Endymion Spring (10 page)

A glimmer of light, like a knife blade, shone through a crack in one of the curtained windows, but by the time Blake stumbled up the stone steps, the partition had closed.

A

A man with owl-like glasses was helping himself to a slab of crumbly cheese from a sideboard near the door and Blake ducked behind him to take cover.
 
He doubled over, panting with exhaustion.

He checked his watch.
 
Barely thirty minutes had gone by.
 
It was nothing... unless you happened to be waiting.

One look was enough.
 
He was in trouble.
 
Serious trouble.

His mother, standing next to a group of quarreling scholars, was barely listening to the discussion.
 
Arms folded across her chest, she was staring fixedly ahead, inwardly fuming.
 
Her body language said it all.

He gulped.

Duck was eagerly on the lookout and got up as soon as she had spotted him.
 
"Where have you been?" she snapped, pushing her way through the crowd.

"Out," he said.
 
Then, failing to come up with a better excuse, he added, "It's really cold out there.
 
It might even snow."

He started rubbing his arms up and down, wondering if she would believe him.
 
She didn't.
 
He stopped his play-acting.

"How angry is she?" he asked, motioning towards his mother.

"Pretty angry," said Duck.
 
"She's stopped talking to the other professors."

That was a bad sign.
 
It meant she was really angry — angry beyond words.
 
The worst kind of angry.

"Where were you really?" asked Duck in a different voice, more curious.

"I told you.
 
I went out for a walk."

He watched as his mother went to fetch her coat.
 
She met his apologetic grin with a steely expression.
 
The smile died almost instantly on his face.

"No, you didn't," said Duck.
 
"You went to the library."

"Huh?"

Blake pretended not to listen, but his red cheeks were a dead giveaway.

"You went to the library," she said.
 
"I know you did.
 
You thought you could outsmart me by finding the blank book and solving the mystery all by yourself.
 
You idiot!
 
I saw you go."

He frowned.
 
"What?"

"I saw you," she crowed.
 
"You thought you were so sneaky, but I was watching the whole time.
 
You're so stupid — it's a joke."

Suddenly he turned on her.
 
"So you were the person in the library!" he cried.
 
"I could kill you, I really could."

Several people turned, appalled by the vehemence of his words, but he couldn't control himself.
 
The fear that had been growing inside him had found a release.

"Why did you do that?" he hollered.
 
"You scared me half to death!"

Something in Duck's eyes made him stop.
 
They were suddenly large and fearful, on the verge of tears.
 
She had no idea what he was talking about.

Immediately, he realized his mistake.
 
She hadn't seen him leave; she'd merely said this to make him feel bad.
 
She was probably jealous because he'd been able to evade her watchful gaze and sneak out without her.

She was about to add something when their mother returned, her coat folded over her arm.
 
Without a word, she led them out.

"I'll deal with you later," she told him icily as they followed her down the garden path.
 
Her words hovered in the air like a frosty cloud.

7

T
hat night, Blake awoke with a start.
 
The book was summoning him.

Sitting up in bed, he switched on the light and blinked as the stripes on his bedroom wallpaper reappeared, one by one, like the bars of a prison.
 
And then he remembered:
 
the book was gone.
 
He'd failed to find it.
 
He let his head fall back against the pillow with a crushing sense of disappointment.

In his dream, the college library had been transformed into a magical forest.
 
Tall trees lined the corridors, reaching up the walls, extending their brilliant canopies across the ceiling.
 
Books filled the shelves, which were made from vast, interlocking branches.
 
As he walked through the library, red, gold and vivid green scraps of paper drifted to the floor like autumn leaves.

Birds chattered noisily in the air above him, hopping from one branch to another; but then, in an explosion of wings, they suddenly shot off into the air, leaving the branches — the shelves — as silent and
bare
as winter.
 
The building was cold and empty, apart from the blank book, which was once again lying on the floor, waiting for him to turn it over.

Mephistopheles sauntered along the corridor to meet him, a scarp of paper dangling from his mouth like a feather.

Blake shuddered at the recollection, convinced the book was trying to reach him.
 
Then, realizing that the shiver had as much to do with the temperature of his room as his nerves, he crept to the foot of his bed to switch on the radiator beneath the window.
 
It was freezing!

He turned the dial and waited for the primitive fossil-like coils to heat up, unused to such antiquated devices at home.
 
The pipes groaned and quivered for a moment and then slowly filled with warmth.
 
It was like the ghost of heat, barely noticeable, but it was better than nothing.

To ease his mind, he peered out through a gap in the blinds.
 
Street lamps spilled pools of yellow light onto
Millstone Lane
and a dog barked somewhere in a neighboring yard.
 
Otherwise, there was no sign of life.
 
The houses were dark and deserted.
 
Everyone was asleep.

It was the middle of the night.

Blake settled back in bed and stared at the cracks that crept along the ceiling like giant spiders.
 
It unnerved him that the blank book had disappeared so soon after he had found it.
 
The book had felt unusual, as though it might contain anything.
 
The paper had an ability to make hidden words come alive, a magical power he couldn't begin to comprehend.
 
It was as though it had contained a mind of its own — a
djinn
, perhaps.
 
Some secret power.
 
But how was that possible?

He let out a long sigh.
 
The book was gone.
 
He'd missed his chance to solve it.

He switched off the light and lay in the dark, a feeling of inadequacy settling over him like a blanket.
 
And then, in the silence of his room, he became aware of a soft secretive sound spitting against the outside of his window.
 
It might be snow, or it might be rain.
 
But it was so nice and warm in his bed, and he felt so tired, that he didn't get up to see what it was.

His mind dissolved into the outer edges of another dream.

A

He was back in the library.
 
Endymion
Spring
was waiting for him to pick it up.

Anxiously, before it could disappear, he curled his fingers round the worn leather spine and opened the covers.
 
Automatically, the blank pages started riffling to reveal the riddle hidden at the heart of the book:

When Summer and
Winter
in Autumn divide

The Sun will uncover a Secret inside.

As Blake recited the words, he was instantly transported to a snowy scene, somewhere else, somewhere like home.
 
White fields surrounded him like the pages of an open book and a frozen pond shone in the distance — a watermark dusted by a light sprinkling of snow.

Someone approached.
 
Footsteps scrunched behind him.
 
He turned round, just in time to see a clean-shaven man
with
 
a
face like worn wood emerging from a fringe of frostbitten trees.
 
The man was dressed in a fur-collared tunic with brown leggings and leather shoes that appeared to have no laces.
 
He dragged a felled tree behind him.

Blake rubbed his eyes.
 
The leaves were changing from
blood-red
to white as they passed over the snow.

On the man's shoulders sat a young girl with flaming auburn hair.
 
She wore a filthy smock and had rust patches on her stockings.
 
Tears clung to her cheeks.
 
Her grim face softened into a smile when she saw Blake and she held out a grazed hand for him to hold, but her fingers passed through his like a ghost's, a whisper of contact, no more than a cobweb.

Blake took a step back and watched as the mad trudged by without a word — without a glance in his direction.
 
The pair disappeared over the brow of a hill.

Suddenly, his parents were on either side of him.
 
Blake gripped them with his
mittened
hands, but they broke free and without a word moved off in opposite directions, fading into the snow.
 
Blake, wanted to run after them, to make them stop, but he was unable to choose which parent to follow and remained stuck in one spot.
 
Tears welled in his eyes, icing his vision.

Then, through his misery, he glimpsed a gleam of yellow.
 
Duck was there.
 
Duck, as she had been since the Big Argument, her hood pulled up to hide her strange tomboy's haircut:
 
a messy bob that no one could tame.
 
She was peering at something in the snow, calling out for him to come and look, but her words were printed in clouds of breath and he read them rather than heard them.

He raced towards her, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not reach her.
 
The snow was deep and his legs felt heavy.
 
He was chained to the ground.
 
Then she too vanished and he collapsed, too tired and lonely to go on.

The boundaries of his dream began to shift.
 
A wind rose and Blake was suddenly lifted into the sky like a freed snow angel, watching as the field below him grew smaller and smaller.
 
And then his heart lurched.
 
For there, in the snow, ending exactly at the spot where Duck had disappeared, was a path of footprints.

They formed a giant question mark.

Immediately, his dream burst and he hurtled back towards the ground like a skydiver without a parachute.
 
His head snowballed into his pillow.

Desperately, he clutched at the lines of
Endymion
Spring
's poem, but the words faded and all he could remember was the snow.

He turned over and fell asleep again.

Mainz

Spring
 
1453

T
he silence woke me.
 
Something was wrong.
 
I opened my eyes and peered into the gloom, trying to detect any sound, any movement, but there was none.
 
Only a sliver cusp of moonlight across the floor.
 
The darkness pressed in all around me, as thick as velvet.

For months now, Peter had been my sleeping companion, keeping me awake with his twitching and scratching, tormented by the dreams he never shared and the fleabites he did.
 
And yet I was grateful for his company.
 
The
bearlike
warmth of his body had kept me from shivering through the long winter nights when snow capped the roofs of the city and icy drafts crept through the house.

Spring had finally arrived.
 
Ploughmen and vintners began once more to prepare their fields and people picked their way through the thawed lanes with renewed vigor, the memory of fresh fruit revived on their tongues.
 
At long last the frozen river relinquished its hold on the boats trading goods up and down the Rhine.