Ghostheart (8 page)

Pa was so proud that I could work like that. He crowed about me at home. Soon he was bragging to Lily Fell and the Craigs and the rest. Saying as how he didn’t know what he’d do up there without me.

I couldn’t tell him my arms ached and shivered all night, and I was sick of it. Or that the smell of our own peaty hearth made me feel fluxy. I couldn’t tell him I sweated whole nights away glooming about the next day, and rode clarty nightmares of toads and adders until morning. I just couldn’t tell him.

He was so proud.

Moo was so eased.

I was the one they could trust.

It took a year for my brother to fade entirely, and for the stranger to take his place. By the following winter Boson took to meeting with his council of birds every day.

Each morning he was out at the willows bargaining with the hedge-wrens, and every twilight, out on the bog giving an ear to the ravens. He gathered magpie feathers and wove himself a cap of black and white that marked him out as belonging to the flocks. At last he climbed into the willow branches and built himself a nest among the redstarts. He wove the nest from soft twigs and sedge, and lined it with wool and feathers. Then he roosted in it all broody in the drooping branches.

He said the birds were just angels in bird-suits and they brought him messages from God the Brother. He heard the messages clear as talk in dropping water, and plain as bells in birdsong. The birds said that there was an angel called Tempus whose job it was to measure out time, so that everything wouldn’t happen at once. He said that everything was always on the edge of happening all at once and I needn’t look so unimpressed.

‘You should be thankful,’ he told me, quite high and snippy. ‘It’s Tempus as keeps today inside today, and tomorrow on the horizon, and next summer faraway and not turning up on the threshold anytime it wants.’

‘Oh, well then,’ I said. ‘As long as we’ve got you to tell us the whole point of
time,
we’ll be all right.’ I had to be slopping around in the wet cut in the morning, and I didn’t care to hear about what he thought about in his idle, flighty days.

He turned a glad face to me and I felt bad.

The first skylarks of each grey or beamy dawn met with my brother out in the black rush and they sang together in full choir. The magpies played Follow My Leader with him all along the bog-ways and out into the quaking mire. He met with kites and merlins out in the water-meadows, and ghosty owls looked for him in the night to be fed the mice and frogs he caught and kept for just such a purpose. I asked and asked why his angels needed such an enormity of blood-food.

Even angels have to eat, he kept saying until I was beside myself with it.

‘What about afterwards, then?’ I said, brimful of irrits. ‘Do angels need to — empty themselves too?’

He gave me a look like the old days; a look like I should shut my gob. It was balm to see him sharp in his own face again.

‘
Boson? Boson? Boson
?’ I asked him in my most belling sort of voice. ‘Please tell us. Are the angels girls or boys? Boson? Boson? Do angels have you-know-whats?’

He was still, with a face you could edge the axe on.

‘The angels want to kick your arse, Fermion Quirk,’ he told me and stalked off. I took his temper as a sign that maybe he was coming back to us.

When he took to wearing his cap of feathers down among the lowlanders, even my parents had to confess him distempered rather than just high-tempered and plaguey.

But my brother was passing from us; already there was hardly any of him left. It was like I’d dreamed a family and been woken of a sudden and now the dream-family was fraying to threads. It was like I’d never been a twin; never had a brother.

It all seemed to have gone missing along with our tools.

Then on one of those mornings when the sunlight buds pale green, I rose from my bed and shuffled outside and I knew. I knew straight-up something had to be done.

Under our hill of baking turf-spits, he lay shrunken in a bed of gravel and shale. His eyes were open and fixed on the house. I turned and that’s when I saw.

The walls were covered in pictures of birds. Entirely. He’d carved them into the stones with blades, and scraped at them in white shale. His crowding flocks had us sieged.

It must have taken him all night.

His cranes stood as tall as the eaves. Snipe and redshank fluttered right up the door-beams, curlew and lapwing crowded the threshold. The casements looked to be rot-spotted but they were just specked all over with thumb-sized wrens and pipits.

I followed a line of puffins around the walls and found his bat-eared owls scratched by the lean-to. Those owls trailed into a cast of diving hawks. Flights of swallows and martins, wagtails and buntings, trailed in ribbons across our wall-stones. Around the back by the nightsoil place my brother had scrawled a tiding of magpies, up to no good in the dust. There looked to be as many birds scraped on our walls as packed into the willows in the summer evenings.

That was that.

When Moo saw what he’d done, gentle cures were over.

This was how it came to be that early last spring, on a day that was not a Sunday or a Feast-day, we tramped toward the chapel and monkward. My mother carried Gilpin on her back and taking Boson by his wounded hands, she led us down off the moaney. She had a whole gobful of things to say before we got there.

Only
answer the Brothers’ questions.
Don’t
wander off or get into talk with strangers.
Don’t
call the monks anything but
Brother
. Do remember to call the Prior
Father
and not
Pa
(this to me), and most important of all,
Don’t
mention the Dead Lamps or we’d be swarming with exorcisms before you could say you-know-what.

‘And as for you,’ she said to Boson as we stopped before the monkhouse walls.

He looked at her like she was someone he’d seen before, somewhere, and whistled through his teeth.

‘Never mind,’ she finished.

She spat on her hand and scrubbed at his face.

Down in the herbarium three monks attended on my brother. Apart from Brother Olloo, there was his assistant Brother Gilbrid and even the Father himself had found my brother’s affliction of enough interest to come down see. There’d plainly been some earwigging because a small mob of excitable Brothers hung about in a stench by the door. The youngest one was that Dolyn Craig from the Cronks with his gormless face full of thrill and smirk.

They were waiting to see and hear just what sort of elf-shot Boson Quirk was plagued by.

We were in a tall shadowy room wholly lined with shelves, benches, and cupboards. There wasn’t one bit of wall without its store or shelf. Every shelf held its piggins and flasks, every bench its mortar and pestles, every store its blades and sieves. In the middle of the floor a vast pot simmered over the herb-Brothers’ whirrying hearth. Their fire gave off good smells of hawthorn and sage-brush and I went right close to it. Up in the rafters dangled thickets of bunched simples drying to usefulness.

Brother Olloo lifted Boson up onto his high simples-bench, easy like he was a doll, and prayed at us through his manky beard. Winking at me in a friendly manner, he crossed himself three times. Things fell from his cassock onto the floor and skittered away into the herbarium’s dark corners.

‘What is your name, my boy?’ the Brother asked loud, like Boson might be deaf.

‘Brother,’ said my brother.

‘I see.’ He didn’t seem surprised. ‘Well, and who is your father?’

‘Father is father, not
pa
,’ said Boson, nodding slow and knowing.

Brother Olloo and the Father swapped lifted lips and eyebrows.

‘Can you show me your mother?’ asked the Father.

‘I can but I cannot say her name,’ said Boson sadly pointing at Moo. ‘She would be in trouble.’

We all turned to look at Moo, who stood straight against the back wall and only opened her eyes a little wider and pulled her hair around her face a little closer. The Father went to her and stared without shame.

‘Aren’t you Moirrey Perkyn that was,’ he said.

Being a terrible blusher Moo’s face reddened, but she didn’t hide it. She stayed upright under the Father’s studying of every bit of her face. Gilpin was on her hip, his hand resting on her cheek, and the two of them moved into the shadows. All we could see was the white nose on her, long and curved inside its cave of foaming ginger hair.

‘Uncle-Brother is gone a long time now,’ was all she said and she said it so quiet that I think only me and the Father heard.

‘All right, young Quirk,’ went on Brother Olloo in an overly-cheerful manner. ‘Who is this young lady, right here?’

He pointed at me.

Boson grinned right into my face like he was a regular person again but I wasn’t fooled.

‘She’s that hard girl,’ he said. ‘The angels want to kick her right in the—’

I hacked until they were forced to bring me a brew and the tricky moment passed.

‘Does he dream in surfeit?’ The herb-Brother asked my father.

‘Well,’ said Pa. ‘I don’t know about in Sirfeet, but he dreams up at home. All sorts.’

‘Tell me the stuff of the dreams.’

‘Fermion?’ Pa looked to me, somewhat baffled. He never listens to dreams.

‘What?’ I couldn’t help it.

I pretended not to know what he was talking about.

‘Tell the Brothers the stuff of the dreams,’ he told me, grit-teethed.

‘Well,’ I sighed. Something told me this wasn’t going to end well. ‘There was his dream of a shrunken-up god rising from out of the skybog.’

The herb-Brothers considered this. ‘Could be a
somnium
,’ said the assistant, soft and wishful.

‘More likely
insomnium
,’ said Brother Olloo and the younger Brother drooped a bit. ‘Tell us another.’

All eyes rested on me and prickled there.

‘Ummm,’ I said. I couldn’t decide which of Boson’s dreams would be worse. ‘There was his dream of a giant out in the channel whose eye is as big as a ship and who told him she sees all the purposes of those who go to sea.’

The Father and the Brothers shook their heads at each other.

‘Childish,’ said the Father and I felt bad for my brother.

What I wanted was a dream that would wipe the rightfulness from their prying faces.

‘Well now, Father, there was that time he dreamed of a whole boat of monsters sailing out from Strangers’ Croft,’ I said, and waited like I’d said nothing. My eyes rested on the Father’s face, soft like you wouldn’t notice.

The herb-Brothers nodded but the Father turned to me, still like a fat wolf-spider.

‘Well now, Miss Quirk,’ he said cool and slippery as clart. ‘That could be considered
phantasma
.’

The other Brothers all startled a little. Brother Olloo made a contrary sort of noise and with a faceful of questions turned to the Father. The Father shrugged.

‘What is that, Father? A Phantasmo?’ asked Pa.

‘Phantas-
mah
,’ said Brother Gilbrid opening one of his books and pointing at a line of marks. ‘It’s a type of dream, Mr Quirk.’

Pa kept right on waiting. He didn’t look at the page.

‘What it means is either your boy is suffering a disorder of the brain, and there’s plenty we can do for that, God be Praised, or—’ He scratched his tonsure and looked put-out. ‘Or I’m afraid he’s making a home for the wicked ones.’

‘Wicked ones?’ My mother stepped out of the shadows with Gilpin asleep in her arms.

‘That could be one of the fallen ones, or any of their servants. They can’t spread their disorders properly without bodies to carry the wickedness,’ said the Father. ‘Now. Does the boy entertain owls?’

‘No more than other birds,’ Moo told him, hanging her head.

‘There’s any number of the wicked ones, and each worse than the other for drawing a person away from God with false angels,’ said Brother Olloo. He turned to the Father. ‘With his dreams it could be Nybbas. Or the birds might point to infection by Andras?’

‘It could be Shax.’ The Father smiled to himself, a small, dry smile. ‘He has a particular feeling for the marshes.’

‘Nybbas. Andras,’ said my brother. ‘Shax.’

He reached his hand into a shaft of light, and Brother Gilbrid took it and put it gentle back into his lap.

‘Does the boy talk of fledging?’ asked Brother Olloo. He sounded kind, he sounded sensible, he sounded like a person you could trust. My bad feeling waxed powerful of a sudden.

‘I don’t know,’ said my mother. ‘What’s the cure for that?’

We crowded around Boson. The Brothers crowded at the door.

‘That would be the trepan,’ said Brother Olloo and the pied mob by the door rustled. Somebody let out a slow whistle but stopped when the Father shot a look at them.

Us Quirks looked at him like he was the marks in his book.

He went to a heavy cupboard that seemed to fill half of the herbarium and pulled from its middle drawer a softly gleaming tool. It had a wooden grip at the top and beneath, a long chisel narrowing to a point. I wondered if they were going to cure Boson by setting him to woodwork. The herb-Brother laid it on the bench next to my brother who looked at it like it was nothing to do with him. We all leaned forward to look.

‘It’s a
borer
,’ said Pa looking close and his mouth twisting. ‘You can’t use it on folk? Not really.’

‘We can and we do, Mr Quirk,’ said the Father, and he sounded hard and right. ‘This is a fight. We don’t turn our noses up at any weapon. They don’t
choose
to leave a body once they’re in, you know. They must be expelled.’ His mouth snapped shut on the last word. ‘Don’t worry. Unless they die or God doesn’t wish the cure to take, it always works.’

‘It won’t hurt him,’ Brother Olloo told Moo, patting her arm.

‘What won’t?’ she asked.

‘Boring the hole.’ He picked up the trepan and a little mallet. The herb-Brother nodded, safe and knowing, at her.

‘Just a little prick,’ he said.