and is still there. Sort of. It’s terribly interesting. She’s why I know you’ll be perfectly safe.’

‘You want me to get her back?’

‘I doubt you’ll have the chance. The machine’s set for a few years earlier at the moment, and I don’t have time to change it. You don’t want to stay for long, I imagine?’

‘Certainly not.’