Battle of the Sun (12 page)

THE KNIGHT SUMMONED

J
ack and Silver could see his helmet. They could see his breast plate, his greaves, his iron feet. By his side was a long sword in a blue scabbard, and his hands were protected by chain-mail gloves.

The Knight did not hurry, nor did he pause. Nor did he speak, nor give any sign. He turned the final stairs and stood before Jack and Silver. He did not speak.

Then he kneeled down, and raised his visor. His eyes were deep and black.

‘I am the Knight Summoned,’ he said. ‘My name is Sir Boris of the Golden Bell.’

‘I didn’t mean to summon you,’ said Silver. ‘I didn’t know the bell was still working.’

‘The bell is the bell,’ said the Knight, and Silver thought this very enigmatic and difficult to follow, but she did not feel she could argue with a knight in shining armour.

‘Now that you are summoned,’ said Silver, ‘what happens next?’

‘I shall travel with you,’ said the Knight, ‘as your Knight, waiting upon the hour when I shall know what is to be known.’

Silver realised that talking to the Knight might be a challenge. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and looked at Jack.

The Knight stood to his feet. He was about seven feet tall.

Jack was slowly coming to his senses. He had been through a great ordeal, and it had forced him into a kind of trance. When he had slept he had dreamed that his mother had come to him, begging him to free her. He had woken at the sound of the bell, with his hand clutching the hard stone of the bed.

‘We must leave this place,’ he said, and once again, as when he had spoken to the Dragon, he had a feeling of something else speaking through him – a kind of knowledge that he did not yet understand.

‘But where are we going?’ asked Silver. ‘I mean, we’ve got to sleep somewhere.’

Jack didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Yet he knew what was to be done. He went down the stairs, Silver and Max following him, and behind them all, the heavy steady iron tread of the Knight.

Jack showed the Knight the stone boys in the antechamber behind the laboratory, and asked Sir Boris if he could carry them into the courtyard and load them on to a cart. But Jack said nothing about his mother.

‘Jack, we can’t leave if we have nowhere to go,’ said Silver, who wondered if Jack was all right in the head.

‘We cannot stay if we have nowhere to stay,’ said Jack. ‘This house is no more.’

Silver was hungry, and had been hoping to find something to eat before they set off.

‘And I must find the Magus,’ said Jack.

As Jack spoke he heard a familiar voice.

‘How so, Jack Snap, how so?’

It was the Dragon.

The Dragon was looking in through the window of the laboratory. His eyes were ancient and wily, yet not cruel.

‘You have summoned the Knight,’ said the Dragon.

‘That was me,’ said Silver, ‘and it was a mistake.’

The Dragon regarded her. ‘Girl with the Golden Face, what comes to pass is what comes to pass.’

Silver wondered if everyone she was going to meet was going to talk like this. The Knight clanked by, carrying Anselm made of stone.

‘The Knight will fight me,’ said the Dragon, ‘when it is time.’

The Knight clanked by, carrying William.

‘He hasn’t even noticed you,’ said Silver, ‘which is amazing as you are a dragon, and your head is enormous, and poking through a very small window.’

‘Until it is time it is not time,’ said the Dragon, with an air of finality. ‘Until it is time we shall not meet again. Jack Snap, thank you for the Egg.’

‘What is inside the Cinnabar Egg?’ asked Jack.

‘I am,’ said the Dragon.

‘Huh?’ said Silver, who was really wishing she was back home in bed.

‘And not only I. A mystery, and how so, Jack Snap!’

And then the Dragon withdrew his head, and there began very quietly at first, and then not quietly at all, a deep shaking, like an earthquake, like the ground was ripping.

‘Look out!’ cried Silver, as a piece of masonry fell right in between them.

Silver thought that the bulk of the Dragon had dislodged part of the roof, but Jack knew better.

‘All speed!’ he cried. ‘The house is demolishing itself!’

Jack shook himself like a dog shakes itself after a plunge in the water. He was suddenly fully awake, fully alert. The stupor and sadness fell from him, and he felt great strength and purpose. Not knowing how he did it, hardly noticing that he did it, he picked up the stone statue that was his mother and ran with it from the room.

Silver got out of the laboratory just as the ceiling came crashing to the floor. She had the Book of the Phoenix under her arm, and pelted as fast as her legs could carry her as the walls of the house started to split and groan.

In the courtyard, Jack and Max were already up on the cart, the statues laid behind, and the Knight ready beside them on a beautiful grey horse.

Then they heard a cry – ‘HELP! HELP!’

At that moment the whole side wall of the house began to crumble and collapse. Jack looked around wildly, trying to see where the voice came from.

It was Crispis, waving from behind a small barred window two floors up.

‘I have to save him!’ cried Jack. ‘Take the cart, go on, go on!’

Crispis had hidden himself from the Dragon, from the Magus, from Wedge, from Mistress Split, from the whole world, by shutting himself into a cupboard where he sometimes shut himself to be quiet, and so he had saved himself from being turned into stone.

But he had fallen asleep, and when he awoke, he had been hungry, so he had eaten the second of the sunflower seeds that Jack had given to him – and a very strange thing had happened – he had turned bright yellow.

As Jack ran back to the crumbling destroying house, he remembered what Robert had said about the house being a kind of thought – that it didn’t really exist. Then the Magus was ‘unthinking’ the house, and the house in its volcanic shudders was trying to throw off all the weight of matter, and return again to an idea or a dream. The Magus had made it, now he could unmake it. But it was still heavy, still solid, and there was nothing dreamlike about the lead gutters and stone tiles flying like deadly missiles at Jack’s head.

A side stair was already standing on its own, its walls fallen away. Jack leapt up the staircase two treads at a time, following the cries of Crispis, until he came to the cupboard jammed shut by a fallen gargoyle.

Jack was strong now, and he threw the grinning stone gargoyle imp aside, and pulled his small friend free. Over his shoulder Crispis dangled, and Jack ran again, in zigzags, jumping, ducking, leaping, as the house crumbled and collapsed into the moat.

S
ilver had never driven a horse and cart in her life, but she took the reins, and the horse seemed to know how to go forward, and forward they went, out through the courtyard and into Dark House Lane and down towards the River Thames.

Stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, pudding dens, places where they stitched jerkins, made tallow candles, forged horses’ hooves, inns, taverns, bakers, cookshops, men and women with fish baskets on their heads, men and women alike smoking short clay pipes, dogs running in and out of cartwheels, a parrot on a perch shouting at passers-by, a woman selling bolts of cloth from a handcart, a tinker with pots and pans hung round his thin body, a fiddler playing a melody, a sheep in the middle of the pitted lane, the smell of cooking, a pork smell, like roasting, and a smell like iron being heated so that it glowed. A little boy with bare feet, a girl carrying a baby, a donkey with a man on its back – a man so tall that his feet tripped along the ground as the donkey plodded on. Two soldiers, ragged and frightening, waved their fists at Silver, but she was brave, and urged the horse and cart on.

Then she came towards the river.

The River Thames, wide like in a dream – jammed with craft and bodies, like in a nightmare.

Black boats that were the charcoal burners. Boats tarred and blistering in the sun. Boats smothered in pitch to keep the water out. Boats sanded and oiled and curtained and secret to keep out prying eyes. Rich boats like these, and poor boats like the others. Boats that carried barrels of beer, and boats half sunk under the weight of cattle, mooing and lowing at the slopping water.

There were naval boats, proud in blue and gold, and merchant boats with their Guild insignia embossed into the prow. There were scavenger boats trawling their nets to drag up what others had lost, and gaily painted boats carrying visitors to and fro. There was a boat full of cats – so full of cats that the boat itself looked to be made out of fur. These were ships’ cats coming ashore or going to sail, a mewling, rioting, spitting, sunning, tails-in-the-air-legs-akimbo of a boat, so noisy that a sloop packed with priests had their fingers in their ears, and the drunken party-goers sailing nearby nearly fell overboard for laughing.

And this was London. And this was the life of London. And this was the life of London rolled out like a carpet and played like a tune, and smelling to high heaven of fish and meat and animals and dung and sweat and beer and the hot scorching acrid smells of leather tanners and blacksmiths, and the steam and hiss of water and flesh as the cattle were branded on the stumpy piers.

London
, thought Silver.
1601
.

And then there was a figure running beside her, strong and fast and covered in thick, damp, dirty, chalky dust. In his arms he carried the smallest possible child, also covered in dust, but this child, no mistaking it, was bright yellow, except for his halo of curly hair, which was now jet black. The child looked exactly like a sunflower.

‘Crispis!’ panted Jack, flinging the child up into the cart, and hopping up himself. ‘Turn right here, Mistress Silver, if you don’t want to end up in the river!’

As Jack took over the reins of the cart, and they swung off along the river towards the Strand, Jack had a feeling of being watched.

He looked up into the sky. Hovering, swooping, dipping, diving, shearing the clouds and grazing the spires, free at last and exulting and malevolent, two eyes glared down. It was the Eyebat.

Instinctively Jack looked out on to the teeming river, and sure enough, he saw what he saw.

Quite on its own, in the hugger-mugger of craft, was a golden boat. It was a dark gold, not a shining gold, but gold it was, and quite different to the other vessels plying their way.

Jack recognised Wedge, and Mistress Split, each rowing a single oar, with their single arm. Standing in the prow, wrapped in black, was the Magus.

‘He’s here,’ said Jack.

‘Of course he’s here,’ answered Silver, narrowing her eyes across the waterline. ‘This is the doing that you have to do,’ and then she realised that she was sounding as peculiar and enigmatic as the Dragon or the Knight.

She looked again. A second boat was approaching that of the Magus. And the person rowing it . . . no, it couldn’t be him. Silver stared and stared. It couldn’t be . . .

‘What can you see?’ asked Jack. But Silver shook her head and didn’t answer. She was looking at someone from another time . . .

The bells were ringing twelve noon.

‘I think we should visit Mother Midnight,’ said Jack.

MORE MOTHER MIDNIGHT

I
t was just as before, though nothing in this life ever is just as before, and the repeats, however similar, are not identical; the tiny difference between two moments holds the clue.

She had been there for centuries, it seemed, under the canopy of the oak, living in the roots of the oak, burning her mysterious fire that needed no fuel yet roared red.

What a figure the woman was – so small she could have lived in a box. So thin that she could have escaped from a hole in a box. Her mouth was as empty as an empty box, and her eyes were as full of secrets as a box that says DO NOT OPEN. She was not a human, not a fish, not a cat, not a dog, not a monster, not a devil, not a born thing, not anything. She was all manner of things. She was Mother Midnight.

Jack and Silver went down the low corridor and sat at the table that was made from the tree. There was the copper bowl filled with green water.

‘You must pay me,’ said Mother Midnight, but Jack had no money.

‘What have you in your pockets?’ she said, and Jack turned out nothing but the five remaining sunflower seeds.

Mother Midnight stretched out her leathery palm. ‘The price is two,’ she said, and Jack gave them to her.

‘I will help you,’ said Mother Midnight, ‘but bring in the yellow child from the cart. There is always danger.’

Jack went to get Crispis. Mother Midnight stared at Silver.

‘I know you,’ said Mother Midnight. ‘You are old.’

‘I am thirteen,’ said Silver, ‘and I don’t know you.’

Mother Midnight laughed. ‘You, you have been alive and you will be alive again.’

Silver didn’t like the sound of this. ‘I am alive now,’ she said.

Mother Midnight shook her head. ‘Yet not in this time. In this time you are but a visitor from another time.’

‘Yes,’ said Silver. ‘Who called me?’

‘The Radiant Boy calls the Golden Maiden.’

‘Is that why I am here?’ asked Silver. ‘It’s just that, on the river, I saw . . . thought I saw, might have seen –’

But before she could speak further, Jack came back with Crispis. The yellow boy sat down by the red-eyed cat.

‘My mother has been turned to stone!’ said Jack.

Mother Midnight nodded. ‘The power you do possess that can free her body from the stone, but you must break the power of the Magus, and from that victory all else shall follow.’

‘How am I to defeat him? He has cheated me of my power already!’

‘Power you have, and it will grow as you use it. Are you not strong in body? Stronger than any man?’

Jack thought of lifting the stone statue of his mother, and rescuing Crispis. He nodded.

Mother Midnight nodded. ‘Now you will learn how to be strong in spirit. Then you will defeat him.’

‘There isn’t time!’ said Jack. ‘He’s in the city, he took my power, he turned my mother to stone, he’s going to turn the whole city into gold!’

Mother Midnight held up her gnarled hand. ‘Be calm! Follow the time and you will know the time – this girl, the Golden Maiden, will be your timekeeper. She will tell you when what must begin will begin.’

‘Riddles, all riddles!’ cried Jack. ‘The Magus, the Dragon, you . . .’

And he stood up, agitated and angry. He wanted someone to tell him what to do and how to do it.

‘You will see me again,’ said Mother Midnight, ‘but now, get gone!’

The fire roared up. The cat jumped on to the shoulders of his eerie mistress and Jack and Silver and Crispis crept out of the low den and into the bustle of the alley.