Ironhand (12 page)

I
t was the football that woke George up—that, and a man’s voice shouting energetically somewhere far away.

“Over here, my son, on the head!”

And then there was the unmistakable dull thump of a boot kicking a wet leather football. George opened his eyes and came out of the dark and saw a white-and-red ball spinning up into the air below him and then slowly drop away to meet a group of players rammed in around a crowded goalmouth. There was a tussle and some muddy skirmishing, and then the ball billowed the back netting. One of the players pulled his shirt over his head and ran off in a victory circuit, hand held high, and there was the sound of good-natured laughing and catcalls from the others. The only abnormal thing about it was that George was seeing it from a teetering bird’s-eye view.

He felt the stone talon wrapped around his chest and remembered Spout, and the fact that he was meant to be dead, and the screaming golden girl on the end of the lance; and the past dropped back in and hit him like a bag of wet cement.

The floodlit green space below was Coram’s Fields, an oasis of grass and trees just south of Euston Road. Spout was flying faster now, as if he were nearly home and didn’t have to conserve his energy. The rain had eased, but was still coming down—a light drizzle instead of the downpour that had soaked him earlier.

George was wet to the skin, shivering badly, and trying to figure out exactly what had happened and why he wasn’t dead.

Ariel had pinned and held him to the gate, so hard that he couldn’t move. The Knight had thundered in behind the lance. George had looked away at the last minute and closed his eyes. And then he’d felt the colossal impact. He really should be dead.

Except now that he was conscious again, he replayed the final moment more slowly and realized that what had felt terribly wrong was not the impact so much as the direction it had come from. The lance had been about to punch heart-high through his chest, impaling him like a butterfly on a pin. But the impact hadn’t come from the front. It had come from the side. He remembered thinking that he’d heard Death’s wings flying in to gather him. But now that he thought about it, it hadn’t been Death but Spout diving out of the night sky at the very last minute, snatching him out of the way so that the Knight’s lance had punched past the empty space where George now wasn’t, and through the gap in the gate railings into the space where Ariel still was.

There had been a feeling like his head exploding, and that must have been Spout clattering him up something like the roof of the sentry box as he snatched him into the sky, because George could feel a definite bump throbbing behind his ear.

So that was how come he was now being flown over Euston Road toward the lavishly ornamented roof scape of St. Pancras Station: Spout had snatched him back. Spout had rescued him, just as earlier Ariel had saved him from the gargoyle. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. The only thing was, he wasn’t sure who was frying pan and who was fire anymore. He was pretty certain Spout hadn’t suddenly changed from an enemy into a friend, so it had to be that the rescue was accidental, and Spout had taken him back for his own reasons. It was all too complicated, and he was hurting and cold and confused.

The memory of Ariel—her smile, her joy in just flying around the gherkin, pirouetting on the top of the world— all that hurt him too, especially when overlaid with the ice in her voice as she had gripped him and held him for the Knight. The hurt was because she’d betrayed him.

Spout was slowing as they flew up and around the tall illuminated clocktower on the eastern end of the building. He registered the green slate roof thrusting sharply into the sky above the clock faces on each of its sides, and the accompanying pinnacles decorating each corner, as they circled the massive exuberant confection of orange brickwork and clean white stone.

The engine shed of Kings Cross passed his right shoulder. Spout flapped down the roof of St. Pancras, over a sharp ridge with a narrow, flat runway on the very top. They flew west between tall chimneys that swept up from the vertiginously sheer roof slopes on either side. Before the building curves abruptly ended, in a squatter tower on the far end, there was another tower, and it was to this tower that Spout was flying. As it loomed ahead of them, Spout stopped flapping and spread his wings wide, making them act as air brakes, slowing their speed to a stalling point. Just when it was clear to George that flight was no longer viable and they were going to start falling, Spout reached out a talon and stuck to the corner of the wall.

“Geer!”
he coughed, and put George down on the narrow space behind him. There was no question of George’s running away from this position. Spout’s aerie was a small space where three angles of roof met and then fell away sheer. There was a lead gutter box, a sort of inset tray with a hole, and a piece of broken masonry wedged in one corner that provided a place for George to squat and watch the gargoyle as he settled into position. Except, unlike all the other gargoyles on the building, which were facing out at the city, Spout turned in and looked at George.

George had no clue as to what was going to happen next. The gargoyle stared at him and then shook himself like a dog, slowly stretched his wings, and folded them neatly down around his back. It was the first time George had really had a chance to look at Spout properly, at rest. Every time he’d seen him before, he’d been moving, running, flying, or chasing. And George had been so busy trying to stay as far from the creature as he could that he’d never had a chance to really take him in, in all his glory.

Not that he was very glorious. He definitely had, as George’s dad used to say, been hit with the ugly stick. He was a stringy feral cat with wings where his front legs should be. There was something strained and tortured in the way the sculptor had made him, and life on the roof had clearly not been kind to him. He was streaked with dirt; his mouth leaked green from where the old copper pipe had been that George had pulled out of his mouth; the weather had not only beaten him, but had shattered off the knuckle tip of one wing, which gave him a lopsided quality. In fact, George wondered if it were this missing bit of wing that made him fly so lopsidedly, too.

Spout bared his fangs, and George saw how deep the green staining went, curling out around the lower teeth like blood.

“Gack,”
rasped the creature.

“Yes,” said George. “Nice place you’ve got here.” He had his arms wrapped around himself and was hunched down into a ball, trying to get some warmth trapped in his middle. “Shame you haven’t got central heating,” he said.

“Gowk,”
said Spout, leaning in and tapping his own mouth, then prodding George back against the tiles.
“Gowk!”

He was trying to say something, George realized. He was definitely trying to communicate. And he looked irritated at George’s inability to understand.

“Gowk!”

“Yes, gowk,” said George.

Spout didn’t look impressed. His fangs ground against each other in silent irritation, and his throat worked as if he were trying to cough out a fur ball or a fish bone.

“Sorry. I don’t speak Gargoyle,” George apologized.

Spout shook his head and batted at his mouth again, wingtips clattering against the bared fangs. And George suddenly realized what he must be saying.

“You want the spout! The spout I pulled out of your mouth. Yes, of course, I’m sorry. . . .”

Now it all made complete sense. It explained why the creature had been so tenacious in his pursuit of him. He’d wrenched an important part out of Spout’s mouth. In fact, before he’d done that, he couldn’t remember the thing making any noise at all. These attempts to speak sounded so painful, George wasn’t surprised that the gargoyle wanted it back.

His hands scrabbled in his trouser pocket and disentangled the corroded metal pipe. He held it out like a peace offering.

And then he got clever just in time, and snatched it back out of Spout’s grasp.

“Although . . .” he said slowly, thinking as he spoke. “Although, perhaps we can make a deal. You put me down on the ground, and then I give you your spout back. You understand?”

He mimed flying down and handing over the pipe. Spout cocked his head. His talon flashed out and back with surprising speed, and George’s hand was suddenly empty. The gargoyle looked at the metal pipe he now held in his own grasp.

“Yes,” said George. “Or you could take it now and then put me back on the ground. If that works better for you, I’m, um, easy. . . .”

He knew he was clinging on to the frayed coattails of a very forlorn hope, and so he folded his arms around himself and tried to look on the bright side.

“Still. As long as you got your spout back, I’m happy. You’re happy, and—”

Spout stopped looking at the copper pipe and stared at George with a stony intensity that shut him up. Spout twirled the pipe once in his talon and then tossed it over his shoulder without the least interest. George stared at Spout as they listened to the pipe ping and clatter its way down the roof and onto the engine shed below. George swallowed.

“Gowk!”
Spout clattered his wingtip against his chest and poked George insistently.
“Gowk—eigengang. Eigengang—gowk.”

Somewhere all this made sense, but not on any planet George was presently inhabiting.

“Sorry. I don’t know what
eigengang
means.”

Spout lunged forward, and for a moment, George thought he was attacking, but then the gargoyle grabbed the broken lump of stone in the gutter box under his feet and tugged it out. George tipped backward and his hands flailed against the tiles to stop himself from falling into the void below. When he looked up, Spout was thrusting the stone at him like a club.

He raised his hands to shield himself, but Spout hissed in frustration and sat back on his haunches. He waved the broken piece of stonework at George. Then he lunged forward again, put the stone fragment down, and grabbed George’s hand. The scar with the maker’s mark twinged as Spout pulled George forward so he was standing on tiptoes. Spout rubbed George’s hand on the edge of his wing—in the place where the weather had shattered a large lump out of it.

“Ow,” said George, his hand being sandpapered by the abrasive surface. Spout hissed angrily and stepped back. George was suddenly alone and unsupported; worse than that, he was on tiptoe, on the brink of a very long drop. He tottered and fell back into the gutter box. The broken piece of stone jagged into his side as he landed, and he arched his back and pulled it out of the way. But as the stone pressed itself into the soft flesh of his hands and fingers, he knew.

He knew without having to look at the shape lopped out of the gargoyle’s wing that he was holding the broken piece. His hands felt the identical rough texture, his fingers knew that he was feeling the negative shape of the one he’d felt on Spout’s wing. He knew it was the same rock, and he knew it would fill the space exactly. He knew that the two pieces of rock not only belonged but, in some way he couldn’t explain, wanted to be together again.

“Oh,” he said. And sat down. He looked at the piece of wing in his hand and then at Spout.

“Oh.”

Spout squatted back in front of him and angled the broken wing knuckle toward George. And although George was more frightened of this stone monster than anything he could imagine, he couldn’t help putting his hand out and feeling the stone wound again.

“You want me to mend you.”

He felt the stone surface. He put the broken piece into the wing. It fit perfectly.

“Eigengang,”
said Spout, nodding.

“If
eigengang
means mend, I can’t. I’m sorry. I mean, it’s not just a matter of putting it back. It’s got to be fixed.”

His mind flashed back to the ordered mess of his father’s studio; he heard his dad breathing in the sucking-air-in-the-side-of-his-mouth way he did when he was smoking but couldn’t spare a hand to remove the cigarette. He saw his dad using two hands to hold a broken piece of sculpture together. It was a ballerina that had belonged to his mother. George had broken it, and they were trying to mend it before she noticed. It had been a conspiratorial moment between the two of them: boys together, working against the clock. He remembered his dad saying it wasn’t just a matter of glue. That you couldn’t just rely on glue. That for a repair to work, you had to make a mechanical join, too, as well as the glue. Especially if you were going to put pressure on the break. George thought of the immense pressure that Spout put on his wings every time he flapped, trying to keep his great mass airborne.

“It’s complicated. It’s got to be glued or mortared or something. I mean, it’s probably got to be screwed or pinned. I’m sorry.”

His hand squeezed the wing apologetically. And as he did so, he felt the stone becoming hot.

Spout looked at him sharply.

“Eigengang.”

George squeezed again. The heat became fiercer, and as he moved his hand along the seam between the two pieces of stone, it became hard to work out where the heat was coming from. He realized he wasn’t feeling heat coming from the stone.

The heat was coming from his hand.

He didn’t know, afterward, why his eyes had closed, but he found he had blanked out the world and just focused on what he could feel. His hearing seemed to dull, too, as he felt the rough surface of the stone. He felt the tiny crackle and popping occurring within the crack, as split granules of stone found their sundered neighbors and knitted back together under the heat coming from his hand.

He slumped back, strangely exhausted and panting for breath, a dull empty feeling beneath his breastbone. Whatever he had done, it had cost him. He was drenched in sweat, and steamed slightly in the cold air.

Spout shook his wing as if testing it. The broken piece was solidly a part of him again. He nodded his head with enthusiasm.
“Eigengang!”
And sat back on his haunches.

George did the same.

“Wow. That was . . . something,” he said. He looked up at the night sky, trying to concentrate on the tingling aftermath in his hand, and not the emptiness in his chest. “It’s stopped raining.”