The Bone Quill (4 page)

‘Well,’ said Matt, looking at the wooden pier standing on stilts over the Thames. ‘Are you going to tell on us or not, Zach?’

Zach gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Not. But only if I can come into the painting with you.’

The Monastery of Era Mina

Middle Ages

S
olon
sat in Brother Renard’s isolated chamber, watching the old monk as he slept in his birch-branch rocking chair beside the roaring hearth. Brother Renard’s skin had turned the colour of a ripe turnip, his hair had begun to fall out in clumps, and bursts of agitated zeal were followed by periods of exhaustion. All these changes saddened Solon more than he could say. Since the Abbot had made the agonizing decision to lock away Brother Renard and his fracturing imagination, the local stonemason had started work on a tower for the old monk on the northern tip of Era Mina, where he would be safe from the world and the world safe from him. Until its completion, Brother Renard was isolated here in the furthest corner of the darkest wing of the monastery, under Solon’s watchful eye.

The only window in the room was barred with wooden shutters, the sunlight slipping in through the narrow slats. From the fire, a log spat and snapped like an angry hound. Two tall, carved candelabra lit the tiny room, their wax dripping on to the mantel in honey-scented drops. The air in the room was pleasant, if a bit stifling, the smells of the wax blending with the scent of heather from inside the bedrolls. For centuries, the women of the village had been stuffing bedding with heather and grass, believing the perfume warded off nightmares. It would take more than heather to ward off poor Brother Renard’s. When an Animare lost control of his imagination, the loss caused far more damage inside the mind than out.

A knock at the door startled Solon to his feet. Visitors to the room were few. He lifted a brass key tied to a strip of leather under his tunic and unlocked the door to admit the visitor.

‘Brother Cornelius!’

Solon liked the monastery’s herbalist and healer, a short, stout monk with rosy cheeks, a wide, hooked nose and a clerical crown of tonsured red hair. Waddling into the room in his black robes, Brother Cornelius looked like the birds that nested on the island’s cliffs. He had taught Solon which plants produced the brightest inks, which trees oozed the best resins, and which seeds could be ground for inks but never eaten.

Cornelius noted the dishevelled state of Brother Renard. ‘I have a dangerous request, Solon,’ he said. ‘It’s perilous, but a task the Abbot and I know you are more than capable of fulfilling.’

Solon sensed an odd stillness from Cornelius. The herbalist was exhausted, Solon decided, returning to his three-legged stool. It had been only three days since the Vikings had attacked the monastery, and Cornelius had been hard at work tending to the sick and injured.

The herbalist sat on the wider of the two bedrolls spread on wooden bunks, beside an embroidered quilt folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

‘Has Brother Renard said much since the attack?’ asked Cornelius.

‘He speaks a little. He asks about the wounded. He prays for the dead. I’m able to distract him with reading, but his mind rests more peacefully, of course, when his Guardian, the Abbot, is here.’

‘Of course,’ nodded Cornelius.

‘How may I help you, Brother?’ asked Solon.

The monk sighed. ‘As you may have heard, many of the wounded from the Viking raid are not healing as quickly or as well as I had hoped. Many who are suffering are children, much younger than you. In the past, Brother Renard was wary of sending you to Skinner’s Bog to gather plants, but I must ask you to go.’

Solon frowned. ‘Why has Brother Renard not wanted me to go to Skinner’s Bog?’

‘Because the bog is the lair of the Grendel.’

W
hether
the ancient stories called it the mud-monster, the spirit-stalker or the Grendel, every peasant on Auchinmurn knew of the beast of Skinner’s Bog. Solon had heard accounts of the Grendel since he was old enough to sit at the fire and listen to his elders. He doubted that such a creature could ever be as grisly and as foul a force as the storytellers claimed.

But before Solon could ask Cornelius anything more, Brother Renard woke. He slowly lifted his head and acknowledged his visitor with a nod. A clump of hair floated to the plank floor like a fuzzy insect.

‘Cornelius, dear friend.’

Cornelius smiled fondly. ‘I’ve come with a task for Solon.’

‘Ah, the boy is certainly capable.’

‘My apologies, master,’ interrupted Solon, ‘but why is it critical that I go to Skinner’s Bog, Brother Cornelius?’

‘Skinner’s Bog?’ said Brother Renard, suddenly glaring at Cornelius.

Solon felt the old monk’s anxiety thumping behind his eyes.

‘Because,’ said Cornelius, ‘it’s the only place on the island with a rowan tree. I have no choice. I must have its berries to heal the wounded from the Viking attack before infection sets in.’

Brother Renard’s eyes narrowed on Cornelius, his rocking increasing in speed. ‘Not possible alone,’ he muttered. ‘Not possible with someone. Not possible at all.’

‘The boy has proven himself to be valiant,’ pointed out Cornelius.

‘The boy has much still to learn,’ said Renard, his agitation mounting.

‘But because of your animation – because you used Solon, Brother – he is now the one connected to the peryton,’ said Brother Cornelius. ‘And you know as well as I do that the peryton can help him find the rowan tree.’

Solon was stoking the fire, listening carefully to the two monks as they argued.

‘Some day very soon,’ the Abbot had told him, ‘when your master is able and ready, he will tell you the story of the islands and of our Order. It may well be his final lesson to you, but until then, know that you and your descendants are forever bound to the peryton and to the island of Era Mina.’

Solon had done his best to encourage, even cajole his master into teaching him this lesson, but his master had always ducked into his own dreams and silences, just when Solon thought he’d caught him at the right moment.

‘The boy would be in mortal danger, even with the peryton,’ snapped Renard at Cornelius.

The old monk’s rocking was becoming more frenzied, and he was scratching his fingers across his lap as if writing on an invisible page. Leaping from his stool, Solon pressed his hands on Brother Renard’s chair, trying to stop its frantic rocking, afraid of the old monk’s rage and what might happen if he lost control.

‘But Renard, he must go,’ continued Cornelius pleadingly. ‘Too many will suffer and die if he does not.’

‘I won’t allow it!’

‘Renard, dear, dear friend,’ said Cornelius. He leaned forward on the edge of the bunk, causing the quilt to slither to the floor. ‘This is not your decision to make. It is Solon’s.’

Suddenly, Brother Renard’s chin dropped to his chest, and the chair settled. For a fleeting moment, Cornelius thought he had passed away, gone for ever. Then the old monk’s hands started to move at lightning speed across his lap again.

‘Look out!’ yelled Solon.

A royal jester in full court regalia was rising out of one of the quilt squares, flopping his arms and twisting his legs as if they were made of soft clay. But where the jester’s head should have been, there was nothing, only his tri-pointed cap resting on empty shoulders, a wide, gap-toothed grin leering from its centre.

‘May the saints preserve us,’ said Brother Cornelius.

Before the stout monk could get off the bunk, the headless jester sprang up into the air, stretched his arms to a ceiling beam, somersaulted over it, grinned malevolently and dropped on to Cornelius’s shoulders, pinning him to the bed.

All in three blinks of Brother Cornelius’s eyes.

Brother Renard’s eyes, on the other hand, were squeezed closed in a kind of trance, the chair rocking furiously under him as he fought to contain his imaginings, his fists clenching and unclenching.

On the bunk, Cornelius was flailing madly to fight off the animation. The jester wrapped his loose legs around Brother Cornelius’s waist and sprang from the bunk again, taking the terrified monk up to the ceiling beam. Cornelius’s scream became a whimper when the jester dropped back down to the bed, leaving the herbalist clinging to the oak crossbeam, high above the floor.

‘L
et
me try to ... to animate a way down for you, Brother Cornelius,’ called Solon, hunting frantically around the tiny room for something he could use to sketch.

He could find nothing. Then he remembered. The Abbot had stripped the room bare to avoid Brother Renard using any tools to animate.

Brother Renard was still rocking and shuddering. A thick, green beanstalk embroidered on the border of the quilt shot upwards, winding and knotting itself over and under the bunk, quickly smothering the headless jester in vines. The jester shook his jingling hat and exploded in a cloud of red and yellow stripes. The moment he had disappeared, the beanstalk grew directly up to the crossbeam and curled around it, sprouting thick, green leaves and white flowers above where Brother Cornelius was dangling.

‘I believe in his own way,’ shouted Solon to the terrified monk, ‘that Brother Renard may be offering his assistance. He must be in a battle inside his own imagination.’

‘I do appreciate Brother Renard’s motives, but I’ve no intention of climbing down from this height on one of his shaky imaginings,’ squeaked Brother Cornelius from the crossbeam. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Solon, I’ll wait for a ladder.’

‘It may be safer to come down when you can,’ called Solon. ‘Who knows what may be next?’

There was a furious buzzing from the quilt. It was coming from a hive of honeybees swarming on one of the middle squares, their black and yellow bodies bulging furiously from the cloth.

‘Oh my. They look angry,’ said Brother Cornelius weakly.

With a piercing squawk, a fat puffin suddenly flew out of the beanstalk’s foliage, swooped over Cornelius’s head and defecated a blob of purple ink on his balding pate.

‘Ach, for the love of God, Renard,’ Cornelius cried, mopping his brow. ‘Alright. Alright. I’m coming down.’

The Abbot suddenly burst through the door.