Jan Siegel - The Poisoned Crown - The Sangreal Trilogy Three

‘ Dangerous ?’ Hazel brightened, doubted, dimmed. In her experience, grownups didn’t normally ask you to do dangerous things. But then, Bartlemy was unlike any other grownup.

She said: ‘It’s usually Nathan who gets to do the dangerous stuff.’

‘This time it’s you,’ Bartlemy said.

‘What is it?’

‘The behaviour of the gnomons is becoming … unpredictable. Something needs to be done about them.’

‘I always carry iron when I walk in the woods,’ Hazel said, thinking of the number in her coat pocket – a number originally made to go on the door of a house – which Nathan had provided for her protection two years ago. ‘But I haven’t seen – sensed – them around for ages. Anyway, I thought they only attacked when someone threatened the Grail – or Nathan.’

‘So did I,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But the rules seem to be changing. I am told they are getting out of control. Someone saw a hare pursued and sent mad. The next time it could be a dog which will turn on its owner – or a person. They have to be neutralised.’

‘How?’ Hazel asked bluntly.

‘If we can trap them in an iron cage, perhaps sealed with silphium – the smell is inimical to them.’

‘What’s silphium?’

‘A herb, generally extinct, but I grow a little of it in my garden. The Romans used it extensively in cooking: they made a rather pungent sauce with it, served with fish. It has a very powerful odour which gnomons cannot tolerate. Remember, they have little substance but are equipped with hypersenses, reacting abnormally not only to the magnetic field of iron but to certain smells and sound levels inaudible to human ears. We should be able to use these elements to hold them, if they can be lured into the trap.’

‘Who does the luring?’ Hazel said with misgiving, already knowing the answer.

‘That would be your job. But I understand if you don’t wish to do it. Geometry is much safer.’

Hazel looked down at a diagram involving several interrelated angles, two triangles and a rhomboid. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is I have to do.’

‘I have a plan,’ said Bartlemy.

Afterwards, when she had gone, he poured himself a drink from an ancient bottle – a drink as dark as a wolf’s gullet and smelling like Christmas in a wine cellar. A woodfire burned in the hearth, an unmagical fire whose yellow flames danced their twisty dances above the crumbling emberglow and bark flaking into ash. The dog lay stretched out in front of it, pricking one ear to hear his master speak.

‘You will take care of her,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I don’t want her in real danger. But she needs to feel valued – that’s the important thing. She needs to know she can make a difference, if only in a small way.’

Hoover thumped his tail in agreement or approbation, or possibly in the hope of a morsel of cake from the plate at Bartlemy’s side.

‘There was a time when I thought nothing I did would change the world,’ Bartlemy continued, in a reminiscent vein. ‘I was too busy looking at what they call nowadays the bigger picture. But big things are made up of small things. Move one particle and you alter the shape of the universe. Perhaps Hazel will remember that, as the decades go by and disillusionment sets in. Meanwhile, you and I will alter the shape of her universe just a little – if we can.’

Hoover pricked the other ear and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

‘Cake is bad for dogs,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Even my cake.’

Nathan had the accident about a week later. He called it an accident but he knew, as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, that it was his own fault. He was by the indoor pool (Ffylde Abbey had both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool) with a group of boys, and Ned Gable was vaunting their prowess at diving in Italy that summer. They had visited a little bay a few times, and had taught themselves to dive off a low promontory into the sea, turning a somersault in mid-air on the way down. One of the boys looked sceptical and made a casually snide remark which Nathan would have ignored, but Ned rose to the bait, asserting the truth of his boast.

‘Okay, show us,’ challenged the sceptic. His name was Richard but he liked to call himself Rix. His father owned a merchant bank.

‘I can’t,’ Ned responded, looking both discomforted and angry. ‘Not with this ankle.’ He’d torn some ligaments in a rugger scrum and was banned from most sport for at least another fortnight. ‘You know that.’

‘Convenient,’ sneered Rix.

‘Nathan could do it,’ said a supporter, with a surge of misguided loyalty.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Nathan said. ‘The rocks in Italy were higher than this diving board, and the sea below was really deep. It would be a bit chancy here.’

‘The pool’s two metres at this end,’ Rix said. ‘Tom Holland, who left last year, he did all sorts of fancy dives off that board. I saw him.’

‘Tom Holland was the Inter-Schools Champion,’ someone else pointed out. ‘ And he was dead short – about five foot nothing. He could’ve dived into a puddle.’

‘Of course,’ Rix said, with a little smile tweaking at his mouth. A smile at once patronising and faintly knowing. ‘Don’t worry, Nat. I understand.’

Nathan didn’t like anyone calling him Nat.

‘ What do you understand?’ Ned growled, picking up his cue while Nathan was still trying to let it pass.

‘Oh, it’s easy to be chicken when you’re so tall people are too scared to tell you the truth.’

There was a short pause, then suddenly Nathan laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m the class bully. Everyone’s really scared of me.’ Since he was notoriously tolerant and had never bullied anybody most of the group laughed with him, and the tension of the preceding moment was defused.

Rix took the laughter personally. He was the sort of boy who would take it personally if it rained on his birthday or his favourite football team lost a match. ‘So what you’re saying ,’ he resumed, ‘is that Ned here is a big-mouthed liar.’

Ned balled his fist. Nathan, who had thought the whole stupid exchange was over, said: ‘What?’

‘ He says you did the dive when you were in Italy. You say you can’t show us now – the pool’s too shallow and all that crap. Excuses. You’re calling him a liar. Your best mate, right? Some friend you are.’

One or two of the others laughed at this piece of sophistry – not a relaxed sort of laugh, the way they had laughed with Nathan, but the uncertain kind that tightens up the atmosphere. If the teacher had been around he might have noticed something amiss and put a stop to it, but he had gone to the infirmary when one of his pupils started a nosebleed. Nathan had no fallback position; he knew he should call a halt himself, but Ned was looking at him with absolute confidence that his friend wouldn’t let him down, and Nathan couldn’t fail him. The dive wasn’t safe, but he had done many far more dangerous things, in the otherworlds of his dreams, and somehow he had always come through, protected by chance, by fate, by whoever watched over him – the Grandir, or the sinister forces that shielded the Grimthorn Grail. He had been plucked from the jaws of desert monster and marsh demon, from the spelltraps of Nenufar – he had lifted the forbidden sword, defeated the unknown enemy. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, survival had made him complacent. He shrugged, not looking at Rix, only at Ned.

‘I’ll do it.’

Then he climbed up the steps to the diving board, stood poised on the edge.

Dived.

He knew, immediately, that he’d miscalculated. Everything happened at once very fast and very slow – the world arced as he completed the somersault – he tried to straighten out, to cut the water cleanly – hit the surface at the wrong angle – felt the sting of the impact, the rush of bubbles as the pool engulfed him. He needed to tilt his arms, curve the dive upward, but there was no depth beneath him, no time to manoeuvre. He’d opened his eyes under water and for a long slow millisecond he saw the bottom of the pool coming for him like a moving wall. Then it struck, knocking the air out of him, and he was breathing water – his lungs clenched – the world spun away into darkness and pain …