Stoneheart (16 page)
O
n the Royal Artillery Memorial there are other statues. The Shell-carrier stands at the gun end, two big shell-holsters hanging on either side of his legs. At the breech end of the gun stands the Officer, legs apart, a coat folded over hands held together in front of him.
A motorbike’s ripped exhaust growled around the unusually empty curve of Hyde Park Corner, making use of the temporary lull in the traffic to get some unaccustomed urban velocity. The rider was going too fast to have noticed the little movement, even if it had been one that he could have seen under normal circumstances.
The Officer flicked his wrist toward himself and flipped the cover off a lidded wristwatch. He looked down. Snapped the cover closed and resumed his normal position, staring toward the bottom of Buckingham Palace Gardens, where the queen presumably keeps her potting shed. And though he stood at ease, with his legs apart, his face was as blank and unreadable as if he were standing at attention on a drill square. It was a face made to endure.
The only sign of what he thought was a minuscule tic, as he sucked his teeth, making an irritable snapping noise.
G
eorge rubbed at his legs with a towel, then pulled on a pair of plaster-spattered builder’s trousers. They were about ten years too big for him, but he slid the belt through the loops and cinched them tight.
“I almost feel human.” He grinned as he rolled up the bottoms above his ankle.
“I know what you mean, young fellow.”
The booming voice entered the room ahead of the Friar, who ducked under the arch, carrying bags of crisps and rolls and a bottle of green liquid, all of which he placed on the table in front of them.
“Sit in the heat, and eat. Then when you’ve stopped shaking like a pair of Quakers we’ll have our conversation. But first—drink this.”
He uncorked the bottle and poured two measures of sticky-looking greeny-yellow liquid into glasses.
“What is it?” asked Edie, in a voice slow with suspicion.
“Made by monks.” The Friar smiled. “Herbs and flowers, and a little kick in the tail. It’ll warm you from the inside. Down the hatch!”
George picked up the glass and slugged it back. Fire, more than heat, slid down his throat, and he choked at the strength of it. It was sweet and pungent fire, though, tasting of honey and medicine and herbs he didn’t know the names of; and when he’d finished spluttering he felt the fire settling inside him, as if something had been rekindled.
“It’s not bad,” he said to Edie, who was watching to see if he convulsed into a poisoned stupor. “Fine,” she said, downing her glassful. She didn’t choke or sputter, but her face grimaced so much that he could see her back teeth.
“Gah!”
She shuddered. “That’s foul. I suppose you think that’s funny!”
“I thought it was okay,” he said.
“Tastes like old ladies’ foot baths.
After
they’ve used them. Ugh!”
She tore open a roll and ripped the top off a bag of prawn cocktail crisps. She emptied the crisps into the roll, closed it, and bit into it. The crunch of her teeth meeting the crisps preceded an ecstatic smile.
“Thath got rid of the tathte,” she announced through a mouthful of bread and crisp shards. “Try thome.”
It was George’s turn to look disgusted.
“No, thanks.”
The Maker’s Mark She shrugged, finished the roll in two huge bites, and set about making another sandwich.
The Friar eased himself down onto a padded bench that ran along the end of the chamber. He beckoned the children with a smile.
“Now gather round and tell me what’s what, my little friends. Tell me what you’ve been up to, to find yourselves in such a pickle.”
“It’s not a pickle,” said Edie.
The monk chortled indulgently.
“And it’s certainly not funny,” she continued, before burying her teeth into her new creation with a defiant crunch.
“She’s right,” said George.
“Everything is funny from some angle, I assure you it is. It’s just a matter of where you’re standing.”
George understood where Edie’s frustration was coming from. He’d just been through a nightmare, and all this spit could do was laugh at them.
“From where we’re standing, it’s serious.”
The Friar looked hard at him. Then he passed his hand over his face from forehead to chin, and as the hand passed, all the features had the smile wiped off them, and a dark and somber expression flooded in to fill the gap.
“Quite so. Quite so.”
The monk leaned back and looked around the room. He looked at the four imp-cherubs that sat high in each corner, but George saw no answering movement in them. The monk stretched a kink out of his shoulders.
“And why should I help you?”
“Because you’re one of the good guys,” said George.
“Am I? I wasn’t aware of that. Indeed, I wasn’t aware of being a ‘guy’at all. A ‘guy’is something you burn on Bonfire Night, and I can assure you an incendiary finale is the very last thing I foresee for myself. My whole life’s work has been committed to avoiding a fiery end, you might say.”
The Black Friar clearly savored the taste of his own words rolling around his mouth, thought George with a strong twinge of irritation. It seemed like people—things, really—had been talking at him all day, and none of them had really given him a straight answer, just pushed him from one horrible experience to another. His voice was unexpectedly curt.
“You know what I mean.”
Edie caught the tone and looked up at him in surprise. The Friar cocked his head to balance the irritatingly raised eyebrow.
“Not at all, goodness gracious. I only know what you say. Who told you I was ‘a good guy’?”
“You’re a monk,” Edie cut in.
“And monks help, do they?”
“Yes. Monks are on the side of good.”
“Well, let me tell you what I am.” He spread his arms wide in the expansive gesture of a man with nothing to hide. The sleeves of his robe fell back, revealing strong muscular arms that didn’t look as fat as George had expected.
“I am what I seem, no more no less. I am both a fat monk and a merry innkeeper, the halest of fellows well-met, and the watcher who stands at the road’s fork. I am also a man who likes talking with men who like to talk. I provide mirth and happiness, warmth and cheer, and absolution for sins past, present, and even—for a fee—future. In short, I can soothe your needs and ease your passage through this vale of tears. I am a helpmeet to the needy and a bringer of quietus. If you see what I drive at. . .”
Edie squirmed irritably, pulling the sweatshirt over her knees.
“What I see, and what I hear, is that some spits have got a really annoying habit of using words we don’t understand.”
She looked at George. George nodded.
“What’s a quietus?”
“A quietus, my dear boy, is a release, a discharge from the cares of life, a payment in full, as of a duty or a debt—”
“Look,” interrupted Edie, “just listen. We nearly died getting here. This isn’t time for an English lesson.”
The Friar just beamed at her and waited. When nothing happened, he raised an eyebrow. And waited some more.
“She’s telling the truth. She was sucked into the mud in the Thames, and I was—grabbed by something in the underpass out there. . . .”
The other eyebrow lifted to join its twin. The grin stretched wider. George decided that there was something infuriating about people who talked too much when you didn’t want them to, and then just dried up and smiled a lot, instead of saying anything when you
did
want them to—especially when the smile did the talking and seemed to say “You’re exaggerating.”
“It happened! In the underpass. The walls grabbed me.”
The eyes opened wide and the grin pursed into a little “0” of pretend shock.
“The walls, you say?”
“Yep. The walls.” George realized he was jutting his chin, just like Edie. The monk leaned forward and hoisted a single eyebrow again.
“Devil of a job for a wall to grab someone, wouldn’t you agree?”
He laughed indulgently, jowls wobbling with mirth. Edie’s voice cut in low and flat.
“It wasn’t funny.”
He chortled some more, then controlled himself with a great and visible effort.
“No. I imagine it wasn’t. Walls grabbing him, you say. Why, I suppose they just grew hands and—what? Pinched and snatched at him?”
He started chuckling again, holding up an apologetic hand.
George wasn’t enjoying the big monk’s laughter at all.
“Pretty much. More snatching than pinching.”
The Friar stopped laughing and looked at him.
“The walls grew hands?”
“And tentacles. And a mouth thing on a stalk. Like a big trumpet with teeth.”
The room had gone very quiet, as if more things than the Friar were straining to hear what was being said. The Friar was no longer even smiling. The only sound was the gas heater hissing.
“And this happened? Really happened? To both of you?”
“Just to him,” said Edie.
“But she saw it,” George quickly added.
The Friar looked up at the other carvings and figures around the pub. None of them showed the slightest sign of animation, but George had the strongest feeling something was being said that he couldn’t hear or understand.
The Black Friar rubbed his head and eyes with both hands as if trying to wake himself up. He shook himself and smiled at George.
“What were they made of, these ‘hands,’the hands that clutched, might I ask?”
“Earth.”
The smile mostly stayed fixed on the face of the Friar, but a little of it seemed to drain from around the eyes.
“Earth?”
“Mud. Clay. Gravel.”
“And they caught you? They touched you?”
George nodded. He showed his ankle and his left arm. The redness was already turning into something harsher and bruisier. Even Edie was impressed.
“Wow. Something really did grab you hard there!” Edie exclaimed.
“I told you. You said you saw.”
“I saw
something.
But it was like ghost trails. Like something on top of what I was seeing. Like …”
She ran out of ways to describe what she had almost seen, so she shut up. The Black Friar leaned in to George and parked his smile right in front of his face.
“If you were grabbed, and I certainly can see you have been roughly used by someone—”
“Some
thing.
Some
things,”
George insisted.
“Quite, quite, my dear fellow, quite so. But, er, if this
earth
grabbed you, how, it occurs to me, how did you escape its clutches?”
“I just hit it.”
Mirth crept into the Friar’s eyes again.
“You
just
hit it and it
just
stopped? You’ll forgive me, but it hardly seems likely, if the elements were raised to such a pitch that they found form and corporated so aggressively, that a mere—again, forgive me—boy could just slap them away. No, I fear this is a twice-told tale, a confection told you by another—”
“It’s not a
confection
! It’s not! They were pulling me apart, and I hit them like this and like this, and they fell apart—just went to, you know, mud and gravel on the floor and—What?”
The monk had been watching George miming his ordeal, and as George’s hand had opened and mimicked the blows that had saved him, the monk’s hand flashed out and grabbed it.
He pulled it gently but firmly toward him, his eyes fixed on the dragon’s mark scratched redly into the skin.
“Where did you get that?”
“Get what?”
The monk twisted the hand gently, so that both children could see the scar.
“That. That maker’s mark.”
Even though he was sitting in front of a walking, talking statue, George felt the full absurdity of his answer as he said it.
“From a dragon. A dragon slashed me. At Temple Bar.”
The friar sat back, still holding the hand, shaking his head.
“That’s not a dragon mark, and if a dragon slashes you, young fellow, you get slashed and you stay slashed until you’re burned and there’s an end of you.”
“It did!” George exploded in frustration.
“It did NOT!” replied the monk, raising his voice. “It is a maker’s mark. And you, young scallion, are no manner of thing to be bearing it!”
George looked at his hand.
“I don’t know what a maker’s mark is!”
“I don’t know what a scallion is,” said Edie. And before the monk could answer, she went on. “But if it means liar, you’re wrong. He did get slashed by a dragon, and something"—her eyes went shifty for a moment, then hardened as they met George’s—
“something
bad happened in the underpass out there. So.”
The monk looked from one to the other, then stood suddenly. Suddenly serious, suddenly slightly terrible in his mirthlessness.
“Stay here. Don’t leave the building, don’t leave the room, don’t touch anything, don’t talk to anything. I’ll be back.”
And in a sudden whirl of cape and cassock, he was up and out of the door; and the last they saw or heard of him was the snick of the key in the lock and his shadow striding away into the fluorescent-lit night beyond the frosted glass of the windows.
George looked at his hand.
“It’s just a scar.”
Edie shuffled over and looked at it.
“It is sort of a bit like a shape, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s a shape!”
“No, I mean a
meant
shape. Like Chinese, or a symbol or something. . . .”
He closed his fist and shoved it in his pocket.
“Yeah, well—whatever it is, it hurts like hell!”
She looked at the pub door.
“You trust him?”
“Why not?”
“Dunno. I never trust people who smile too much.”
George looked around the room. It seemed stuffed with faces and statues looking at them. In fact, the whole space was getting very warm because of the heater. It was claustrophobic under the vaulted roof. The brown and black marble seemed sweaty and unwholesome, like smoky mutton fat.
“So,” she repeated, “do you trust him?”
He nodded around the room.
“I don’t think now is the time. The walls have ears—”
“Yeah. And eyes and mouths and hands and hooves and talons and, hello—”
She stopped under an alabaster light fixture that came out of the wall. At first it looked like an upsweep of decorative swirls, from which hung a strange lamp made of metal in the shape of a buxom milkmaid. She was carrying the twin hanging lightbulbs on a yoke across her shoulders.
“What?” said George, trying to see what she was looking at.
Her fingers traced the raised letters on the bottom of the alabaster bracket. They read: NOON. Her hand stopped and she pointed.
“See?”
He looked closer. The carving wasn’t just decoration.
It was a faun: half-man, half-goat; but it was a winged faun, and it hung upside down, eyes closed, arms crossed across its chest, sleeping like a bat.
“It’s a devil,” said Edie.
“It’s a faun. Half-goat, half-man. It’s from mythology,” George replied.
“It’s not very monkish though, is it. Fauns, milkmaids, those cherub things up on the corners—what’s that got to do with being a friar?”
“I don’t know. But the Gunner wouldn’t have sent us here if he was bad.”
