He leaned across the baize now, low above his cue and squinting down its length towards what even Fred could see was a white ball. This white ball represented, Freddy understood, somebody white, somebody that Fred didn’t know who more than likely wasn’t from round here. The white-haired builder known as Mighty Mike now called out “Black into cross corner”, and then punched his cue once, hard, into the white ball, sending it at high velocity across the breadth of the tremendous table with its trail behind it like a tight-packed string of bright white pearls. It hit the west side of the table … Freddy thought that it might represent all them what left here for America after the Civil War with Cromwell … then rebounded into a collision with the black ball that the white-haired artisan had actually been aiming for, a sharp smack ringing round the dimly-lit hall as they hit. The black ball, Freddy understood with sudden clarity, was Charley George, Black Charley, and he felt a great relief that he could not explain when it shot neatly to drop into the south-eastern pocket, where the sloppy, gold-etched cross was carved into the round boss on the table’s edge.
The local hero with the chalk-white hair did that thing all the builders did whenever any of them pulled off a successful shot, throwing both fists up in the air above his head, the cue still clutched in one of them, and shouting an exultant “Yes!” before he let them drop once more down to his sides. Since both arms left their hot white trails as they ascended and descended through the space to either side of him, the end effect was that of burning pinions fanning up to form the shapes of brilliant full-spread wings. The odd thing was that all the builders did this every time one of them pulled off a successful shot, as though the nature of their game did not involve them being in a competition with each other. All of them, at all four corners of the table, threw their hands up and cried “Yes!” in jubilation as the black ball dropped into the southeast corner pocket. Now it was apparently the builder at the northeast pocket’s turn to take his shot, into the corner decorated with a skull.
This builder was a foreigner, and nowhere near so well liked by the home crowd as what Mighty Mike had been. His name was Yuri-something, Fred had heard, and in his face there was a hardness and determination that Fred thought might very well be Russian. He was dark, with shorter hair than the home favourite as he took the long walk round the table’s edge to the most favourable position, bent above his cue and sighted down it at the white ball. As with all the builders’ voices, when he spoke it had that funny echo on it that broke into little bits and shivered into ringing nothing.
“Grey into skull corner” was a fair approximation of what he’d said.
This was getting interesting. Freddy didn’t know quite who the grey ball made him think of. It was someone bald, balder than Freddy, even, and was also someone grey, grey in a moral sense, perhaps even more grey than Freddy was as well. The grim-faced Russian-looking builder took his shot. The white ball streaked with its pale comet-tail across the table to clap loudly up against another ball that Freddy couldn’t tell the colour of. Was it the grey one Yuri-something meant to hit, or something else? Whatever colour it might be, this second ball shot off towards the skull-marked corner.
Oh no, Fred thought suddenly. It came into his head just who the hurtling ball was meant to represent. It was the little brown girl with the lovely legs and the hard face who he’d seen by St. Peter’s Church the other afternoon and then again today, sat watching him and Patsy at their Bath Street assignation. She was going into the skull pocket, and Fred knew that this meant nothing good for the poor child.
A hand’s breadth from the death’s-head drop, the hurtling ball impacted with another. This one, Freddy thought, must be the grey ball that the Russian-looking player had declared to be his target. It was knocked into the pocket Yuri-something had intended, whereupon he and the other Master Builders all threw up their arms into a dazzling spread of feathered rays and shouted out in unison their “Yes!” with all its splintering, diminishing reverberations. Just as suddenly, however, all the uproar died away when everybody noticed that the ball Yuri had used to knock the grey into the hole was now itself perched at the northeast pocket’s rim. This was the ball that Freddy had associated with the brown girl he’d seen earlier. This wasn’t looking good. The grim-faced player who’d just made the shot looked down towards the ball now teetering upon the brink of the skull-pocket that he’d chosen as his own, then looked across the table and at Mighty Mike, the white-haired local champion. The Russian-looking fellow flashed a chilly little smile and then began to pointedly chalk up his cue. Fred hated him. So did the crowd. He was like Mick McManus or a wrestling villain of that nature, someone who the crowd would hiss, except of course they wouldn’t in this case, however they might feel. Nobody hissed at builders.
It was now the sturdy white-haired favourite’s turn to take his shot, but he looked worried. His opponent clearly planned to knock the threatened ball into his own skull corner pocket with his next go, unless Mighty Mike could somehow move it out of danger. It was so close to the hole, though, that the slightest touch might send it tumbling in. It was a bugger. Fred was so wound up he almost fancied he could feel his heart pound in his chest. The local hero slowly and deliberately walked round the monstrous snooker table to a spot on its far side, where he crouched down to make his fraught and crucial play. Just as he did so he looked straight across the baize and into Freddy’s eyes, so that it made him jump. The look was sober, hard and obviously intentional, so that even Jem Perrit, stood beside Fred, turned and whispered to him.
“Watch ayt, Fred. The big man’s lookin’ at yuh. What are yuh done now?”
Fred numbly shook his head and said that he’d done nothing, at which Jem had cocked his head back and regarded Fred suspiciously and cannily.
“Well, then, what are yer gunner do?”
When Fred did not know how to answer this, both men turned back to watch the builder take his shot. He wasn’t looking now at Freddy, with his eyes instead fixed firmly on the white ball he was lining up. Amongst the crowd of onlookers you could have heard a pin drop. This is all to do with me, Fred thought. The way he looked at me just now. This is to do with me.
“Brown in cross pocket,” said the white-haired Master Builder, although what he really said was a fair bit more complicated.
Straight away his cue shot out – a boxer’s jab – and sent the white ball slamming up the table with its after-images a stream of bursting bubbles in its wake. It whacked explosively into a ball whose grey seemed slightly warm so Freddy thought it might be red, and sent it like a rocket so it struck between the brown ball and the death-trap pocket with a noise that sounded like it hurt, so all the rough-shod audience winced at the same time. The brown ball shot into the southeast pocket at the cross-marked corner of the table like a thunderbolt, and everybody in the room, not just the robe-draped foursome that were playing, threw their arms above their heads and shouted “Yes!” all with one voice. The only difference that there was between the players and spectators was that the fanned shapes the former made when they threw up their arms were blinding white, while those the audience made were grey and looked more like the wings of pigeons. Having pulled off this spectacular accomplishment, the white-haired builder looked once more across the table and directly into Freddy’s eyes. This time he smiled before he looked away, and an exhilarating shiver ran through Fred from one end to the other.
With the possibilities for play apparently exhausted on the east side of the table, it was now the turn of the two Master Builders on the west side to pick up the game. Freddy had no idea what had just passed between him and the frost-haired player, but he felt excited anyway. He’d watch to see how the remainder of this championship event turned out and then head up the Jolly Smokers on the Mayorhold so that he could keep his word to Mary Jane. Fred grinned and looked around him at the other down-at-heel departed, who were grinning too and nudging one another as they whispered their amazement at the stunning trick shot they’d just seen performed.
This looked like it was going to turn out to be quite a night.
X MARKS THE SPOT
On his return, from the white cliffs he’d walked the Roman road or bumped along on carts where he should be so fortunate. He’d seen a row of hanging-trees like fishing poles set out beside a river, heavy with their catch. He’d seen a great red horse of straw on fire across a murky field, and an agreeable amount of naked teats when herlots mocked him from an inn near London. At another inn a dragon was exhibited, caught in a mud-hole where it sulked, a kind of armoured snake that had been flattened, having dreadful teeth and eyes but legs no longer than a footstool’s. He had seen a narrow river dammed by skeletons. He’d seen a parliament of rooks a hundred strong fall on and kill one of their number in amongst the nodding barley rows, and had been shown a yew that had the face of Jesus in its bark. His name was Peter but before that had been Aegburth and in France they’d called him Le Canal, which in their tongue meant channel, for the way he sweated. This was in the year of our Lord eight hundred and ten, about the Vernal Equinox.
He’d ventured half a world and back, stepped on the skirt’s edge of Byzantium and walked in the dazed wake of Charlemagne, had sought the shade of heathen domes in Spain with their insides a myriad blue stars and not a cross in sight. Now he was come again to these close and encircling horizons, to this black earth and grey sky, this rough-made land. He was returned to Mercia and to the Spelhoe hundreds, though not yet to Medeshamstede, to his meadow home there in the bogs of Peterboro, where they must by this time think him dead and would already have allowed his cell to pass on to another. He’d get back there soon enough, but in his travels he had taken on an obligation that must first be properly discharged. The content of the jute-cloth bag slung over his right shoulder, where there was a callus grown he had been bearing it so long, must be delivered unto its precise and rightful destination. These were his instructions, given to him by the friend he’d met when in another place, and it was his resolve to see them now fulfilled that led him up this dry mud path, with spear-sharp grass and weeds on every side, towards a distant bridge.
The morning’s dew was cold upon his toes, lifting the smell of wool fat from his habit’s damp and dragging hem. He went on uncomplaining up the track, amongst the busy hum and flutter, through the green stink of the chest-high vegetation that surrounded him. Ahead, the wooden crosswalk that would bring him to the settlement at Hamtun by its southern end grew slowly closer, slowly bigger, and he spurred his blistered feet, clad in their coarse rope sandals, onward with the notion that their journey was so near its finish, his ten little soldiers with their faces red and raw on this forced march, advancing by one ordered phalanx at a time, step after step, mile after mile. Beneath low cloud the day was close so that inside his robes he streamed, a salty glaze that covered all his back and belly, lukewarm ribbons trickling in the creases of his groin and spooling down the inside of each meaty thigh. A roasted-looking man basting in his own juice he slowly rolled towards the river’s edge, grey as a stone against the greens surrounding him.
Not far before the bridge there was a raised-up square of ground with the remains of a square ditch about it, all its lines and edges softened by some centuries of turf and overgrowth. The banked earth seemed a comfy bed where he might rest a while, but he denied himself this idleness. It was, thought Peter, thereabouts of five and twenty paces on each side, and looked to him as though it had once been the footings of a river fort, perhaps as long ago as Roman times when strongholds of that like were strung like pendant charms along the necklace of this River Nenn. Collected in the bottom of the trench was a variety of rubbishes all in a winding seam, such as a ram’s skull and a small split leather shoe, some pieces from a broken barrel and a cheap brooch with its clasp gone, here and there amongst the tares, the stagnant pools. Thus passed away the glories of this world, Peter observed, but doubted in his heart that the new Holy Roman Empire would, despite its aspirations, last so long as its more earthly counterpart had managed. One day, it was his opinion, there’d be gilt-worked manuscripts and princely vestments down there with the splintered staves and beaded rabbit shits, when time had worked the world down to its mulch of sameness.
Passing in between its tall oak end-posts he stepped out onto the bridge’s hanging logs, one hand clasped tight about the thick rope rail to make him steady and the other clutched as ever on the neck of his jute bag. Out on the sway and creak of the construction’s middle span he stood a moment looking off along the slow brown river to the west, where it curled round a stand of drooping willows at a bend and out of sight. What seemed like several boys were playing on the bank there at the river’s elbow, the first people that he’d sighted in two days of walking, but were too far off to hail and so he raised a hand to them instead and they waved back, encouragingly as it seemed to Peter. He went on with mygge-flies gathered in a spiteful halo at his brow that only scattered when he’d passed the far end of the bridge and was some way off from the water’s edge, upon a path that led between a scattering of homes towards the settlement’s south gate.
Dug down into the earth, each with its wattle roof heaped to a point above the cosy trench, these were submerged in dirty clouds that billowed from their chimney holes so that they seemed more built from smoke than sticks and clay. Come out into the world above from one such nest of fume was an old woman, grinning round the few teeth that were left her when she saw him, climbing painfully the three or four flat stones on hard dirt steps that led up from the covered hole. Her skin was cracked as pond-bed mud in drought, and ashen plaits that hung down to her waist recalled the sagging willows, so that she appeared to him a very river-thing, more like to live beneath the bridge itself than in her dwelling up this dusty path. The voice too, when she spoke, was thick with phlegm and had the sound of water dragging over stones. Her eyes were wicked little snail-husks, wet and glinting.
“Eyyer brung et?”
Here she nodded, twice for emphasis, towards the sack he carried slung across his shoulder. Something jumped in the pale tangles of her hair. He was perplexed and thought she knew by some means of his mission; then he thought again that she’d mistaken him for one appointed to bring something to her lowly hut, or else that she be mad. Not knowing what to make of her he merely stared and shook his head in puzzlement, at which she showed her awful toothless smile again, finding amusement here where he found none.
“What thing there is by all four corners as yet marks the middle. Eyyer brung et?”
He could make no sense of what she said, could only summon a vague picture that meant nothing to him, of a page of manuscript where all the corners had been folded in towards the centre. Peter shrugged uneasily, and thought he must seem dull.
“Good woman, I know not the thing of which you speak. I am come here across thy bridge from far away. I have not been about these parts before.”
It was the crone’s turn now to shake her head, the rank plaits swinging like a beaded Moorish curtain and her ruined grin still fixed in place.
“You are not come across my bridge, not yet. You are not even past my fort. And I know thee of old.” With this she reached one hand out like a brittle claw and slapped him hard about his rosy, glistening cheek.
He sat up.
He was resting on the banked verge of the ditch that ran around the relic river fort, the bridge’s southern end some distance off upon his left. A beetle or a spider in the grass had bitten him on one side of his face where he had dozed with it pressed to the turf, and he could feel a swollen lump beneath his finger when he raised it to inspect the source of the insistent throbbing. He was frightened for a moment when he realised he no longer held the jute cloth bag but finding it upon the slope beside him he was reassured, though still bewildered by what had occurred. He struggled to his feet, his robes all sodden down the back from the damp grass, frowning at first the fort’s remains and then the nearby bridge, until at length he laughed.
So this was Hamtun, th
en. This was its character, its notion of a jest with travellers who thought they had the place’s measure. In the country’s ancient heart this curious essential nature hid and made itself a secret, slyly marvellous and dangerous in its caprice as if it did not realise its frightening strength or else pretended it did not. Behind the madman glitter of its eye, behind its rotted smile, he thought, there was a knowledge it had chosen to conceal with mischiefs, frights and phantoms. At once monstrous and playful, antic even in its horrors, there was something in its nature Peter found he might admire or fear, yet all the while still chuckling in wonderment at its defiant queerness. Shaking now his curly, greying head in good-natured acknowledgement of how amusingly he had been tricked he shouldered once again his sack and made towards the bridge, his second try at it, or so it seemed to him.
This time the structure was all made of wood, a sturdy hump that curved above the muddy flow, supported by stout beams beneath rather than hung from ropes as in his dream. He could console himself, however, that there were still mygge-flies all around him in a droning cloud, and when he paused out on the middle section and looked west there were yet willows stooping at the water’s bend, although no children played beneath them. Overhead the great disc of the heavens turned, a grubby fleece that frayed to streaming rags at the horizon, and he carried on across the river with his trailing beard of gnats plumed out behind him.