Spring

  Yet the truth was that in all its long history, Brum had never witnessed such a sorry, corrupt, perverse individual in that great and historic office, nor one apparently less capable of guiding the helm of a great commercial hydden city. In the view of his many critics, there was no surer sign of Brum’s final descent into decadence during the years since the Fyrd had taken over its administration than the awful fact that he was now this great city’s figurehead.

  This was a tragedy all the greater because of the six great families who had most put their stamp on the city, two stood out head and shoulders above the others: the Avons for good, the Sinistrals for ill. Now the Sinistrals ruled the Hyddenworld and Brum from Germany, while their puppet Festoon shamed his own family name in Brum and was the laughing stock of the Fyrd worldwide, a figure of fun and japery, the joke of comics and the sorry butt of ribald songs and tawdry theatricals in every language known to hydden.

  His first sin was gluttony.

  He had started young and it was said that he had abandoned the nourishment of his mother’s breast at the age of only five months in favour of sweetmeats, which he had consumed on a massive scale ever since.

  He was so vast in bulk that he had trouble rising from his chair without help; so unfit he could barely climb three steps without running out of breath; so indolent that he spent vast sums on servants to do everything for him, or on machines to perform functions that required exertion. The Sisters of Charity were effectively his servants and his chairs were made to be wheeled so he might avoid unnecessary exercise.

  He covered his rotund frame with shapeless perfumed silks, voiles and damasks, soft fabrics from the east, as if he was – which he sometimes imagined himself to be – an emperor from Araby.

  But clothes and sweet scents were not the only thing on which he had wasted his vast inheritance since he had taken possession of the ancestral estate and the Fyrd had made him their puppet and amiable plaything.

  He had spent his fortune in spectacularly self-indulgent ways – with endless expensive fripperies, vast quantities of rich food, exotic entertainments, as well as priceless lotions, manicures, pedicures and massages, along with musicians and entertainments of every kind – and anything else that his sudden whims and appetites might desire.

  It was truly said that what had taken his careful ancestors two hundred and fifty years to steal from Brum, and the world beyond, he had given back in twenty-five, the number of his living years.

  That he had survived the vicissitudes of fortune under the Fyrd, who had brought down so many other members of the leading Brum families, he owed to two things.

  First was the very obvious fact that one so young and seemingly naïve was a threat to no one at all, and therefore an ideal figurehead, easy to control and manipulate.

  Second was his indisputable charm and ability to flatter the humourless Fyrd without appearing in any way deceitful. He pleased easily and was easy to please, and the Fyrd generals who took over the city’s administration, one after another, since his appointment as High Ealdor at the age of just fifteen, ten years before, had found him the perfect partner. He was indeed clever and well-connected enough to know who was who among the hydden, how to flatter each of them, whose palm to grease, whom to exert his charm upon, and when to employ the stark threat of a visit from one of the Quentors, the inquisitors whose job it was to execute the orders of the Fyrd high command.

  The contract was simple: in return for allowing Festoon to indulge himself with his own dwindling fortune, the Fyrd got all the benefit of his local expertise.

  There was however one aspect of this comfortable arrangement that puzzled the Fyrd as much as it did the rich and the notable of Brum, who regarded Festoon with a mixture of embarrassment, shame and contempt. This was the fact that, for all his excess and wasteful extravagance, he enjoyed huge popularity among the ordinary folk of the city, whether they lived in New Brum or Old.

  For them he embodied a quality which had never been satisfactorily defined, least of all by the denizens of that city themselves. It might be called ‘Brummishness’, which is the ability to poke fun, more or less with impunity, at whomsoever they pleased in a witty, droll and often unspoken way.

  There was the sneaking suspicion among Brum folk, never spoken aloud nor even hinted at, that Festoon’s excesses and grotesqueries were aimed in some subtle way at the Fyrd themselves who, being what they were and coming from the culture that they did, could never quite get the joke.

  It was a possibility bolstered by a very simple practical fact: while his forebears in the Avon clan had built their vast wealth at the expense of the poor folk of Brum, and in particular those who lived in lower Digbeth and the slums of Deritend, their last scion, the inheritor of their ill-gotten gains, seemed intent, through his extravagance, on giving them back in one single generation all the wealth that had been stolen from them throughout many.

  For who grew fat on Festoon’s spending, apart from himself? The butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers, and all such traders and artisans he continuously employed – all of them hydden, all from Brum, all those folk whose arts and crafts, under the direct domination of the Fyrd in any other city in the Hyddenworld, would have died away to nothing and been replaced by the dull uniformity that characterized their alien breed.

  But in Brum they flourished like never before, and by them, and the families they supported, Lord Festoon was seen as a much-favoured and popular lord and master of them all.

  So most certainly, though Festoon might merely be a puppet, a fool he was not. That was a fact he disguised very well as he downplayed his considerable intelligence and learning on matters cultural and historical, and his willingness to spend his wealth not just on himself but on the arts and sciences as well, for it pleased him to patronize any whose skills and creative talents might bring a return of glory to his fading city.

  But those few who knew him well, and whom he trusted, understood something else. He had an obsession, and one he self-deprecatingly claimed he would climb a mountain for, even in his obese condition, just to satisfy. He would, indeed, have relinquished his position and his remaining wealth for it, perhaps even his life.

  The thing Lord Festoon most wished in all the world was to gaze upon Beornamund’s unrecovered piece of the Sphere, which held the colours of Spring.

  To this end he had formed a collection of artefacts, archives, and much else besides, of items from all over the Hyddenworld which had anything to do with Beornamund, or the Peace-Weaver, or the legendary pendant of gold, inset with three of the four gems of the seasons, that she was said to wear.

  In this he was given a start by the modest collection begun by his great-great-grandfather, Raster Avon, who had possessed the wisdom and foresight to bring to Brum, in the heyday of its development, the greatest architect of Araby, and a wise philosopher, namely ã Farouñ of blessed memory.

  It is well known that among the most extraordinary of that sage’s creations in Brum was the elusive Chamber of Seasons, to which very few apart from Lord Festoon and his chef, Parlance, enjoyed access. Festoon himself, when he was well enough and had sufficient strength to climb the steps and negotiate the complex corridors necessary to reach the Chamber, would go there to indulge in reverie and to meditate; and Parlance would arrive simply because he had been summoned to take instruction from his master.

  It was Festoon’s genius to order his extraordinary collection so that its different items were housed according to the season they represented within the Chamber – or, more accurately, in the sequence of chambers, each of which represented one of the different seasons.

  Festoon believed that he himself was a direct descendant of Beornamund, and it was this fancied connection which drove him endlessly in pursuit of the lost and last piece of the fabled Sphere.

  So it was that very often, when he was not indulging in public entertainment and feasting, he spent much time and effort in reading ancient tomes brought to him from the city archive,
which might help him pursue this quest. As a result he was both friend and supporter of Messrs Brief and Stort; and when news of some discovered text or artefact came to their ears, it was Festoon’s habit to send the dependable Pike and Verderer Barklice off in search of that item, since clearly he himself was in no condition to go.

  Festoon lived in – or rather beneath – a landmark building that was very well known to hydden and human alike – a building so prominent in Brum, in fact, that it offered proof of the original business genius of his ancestor Raster Avon to have grabbed it for a home when it first became available for hydden occupation.

  The London and Birmingham Railway Company and its partner the Grand Junction Railway could never have imagined when they built the Curzon Street Station in grand neoclassical style in 1838, that within a few months of its opening the latest scion of the Avon family would be moving in. And that there, after importing leading architects and artists from Araby, he would create one of the greatest hydden buildings of all time which, apart from the mysterious and private Chamber of Seasons, included amongst its many glorious spaces the extraordinary Orangery whose warmth and humidity, so necessary for cultivating citrus fruits, was brilliantly engineered by a subversion of the city’s early steam boiler systems and daringly restored in the 1930s by the dour genius Archibald Troop, a designer famed for having entrapped the venting systems of nearby New Street Station and thus saved the Orangery and its rare specimens in the nick of time.

  By Festoon’s generation, all that remained of what had once been the most elegant rail depot in Englalond – whose railway lines once fanned out eastward across a vast acreage – was its colonnaded entrance building.

  Raster’s infamous bully boys had secured as much of the footings of this building as was possible, thus gaining control of miles of already half-forgotten conduits, drains, access ways and culverts in and around New Brum. In this way was created not just the base of the Avon business empire, but also room for its steady expansion under Raster’s successors.

  Such was the foundation of the glory days of the Avon family.

  But the strong seed of the past had turned to something impotent and sterile: the branches and shoots from the mighty trunk that had once been were now withered and dry, and all that was left of the trunk itself was the vast but seemingly rotten bulk that was Lord Festoon.

  During those long days of rain when Katherine and Jack arrived in his city, Festoon was in no way exercised by the dire threat of the rising levels of river and canals. It was the eve of his birthday and, though every watercourse in Brum was overfull and rushing to discharge its load and flooding was imminent, he did not intend to lose sleep over the fact.

  True, he listened briefly to the drumming of the rain and the sluicing of the pipes, considering matters carefully, but then, throwing all that aside with the careless comment, ‘It is out of my hands now and I shall not let it spoil my feast!’

  He had long since decided to break with tradition that year and hold his feste in one of his inner sanctums, the splendid Orangery created in Arabesque style back in Raster Avon’s time by the lute-playing genius ã Faroün.

  This extraordinary architectural fantasy, whose drapes shimmered exquisitely according to the cleverly directed winds and draughts of passing human traffic far above, and whose strange glass-and-metal panels, designed to reverberate to the shunt and hiss of steam trains overhead, were now responding subtly to unseen human cooling systems and Festoon’s private band of percussionists, was one of the glories of modern Brum.

  Festoon loved it and sometimes, in the privacy of the night, it was his habit to go there alone, lock the doors and jump and pirouette elephant-like to the rhythms of the music in the place, imagining himself to be a delicate nymph rather than the grotesque obesity he actually was.

  An invitation to celebrate his birthday in this rarely viewed Orangery was Brum’s must-accept ticket of the year, and everybody that mattered was coming, bar a few misogynists.

  He had all but retired to his vast, soft bed when it occured to him that a conversation with Parlance, his personal chef and Master of Cuisine, might be sensible, to check all was in order for the day to come.

  With much huffing and puffing Festoon raised a hand and tugged at the velvet bell-pull that hung ever-ready for his convenience. A short while later Parlance appeared. He was thin and tiny but made up for his minute stature by wearing built-up shoes and a very tall chef’s hat.

  Parlance handed his lord the day’s menus and they were studied in reverential silence. There was considerable mutual respect between these two, and a strong sense that the gastronomic efforts of the day were an exciting joint enterprise.

  Festoon gave his verdict at last. ‘More crayfish, Parlance, stewed in lime,’ he whispered weakly, ‘and we can never have enough of your slivered Apfelkuchen, but powdered today, I think, with grain of cinnamon.’

  ‘Grain, my lord?’ said Parlance in some surprise. This was indeed a departure from tradition.

  ‘Yes, I mean a grain. In the structural sense, as if it were a grain, which it is not, as I am perfectly well aware. Shall we say instead that it is cinnamon reduced to fragments which are smaller than granules, yet not so fine as powder?’

  Parlance gazed at Festoon with admiration. No employer he had ever heard of had such startling originality as Festoon in matters of gourmandy, or was capable of such delicate precision in his instructions.

  ‘I fancy,’ said Festoon, after indulging in a sweetmeat or two and wiping his sugar-shiny lips with the damask that was his preferred material for napkins, ‘that those marinated bleakfish you roasted in mustard last week are a tad on the murky side for our guests today, though I myself prefer them thus served. Was it English or French, the mustard?’

  ‘French.’

  ‘A mistake perhaps. Try the more piquant English, and less of it, with a hint of vaporized lemon – lemon, I say, not lime, for we are using that already – which, I believe, will excite any hydden palate worthy of the name. Agreed?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said Parlance most cheerfully, for great though his own skills were, he knew that Festoon’s instinct added a touch so complementary to his own that the result was, on occasion, near-genius.

  ‘And the wines, Parlance, what of them?’

  They talked their way similarly through the wines, the beers, and small-beers, the fruit elixirs and the meads, adding and discarding until the balance was absolutely correct.

  ‘Our work is now done,’ said Festoon at last, ‘and I must away.’ Parlance discreetly withdrew and Festoon fell into a happy reverie about his special day.

  65

  JIGGERED

  It was only when Barklice called out for his boatman a third time into the gathering gloom by the West Gate that he got a response.

  There was a sudden rustling in the vegetation further along the canal, the knock and rattle of wood on solid wood, and someone called out, ‘Ho there! Mister Barklice and party?’

  ‘That’s right,’ replied Barklice.

  A figure then appeared along the bank, holding a lantern in one hand and clutching a sturdy oar in the other.

  Jack gazed at the newcomer, mightily impressed. His face was in shadow but he seemed to be dark-skinned, and his garb looked vaguely Indian, with a touch of the far Orient. He wore only a dark vest and a loincloth, beneath which his muscular legs and feet were bare. He had thrown a thick red cloak over his shoulders, while round his head was rakishly swathed a band of material of the same colour.

  He approached with a swagger and stopped directly before them, parking one end of his oar on the ground so that it towered above him vertically. His face opened up into a wide, white-toothed smile.

  Jack stared at him in astonishment, for ‘Old Mallarkhi’ seemed a strange name to have given someone so young. Strong he might be, but this was a boy of no more than twelve.

  Pike swore and growled, ‘There’s no way I get in any boat with a luggerbill boy in this foul weather
!’

  ‘Where’s your grandfather, Arnold?’ asked Barklice uneasily.

  ‘Busy as a dozen rats, Mister Barklice. Our own patch was set to back up half an hour ago, and that’s got to take priority, so he left off waiting here and sent me up instead. The luggerbill’s waiting below in the dark, and it’s the best craft to use in these conditions.’

  ‘Most dangerous craft ever invented!’ snarled Pike, pushing past him through the bushes to the canal’s edge, from where came a horrible slurping sound as the water swelled and billowed against the bank.

  He stared down and shook his head at the craft below. ‘He’s not old enough to have passed his apprenticeship, let alone handle one of the trickiest craft on the water. I tell you, Barklice—’

  ‘Tell him what you like, Mister Pike,’ reported Arnold Mallarkhi, ‘but if we don’t get off now, and that means now, we’ll not just be jiggered but we’ll be gargled as well. The back-up’s beginning to merge. I can feel it in my bones.’

  Arnold, the most junior of the Mallarkhi boating clan, smiled again. Ignoring Pike he nodded respectfully at Brief, and then stuck a finger in Jack’s chest.

  ‘You ever been in a luggerbill?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ For some reason Jack’s mouth went dry.

  ‘You paddled a canoe?’

  ‘Well, I did once. I . . .’

  ‘Good! Your name?’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘Jackboy, jump in, helm end, and stay centred, help this cargo down one by one, do as I say, and move it! Minutes is turnin’ to seconds, and once seconds run out we’ll be worse than gargled – we’ll be spewed!’

  ‘By the Mirror, Barklice, I’ll—’ cried out Pike.