Ironhand (20 page)

“Go on, then,” he said.

She took a breath and touched the nearest slab of rock. It was about the same size as a roughly hewn telephone directory.

She jerked slightly as the memory in it flowed into her.

A weeping red-haired woman in a green coat sat in the chair Edie was sitting in.

She clutched a blazing heart stone that was pinned to her lapel as a brooch.

She had big hair, like an astronaut’s wife in a 1960s newsreel.

Her thick mascara was running.

She screamed as the Walker reached in and ripped the heart stone out of her hand and off her jacket.

Edie convulsed as she felt the irreparable wave of anguish tear into the older woman as it was taken.

She heard the Walker say:

“Try another one, and you shall have your dainty back.”

Then the vision of the past was over, and it was she who was strapped to the chair. She tried to understand what she had just seen.

“You have had other glints testing these rocks.”

He nodded. “Ignore the memories of them. Their pain is . . . a minor distraction. Find me the rock with the possibility of a gate in it. Try them all.”

He tapped the dagger handle.

“Try to thwart me by choosing the wrong one, and I will open the boy in front of your eyes and you can watch his life puddle away through the cracks in these very floorboards.”

“But why do you need me if you’ve already had others test the stones?” she asked, in a final attempt to stave off the inevitable.

“Because the nature of the void in the mirror changes in time. It’s as if whatever is beyond the gate in the mirror moves. As if it has been floating loose since it was separated from the second mirror. Two of them together seemed to hold each other steady. The uncut stone that was a match for the mirror ten years ago won’t be right now. That’s why having a glint and a master maker on hand at the same time is so very fortuitous.”

She nodded slowly, turned, and felt the next stone. And the one after.

So began the longest hour of Edie’s life. Most of the stones held at least one anguish-soaked memory of an earlier glint, sometimes more than one. She lost track of the pain and the faces in a mounting accretion of despair as she dragged her wheeled chair after her, trying stone after stone. The pain didn’t make her numb. It just went on and on, wearing different faces that all blurred together. She began to feel she couldn’t breathe, as though she were drowning in a never-ending sea of tears.

Eventually she became so punch-drunk that she just assumed this was going to go on forever. Only the closeness of the heart stone in her pocket kept her going, because in her mind it was where she’d hidden her last hope, her one desperate plan for escape, a plan that could only happen when everyone was in the right place. It was so unending, this onslaught of women’s and girls’ despair that when she came to the empty stone, she wept with relief.

He didn’t have to ask her if it was the one. He just looked up from where he was bent over the desk, and smiled.

“Good.”

Edie leaned against the shelf as the Walker reached past her and took the slab over to the table. As soon as he walked away, her hand closed on the obsidian next to the place where the empty one had been.

She checked that he was still moving away. And once he was at the desk, carefully putting the empty stone next to the dark mirror, she took a fast deep breath and closed her eyes.

She lifted the heavy slab and smashed it down on the stone on the shelf.

She heard a sharp cracking noise and felt chips of rock fly past her face.

Something stung her ear, but she ignored it and opened her eyes.

Sure enough, the obsidian had shattered, leaving fine shards all over the shelf.

“What are you doing?” the Walker shouted, and the noise started the dogs on the other side of the door barking furiously. Edie didn’t spare a millisecond to see if he was going to get to her before she did what she had to do. Her free hand darted into the stone debris and grabbed a long, thin shard like a straight razor. It was the wrong way around, but she spun it in her hand in midair so the blade edge faced out as she slashed it at her trapped wrist.

The obsidian blade, sharper than the sharpest scalpel, seemed to whistle as it cut through the air and hit the taut rope, severing it almost as if it weren’t there at all.

Without pausing, she kept the momentum of her slash going and rolled out of the chair, spinning to her feet and whirling the heavy wooden seat on its wheels so that it was between her and the approaching Walker.

He was diving forward, and hit the solid chair hard, knocking it off its wheels as he tangled in it and fell. Edie jumped out of the way as he and the chair crashed to the floor.

The candle on the table fell over with the impact, but it didn’t go out. It rolled in among some of the loose sheets of paper that Edie had disturbed.

The Walker managed to reach one hand out and grab the edge of her jacket. His normally sneering face was crimson with rage and pain.

“You will pay, you little hellcat!” he shouted in a voice like a thunderclap, dragging her toward him.

“You too—” said Edie calmly.

And with all the power and cold fury in her body, she slashed the obsidian razor across his face.

“—And don’t call me little.”

She didn’t wait as he screamed and his hands flew to his eyes.

She vaulted over his hunched body, ran across the room, grabbed another big lump of stone from the nearest shelf, so heavy that she could hardly lift it, and with the last of her strength, hurled it through the leaded diamonds of the window. Snow billowed into the room as she jumped out into the night without a second’s hesitation.

The only thought she had time for as she fell through the air was that, for all she knew, she was going to break her neck; but anything was better than what was in that room, pulling from the black mirror.

G
eorge clenched the horsewhip in his hand and braced his back against the Portland stone stacked massively behind him. He had a thousand questions that he wanted to ask the Officer, but before he could think which one to call out, he heard the sound of a deep familiar bell tolling, reverberating high in the night air.

It was the sound of Big Ben, marking the turn of the day from its position three hundred feet above the city. Though he had heard the old bell on the radio marking the hours before news broadcasts, now that George was hearing it directly through the night air, it felt like the first time.

He heard the warning carillon ring one, two, three, four times, and then after a pregnant pause, he heard the majestic lonely bongs of the great bell counting out the hours. And as he listened, he thought of something his dad used to say when they’d return home after an adventure or a treat of some kind. He’d look rueful and tousle George’s hair and, no matter what time of day it actually was, he’d say, “Well, we did that, didn’t we? We heard the chimes at midnight.”

The memory faded as George became aware of something else.

With each
bong
, he felt himself changing. And not only himself, but his surroundings. As the darkened city paled into a harsh winter light, he felt his body stiffen and become more ponderous. He wondered fleetingly if he was turning into a statue. His feet felt massy and increasingly clumsy, and his clothes seemed to become heavier. And then not only heavier, but less comfortable. They scratched and itched at him. And then he forgot his clothes and the heaviness as he focused on what was happening to the four-story white stucco building opposite. With each sound of the bell, it was fading, and in its place was a clear sky seen through a lattice of black-and-white silver birch trees. There were no leaves on the slender trunks and branches, and George felt a chill breeze cut through him. As he instinctively reached to fasten the plastic buttons on his reefer jacket, his hands met stiff tarpaulin canvas, metal buttons, and leather straps. He looked down in time to see the dark bronze rectangle of the plinth fade away and leave his boots standing on a muddy crisscross of wheel tracks punctuated by hoof marks.

Except they weren’t his boots. They were the Gunner’s boots, the Gunner’s leg protector on one side and the tight twine of puttees on the other. Although, they weren’t exactly the Gunner’s, because the Gunner’s had been bronze, and these were real: leather boots, canvas puttees, wool army britches, canvas and leather bags and holsters hanging off him, as real as the stiff crackle of the thick canvas groundsheet he was wearing as a cape. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were flesh and blood; but they were not his hands: they were a man’s hands—perhaps the hands that his would become one day, but weren’t yet. Strong wide hands, grubby and calloused by work.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, the sense that he was a boy of nearly thirteen standing on a traffic island in London was fading away like the vision of the bronze plinth at his feet; but before it retreated to a point where he couldn’t connect with it anymore, he was able to notice other changes as they happened.

His fingers rose to his face, and even without a mirror, he could tell it wasn’t George he was feeling. The chin was covered in a strange rough bristle, the nose was longer, and all the planes of the face were wider, flatter, and wrong. The skin that covered them somehow felt thicker and more rubbery as he kneaded it against the bones of his skull. In fact, his whole body just felt denser and blunter. It was as if his center of gravity had moved lower, and the pull of that gravity had doubled. He no longer felt light on his feet, and it wasn’t tiredness that made him feel that—it was a reconfiguration of his muscles and a thickening of his bones. He felt bulkier and stronger, but he also felt in a way that was as tinged with sadness as it was full of wonder, that he’d lost something irretrievable in this growth. Like something you don’t notice until it’s gone, he was missing the green ease and lightness in his body. It didn’t feel like a body that could run full tilt and without much thought all the way from St. Pancras to Hyde Park, for example. His body had just fast-forwarded fifteen years. It wasn’t that he had become fat; it was that he had become strong, like a flexible tree sapling that grows into a solid trunk, which can’t bend as easily but carries more weight.

What he felt was simple age, and the inescapable weight of growing up.

He was also feeling an insistent itching, and he realized he was scratching at those itches without thinking about it. He looked up at the clear winter sky through the birch branches and wondered at the brightness. He heard the wonder in a deep voice saying:

“I thought it would be midnight.”

He realized that the voice had come out of his mouth. He heard it all, the sounds of this new world dialed up around him. He heard a distant cracking and popping, and behind that an even fainter whine like an engine. Much closer, too, he heard the rattle of harnesses and wheels, men moving about, metal sliding against metal, and the sound of someone coughing his guts up close by.

And then he heard the Officer’s voice right beside him saying:

“Thought what would be midnight, Gunner?”

George looked down from the delicate fretwork of birch branches against the pale winter sky and saw the world he had fallen into, and realized that he was, as advertised, eye-deep in hell.

A horse’s body hung upside down from a tree, frozen and unmoving on the sharp stump it had been blown onto, its legs pointing skyward in an obscene imitation of the branches it had replaced. The other trees around it looked as if they had been hacked and slashed by some wayward giant, randomly splintered and shattered trunks jagging up out of the plashed earth at crazy angles. Below it, the earth was torn up in senseless ridges and random shell holes, strewn with barbed wire and the smashed detritus of war.

The Officer was standing in front of George, still carrying his greatcoat, and he too was now flesh and blood, no longer a statue.

“Nothing, sir. Sorry, daydreaming.”

The words came out of George’s mouth as if he were partly on autopilot. It certainly hadn’t occurred to him to call this man “sir” on a conscious level.

“Well, snap to and get those nags into some kind of cover before that spotter plane gees Fritz into lobbing a wake-up call our way.”

George looked at the horizon and saw a tiny twin-winged plane moving slowly against the light, like a paper cutout. He realized that was the source of the distant whine.

“Sir,” he heard himself say, and he saw his hand rise to the overhang of his tin helmet in a sketchy salute. Again, he hadn’t thought of doing it, but some part of him was like a passenger without control of the body he was in. He didn’t feel detached from it, just not wholly at one with what it did. It was the same feeling when he found he had reached back over his shoulder without looking and patted the muzzle of a horse that he hadn’t really known was there.

“Come on, then,” he heard himself say. “Let’s find a better ’ole.”

He turned and gathered two leading reins in his hand. A pair of chestnut-colored horses stood there. Behind them he could see a pair of field guns being set up for action by teams of gunners working fast to manhandle them into position just behind the lip of a shallow ridge. Some wore greatcoats and mufflers, others wore shaggy sheepskin jerkins, but all wore tin helmets and looks of fierce determination as if they were working against the clock.

George could feel his heart thudding with adrenaline. He realized there was a huge sense of apprehension churning in his gut, as if something very, very bad were about to happen. He could see by the tight faces around him that everyone else felt the same. It was as if someone were playing a single unending note on a violin, a note so high that you almost couldn’t hear it, but just audible enough for it to be painful in its persistence, in the way it underpinned everything. His mouth was dry, and he felt he would murder someone for a cup of tea. Which was strange, because George—normal George—didn’t much like tea at all.

Two artillery spotters were receiving orders from the Officer. One had a trench periscope strapped to his back. They nodded and set off over the lip of the ridge, keeping low. They held a spool of telephone cable on a bobbin between them that unwound as they ran. Then one stumbled and lay still. The other man kept hold of the bobbin and carried on, running until he disappeared over the ridge.

The Officer swore and trained his binoculars on the fallen man.

George felt the horses pull against the reins and found himself jogging away from the guns. He led them toward a dip in the landscape that had two walls of a ruined farmhouse at the bottom of it. He ducked them under a low arch, and wasn’t surprised to find two more horses already hobbled and waiting, faces obscured by nose bags, contentedly chomping away at the contents. Except for the lack of a roof, the protective walls of the ruin made for good cover. High above them, George heard the distant engine whine getting louder.

There was another soldier crouched by a wall, trying to get a fire going under a large blackened teakettle. His helmet lay on the ground beside him, and he was wearing one of the shaggy sheepskin jerkins.

“Char’ll be up in half a mo’. Tell them to keep their hair on,” he said.

George found he was hobbling his horses as if he’d been doing it all his life, but the watching part of himself in the back of his mind was looking at the shoulders and hair of the soldier hunkered down in front of the small fire. He had a cigarette parked in the side of his face, and George could hear the pop-and-suck of his smoking without using his hands as he squatted before the meager blaze, looking at something held in front of him.

Maybe because he was trying not to think too hard about why the man carrying one end of the telephone wire spool had not gotten up when he had stumbled and fallen, George concentrated on the back of the man’s head.

The soldier had dark hair, the same color as George’s, cropped short on the back and sides. When he swept his hand back through the unruly longer hair on top, George felt something tug at him in the pit of his stomach at the familiarity of the gesture. He suddenly and fiercely wanted this moment to freeze. He didn’t want whatever was going to happen next to happen; because whatever was actually going to happen wasn’t going to be the thing that tug had so treacherously hinted at. Because that was impossible.

The man picked the ragged stub of his cigarette out of the side of his mouth and spun it into the fire, then stood up, stretched, and turned.

George’s heart stopped.

Any heart would stop if it saw the impossible happen.

Any body would forget to breathe.

Any throat would choke up so tight that there was only room for one small word to escape.

A word as small as:

“Dad?”

The eyes that he knew so well, the eyes he’d known he’d never see again, crinkled at him, and one brow rose higher than the other in an expression George not only remembered but had himself practiced to death in front of the bathroom mirror in the weeks after the funeral, so he would not ever forget. The doors of his heart burst open, and he felt light again as he started to run toward him.

“Who you calling Dad, mate?” The soldier laughed. “I reckon I’m younger than you. . . .”

George stopped dead as he realized that though the eyes were smiling good-naturedly, there wasn’t a hint of answering recognition in them.

Then the ground skipped beneath his boots as the first bomb hit.