The Greenstone Grail (31 page)

‘As you say.’

‘One more thing: the Grail should be there.’

‘No.’ His tone was flat.

‘Why the fuss? Have all the security you want. No one’ll nick it – it’s unsaleable without provenance. That’s why Sotheby’s contacted me in the first place. Carbon-dating didn’t work; if I say it’s a fake you probably won’t get a buyer. Not at the price you want, anyway. Need it there if we’re going to meet. Atmosphere.’

‘Mrs Thorn,
I
am not a romantic. You won’t get round me like that.’ Von Humboldt was looking puzzled.

‘Know that.’

‘Why then?’

‘Told you. Atmosphere.’ She waited a minute, then affected to drop her guard. ‘Want to see it back where it belongs, just once. Then, if I have to let it go …’ She shrugged.

He didn’t entirely believe her, but she knew he was curious – and he didn’t want to wait for slow legal machinery to grind into action.

‘I’ll discuss the matter with Sotheby’s,’ he said.

For Nathan, the advent of the holidays didn’t bring the usual feeling of unalloyed bliss. Instead, there was relief, because the distraction of school was removed and he could focus on other matters. He felt a faintly uncomfortable fizz of excitement, and the leading edge of fear. He put out tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt to sleep in – he was fed up with universe-hopping in pyjamas – anointed himself with
Bartlemy’s herbal mixture, and proceeded to sleep without dreams, or at least, none of any significance.

Saturday was spent with Hazel and George, who were, as always, deeply envious of his early break-up. ‘How come people who pay for education get less of it?’ George wanted to know.

‘Mum doesn’t pay. I’m on a scholarship.’

‘You know what I mean.’

That evening, Annie said she had to go and see Bartlemy for a couple of hours. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’

‘’Course. Anyhow, Hazel will stay. She’s been grilled by the cops: she needs lots of moral support.’

‘Are you okay?’ Annie asked her.

Hazel nodded. She’d told Nathan about writing the letter, but no one else.

‘I’ll put a pizza in the oven. Mushroom and mozzarella or pepperoni?’

They opted for pepperoni. ‘What’re you going to see Uncle Barty about?’ Nathan asked. It was unusual for her to go without inviting him.

‘Private talk,’ Annie said. Bartlemy had been emphatic that she should come alone. ‘Grown-up stuff.’ And, mentally crossing her fingers: ‘Probably about money.’

Nathan said nothing, but he didn’t believe her.

Annie arrived at Thornyhill to find Bartlemy alone; Eric had gone to have supper with Rowena Thorn. ‘She’s up to something,’ Bartlemy said, taking Annie into the kitchen. ‘Apparently, she’s trying to persuade the owner to allow the Grail to be brought here for a couple of days. She wants Eric to get a look at it. She seems to have taken quite a shine to him.’

‘Everyone does,’ Annie smiled. ‘Perhaps she believes he really
does
come from another world.’

‘Perhaps.’ As she was walking, not driving, he presented her with a glass of elderflower champagne which packed the punch of vintage Krug. ‘I’m afraid we’re not eating till later. I have a little research I want to do first, and I need you with me, in case there’s anyone – or any
thing
– you recognize.’

‘What sort of research? And why all the secrecy?’

‘You’ll see.’

In the drawing room, he had pushed back the furniture and rolled up the Oriental rugs. The curtains were drawn, shutting out the long light evening. ‘I would prefer to wait for dark,’ he said, ‘but it would make us very late.’ He crouched down by the fireplace, striking a match; Annie thought what was on the hearth wasn’t coal. The lumps appeared to be pallid and angular, like chunks of crystal. Presently they began to burn with a bluish flame which looked wan in the veiled daylight.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked him, and there was a note of fear or doubt in her voice.

‘Something I haven’t done in a long, long while. I was never very good at it; my heart wasn’t in it, as they say. But I had the Gift, so I was taught all the tricks of the trade. I rarely use them. Cooking has always been magic enough for me.’ Hoover padded at his side as he began to sprinkle powder from a flask round the perimeter of a wide circle. A mark on the floor, faint as a shadow, indicated that this had been done before.

Annie said: ‘Is this – magic?’

‘Oh yes. One of the oldest spells. Quite powerful, really, but don’t worry. As long as the boundary is correctly sealed nothing can leave the circle.’ Still using the powder, he drew four strange runes beyond the rim. When not talking to her, he murmured something under his breath, words she couldn’t hear properly, or hearing, couldn’t understand. ‘I’ll do the
talking. You can sit here. It’s best if you stay in the chair. On no account try to cross the perimeter.’

Annie sat down, clutching her glass. ‘Are you – are you going to call up the dead?’

‘Good Lord, no. Waste of time, in most cases. Spirits who have passed the Gate cannot return. Of course, some don’t, and the recently deceased often hang around for a bit – unfinished business and all that. I suppose we could try … well, we’ll see. In due course.’

‘Can you summon people from another world?’

‘No. That would take unimaginable power. The circle is just for this world. It’s a way of getting in touch with spirits who don’t usually talk to Man. Or people who don’t want to. Once called to the circle, you see, they have to answer your questions truthfully. At least, that’s the theory of it. They have to say something, anyway. And even lies and distortions can be informative, if you read them right. Personally, I don’t know that it will be useful and I don’t really like doing it, but we need all the information we can get.’ Suddenly, he turned to her with his most calming smile. ‘Don’t be upset by anything you see. Or hear. Spirits are a lot like people: they like to talk big and act tough. And they resent being summoned, of course. It’s rather like the genie of the lamp, you know. You rub, he has to appear. I’ve often thought he must have been regularly annoyed about that.’

‘I never saw it that way,’ Annie murmured.

He positioned himself at the circle’s edge, one hand on Hoover’s head. She had the feeling the dog, too, had been here before. Bartlemy spoke a single word – she thought it was: ‘
Fiumé
!’ – and a spark ran round the perimeter, igniting the powder to a flame which flared and sank. Then both the runes and the boundary burned with a barely visible flicker. In darkness the effect would have been far more dramatic,
but for Annie it was the banality of it – the fact that darkness and drama were not essential – which she found deeply disturbing. This was a spell, it was potent, it was
real
, perhaps even dangerous – and yet it was also ordinary. As much a part of Bartlemy’s routine as preparing a complex dish which he hadn’t tried for a while, with ingredients which might have gone off in the interim.

Hoover sat down looking unusually alert, both ears cocked. Bartlemy started to speak in an unfamiliar language, a language that sounded cold and strange even in his soft voice, changing it, changing
him.
At the heart of the circle there was a thickening in the air – a mistiness – a blur. Then a shape. A woman – a woman who looked pale and insubstantial, as if drifting in and out of reality. She seemed to be seated – there was a suggestion of chair beneath her – and held something in her hands as if it were very precious, something small and round. She was all monochrome save for a red veil which covered her face.

‘Greeting, Ragnlech,’ Bartlemy said politely, in English. ‘You are welcome.’

‘What do you seek of us?’ The voice from behind the veil was faint as the wind sighing far off, and full of echoes.

‘Knowledge. A seeress sees many things, both present and past. I need to know what the sisterhood have seen.’

The woman lifted the veil. Her face looked curiously unstable, sometimes young and unlined, sometimes withered with years. The skull gleamed through the dim covering of her flesh. Her eye-sockets were empty. When she raised her hands, holding the little ball, Annie closed her own eyes for a second.

Only for a second. Now the Eye was in place, in the left-hand socket. It looked far more solid than the face around it, glowing as if lit from within, fixing some point beyond the circle with a monstrous stare.

‘What would you have us see?’ asked the seeress.

‘The vessel called the Grimthorn Grail. I would know how it came into the world, and for what purpose. Also something of its making, if possible.’

‘Its making is hidden from us, and its purpose. One Josevius Grimthorn brought it here, more than thirteen hundred years ago, from another place. A place outside the dimensions of this world. How he did this we cannot tell. There was great magic involved, but it is unfamiliar to us.’

‘If not its purpose, can you tell me of its power?’

‘Its aura is very bright.’ The Eye shone brilliantly for an instant, then Ragnlech blinked once, and a tear ran down the shadow of her face. It looked like blood. ‘It hurts us. We cannot look at it. Its power is great. It can wipe the memory of those who should not see it, or bind the tongue. It has protectors, beings – entities – not of this world. They are invisible here, or nearly so. They speak words without thought, make footsteps without feet. They were sent with the cup.’

‘Sent … Who sent them?’

‘We cannot see. There are spells here … beyond our ken. It is perilous for us to pierce the shield. We will not do it.’

‘I wouldn’t ask you to put yourself in peril. Ragnlech …’

But the woman had already faded from view.

‘I could recall her,’ Bartlemy said, half to himself. ‘However … This is obviously a matter beyond the vision of the seers. It’s probably useless, but we’ll try elsewhere.’ He reverted to the alien language, the words hissing on the air like a music of knifeblades.

Another figure materialized in the circle, a man, very tall and all but naked, far more solid than the seeress.

His body appeared to be made of plaited muscle; antlers sprang from the thick snarl of his hair. His face was all long
bones and savagery, the way a stag might look if it was predatory and human enough to be psychopathic.

‘What is the word in the Wood, wild one?’ Bartlemy asked.

‘The Wood is shrinking. There is no word any more.’ The great head tossed, stag-like. ‘Why do you call me?’

‘There is a matter noised abroad – a little matter or great, I know not. It is called the Grimthorn Grail. I thought
you
might know more.’

‘The Wood here keeps its secrets, even from me,’ the man said sharply. ‘But I heard something – or dreamed something. It is all the same. I heard of a world where trees dominate, and a stag can run all day without crossing a path or scenting a hunter. A world without men. The Grail opens the Gate to that world, or so they say. Maybe to all worlds. But I would not meddle with it. It is protected.’

‘By whom?’

‘If I knew that, I would be less prudent. But you cannot challenge the foe you cannot see. That is a foolishness I leave to Man.’

‘There is much in what you say,’ sighed Bartlemy.

The antlered man faded, to be replaced by an old crone who was, Annie thought in mingled pity and horror, the ugliest creature she had ever seen. She was half bald and a single tooth protruded like a tusk over the lipless verge of her mouth. Her eyes were screwed so tightly they were almost shut; her voice emerged in a mumble. Bartlemy looked at her for a long moment and then dismissed her unquestioned.

‘That one has grown too old and sleepy to know anything any more. Soon, I think, she will fall into the ultimate slumber, and nothing will wake her. Once she was powerful indeed, she was Hexaté, the queen of midnight and sacrifice. But she drank too deep of whatever it was they were drinking – some
potion, or raw wine, or blood – and now her brain has rotted. I wish I could say it was a tragedy. Ah well …’

He began another conjuration. As he spoke, Annie thought she heard a noise from behind her, a quiet snick like the lifting of the latch on the door. She saw Hoover, too, prick up his ears. When they turned the door to the kitchen was open, but she wasn’t sure it had ever been closed – Bartlemy didn’t normally close it – and anyway, doors in Thornyhill, like in many old houses, tended to open and shut of their own free will, nudged by a draught or a shifting of ancient joists. Certainly there was no one there that she could see. Hoover stared for a minute, ears twitching, then he turned his attention back to the ritual.

At the hub of the circle a slight form developed slowly. It had fair curls of the shade usually called flaxen – though Annie wasn’t sure what colour flax was really meant to be – a slender, androgynous body, and a pale, heart-shaped face with a faintly wistful mouth. It troubled Annie that although she decided the child looked about ten, she couldn’t make up her mind about its sex. She compromised by thinking of it as ‘he’ without actually concluding it was a boy. It seemed to be the epitome of innocence and purity – until she saw its eyes.

Its eyes were old.

‘Eriost,’ said Bartlemy. ‘Greeting.’

‘
You
were never one for these games,’ the child remarked. ‘What changes?’