Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Damson Beeton walked down the corridor of the mansion, her lantern’s light flickering over the portraits that lined the gallery. Not that they were anything to do with the master’s family — they had come along with the house, left by the previous owner. What had not come, however, was any decent clockwork-timed lighting or heating systems to enliven the draughty corridors and rooms. Where the other islands on the Skerries were palaces of light after night fell, Dolorous Isle stood alone as an oppressive dark mass, only a single pier lamp blowing in the wind to remind the river’s pilots that there was life here.

Septimoth was approaching down the corridor from the opposite end, his wings tucked back so they did not knock over any of the table ornaments as he went. The housekeeper and the lashlite met in the middle of the corridor, outside the master’s room.

‘You heard it too?’ asked the housekeeper.

Septimoth cocked an ear to the door. ‘It is the dream, Damson Beeton. He is having the dream again.’

‘It’s not right,’ said Damson Beeton, ‘a man like him suffering like this. Can’t you impose on him to see an alienist? With his money he could go to the best practice in Middlesteel.’

Septimoth shook his head. ‘There are some things that are beyond even the powers of your surgeons of the mind and soul to heal.’

‘He has the dream once a week now. It was bad enough when they came each month.’

‘He is worried of late, I think,’ said Septimoth.

The housekeeper waved an accusing finger at the lashlite. ‘You two are as thick as thieves with your Circle-damned secrets. Don’t think I don’t see it. What is the dream, you wily old bird? Master Fortune won’t tell me … but you know, I can see that much. It has something to do with your blind eye, doesn’t it?’

Septimoth scratched the back of his neck, at the weal where his seeing eye should have been. The one that gave the aerial hunters their three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision — along, it was rumoured, with other powers. Such as the ability to see into the future. ‘Not directly, damson. I have told you before, this eye I lost because I lacked vision.’

‘Teeth of the Circle,’ the housekeeper growled in frustration. ‘Damn your eyes then, Septimoth; the two you’ve kept, and the one you lost that makes you a useless manservant in this old heap. I’ll be off to bed and hear no more of your double talk until I make the three of us breakfast.’

Hours later, on the other side of the door, Cornelius Fortune still tossed and turned, in the power of a dream as his two servants had suspected. A nightmare that had become habit.

Cornelius was walking across a recently ploughed field — tilled by hand, now all the horses had been slaughtered for food — in the company of the village simpleton the local committee had found to tend the orchard, leading him slowly across to the tree he was seeking.

‘This is it,’ said the newly recruited farmer, casting a sad eye over the barren stumps barely rising out of the ground — all apart from one. He raised a hand that had only three fingers on it towards the solitary budding tree. ‘But look how this one grows. What a beauty. She’s the only one to thrive here.’

‘Look how she grows,’ Cornelius moaned, his hands scrabbling through the dry mud around the tree. They didn’t know how to grow anything in this land anymore. There were no irrigation channels. No water. They hadn’t even buried the seedling orchard deep enough for its roots to take hold. One boy tending farm land meant to be worked by a hundred, while his compatriots debated furiously over which illustrious revolutionaries the fields should be named after, passing regulations to bid the crops to grow faster, enacting laws to make it rain more equitably across the regions.

‘That’s how I knew where to take you, she’s the only tree to thrive out in the Glorious Orchard of the Revolution Seventy Six, Farming Community of Heroine Justine Taniayay,’ said the boy, getting the mantra just right. ‘They say I’m stupid, but I can remember them all, the names written on the sacks, the sacks that smelled so bad. That dead tree over there had a baron emptied over it. That tree next door got a woman who owned the manufactory that made rocking horses; I went on one of those once. Imagine that. I rode her wooden horses, and then I got to empty her over a tree, a tree just for her. And this tree is the one you asked for. Look how she grows.’

Cornelius let his borrowed face slip. He could hold the image of the area inspector no more, his face warping back to his natural features, the tears streaming from his eyes. The simple peasant lad just looked on, as if a melting, changing face was something he saw every day. Cornelius dug out the young sapling with expert care, brushing away the dirt, removing the tree from the ground without killing it.

‘You know about the growing and the planting and the old ways?’ asked the boy.

‘I was a farmer,’ said Cornelius, cradling the plant. ‘Once.’

‘You should stay here, then,’ said the boy, as if he was offering Cornelius the crown of the Sun King itself. ‘This is a farm.’

Cornelius stood up and touched the boy’s arm gently. ‘Thank you, but I cannot — I am not a farmer any more.’

‘There were more of us here last year,’ said the boy. ‘More of us helping with the trees and the turnips and the corn and the barley. At least ten people. I remember that — even though people keep on telling me I am wrong, there was never anyone else working with me. There was old farmer Adoulonge too, even though people say there was never a man of that name living here. What do you do now, compatriot sir?’

‘Didn’t you see my face, doesn’t it scare you? I am a monster. But now I shall prey on other monsters. What do you call such a thing, boy? A monster that eats other monsters?’

‘Furnace-breath Nick,’ smiled the boy. ‘The Sun Eater, Old Night-hand. The light priests will tell you stories about the Sun Eater, but I haven’t seen any of them in the village for a long while.’

Poor young fool. He knew about the bags that smelled bad, but he hadn’t made the connection between them and the diminishing population of his village. The human mind was such a complex instrument. Cornelius could feel his own slipping away even as he spoke, a dwindling dot of reason dimming to nothing along an impossibly long corridor.

‘The priests have gone away,’ said Cornelius, ‘along with your other friends.’ He lifted the precious sapling and shielded it inside his greatcoat. The boy stared out across the empty fields, not noticing that his visitor was stumbling west now, away from the farm. Away from Quatershift.

‘I like farming,’ the boy said to himself. ‘Better than dirty loom work, losing my fingers one by one.’

Howling like a dying fox, Cornelius glanced up at the sky as he lurched across the dead ground, the summer sun beating down. He should only look at the sky now, so clear and pure and unsullied. Filled with the sun. Waiting to be devoured. Don’t look at the mud, don’t see the ground bones lying between the furrows. White, angular bones. He lifted the sapling he had dug out high to the heavens, the young trunk left moist and supple by the fertilizer of his murdered wife’s flesh. His tree, his darling tree. She would grow again, but not in the spoiled soil of Quatershift.

He shook the young tree at the sky. ‘This is my wife, this is the child that was in her belly.’

A shadow grew in the sky, dark, bloated, born in the sun and feeding on its warmth. ‘ She will live again. Your unbornchild too. They will live in the torment of those that murderedthem .’

‘I’ll give you blood,’ he screamed. ‘Is this what you want? There’s an ocean of it inside the bastards who did this — a whole jigging revolution’s worth of blood.’