Awakening (9 page)

He shook his head meekly, as did Barklice.

‘Good. Actions have consequences, do not forget that fact,’ she said warningly. ‘Now. More tea, gentlemen?’

While she was absent making a new brew Barklice asked, ‘Has she interfered with any aspect of your life other than your clothes?’

‘She tidies anything she can lay her hands on, and I greatly fear that she threatens my laboratory with order! What am I to do, Barklice?’

‘Stand up to her, Stort. Fight for your rights or you will be subsumed by her orderliness and put into a box whence it will be hard to get you out again except as a pale shade of your former self. Take heed, my friend!’

Stort did not sleep well after this visit, his rest disturbed by nightmare visions of boxes, padlocks and huge females with large hands and commanding voices.

He knew Barklice was right. Cluckett had many good qualities, but if she was to stay on as his housekeeper after he was better, as he sometimes felt was a good idea, he would need to assert himself. But that, he knew, might be no easy thing where a female of her mettle was concerned.

The crisis soon came and centred, as he had feared, upon his laboratory.

This untidy rambling space was at the far end of his home. Stort had cleverly subverted various nearby steam and gas pipes and live electrical supplies of human origin and used these as sources of power and light.

A day or two after Barklice’s visit he ventured into it and was relieved to see that Cluckett had not yet touched anything.

What forgotten treasures of his past inquiries and research he found! He spied a mortar in which he had once ground up certain ingredients with a pestle that lay nearby. He had forgotten what it was and, dipping a moistened finger in, gave it a cautious taste.

‘Ah! Aargh! Utterly vile!’ he cried, stepping back. ‘But now I remember! This was my last attempt to rediscover Lysurgian’s lost recipe for that powder which he claimed in a footnote to his work was very efficacious in keeping dogs at bay!’

All wayfarers and pilgrims suffered from the problem of feral and rabid dogs abandoned by humans, which, unlike their former masters, could still see and scent hydden and enjoyed attacking them. He was sure that if he could rediscover that recipe his fortune would be made.

‘Hmm,’ he mused, spying some ingredients still waiting to be ground and mixed, ‘how pleasant it is to be here once more, free to try such things out, at liberty to think my own thoughts and do as I please!’

He idly put more ingredients in the mortar, ground them, and put them in a lettered and numbered envelope that he might know which recipe it was. Such simple physical acts of experimentation, preparation and cataloguing always calmed Stort.

But he was disturbed in these actions by the clear, firm voice of Goodwife Cluckett from the doorway.

‘I see you are up now, sir,
and
about! I am disappointed to see that you are engaged in some trivial pursuit rather than in tidying this messy place up! Let us do so now!’

She approached one of his untidy tables and swept its contents into a waste-paper bin.

Stort’s heart beat faster.

Sweat broke out upon his brow.

‘You shall not do that!’ he said as firmly as he could.

She stilled and frowned ominously.

‘My rule is,’ she said, ‘that if something remains untouched after three weeks it is probably best thrown out of the house. These items look as if they have not been touched in years! They should go!’

Stort grabbed a pencil and inscribed the number sixty-three upon the envelope he had just filled.

‘Thus do I work!’ he cried. ‘Who can tell what will be needed?’

‘Sixty-three,’ she said, ‘is that an important number? More important than sixty-two or four?’

He stared at her blankly.

‘Well, of course it’s important, Madam—’

‘Cluckett, call me Cluckett.’

He stared at her again, his thoughts confused. What had he been saying, what was his drift? Why did she so bewilder him? He waved the envelope about.

‘Sixty-three may be an important number, certainly it is an interesting one, but that is not quite—’

‘If it’s important, sir, would it not be better to look after that envelope more carefully?’

‘That is not the point I am trying to make, Goodwife . . .’

‘Cluckett is not a difficult name to remember, I would have thought, especially for a bookish kind of man like you.’

‘Well then, sixty-three may or may not be important depending on what is contained within, which is a recipe for canine dispersal. My point is that it might be a great loss to science and to mortality were it to be “tidied away”. I am ordering you to touch nothing.’

‘Canine is dogs and I don’t like ’em,’ said Cluckett.

‘Nor I,’ said Stort, ‘hence the vital, truly vital importance of this envelope and me being able to find it.’

‘Well, sir, you cannot stop me tidying things, it is in my nature. You are not, I take it, intending to stop me?’

She stared at him boldly with challenge in her eyes and Stort knew the moment of truth had come. Back down now and all would be lost, his home tidied away to nothingness, the good work of many years destroyed, and he, as Barklice feared, tidied away as well.

She advanced upon him as an army to battle, keys clanking warningly on her belt.

‘Madam, I . . . I . . .’

She came nearer still.

‘Yes, Mister Stort, you have something to say?’

‘I . . . yes . . . no . . .’

His chest felt constricted, his breath difficult, his throat so dry with trepidation that he could not speak. Nor finally could he stand up without the support of the nearest laboratory table, which he clutched, gasping for air.

This had a salutary effect on Cluckett, who rushed to a sink in the laboratory, filled an empty glass vessel with water, and proffered it to him. He took it gratefully and drank it at once, his stand against her beginning to weaken. The water tasted strange yet not unpleasant. It put a sudden fire to his throat and then his spirit too as it hit the lining of his stomach like a thunderbolt. Moments later his hair, as it felt, began to stand on end.

She stared at him in alarm as, while he still fought for words, his eyes turned a ferocious red.

Speechless still, he stared down at the retort in his hand and saw that what he had drunk was water mixed with the evaporated remains of a little experiment he had been working on a year before. The label on it read ‘CURE FOR WARTS’.

His nostrils flared and his ears trembled as a dragon-like heat came out of them both.

Then he heard a voice deep and strong, which sounded only a little like his own. He felt himself advancing upon her in his turn. To his surprise she began to back away, fear in her eyes.

‘Madam or Cluckett or whatever your name is,’ he said, ‘if you touch a single thing in this laboratory without my permission I will dismiss you instantly and without a reference!’

Her expression darkened, her cheeks and forehead turned red, she looked enraged.

‘Sir, if you—’

‘Cluckett,’ he responded at once, ‘if you continue like this I shall be forced to rid my home of you at once!’

‘You would deal roughly with my person?’

He thought about this for a moment and finally said, ‘I would and come to think of it – I shall!’

He loomed over her as if to carry through his threat.

Her response astonished him.

‘Oh sir,’ she said, backing off still further, her hands unclenching, a strange softness coming to her eyes and a flush to her cheeks, ‘are you being masterful with me?’

Stort, who had never been masterful with another in his life, supposed he was but felt it best to say nothing. She filled the silence herself.

‘Mister Cluckett was very masterful,’ she said with unexpected compliance, ‘and I do so miss that now he is gone!’

‘Cluckett, stop talking,’ said Stort, who felt suddenly tired, ‘and please make a brew that we may discuss how best we are to continue together in this humble now that I am getting better.’

‘I will, sir, at once! I like an employer who knows his own mind.’

‘And I, Cluckett . . .’

He still felt queasy so she took his arm and helped him to a seat at the kitchen table. She made the brew and poured them both a cup.

‘You were saying, sir?’

He looked around at the clean and tidy kitchen, the neat shelves, the breakfast things all ready.

‘I am grateful for the care you have shown me and . . . and I like such a home as you have made for me in so short a time!’

‘Oh sir!’ she said, turning from him with emotion and dabbing at her eyes with the crisp, new-ironed kerchief she pulled from her sleeve.

From that moment on Stort became master of his house once more and both he and Cluckett respectful of their different domains.

He permitted her to tidy his books, and his parlour too, though he insisted that the dresser, filled as it was with a clutter of plates, cups, a teapot with a broken spout and other mementoes of his past, was left just as he liked it.

‘As for my laboratory, if you place a waste bin by the door I shall endeavour to remember to put rubbish into it!’

‘Thank you, sir, that is kind of you. And, sir . . .’

‘Cluckett?’

‘Wet towels. May I ask that you hang them up rather than leave them in a heap upon the floor?’

‘You may and I shall do as you suggest.’

From that day Stort slept well again and his recovery was almost complete.

‘Cluckett,’ he said some days later, ‘if Brief and the others call I shall wish to see them.’

She smiled happily.

‘It is already arranged, sir. They are coming to tea tomorrow and it is not a social call.’

‘It is not?’

She shook her head.

‘Master Brief wishes to convene a summit conference in your parlour and I told him that I judged you well enough now for that. Does that have your approval, sir?’

‘It does,’ said Bedwyn Stort happily.

11

N
IKLAS
B
LUT

I
t was several days before Emperor Slaeke Sinistral was ready once more to try to signal to the outer world that he was awake and needed rescuing. He had only to raise a finger and press a button to summon instant aid, but his reserves of energy were so low that each attempt robbed him of almost all he had left. He was also taking his time. He knew that the return to the real world was going to be painful, a rebirth, in body, mind and spirit.

Meanwhile the helpers who had tended him for eighteen years past, who were inhabitants of the vast complex of tunnels of which his Chamber was a small part, continued to do so. They came when he was asleep or nearly so and he knew neither their names nor faces. They did their best to slow down his foul decay, but since he had begun to wake and his mind and body grown more active the rate of his decline had speeded up and they could not keep up with it. It was not these creatures of the dark he needed now but the hydden of the day and light, and the stimulus and nourishment they could provide.

Yet though Sinistral knew well that when he woke from a period of deep sleep it was essential he returned to normal health and life as fast as possible, the Chamber held a continuing allure. This had to do with the beauty of its extraordinary acoustic as, from every crevice and crack, fault and fissure in the vast roof so high above, water dripped.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

The ever-changing pattern of sound was a function of the fact that each drip of the thousands that continually fell down did so after a different lapse of time from all the others and the sounds they made varied in their pitches and tones, themselves changing with subtle shifts in the Earth’s own harmonies of tectonic movement, near and far; and the orographic patterns of rain on the surface above, the water filtering down in strengths and weaknesses that echoed the patterns of rainfall and surface flow, years, decades and sometimes centuries before.

A brief stay in the Chamber was not enough for the true nature of these sounds to be understood. They seemed chaotic until, after due time, their patterns emerged. Sinistral had come to understand that these patterns were recognized by him not only when awake but when asleep, perhaps even more so then.

In time, he believed, he had learned their language and that this communication was not one-way. He heard the sound, and it heard him and responded. It was a voice, an ancient and eternal one. The music of endless dripping made by the water was nothing less than the old voice of Earth and Universe. Like light from a star long dead that a mortal sees today, the Emperor heard all the ancient voices of the past through the echoes of this internal rain. In this he felt his times of extended sleep had given him something few mortals had ever had – direct communication with the divine.

He thought of what he heard as music – in fact he believed it to be that ethereal music which human and hydden philosophers alike described as
musica universalis
– the harmonic sound which rang out at frequencies beyond the mortal range, which was the energy which gave life and connection to all things.