‘We have work to do, Field Marshal Brunte.’
Brunte nodded slowly, the wrinkles around his eyes showing his appreciation. ‘Sub-Quentor’ had indeed become inadequate. Backhaus had offered the solution.
‘I think “Marshal” will do well enough!’ he said, adding after due pause, ‘Kapitan Backhaus.’
The newest Kapitan in the Hyddenworld smiled and felt it necessary to be crystal-clear about his dead rival: ‘Unfortunately Doam suffered a fatal accident and will not be joining us,’
It was all that was said or ever needed to be upon the subject. Doam was a casualty of war, Backhaus one of its beneficiaries.
‘I also met Meyor Feld downstairs, Marshal. He is, I take it, my immediate superior?’
Brunte nodded.
‘He has been promoted to general for his recent work and much else besides. You will find him an agreeable colleague.’
Backhaus stared past his new patron at the human world behind and watched bemused as a huge building, from which smoke billowed up into the evening sky glowing with the fire beneath, collapsed slowly into itself and was no more.
He blinked and might have mentioned what he had seen and suggested that it felt like time to leave these grubby premises, but the abstracted expression on Brunte’s face showed that he had moved on. As if on cue a clerk appeared.
‘The girl is alive, Sub-Quentor . . .’
‘Marshal,’ corrected Brunte pleasantly.
‘She has been observed in the company of Professor Foale heading in the direction of the High Ealdor’s private quarters. But of the boy there is no sign.’
It was indeed perfection.
‘The boy will follow her before long,’ said Brunte simply, getting up to indicate their time toppermost was over, ‘and we shall be ready for him. We must consult with the Bilgesnipe and reassure ourselves concerning the River Rea, and then I shall call upon the High Ealdor. Agreed, gentlemen?’
‘Agreed,’ murmured Dowty and Backhaus as one.
‘Agreed,’ said another voice.
It was Feld, who had appeared in the doorway and heard their talk.
Brunte felt good.
He had won the city, gained the right courtiers, and all he needed now were the keys to the kingdom.
77
THE CHAMBER OF SEASONS
Lord Festoon’s interest in Katherine was real and sympathetic.
‘I was very sorry, as we all were, to learn of your mother’s death. It is not something that is easy to get over, I know – I too suffered that loss at your age. And I, too, had no father to help me bear the burden of it.’
‘You knew she died? Even here in Brum?’
‘We have kept an eye on things. And, naturally, Arthur has briefed us too. But her death, though to be expected after so many years of suffering, was upsetting.’
It was, but Katherine’s grief was no longer as raw as it was and now she wanted to know about Jack. She met with a satisfactory answer when she asked about him.
‘On that we cannot enlighten you except to say this: Jack is in capable hands and we have plans afoot to get you out of here safely and well away from Brum. To be frank my dear, matters such as lost gems, prophecies and Shield Maidens, important though they are, are less important than your safety and Jack’s. One way or another he will be on his way here, and when he is we can act. As for those other things . . .’
He waved his hand about as if ‘those other things’ were of no importance at all.
But the moment he heard about the massacre they had witnessed the night before, and that the Fyrd were looking for them, he wanted to talk with Arthur alone and said she must look after herself for a time.
But first he made sure she was comfortable.
‘Pray make yourself at home,’ he said, pointing to a luxurious Turkish rug that was spread across the floor before his throne, which stood on a raised dais along with the paraphernalia she had noticed when she first came into the Chamber.
There were trays of succulent fruit on the thick rug, silver boxes full of chocolates and sweetmeats dusted with white and pink sugar, and a golden ewer filled with iced water sprinkled with rose petals, all set among the softest, deepest, most luxurious cushions and bolsters she had ever seen.
‘Rest, eat, drink and sleep,’ he suggested, ‘and by all means wander about this famous chamber too, but avoid the doors, they are not as they seem. But then things rarely are. On no account attempt to open them. That would be folly indeed if done at the wrong moment and in the wrong way.
‘Meanwhile, should you have any special need in the way of victuals I am sure my dear friend Parlance here will see to it. He is about to return to the kitchen with my orders for the coming hours.’
It was only then that she noticed the strangest of diminutive figures hovering behind Festoon’s throne. He wore the starched white jacket and black and white chequered trousers of a chef. His white chef’s hat was inordinately tall.
‘Madam?’ he said.
At first Katherine didn’t understand that he was asking if she wished for anything in particular, and her immediate instinct was to say no, but there was such genuine interest in her welfare in his eyes that a sudden thought came to her.
In fact it was a memory, a powerful and unexpected one, and it was connected with Arthur, and Margaret, and her mother and many happy hours in Woolstone sitting and talking, whether in the kitchen of the old house, or the conservatory in more recent times by her mother’s bed.
It felt that what she suddenly wanted was something she had not had in years, though really it was barely more than days ago.
‘I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea,’ she said.
The moment she said it she realized that in such exotic surroundings what she had asked for seemed ordinary, even ridiculous.
But Parlance looked delighted.
‘Ah! Tea! That most excellent and, in the Hyddenworld, underrated beverage. But for Professor Foale here, who made a like request when he first came among us, I fear we might not be able to satisfy your request. But my suppliers sent forth their requests for what tea they could find and, well, my goodness me, what riches did they discover and have we tasted. Is that not so, my lord? Would you not agree, Professor?’
‘It is and he does,’ said Festoon enthusiastically. ‘The young lady makes an intelligent request. Satisfy it at once, Parlance!’
He bowed, retreated and was suddenly gone, though exactly where to she could not work out. Nor, when she looked around her, could she see where the lift had come in, and where it too had disappeared.
Katherine decided to explore while Festoon and Arthur talked. To do so, she had to walk around Lord Festoon’s dais which, being very large and the perspectives in the room made more confusing by the strongly chequered parquet floor, seemed to take a strangely long time.
But she soon realized it was difficult to work out how far off the walls were, the more so because while the centre of the room was well lit from an octagonal lantern of windows high above, the walls were in shadows.
Lord Festoon and Arthur were engaged in such a lively discussion, with occasional looks in her direction, that she delayed her exploration for a few moments in the hope of hearing something useful.
What she got instead was a diversion by the High Ealdor on the subject of his chaise longue and the clever way in which, at the touch of a button, it came upright on hinges to become a throne.
‘A huge improvement, my dear Foale,’ she heard the High Ealdor say as he demonstrated how the contraption worked, before adding in a helpless way, ‘My weakness, my frailty, caused by my long years of illness, necessitates these easements to my daily chores.
‘I fear that physical exertion of any kind is dangerous to one as delicate as I, and that there is no hope that I will ever reach the vale of years towards which those without my sad afflictions can live and hope. Eh?’
He brought himself upright again just as Parlance reappeared, again mysteriously, with a tray of tea th
ings. He poured some for them all while Festoon helped himself to a chocolate from a plate of them which, at the touch of a button on the arm of his chair, appeared before him, held in the grip of a large articulated silver hand which concertinaed out from a fixture behind him.
‘My latest ballotin des pralines, made yesterday for my feste by the new young chocolatier from Wallonia who Parlance recently engaged. The recipe is a refinement of Aroudel’s classic of the 1790s and is, I believe, an improvement.’
He signalled for Arthur to have one, which he did, though not without a dubious look at the chocolate, his own stomach, and the very much larger one sported by Festoon.
For ‘sad affliction’ read ‘greed’, Katherine told herself, confident that Arthur was thinking the same.
The various pieces of equipment with which Lord Festoon was surrounded had an old world air. They were made of richly varnished wood with shiny brass fittings of the highest quality and craftsmanship, apparently created especially for his comfort and easy convenience. Raised together on the dais, and from a distance, he looked to Katherine like a captain on the bridge of a nineteenth-century steamship.
She turned her attention to the room again. She had first thought it to be circular, but once she had walked right round it she realized that was not so, it was octagonal.
Its eight walls were differently sized. Four were no bigger than the width of the doors set into them, while between them were the four much wider walls on which hung tapestries depicting different seasons.
Each door had the name of a season painted on it in a shimmering gold script of a Gothic design that was shadowed by the colour of its season: green for Spring, yellow-gold for Summer, red-brown for Autumn, and bleak grey for Winter. But otherwise the doors looked old, even dirty, and were in places cobwebby, with brass handles tarnished almost black. They looked as if they had not been opened in years, maybe decades.
‘Perhaps even centuries!’ Katherine murmured to herself.
Lord Festoon heard her and called out, ‘Not quite that long, my dear, but certainly long enough!’
When she turned to him to ask him something more about the doors she was surprised to find that he and his dais were facing the other way entirely, even though she was sure that had not been the case moments before. She saw for the first time that the dais was able to rotate, probably at the push of a button, so that its incumbent could study the tapestries without having to move at all.
Even so she was puzzled that he had moved so far round in the time it took for him to speak and for her to look at him. The Chamber played tricks on her not only with scale and distance but with time as well.
Then something stranger still: when she went back to where she had just come from, which was the door of Summer, she found it had changed its name to Spring, and looking back she saw that Summer was where she had just come from.
Katherine gave up on the doors and began to examine the tapestries on the walls between the doors. They were exquisitely embroidered with fauna and flora, and each one depicted the different seasons according to their position relative to the doors on either side of them.
The tapestry between the doors of Spring and Summer had images of snowdrops in melting snow on its left side but moved on to the bright blues and yellows of eyebright on the right.
The next tapestry, between the doors of Summer and Autumn, continued the theme of Summer with the first soft pinks of eglantine, its leaves shiny with Summer sun, but as it reached the door marked Autumn the flora changed accordingly, becoming a bank of fading nettles, with sloes beginning to show their blue bloom and the red-orange fruits of lords and ladies nestling in moist shadows below.
‘So the tapestries are sequential,’ she muttered, ‘and each shows the end of one season and the beginning of the following one.’
‘Correct!’ said Lord Festoon cheerfully.
He was now sitting facing her, while Arthur lolled on a Turkish carpet on the floor in front of the dais, drinking from a beautiful golden goblet.
‘Have some,’ he said amiably, pointing at a tray on which were more goblets and a matching ewer.
‘Later, thanks,’ she said, turning back to the tapestry.
She knew most of the flowers, but not all of the animals that gambolled among them. The sight of them put into her a sense of nostalgia and loss for days gone by in the countryside around Woolstone, when her mother was still well enough to share such things with her . . . days she knew could now never return. She felt a wave of sorrow and grief.
She saw that while the flowers of the seasons made the eye read the tapestries one way, from left to right, from Spring to Summer and on to Autumn in a circle clockwise round the room, the landscapes they depicted took the eye in the opposite direction.
At the top right of each tapestry was a mountainous landscape which sloped generally leftward and downward into foothills, on to high moors and heaths and so on down into gentler woods and valley pastures, until at the lowest and left-hand side of each tapestry there lay the sea.
In each of the four tapestries this natural course from mountain to sea was followed by a river, a raging torrent for a time, but in the end a slow winding thing of old age that passed through marshes and side waters, deltas and mudflats of its own making, and so into the waiting sea.
Seen one way therefore, the tapestries were depictions of the endless cycle of the seasons and renewal of life; seen another they showed the passage from youth to old age across Earth’s face. One way was to the right and the other . . .
‘Sinister,’ breathed Katherine, thinking then of so many things – her mother, the shadows in the henge, her own passage through childhood, Jack’s hurt body, her feelings for him, which had changed like the seasons and yet remained the same from the first day she met him, which felt as solid as the Earth.
‘Except it’s not solid,’ she told herself, her gaze following the river from its youthful phase in the high mountains of early Summer to its place of old age, as a meandering waterway, in late Spring.
‘Oh!’ she whispered. ‘Of course! It’s obvious when you see it . . .’
The rivers in each of the four tapestries seemed also to flow into and out of each door, or rather the place beyond the door. In seeing which, Katherine began to think that the eight walls of the Chamber, whether doors or tapestries, were dissolving away before her eyes into a great world in her mind of the cycle of life’s renewal through youth to old age, of death and rebirth, as if there was an eternity in each living moment, each connected to the next backwards and forwards, up and down, every which way and more.
‘You like the tapestries?’ asked Lord Festoon, his voice saving her from a whirling and turning in her own mind that was gathering pace so fast that her body was beginning to do the same, and she in danger of losing her balance and tumbling into the confusion of the dazzling reflections and geometric illusions of the oak floor and thence into the tapestries themselves.
‘You do!’ he exclaimed with delight, answering his own question, though mistaking her silence for simple pleasure rather than the kaleidoscope of feelings it really was.
He had stopped talking to Arthur and seemed to have been following her progress around the chamber from the vantage point of his dais. He and his throne were now facing her, while Arthur had moved, along with the carpet he lay on, almost out of sight on the far side.
‘I do like it,’ began Katherine, ‘but . . .’
‘Sit down, my dear, for you seem quite dizzy with its pleasures and surprises, which is how we mortals should be in our wondrous world. It is only the limitations of our own minds, and the fear we surround change with, that makes our lives and perceptions dull and unrealized. I should know!’
He motioned to the floor to his far right from where, as if the carpet was sliding over the floor, Arthur soon appeared, still happily reclining. She frowned, shook her head and gave up trying to make sense of anything.
‘Sit on this rug,’ said Festoon enticingly, ‘adjust
these soft cushions to your pretty person, lie down now and enjoy the refreshments from the master of my kitchen, as our mutual friend is himself presently doing.’
He spoke now so mellifluously that each word seemed to nudge Katherine’s limbs softly one by one to bring her to a supine position near Arthur.
‘Will this drink make me think strange thoughts,’ she asked doubtfully, ‘like the so-called water your Sisters of Charity gave me?’
Festoon affected to be offended by the question, but laughed heartily as he did so.
‘The Sisters have their ways and wiles, as they always have had, but trust me when I say that this plain water, which has merely been caressed by the essence of rose petals, will clear your head and whet your appetite for other pleasures to come, which is to say the later supper which it is my habit to enjoy in the night and in which I trust you will join me.’
‘I thought it was about the middle of the day.’
‘So it was,’ he said ambiguously, ‘when you arrived. Tempus fugit! Wherever is Parlance with your tea?’
She drank the water and felt immediately refreshed, and then drank more.
A bell suddenly tinkled and Festoon jumped as the speaking tube, which hung to the right and above his head, dropped down conveniently to his right hand, where with minimum effort he took it and applied it to his ear.
‘We are ready for supper,’ he said into it. ‘Light but nostalgic suits my mood.’
A whispering voice was heard and Festoon nodded and replaced the tube.
‘Supper is on the way,’ he announced.
Katherine decided to keep a close watch for where Parlance appeared so that she would know where his lift came from, but somehow knew that wherever it was it would not be in the direction she was looking. Nor was it. It emerged finally in the shadows of the dais, somewhere behind the throne itself, almost silently.
One moment Parlance was absent and the next he was present, holding aloft a vast silver tray on which their supper things were laid out along with a teapot, milk and a cup and saucer.