Jan Siegel - The Poisoned Crown - The Sangreal Trilogy Three

It was Ned who got him out, jumping in fully dressed despite his sprained ankle, heaving him out of the water while the other boys reached down to haul him over the edge. They’d done life-saving techniques earlier that term and someone managed to pump at his chest while someone else tried mouth-to-mouth. Ned said: ‘Get Mr Niall,’ meaning the games master, but no one did and it seemed an incredibly long time before any adults appeared on the scene to take over. There was blood on Nathan’s head, on his arm, blood fanning out across the wet floor-tiles. Rix stood back from the rest of the group, looking pale and uncomfortable.

‘This is your fault,’ Ned said, struggling to evade his own guilt, knowing Nathan would never have reacted to Rix’s taunting if it hadn’t been for him.

‘He was sh-showing off,’ Rix stammered, determined to convince himself.

Later, in the headmaster’s study, he said the same thing.

Annie was informed and drove to the school in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, exercising all the self-control she possessed in order not to go too fast. By the time she got there they were able to tell her Nathan would be all right: he had concussion, a dislocated shoulder, severe bruising, and what the doctor called ‘extensive physical trauma’ but no broken bones or internal damage. His first words to her were: ‘Sorry, Mum.’ She sat by his bed in the infirmary, holding his hand until it occurred to her that might embarrass him, torn between standard maternal anxiety, pointless anger (why was he always doing dangerous things, even when it wasn’t necessary?), and the sneaking paranoia of other, deeper doubts. Romany Macaire, tumbling into the river … Nathan, diving into a pool too shallow for him … Water, water, everywhere … Was it mere coincidence, or some dark supernatural plot?

‘Don’t overreact,’ Bartlemy said when she confided in him. ‘We’re surrounded by water, all the time. It’s essential to life. Don’t start seeing demons in every raindrop. Teenage boys do rash and often stupid things. Children fall into rivers. Accidents happen. It’s a very human weakness, that we need someone to blame.’

Ned blamed Rix, at least to his classmates. To Nathan, he blamed himself, saying awkwardly: ‘It was me. I made you do it. I shouldn’t have—’

‘Forget it,’ Nathan said. ‘It was my own stupid fault. I knew the dive wasn’t possible there but I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it.’

He, too, was blaming himself, not just for his recklessness but for that seed of unthinking arrogance which had made him believe that whatever he did, no matter how foolhardy, somehow he would get away with it. His guardian angel (or devil) would always take care of him.

But the devil had let him down, and now he knew he was vulnerable, and a tiny germ of fear grew at the back of his thought, not the fear of danger but the fear of fear itself. He could be hurt – he might be killed. Knowing that, would he be able to explore the otherworlds as boldly as before, doing whatever he needed to do, or would his newfound fear hold him back?

He couldn’t talk to Ned about it, or any of his other classmates, because they knew nothing of the voyages he made in his dreams, and would only think him nuts if they did. He couldn’t talk to Annie, because she was his mother, and he knew she worried about him too much already. He couldn’t talk to Bartlemy, because although his uncle came to see him once he was back home, they had no privacy for confidences.

In the end, he talked to Hazel. Just as he’d always done.

‘You think too much,’ Hazel said. ‘Like what’s-his-name in Shakespeare who wanted to avenge his father’s murder and kept messing it up and killing the wrong people.’ She’d been on a school trip to see Hamlet the previous term. ‘He got rid of nearly everyone in the play before he killed the right person, didn’t he? The point is he spent too much time agonising and making long speeches to himself instead of just getting on with the job. You’re starting to do that. Picking your feelings to bits and worrying about them. It’s a waste of time.’

‘I don’t make long speeches,’ Nathan objected.

‘You’d better not,’ Hazel said grimly. ‘The play was quite good but the speeches were boring.’

‘They’re famous,’ Nathan said, quoting: ‘ To be or not to be, that is the question – and something about to die, to sleep – to sleep perchance to dream … For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …’

‘Boring,’ Hazel said. ‘You’re going all thoughtful on me. That’s your problem. Thinking.’

‘Thinking is a sign of intelligence,’ Nathan said.

‘No it isn’t,’ Hazel argued. ‘Stupid people think too. It’s the thinking that makes them stupid. Like that guy in the play. He stuck his sword in a curtain and killed a harmless old man because he thought he was someone else. Hamfist, Prince of Denmark. Stupid.’

‘I don’t go around sticking swords into people,’ Nathan said. ‘At least, only once.’ He had picked up the Traitor’s Sword – the sword of straw – and slashed at the Urdemon of Carboneck, but killing a demon, he felt, wasn’t the same as killing a person. ‘Anyhow, that was self-defence. I didn’t have much of a choice. The point is, maybe I found it easy to be brave, because – subconsciously – I thought I was sort of looked after. And now I know I’m not … well …’

‘You were brave from the start,’ Hazel responded. ‘You couldn’t have felt looked after then. If you’re more scared now, you’ll just have to be braver. You’ll manage it. You’re a brave kind of person. As long as you don’t start thinking about it.’

She hadn’t told him about the gnomons. Bartlemy had said he would set the trap that weekend. Hazel had already decided that if she didn’t think about what she had to do she wouldn’t worry, and if she didn’t worry she wouldn’t panic, but the effort of not thinking was taking its toll of her. She knew she wasn’t as brave as Nathan but that only meant she had to try harder. Nathan’s self-doubts she regarded as trivial – yet it was strangely reassuring to find that he, too, was having to cope with the possibility of failure and fear. Somehow, it made her feel better about her own secret terrors.

‘No thinking,’ Nathan said. ‘Right. I’ll – um – bear that in mind.’

‘And don’t start being clever ,’ Hazel added, throwing him a dark look. ‘I can’t stand that either.’

‘Sorry,’ Nathan said. ‘Am I treading on your inferiority complex?’

‘I don’t have one,’ Hazel snapped. ‘I don’t do complexes and stuff.’

‘Oh really? Then why—’

But that was the moment when Annie put her head around the door with an offer of tea and cake, and the downhill run to a juvenile squabble was averted.

Since the accident Nathan had been on painkillers to help him sleep at night, and his dreams had stayed inside his head. The drugs, he suspected, affected his sleep patterns, making it impossible for him to stray outside his own world, but as the concussion had made him sick and the bruising had left him too stiff to move he had been feeling far from adventurous. However, he was strong and resilient, with quick powers of recovery, and that night he decided he could do without the paracetamol, though he didn’t mention it to Annie. It was hard to get comfortable – his shoulder still twinged at any awkward movement – but eventually he drifted into sleep, and through sleep into dream.

Only it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.

He was diving into deep water, hurtling down and down through an endless gulf of blue. The seabed rushed towards him like a moving wall. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. He tried to close his eyes, to brace himself for the impact – but there was none. No impact, no eyes. With an exquisite surge of relief he realised he was only an atom of thought, a bodiless observer whose horrifying plunge had speed but no substance. He slowed as the sea-floor drew near and found himself gliding above the level sand which stretched away in every direction, featureless as a desert. He guessed it couldn’t actually be all that deep, since he could still see in the blue dimness, and high above there was the glimmer of the sun’s rays, reaching down through the water. Something like a cloud passed overhead, a huge shadow blotting out the far-off daylight. A ship, he thought, gazing upward – but no, this was Widewater, it must be, where the land had been devoured by sea and there were neither people nor ships. Yet it looked like a ship, a vast, deep-bellied tanker hundreds of feet long. Others followed, five, six, eight, one far smaller, another little more than a dinghy. Not ships: whales. A pod of whales far larger than any in our world, sailing the ocean like a convoy of giant galleons.