At the Edge of Waking (34 page)

The figure stood among the grave-trees, sneering down at the valley, too arrogant even to turn and acknowledge the twins’ approach. It should not have been impressive, slouching and dressed like a tramp as it was, but therein lay the proof of its power. Arrogant, yes, and mad, outside the rules even of the story that had created it, a story that would have dressed it in robes of velvet and chains of gold. But it scorned the story, you could see that in its white and misshapen face. It scorned everything, all the rules, and in contempt imposed its own rules on whatever part of the world that did not fight back.
That
was the Tyrant.

That was the
Tyrant,
Paul thought, and he shook with the urgency to get his fist out of his crowded pocket.

“In the Lady’s name,” he bellowed, and threw the first stone.

Claude threw a stone; he had to, with Paul firing one missile after another. Paul was finally consumed by the game, screaming war cries and taunts as he threw stone after stone, and it was as if the game had suddenly chosen him over Claude. There was a sickening disjuncture in Claude’s head. He threw stones with all the strength in his arm—and how had he carried so many in his pockets? There seemed no end to them—he pelted that arrogant figure with its coarse and sneering face—that white plaster face that was his face inside—and some part of the world came adrift. If the castle rock had come unmoored and scudded off above the hills he would not have been surprised; if it had revealed itself to be the tower he called it, tall as a skyscraper and black as hell, he would not have been surprised. The surprise, the horror, was that it did neither. It was just a battered island of granite left behind by a glacier some thousands of years ago, its feet in the hay meadow and its head not even as high as the tops of the cedars that grew at the edge of the field. It was just the castle rock where they had used to play when they were little boys.

But if that was true, then what was that thing?

Who was that thing?

That man?

Staggering under the blows of the ensorcelled—no, the mine-rubble stones. Flinching under the diving attacks of the excited crows. Throwing up an arm to shield his head, falling back against the dead trees, bleeding horribly from his head, his face, his mouth a gaping shattered ruin.

Paul was a machine, throwing stone after stone. Claude was a machine too, a puppet played upon by his terrible spell. He threw another stone, feeling his own face stretched into a mask of horror, and another stone that fell short, and the next one he managed somehow to throw far out over the field, and then, with the last stone still in his hand, he had torn himself free.

“Stop it! You’re killing him! You’re killing him! STOP!”

Paul couldn’t stop. He saw the blood, but knew it was impossible—some trick of Claude’s, red paint, his own fevered imagination—and the air was in constant motion, confusing him, as if the wheeling of the crows had got inside his head, filling his skull with random motion, shuffled fragments of darkness and light. His own movements, the wind-up and the throw, joggled his eyes. It was a weird, claustrophobic kind of blindness, and he was deafened by his own panting breaths, the shouts in his throat that had no more meaning to him than the barks of a dog. And he couldn’t stop. He was weeping and he couldn’t stop. And then Claude screamed.

The birds flew up into the sunlight.

The crows. A woodpecker in the trees. The magpies in the grass.

They flew up high.

You could see their shadows moving across the ground.

Paul, wiping the sweat and tears from his face, was the first to move forward. He was shaking, but the world had expanded again beyond the reaches of his skull. It was so quiet suddenly, just the birds calling from high above the hills. He felt that something horrible had stopped, like a car crash, a car crash that was him. He stepped toward the figure, Claude’s scarecrow, that was hung up among the trunks of the dead birch trees.

That was blood, there.

That was an eye exposed by a torn lid, as if the lid had opened from the top down.

That was a tooth emerging like a giant maggot from the torn cheek and shattered jaw.

That was a bubble of blood swelling from the nostril of the broken nose. That was a bubble of air, that swelled, slowly, like a bubble-gum bubble carefully blown, until it popped and there was no more. No more air, no more blood.

That was a man, and they had killed him.

“I did this.” It was a whisper. Claude didn’t even know that he was speaking out loud. “
I
did this. I
did
this.”

He kept saying it, over and over, like a chant. I
did this. I
did
this.
I
did this. I
did
this.
Paul heard him at the far distant edges of his mind, and then suddenly there was nothing but Claude’s voice drilling a hole in his skull. Paul spun around and yelled, “
What
did you do? Shut up!
What did you do?”

Claude was as white as a cold marble statue of himself, and his eyes showed white all around the rims of the iris. He did not look away from the dead man when he spoke.

“He wasn’t real. He was just a mask. Some clothes, a book. I made him real.” Claude started to tremble, and then he was crying. “He was the Tyrant, and I made him real.”

And then we killed him.

But that thought was intolerable. Paul had never had an intolerable thought before and he did not know what to do with this one. He had to get rid of it. Get rid of it. His hands made an involuntary gesture, as if he could throw it away, but his arms ached from throwing all those stones, throwing them so hard, killing the Tyrant, killing the game.

“I made him real.”

“Shut up,” Paul said—he had no room to shout with that thought inside him. He staggered away, thinking he could throw it up if he couldn’t throw it away. He had stones in his guts. He was going to shit himself, wet his pants. He was going to come apart at the seams, there was going to be nothing left of him, nothing left but a book, some clothes, a mask. The birds were circling down, the crows and the magpies, curious and drawn to blood. Paul staggered to the rough edge of the castle rock’s top, sure he was going to puke, but when he got to the edge he just . . . went down. He ran right into the flocking magpies, put up his arms against the accidental scratches of their claws and went on running. He hurtled down the steep side of the rock, skidded on his heels, fell flat on his back and leapt up, not even caring if he could breathe. He heard the birds calling. Over the noise of his running, the uneven whimper of his breath, he could hear his brother calling for him to wait.

“Come on, Claude,” Paul said, but it was only a whimper, and he did not dare to stop, to turn back and call and wave until Claude caught up with him. “Come on, Claude, come
on,
” he said, and he thought Claude must be coming down behind him, he
had
to be coming down behind him, because Paul knew there were only two choices: run, or come apart like an exploding grenade.

He jumped the last meter down to the level field, stretched out his stride, and with his brother close behind him ran for home.

“Paul, wait.” Claude had no breath to shout and his cry was lost in the muttering of the troubled birds.

The birds, he thought. The war birds, the Tyrant’s orphaned spies. The gore crows that grew fat on the battlefield’s dead.

“We can’t just leave him here. Paul, wait.”

But Paul ran, a small figure and strangely slow—strangely, because he was so quickly gone.

Claude turned back to face his dead.

The mask was ruined, the face shattered to show the flesh beneath. Had they really thrown that hard? How could they have thrown that hard? They were just boys.

You are in the service of the keep,
said the Cellarer,
do you think you would have been chosen if you were not man enough?

Alexander the Great was leading armies when he was your age,
the Cooks said in their gossipy way.

And the Lady’s gentle voice murmured,
You have done nothing but what we laid upon you to do.

But that wasn’t true. It had been Claude’s spell. It was all right that Paul had run—no it wasn’t! Fucking Paul,
how could you?
—but it was just that Claude should deal with the consequences alone. It had been his spell. His was the responsibility, and—

He drew a deep breath.

—his was the power.

He had made the Tyrant real. They had both killed him, but
he
had made the Tyrant
real.

He had no fire, no ingredients with which to build a new spell. But this was the place of power, the Tyrant’s tower, the hinge-point of the keep, and it was now also a place of sacrifice.

Let the sacrifice be not in vain,
said the Lady of Fountains.

Use it,
said the Cellarer.
It’s there, for good or ill. Use it to do what needs to be done.

Claude, bowed beneath the weight of his responsibilities, knelt at the corpse’s side and began to summon the keep.

“Did you guys manage to get yourselves some lunch? I’m sorry I was so late with the groceries. Annie asked for a lift to town and we ended up having lunch together after her appointment. Did you get some of the zucchini loaf out of the freezer? I hope? Please eat the zucchini loaf. If it’s not gone by next June I may actually have to kill myself. You can build my tomb out of zucchini-loaf bricks. Sorry, morbid humor. Are you okay, Paul? You’re looking kind of rough. What were you guys up to today? Out before breakfast. Did you even eat before you . . . Paul, are you crying? What’s wrong? Did you have a fight? Is that why Claude’s in hiding? Paul. Stop crying. Tell me what happened. Paul, talk to me. Where’s your brother?
Where’s Claude?”

He built the keep stone by stone.

He began with the places he knew well: the Cellarer’s door, the laundry and the Wellhouse, the kitchen with its massive hearths. He built the walls along the line of the surrounding hills, and he built the single gate with its gatehouse that rested where the farmhouse stood in his mother’s world. He built the stables, the armory, the many shrines. He built the clerics’ studies and the chatelaine’s offices and the ladies’ solar, but there were no clerics scratching with their pens, no chatelaine jingling her keys, no ladies toying with their jewels and their little dogs. There were no little dogs and no hounds in the kennels; no horses in the stables; no hawks in the mews. No cats in the sunlight; no rats in the cellars; no mice in the walls. No soldiers, no servants; no ambassadors or slaves. But the baileys stood cobbled and sodded within the massive bulk of the keep. The keep stood, thick-walled and many-roofed, riddled with secret passages and cellars tunneling away into an abyss even the Cellarer could not plumb. And at last, but also first and always, the tower stood, the castle rock that was the foundation for all the rest. A great, massy tower, though not so tall as it seemed with the Tyrant’s arrogance stealing the light from the sky. This was the tower as it should have been, as it was once and as it will be now the Tyrant is dead, and at its base, deep in the earth, lies the keep’s crypt. Claude built the long winding stairway, stone by stone, and when it was done, every step solid in his mind, he began to drag the Tyrant’s corpse down from the tower’s peak.

Step by step. Stone by stone.

It was dark as night inside, but that didn’t matter. He had it all in his mind.

They were out until long after dark, Paul and his mother, calling Claude’s name and shining their flashlights into the trees. The woods weren’t so thick in the daytime, but everywhere you shone your light there was a tree, and where there was a tree you couldn’t see beyond.
Claude!
A frightened grouse exploded like a bomb in the bushes, sounding like an entire flock as it made its escape.
Claude!

They found the camp he’d made, with the tarp and the blackened fire pit.
That would be reassuring,
their mother said,
if he were actually here.
But he wasn’t, just the tarp and a few unburned sticks. This was where he had made it, Paul knew. This was where he had made the Tyrant—
I made him real
—no. No. This was where he plotted the last play in the game.

Were you fighting?

No.

Oh, come on, Paul, look at you. Look at your hands.

We weren’t.

What?

We weren’t fighting. We were just . . . playing.

Playing. Playing with
what
?

He always wanted to play the same stupid game.

What game?

You know.
He felt like he was lying. He had never known the truth could be a lie.
The game we used to play as kids.

But what happened? Christ, Paul, what do you think I’m going to do to you? I just want to know where my son is!

As if, at that moment, she had only one. As if she had only the one who was not there.

I don’t know where he is. I went one way and he went the other. That’s all I know!

In the morning she called the Search and Rescue team.

He dug the grave with a shard of rock and his hands.

There was nothing else, and that was right. It was real magic he was doing here—not evil magic, though it was bloody and dark. This burial at the tower’s heart was the true end, the only proper kind of end, which is also a beginning. He was setting a foundation stone; he was planting a seed. He dug the grave with his hands in the hard, stony earth, shedding blood into the dirt where it would mingle with the Tyrant’s, and that, too, was right. It was his own power he was burying here; his spell. He shed sweat into the tower’s foundations, and tears. He vomited a thin acrid bile of remorse and fear. And it was all right, it was
right,
this is what magic
is.