Corbenic

Chapter Twenty-three

Am I on the right road for the house of the Fisher King?

2nd Continuation

There were crystals hanging in the window. They swung softly in the drafts, and Cal watched the tiny brilliant rainbows they made on the walls, all moving together. He lay on the soft pillows, wonderfully comfortable.

Shadow’s spare room was twice the size of his old room in the flat, larger even than the bedroom at Trevor’s. The furniture was old and graceful, and the windows immensely tall, with white painted shutters that could close the night out. Now, late in the morning, he watched the sun, and thought of the Waste Land.

He had been wandering there three months. At least, out here it had been that long. For him, he didn’t know how long it had been. He could only remember fragments, the burning tree, the chapel. You couldn’t forget a whole quarter of a year. Unless your mind was breaking up.

In the comfort after his deep sleep he was oddly unworried. And that wasn’t like him. Maybe he should see a doctor. He examined the idea idly, mulled it over, saw himself in waiting rooms, and then explaining, trying to explain, to a man behind a large wooden desk. “It’s as if time went differently there. But Merlin said . . .”

The doctor would lean forward, interested. “Merlin?” he would say.

“Yes. One of Arthur’s men.”

The doctor would make notes rapidly.

Despite himself, Cal grinned and stretched. If he was going crazy, at least this morning he didn’t care. Until he thought of his mother.

He got up instantly, dressed in his borrowed clothes, and went downstairs, looking through the tall, sunny rooms of the house. Finally he found Shadow sitting out in a sort of conservatory, reading, a fat white cat on her lap. She looked up. “God, you can sleep!”

“I was tired.”

She was wearing the other clothes this morning, the ones she’d worn in Chepstow, the filmy black, the boots. It made her look more familiar, despite her clean face. She pushed the cat off. “Let’s go out for something to eat.”

It was holiday time and Bath was busy. Down in the town they found a small café full of American tourists and squeezed into a table at the back. Shadow ordered pizza and chips and Cokes and Cal said bleakly, “I haven’t got any money.”

She put a credit card on the table. “Daddy can pay.”

“Shadow . . .”

“Forget it. What did Trevor have to say?”

Cal sighed. The conversation had not been pleasant. “He was furious. Where had I been? Didn’t I know Thérèse was worried stiff? Didn’t I know the police in three counties were out looking for me?”

She nodded. “Sounds familiar. And when he’d calmed down?”

Cal drank the Coke. “Said the job was still there if I wanted it.”

“Do you?”

He gazed out at the packed streets. Then he said, “I used to dream, at home. All I ever wanted was somewhere clean, quiet. Everywhere I went I’d look at the big houses and be sick with envy of the kids who came out of them. I still am. I can’t just turn that off. And that takes money.”

Shadow waited till the waitress had put the plates down and gone. Then she said, “So that’s a no, then.”

He looked up at her, a sudden grin. “I suppose it is.”

“Sophie?”

She looked up, alert. Then said, “Hi, Marcus. Cal, this is Marcus. I told you about him.”

He was big, blond, expensive. Public school, by the voice. His sunglasses would have cost a few days’ salary. Cal stood up, found he was taller and enjoyed that. “Hi,” he said quietly.

Marcus looked at him, then at Shadow. “Thought we might go out somewhere tonight, if you’re interested. But. . .” he shrugged, “no bother.”

She smiled sweetly. “Maybe another time.”

“Fine.” He went, looking back once. Cal sat back down and glanced at Shadow. She laughed softly. “Perfect,” she said.

Afterward they went shopping, Shadow buying a strange hand-painted T-shirt for herself, and a sweater for him, even though he told her not to. Such casual spending appalled and thrilled him. It was like another world.

In the Body Shop he lounged while she picked over various shampoos, leaning against the green-painted counter idly. Then his gaze froze.

Leo was looking in through the window. The big man was watching Cal; as soon as he saw Cal notice him he turned and was gone in the flood of pedestrians. Cal yelled, “Shadow!” and raced out.

People buffeted him. He pushed through them, turned right up Milsom Street and ran, jumping impatiently out into the road where cars hooted. Up ahead Leo’s huge back was clear. He crossed into an alley. Just behind, Cal sprinted between vans, dodged a stroller, threw himself around the corner. “Hey! WAIT!”

The man turned. He was a total stranger.

Cal’s breath almost choked him.

Behind him, Shadow turned the corner, breathing hard. “Cal! Who was it?”

He looked around at the totally ordinary town, then at her face, the hidden concern. He rubbed his hair with a shaky hand. “I think it’s me, isn’t it?” he whispered.

You had to pay for deckchairs in the park. It was like you had to pay for everything in the world. Devastated, he sat there and knew he had imagined it all. Unless he could find Corbenic again. Unless he could find the Grail.

They both sat silent in the sun until she said, “Look, Cal . . .”

He sat up, interrupting. “I’m going to Glastonbury. Will you come with me?”

“Why there?”

“Merlin said in all the stories the Grail is there.”

“Merlin’s mad. I mean,” she said hastily, “he may be right about that, but this place you found . . . this hotel, was up north. Right?”

Suspicious, he looked at her. The truth came to him, blinding and brilliant as the flashing rainbows in the bedroom. “You don’t believe any of it. The bleeding spear, the Grail . . .”

“I think you stayed the night at some hotel. That you saw some . . . people carrying things. It must have been a bit odd.”

“A bit odd!” Aghast, he stood up and stared down at her. “I thought you at least would understand.”

Shadow bit a nail. “It’s like Hawk. He thought he was someone from the past. They all had this game, that they were immortals. I never knew if they were winding me up. Then I thought, they believe this. So I believed it. If you believe something hard enough, it comes true. In a way. What he said to you about the Grail is just another old story.”

He came and sat down. “You think I’m going the way my mother did.”

“I think you’re looking for something that’s not here. Maybe you’re looking for her. You won’t find her in Glastonbury.” It was cruel, he thought bitterly, and maybe Shadow thought so too, because she said quietly, “I never knew her, remember.”

Out of his anger he shrugged. “I often thought I’d like to tell you. Have someone to moan about it to.”

“Tell me now,” she said gently.

He didn’t know where to start. There was too much. The dirt, the drink, the time she’d come at him with the broken bottle. So he said, “Once, she cut herself.”

“What?”

“I’d come home late, and she’d cut herself. With the kitchen knife. Long, red slashes, on her arms. Blood everywhere, on her sleeves, the sofa, everywhere.”

Shadow was rigid. “What did you do?”

“Freaked out. Panicked. Mopped up. Got her to Casualty—God, we lived in that place. Locked up the knives. Lived with it, the terror of it happening again, rocked myself to sleep. Never told anyone.” He looked up, stricken. “There’s all that in me, Shadow, and I can’t get it out. And I swore to her I’d be back for Christmas, I swore I would and I didn’t go, and I knew, I knew what she might do! Don’t you see, I can’t live with that! I can’t!”

He was shaking. His voice was broken up. “I’ve coped, always coped. Made rules. Never admitted . . . But now I’m lost, Shadow. I’m in pieces. There’s nothing left.” He was sobbing at last.

Shadow put her arms around him and held him tight and they sat together in the sunlight for a long time till he was calm, kids on skateboards going up and down the path in front of them, wheeling, their voices high in the bright air. Finally, confused, he rubbed his face and pulled away and said, “You didn’t answer my question about Glastonbury.”

“I can’t come, Cal. I have to stay here now, and that’s your fault. I promised I’d finish my exams and I will. I don’t think you should go either, not on your own.”

“I’m not . . .”

She turned to him. “Look. Stay a few days. Think about it. You’ll feel better.” She sounded choked. Then she lay back in the striped deckchair and closed her eyes against the ripple from the river. “There are two sorts of life, aren’t there? The one that seems ordinary, like this, and then the reflection from it. Curved, shiny. All mixed up.”

He should have known. Leaning over the mahogany banister that night he heard her voice, low and urgent. “He’s not right. He’s been sleeping rough for three months and can’t remember any of it. And now this nonsense about Glastonbury. Yes, but he needs to be home!”

Maybe Hawk said something; she laughed, low, but she wasn’t amused. Then she said, “Tomorrow. First thing. I don’t know what to do, Hawk. Just get here.”

Back upstairs, he waited, watching his own gaunt face in the mirror. When she had gone to bed he sat there still, hearing the clock chime in the hall below, the slow cars in the street, the laughter of late-night drinkers. When he finally moved he was stiff; but he picked up the rucksack and went downstairs silently, and let himself out and walked down the long broad street without looking back.

Next morning, on the bus crossing the high plateau of Mendip, he thought of Merlin, because this was not how quests were achieved, not how the soul was saved, not squashed beside a fat woman with shopping bags and behind a kid defiantly smoking under a NO SMOKING sign. But he knew that unless he found Corbenic he would be lost, he could not move on. He would spend his life in regrets. He had caused his mother’s death, he had lied to the Company and betrayed Shadow back into the life she detested, and there was nothing he could do about any of that. But Bron was left. He might still be able to tell Bron he’d been wrong. And if Bron was real then he was not going mad.

In Corbenic, there might be another chance.

She would be waking about now. On the end of her bed she would find the CD, and would be staring at it. Listen to this, he had scrawled on the cover.

Outside, now Bristol was left behind, the countryside was wide and green, the buds on the trees bursting with fresh leaf, the sky blue and windy with high cloud. They travelled through villages he had never heard of, with names out of lost stories: Farrington Gurney, Temple Cloud, Chewton Mendip, and people got off and on and the crush eased and the smoker was gone and he could breathe.

And then the bus came down through a steep wood of birch and turned a corner, and before him he saw a wide plain, flat as a chessboard with its tiny fields, and rising out of it like a conical, mystical hill from a medieval painting, was the Tor, crowned with its ruined church.

At the town’s entrance the sign said THE ANCIENT AVALON. He hoped it still was. Though as he got off and a sudden shower turned the world gray, it seemed farther away from Corbenic than any other place that he’d been.