The Battle of the Sun

  Jack fell asleep at once, and Max lay down at his feet, with one eye open, black and shining like a living coal.

  Silver stood for a moment. She realised she was cold. She looked around for a blanket, realised she had piled them all on Jack, then noticed some clothes belonging to the other boys. It occurred to her that she would be the only person in Elizabethan England wearing jeans, trainers and a fleece. Time for a change . . .

  She found woollen breeches, a thick coarse shirt, a leather jerkin, a cap, flat leather shoes and stockings. The stockings were a bit smelly so she decided to keep on her own long socks that were made of wool anyway, because although she came from the future, her house had been built in the past, and it was always freezing. If this is 1601, she thought, the house I live in is only thirteen years old! If I could go there now, it would be new . . . But it would still be freezing.

  She pulled on her cap, shoving her unruly curly red hair out of the way. If no one inspected her too closely, she could be a young boy – like Jack.

  She went over to the window and looked out at the skyline of spires and fires. Smoke from the tall chimneys billowed everywhere. This wooden London was all fires and churches, it seemed to her; and she remembered from her history books that before the Great Fire in 1666, London was like a forest, a vast seething growing forest, made out of people and wood – buildings of wood, and burnings of wood. Far past the tight lines of the city were open fields. And Silver thought how it would be, over four hundred years later, of glass and concrete, of cars and buses. How unlikely. How impossible . . .

  Breaking her thoughts, Silver went on to the landing. She was drawn to the attic space that Jack had shown her – the nest of the Phoenix. She was agile and strong and light, and by balancing on the banister rail, she could just reach into the opening, and then she pulled herself up, crossing her feet, lifting her knees, and propelling herself through the gap. She fell flat on her face and almost choked with the feathers.

  She got up and dusted herself down, her eyes getting used to the dim light. She saw the heavy carved desk, and the book on the desk.

  The Book of the Phoenix! she thought.

  Silver went over to it. It was open at the page of the Radiant Boy – and there was Jack.

  She turned the page – the Golden Maiden. Yes, there she was. Herself. And she was holding her emblem – the clock known as the Timekeeper.

  But Jack won’t know anything about that, thought Silver.

  Now Silver was an ordinary girl, and an extraordinary girl, all at the same time, and this wasn’t her first strange adventure – but Jack won’t know anything about that, she said to herself again, wondering what to tell him, how much to explain . . .

  She looked curiously through the pages, and most of it she couldn’t read because it was in Latin, but she could see that it was a book about alchemy. There were the alembics, and there was the Nigredo – that was the black sludge stuff that had filled up the Moat – and there was the Phoenix, and there was the Dragon, and there was the spirit mercurius, or mercury, quicksilver and strange. Yes, she knew quite a lot about alchemy, thanks to . . . She shuddered. She didn’t want to think about him.

  For a long time Silver sat reading and trying to read the book. Then she noticed it was getting dark, and that the whole day must have passed. A short day, she thought, but then she knew from past experience that some days are shorter than others, that time is not what it seems to be by the sun and the clock . . .

  She would go and wake Jack, and they would decide what to do next. Silver decided to take the Book of the Phoenix with her, but she couldn’t swing herself down carrying it, and she didn’t want to just drop it through the floor. She looked around. There was an old disused bell-pull in the room, of the kind you use when you ring for a servant, and Silver thought she could take down the bell-pull, tie the cord round the book, and lower the book down on to the landing.

  She gave a great tug at the frayed cord, but as it tore from its hook, a bell began to ring, clang clang clang – and on it went, clang clang clang, even though Silver was no longer pulling the cord.

  Quickly she did as she had planned, lowered and dropped the book, then swung herself down after it.

  Clang clang clang! Clang clang clang!

  The bell woke up Jack.

  Max, whose ears were sharper and faster than those of his human friends, began barking. Far below, from somewhere so far below it might have been the bowels of the earth, came a clanking noise, as though an engine or a rusty machine were beginning to grind and whirr.

  Silver ran towards Jack, who came stumbling sleepily out of the bedchamber. The two of them gazed down over the banister rail. Max stuck his head between the stair rods, because like it or not, ready or not, someone, something, was coming up the stairs.

  THE KNIGHT SUMMONED

  Jack 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.

  1601

  Silver 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 . . .

  Th
e bells were ringing twelve noon.

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

  MORE MOTHER MIDNIGHT

  It 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.’