Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

The second book in the Fourlands series, 2005

JANUARY 2020

On this soft night I followed the Moren River valley, flying back to the Castle, hearing the chimes of clock towers in the Plainslands villages as I passed high above.

The night air was shapeless. I couldn’t sense any current. I concentrated, flapping steadily on, marking distance by time, marking time by going through all the songs I know. I lay horizontally, looking down around me, cruising with stiff, shallow beats. I felt the air rushing between my feathers on the upstroke. Then I pulled my wings down again, the feathers flattened, the tight muscles moved around my waist.

Thermals were dissipating as the sun set. I was dropping altitude to find them and the work was getting harder. Fog was forming, low in the pasture and along the river bank. The tops of the valley sides were dark shapes rising from the mist like islands. Beyond, I could see parallel hills all the way out to the beginning of Donaise. Hedges and drystone walls looked like black seams separating fields of clean, lapping white mist. There was no sound, just the skeleton zip of my wings peeling back the air.

I spotted a point of light in the distance, like a city, and checked my compass-bearings dead on for the Castle and hopefully there would be some supper left. The speck resolved into a cluster of lights, then each cluster separated again, and distances between them seemed to grow as I got closer. Lights slipped from the horizon down toward me, until I was over Demesne village. Street lights shone up, picking the mist out in flat beams. Denser wisps blew past, curling, and the fog began to take on a shape of its own.

The fog changed everything. Fog covered the river’s reflective surface, meandered to the water meadows. Fog poured between the cultivar yew plantations and spiky poplar coppices where tomorrow’s bows and arrows were painstakingly being grown. Fog drifted over the roofs of the village where most of the Castle’s staff live. It pooled on the carp ponds, stole into the tax barns and settled on the market’s thatched roof. It cloaked the watermill, the aqueduct’s dark arches, Hobson’s stable and the Blacksmith’s yard. Fog overran the Castle’s outermost boundaries. It advanced through the archery fields, lay in the tilting lists, rolled over the tennis courts. It muffled the concert hall and the bathhouse complex.

One of the Castle’s spires was silhouetted against a white light, which suffused into the mist in an immense grisaille sphere. The floodlights were on in the amphitheater. They only illuminated the sharp Northeast Tower, its black sarsen stone striking in the whiteout. Features became visible as I closed the distance. The Castle’s vast bulk was obscured. Occasionally angular roofs and the crenellated tops of walls appeared, fragmentary, through the mist. The square base of the round tower was submerged two meters deep into a sea of fog. I flew through thicker patches-then it looked as if it was receding on the plains. On a whim, three hundred years ago, the Architect had encrusted her studio in the turret with sculptures. Eagles, storks and eels loomed out of the mist, with her company’s logo and the tools of her trade in stonework blackened by kitchen smoke. The windows bristled with deep, tangled marble ivy so realistic that birds were nesting in it.

Fog cold in my eyes and throat like clouds. A smell from the kitchens of wood smoke, roast beef and dishwater had caught in it. A faint scent of lavender from the laundry house tainted it. Burned whale oil from the floodlights saturated it, turning the fog into smog.

Stories and gable roofs and towers rose behind towers. The spaces under the buttresses were filled with tracery. The Carillon Courtyard had a lawn mowed in wide stripes and a roof that had been covered in scaffolding for eight decades. On the steeplejack’s walkway was a wooden treadmill twice as tall as a man, used to raise loads of Ladygrace stone. Its basket hung from the rope wound on its axle.

Two centuries ago, I thought the North Façade was a cliff face formed by the power of nature. I had tilted my head until I thought I would fall over backward, but I still couldn’t see the top of its spire. I had crouched on the hard grass a few hundred meters away, looked up and realized-all the crevices are carvings. The cliff ledges are parapets. Statues of idealized immortals, pinnaform spires embroidered with vertical lace. The glory of the Emperor, god’s governor of the Fourlands. It had made my neck ache.

I flew an assured path around walls flaking masonry, mottled with moss. I passed pinnacles decorated with ball flowers. The Finials, a memorial sculpture, was a row of scalloped arches resting on freestanding black marble shafts. It carried the signatures of Eszai, people who through their peerless talents have won immortality, a place in the Circle, and reside here. Graffiti scarred the arches, the names of immortals past and present; I had incised CJS & TW 1892 in a love heart on the highest topstone.

Now invisible in the mist, the gravel courtyard at the foot of the Finials encircled a statue of Dunlin, recently the King of Awia. I had ordered it to be placed there with the statues of other great warriors so that he would always be remembered.

The tall Aigret Tower seemed to drift in the mist and I sheared through it. It was the Slake Cross Battle cenotaph, square openwork, completely hollowed out to a lantern of air. At every level its pillars were thicker at the top than at the bottom, so they looked like they were dripping down-melting. It had no walls, its pillars were backed by those of a second and third tower nested inside; through its worn bird-boned latticework I flew without breaking pace.

Small, indistinct groups of people were heading along the avenue in the direction of the dueling ground. Some carried oil lamps; their golden light-points bounced away into the distance. Next to the floodlights’ white glare, a whole crowd of lanterns was gathering. I must take a look and see what’s happening. Standing on one wing I bent my knees and turned. The ground tilted sharply as I dropped onto the Castle’s roof-forest, like a wasp into a very ornate flower. I swept in so low over the barbican that my wingtips touched, made a sharp right, narrowly missing the lightning rod. Airstream roared in my ears as I dived toward the dueling ground, wondering if I could see well enough to land safely.

Fog drifted with me over the low roof of the adjoining gymnasium, and a second later poured from the open mouths of a dozen gargoyles carved in the shape of serene kings like chess pieces, which leaned out, facedown, over ornamental gardens. I flew through one of the streams, taking a shower in the damp fog. As I glided in on fixed wings, vortices curled off my wingtips so I left two spiral trails.

The dueling ground is inside a large amphitheater with high, half-timbered walls topped by flagpoles. The fog had not yet smothered them but it rose up the outside like water climbing around a sinking ship-the oval building looked as if it was sliding down into the invisible earth.

Four floodlights stood at the edges of the amphitheater, on ten-meter-high iron scaffolds. I circled the nearest floodlight, feet dangling, and settled onto its metal housing. I shook wisps of fog from my wings and pulled them around me, stood cloaked in long feathers.