The Greenstone Grail: The Sangreal Trilogy One

If she was hostile, Rianna didn’t appear to notice. ‘Who was his father?’ she asked. There was a note of boredom in her voice, as if the question was automatic rather than inquisitive, but the narrow eyes were intent. Or so Annie imagined, though in the sombre interior of the bookshop it was difficult to be sure.

‘He was my husband,’ she answered, and there was an instant when Rianna appeared to freeze, perhaps recognizing the snub, but it passed, and she turned away, and left the shop without further questions.

She seemed more interested in Nathan than in my friendship with Michael, Annie thought, and she found this so baffling that she determined to mention it to Bartlemy, when a suitable opportunity arose.

In the kitchen at Thornyhill Bartlemy listened to the story in his usual unruffled manner. The cauldron of stock still simmered on the stove; Annie couldn’t recall a time when it hadn’t been there, and she had a sudden fancy that it was the same as the night she arrived, its contents stirred, sampled, augmented, but never changed, growing richer and more flavoursome over the years. The smell that drifted from beneath the lid still made her mouth water, and a mug of that broth – something Bartlemy doled out only rarely – satisfied hunger and warmed the heart like nothing else. ‘Do you ever change your stockpot?’ she asked him.

‘Good stock needs time,’ he said. ‘The longer the better.’

‘How long?’ Annie inquired; but he didn’t answer.

‘Don’t worry about this Rianna Sardou,’ he said at last. ‘She’s probably just curious.’

‘Why should she be curious about Nathan?’ Annie persisted. ‘She must know of him through Michael, but … why ask about his father?’

‘It may have been just a shot in the dark. She may be the inquisitive type. Has she ever seen him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. He likes Michael, so I expect he would’ve mentioned meeting his wife.’

‘Mm. Well, no doubt the truth will become evident in due course. Events – like this stock – take time to mature. You are young, and impatient.’

‘Not that young,’ Annie said. ‘I’m thirty-six.’

‘How old is Rianna Sardou, do you suppose?’

‘Late thirties … forty … Older than Michael, I think. Why?’

‘I just wondered,’ Bartlemy said.

When she had gone, he sat in the living room with Hoover, drinking sweet tea and gazing into the fire. ‘Why did I come here?’ he asked of no one in particular, but Hoover cocked an ear. ‘I read the signs, but I have never been one to follow such things. There have been few portents for me, over the years. All I ever wanted to do was heal sickness, and cook. Two sides of the same coin, Rukush. Drugs and potions cure illness, good food makes the body strong, and great food – ah, great food nourishes the soul. I can prepare a dessert that will turn a peasant into a poet, I can soothe the tyrant’s rage with soups and sauces, I can roast a sirloin so tender that it would make a proud man humble and an atheist believe in God. That was all the power I ever wanted. But when I saw a fantasy in the smoke I came here, and I waited. And the day Annie knocked on my door I knew that was what I was waiting for. Annie and the child. But still I don’t know why. There are always more questions, less answers. I think it is time to draw the curtains close, and make a different fire.’

When the last of the logs had burned down he cleaned out the grate and pinned the curtains together against prying eyes. Even so, it was far into the night before he lit a new fire, feeding it not with wood or coal but with bluish crystals that spat and cracked after too long in storage. The flame they emitted was also bluish, and cold-looking, and it filled the room with a pale chill light. Presently he threw some powder on it which seemed to be damp, turning the flame to smoke, and the room darkened again, and the chimney was closed off so the smoke could not escape, and the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy made a gesture, a little like that of the man in Nathan’s dream, and the smoke was sucked into a cloud which hovered in one place, and there was a whirling at its heart. Vague colours flickered in its depths like trails of light. Then the whirling steadied, and the colours condensed, and in the midst of the smoke there was a picture.

A cup. It looked mediaeval or older, with a wide bowl and a short, thick stem entwined in coiling patterns that seemed to shape themselves into runes and hieroglyphs. It was made of opaque glass or polished stone, but it glowed as if endowed with secret life, and appeared to be floating in the green halo of its own light. The thread of a whisper came to Bartlemy’s ears from nothing in the room. Then the light vanished and the cup was falling, clattering onto a floor somewhere, rolling back and forth on the arc of its rim. A human hand descended slowly, and picked it up. ‘The Grimthorn Grail,’ Bartlemy murmured. ‘One of a hundred – a thousand – that lay claim to the ancient legend. But it was sold abroad, and lost in the turmoil of war, and the Thorns who had failed to care for it are long gone …’

The vision of the cup was replaced by a muddle of dim shapes, all unclear, but he thought he could make out a running figure, coming towards him. The image was too dark to see properly but he had an impression of breathlessness and fear, and shadows following, swarming on its heels, and in the quiet of the night there was the sound of whispering, reaching out from the smoke. It seemed to him that it was the same whisper he had heard a few minutes earlier, though louder, and with different words, different purpose. But he couldn’t be sure, since the words were indistinguishable, the purpose unrevealed. The picture sombred and was lost, and other images succeeded it, changing swiftly, some distinct, some vague and blurred. A small chapel with a cloaked man going from candle to candle: the lighted taper picked out his profile as he bent his head, the nose outthrust like a broken spar, the lipless fold of the mouth, the eyes sagging between multiple lids. The candles burned with a greasy flame, showing a gargoyle-face peering from a stony arch, and a low altar without a cross. Then the scene dissolved into a wood with tangled trees, maybe the Darkwood – then the flash and sparkle of a river in sunshine – a cage or grille, and hands that shook the bars – a wood in springtime, with a brown twig-legged creature lurking in the hollow of a tree – the river again, only this time there was a face beneath the water, and rippled sunlight flowing over it, but he knew it wasn’t drowned. Then back to the cloaked man, raising his arm, and a sudden blaze of fire, fire in the chapel, fire in the wood – and lastly, for no reason that Bartlemy could understand, a shingle beach in the drear light of a winter’s morning, and the ebb and surge of grey waves, and a man who seemed to have come out of the water, wearing a hood that covered his entire head.

Bartlemy rose from his chair: he had used few crystals, and he assumed the visions were over. ‘There is a pattern here,’ he told Hoover, ‘if only I could see it. Possibly the shadows that hounded Annie are connected to the Grimthorn Grail – but they pursued her to this place, not from it, and the Grail has not been here for nearly a century. Who sent them – if they were sent – and how? Such a sending would take power. Josevius Grimthorn is long dead; could his influence live on?’

Hoover made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl, and Bartlemy, who had bent to unblock the chimney, glanced back into the smoke. It was already thinning, but for a few seconds he saw another image there, too dim to identify, a woman with grey hair in a bun, leaning forward over a shallow basin full of some cloudy liquid, and briefly, very briefly, looking up at the woman, out of the basin, a reflection that he knew was his own face.

For an instant his placidity vanished: he spoke one word, and the smoke was scattered into wisps which fled into every corner of the room. ‘Careless!’ he apostrophized himself. ‘I do these things so rarely – I never much liked conjuring – but there’s no excuse for such a slip.’ He removed the screen from the flue, and the smoke sneaked out. Then he took a bottle out of a cupboard – a bottle that was grimed with age rather than dirt, like something retrieved from a shipwreck – unstoppered the neck, and poured himself a very small glass, hardly more than a thimbleful. The liquor was almost black and it smelled darkly fruity and overpoweringly alcoholic. Bartlemy sat down again to savour it.

Hoover raised his head hopefully.

‘No you can’t,’ said his master. ‘You know it won’t agree with you. Well, well. Euphemia Carlow … Where does she fit in, I wonder? Time was when her kind were happy to curdle the milk with a look and cure warts for a farthing, but now … the world changes. Still, she must always have known what I am, or guessed. She’s no fool, if less wise than she wishes to appear. Let’s hope that what she has seen will be a warning to her. Curiosity is no good for either cats or witches.’

In April, Nathan turned thirteen. ‘You were a spring baby,’ Annie recalled. ‘You came with the swallows.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be a stork,’ Nathan said with mock innocence.

Annie laughed.

Michael had bought a boat, not an inflatable with an outboard motor but a twenty-six-foot sailboat which he said he would take down to the sea from time to time. He had done quite a bit of sailing when he was younger, he explained, and a boat this size he could handle on his own. For Nathan’s birthday he offered to take him, George and Hazel downriver, weather permitting. Nathan was obviously thrilled at the idea and Annie suppressed a tiny pang, which she knew to be unworthy, that he preferred an excursion without her. ‘Why don’t you come?’ Michael had said, but Annie declined.

‘I get seasick.’

‘On a river?’

‘I get seasick on a bouncy castle.’

At the last moment Nathan said he would forgo the treat, he wanted to spend a family day after all, but Annie, undeceived, dealt summarily with that. She saw them all off around noon, sweater-clad and life-jacketed for the sea-going part of their trip, and then returned to Thornyhill with Bartlemy. A suitable birthday cake had been prepared, and the sailors had wrapped several slices in foil to take with them, but there was a large section left, and Annie, Bartlemy and Hoover sat by the fire at teatime (it was not yet too warm for a fire to be unwelcome) and munched their way through a respectable portion of it. Annie talked about Nathan, as she so often did, proud of his academic achievements, but still happier at the person she felt he was growing into. ‘I’m being boring,’ she said, catching herself up short. ‘Boring on about my son.’

‘What mother doesn’t?’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘You know I’m not bored.’

‘It’s at times like this,’ Annie continued after a few minutes, ‘birthdays, and family times, that I wonder most about his father. Not – not Daniel, I can’t fool myself that he’s like Daniel. Maybe in nature, in some ways, but not looks.’

‘He could be a throwback,’ Bartlemy said lightly. ‘You shouldn’t worry about it.’

‘A throwback to what? And I don’t worry, that’s not the word. I just feel I ought to know. One day soon he’s going to ask, and I’ll have to tell him, but I’ve no idea what I’m going to tell him. Have you … thought about it any more?’

‘I’ve thought about it a great deal,’ Bartlemy said.

‘Will you tell me what you’ve thought?’ Annie said a little shyly.

Bartlemy set down his plate with the remainder of a piece of cake. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you must understand this is pure speculation. We may never know the truth.’

‘I understand.’

‘We spoke once before of the Gate of Death. It has always been so called because death was supposed to be the only way to open it, but love, so they say, is stronger than death, and it may be that your love opened the Gate, and in a moment lost to memory you passed through, and returned with a child in your womb. Such unexplained pregnancies have happened before: I need hardly mention the most notorious case.’

Annie glanced up in bewilderment; then her face cleared. ‘I really don’t think Nathan’s the new Messiah,’ she said. ‘My God, I hope not!’

‘I too … but he is special. There is a maturity, a strength of character which distinguishes him. He’s a teenager now: it will be interesting to see if he displays the wayward behaviour usually associated with that age.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’ Annie said. ‘If he doesn’t start being rude to me, and having moods, and playing very loud music in his bedroom, and smoking pot and taking E, and treating me as an embarrassment? Is that when I should worry?’

She wasn’t quite joking, and Bartlemy smiled only a little. ‘If you want to,’ he said. ‘Worrying doesn’t achieve anything, but we all do it. If you need to worry that Nathan gives you no real cause for anxiety … Exactly. Where were we? You passed the Gate, or may have done, and became pregnant, so you believe, in that moment. Not your boyfriend’s child: that seems fairly obvious. There are worlds without number beyond the Gate, Powers which rarely touch our lives so nearly. Once in a while, however, those Powers concern themselves with our immediate affairs. Not in my experience, nor that of anyone I know; but it has happened. Maybe there is some task to be done, some destiny to fulfil – mind you, I’ve always had my doubts about Destiny: she’s a temperamental lady. I feel Nathan was born for a purpose, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a doom which only he can avert. Time will show. Whatever the truth, it seems clear Nathan has a father from outside this world, a being superior to us, in intellect and quality if not in essence, possibly one of the Powers themselves – anything is possible. You both have enemies, we know that much, enemies on what might be termed a supernatural plane; but a child that unique would attract attention from birth. The circumstances of his conception – the Gate opening for someone still living – would cause ripples that the sensitive might feel. Certainly there is – interest – in him, from many sources.’

‘Now you really are frightening me,’ Annie said. ‘Otherworldly beings – Nathan – a mythical task – all this can’t be true … can it?’

‘Someone sent the things which followed you,’ Bartlemy pointed out. ‘They may even have slipped into this world after you when the Gate opened: such shadows might do that. But of one thing you can be sure, if you have need of comfort. Whoever fathered Nathan has power of a kind we cannot imagine – the power to break the rules – and such an individual would never leave his son unprotected. Somehow, he will be watching over Nathan. Believe me.’

But do I want an alien power watching over my son? Annie asked herself. She finished her cake, and stroked Hoover’s rough head, and tried not to feel the future touching her with its shadow.

The sailors had made it to the sea via the little harbour of Grimstone, and enjoyed themselves very much learning how to tack out in the bay, where a brisk wind whipped the waves into scuds. The river journey back took more than two hours, since the Glyde was winding, and Michael observed the speed limit, so it was dark before they reached the mooring outside Riverside House. They had left the breeze behind in the bay and it was a clear still night with a young moon not bright enough to obscure the stars.

‘There’s the saucepan,’ Hazel said. ‘And Orion’s belt.’

‘Do you know your stars?’ Michael asked.

‘Nathan does.’

‘Not much,’ Nathan disclaimed.

‘You can navigate by the stars,’ Michael said, ‘if you’re out at sea. Look, there’s the Pole Star, and the Evening Star. They tell you what direction you’re going in. It’s like a route map up there.’

‘I thought you had radar,’ said George.

‘Yes, but a good sailor doesn’t need them. Not that I’m a good sailor – I don’t know the sky well enough.’

‘Do you know what that star is?’ Nathan asked, pointing. ‘The one just under Orion.’

‘No idea. I told you, I’m not really an expert. I just remember the easy ones.’

‘Is that the new star we found last year?’ said George. ‘The one that wasn’t on the chart?’

‘You found a new star?’ Michael was amused. ‘Well, it’s a busy sky up there. Maybe it was an old one that had popped out for a tea break when the chart was drawn up.’

Nathan found the opportunity to tread on George’s foot. ‘My star chart’s pretty basic,’ he said.

It was back, the unknown star, hanging above the village; he was almost sure it hadn’t been visible further downriver. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss it with grown-ups yet – not even a grown-up as nice as Michael. It was their star, they had located it, a private star shining over Eade.

‘Like the star of Bethlehem,’ Hazel said later.

‘That’s silly,’ George objected. ‘There’s nothing special about Eade. Even if it was the second coming, Jesus would have to be born in the hospital at Crowford, like my cousin Eleanor. That’s where the – the maternity unit is. And the Bethlehem star was big and sparkly: the three kings followed it from another country. Ours isn’t really noticeable at all. I still think it’s a UFO.’

‘Why would a UFO be interested in Eade?’ Hazel retorted scornfully. She thought George was getting much too assertive.

‘Why would a star?’

‘Shut up arguing,’ Nathan admonished. Michael joined them (he had been locking up the boat), and they cut through the gardens of Riverside House and set off along the lane towards the village. Nathan tried not to keep glancing upwards, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself, and he half fancied the star was looking back at him, gazing down from its viewpoint in the night like an unwinking eye.

THREE The Luck of the Thorns

Annie wondered a good deal about her conversation with Bartlemy and his theories concerning Nathan’s conception. On the one hand she dismissed them as bizarre, on a par with the worst of New Age mysticism, crystal power, geomancy, and the sort of people who talked about former incarnations. On the other hand, Bartlemy was not that kind of person, and the fold in her memory – the timeless moment locked away – was something she felt, dimly now, but still real even after the passage of over thirteen years. She could recall clearly the deep shock she had experienced, less from Daniel’s death than from her own involvement in it, her journey to another place, forgotten but still sensed, forever a part of her, forever changing her. It remained always the most intense event of her life … but founded on what? Fantasy – delusion – her imagination overworking in an attempt to blot out the abyss of her loss? No, she decided; in the end, you must trust yourself, because if not yourself, whom can you trust? Besides, she had seen them, she had heard their whisperings, and if shadows walked in this world, then anything was possible, in any world. She sat in the bookshop on a quiet afternoon, her fingers slackening on the computer keyboard, revolving these things in her mind, always returning to the same enigma: Nathan’s paternity. It was strange how she had accepted it, over the years, rarely troubling herself with speculation. And now …

For the first time, Annie found herself trying to go back – and back – into her memory, into the past, into the unopened rooms of her subconscious. She thought she must have been afraid to remember, to even make the attempt, but now it was necessary, it was urgent. She pictured the pallor of that hospital room, Daniel lying there, the bruising on his face dark, dark against the whiteness of his skin, white bandages, white pillow … Daniel slipping away from her … and the sudden opening of his eyes, and the love in them that stabbed her, even now, making a wound that would always be fresh, always raw, as long as her heart beat. She clung to that moment, and shrank from it, because beside it all the other moments of her life were as shadows and half-lights; but this time she knew she must go beyond it, opening up the pain, reaching into death itself. Her fingers slid from the keyboard; her face emptied. There were impressions – colours – a spinning sensation – falling into softness, warmth, touch. There was a love enfolding her, mind and body, filling every pore, eclipsing both heart and thought, absorbing her into its passion and its potency. Daniel’s love – it must be Daniel – but Daniel had given much, and taken little, and this was a love which took everything, all that she was, and all that she had, and gave only on its own terms, in its own way. A great gift, a gift that was worth the price, though she paid with her life and her soul …

There was a violent jolt, and her head was in her hands, and the world slid back into place. She looked up, and saw the bookshop, and her current screensaver, fish swimming through a coral grove, and the spiralling dust-motes caught in a ray of sunshine from a small side window. Gradually her pulse steadied, but she didn’t move. After an hour or more, she got up and went to make tea.

When the tea was ready she returned to the table, sat down, sipped, pressed a few keys on the computer, tapped out an e-mail to other dealers about a rare first edition she was trying to obtain for a client. But her thought was elsewhere. She had listened to Bartlemy’s theory, but hadn’t really digested the implications. Something – someone – had taken her, in the instant of Daniel’s death, and made her pregnant. She had been invaded and violated, when she was open and vulnerable, when she had offered her whole being, to Daniel, for Daniel – but it was not Daniel who had accepted. Some alien power had seized her and used her, drawing a veil in her mind to blind her, leaving her with … Nathan. She loved Nathan as much as she had loved Daniel, though differently, but in that moment it didn’t matter. A slow-burning anger mounted in her, like no anger she had ever known, a white fire with which she could have torn down the walls between worlds, and stormed across the multiverse to find her ravisher. He had imprinted her with his spirit, but she would tear him out, and take back the life he had riven from her, and the love he had poisoned, and the soul he had left broken or benumbed. Her heart raged until the tea grew cold, and the fire died within her, and the tears came and came and would not stop.

Hazel Bagot found her there, when she came round to borrow a book for school. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, horrified. ‘Annie, Annie, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Annie sobbed, struggling for self-control, and Hazel put her arms round her, awkwardly, embarrassed to find an adult weeping with such abandon, though she had seen her mother cry, often and often. Her bracelet caught in Annie’s hair, pulling it sharply, so she started with the pain, and Hazel sprang back, stammering an apology, and ran out into the street. And there was Michael, walking towards her, and she dragged him inside, though he offered little resistance, and left him to do what he could in the way of comfort, while she headed home to brood on the mystery of it, with Annie’s hair snagged on her bracelet.

In the shop, Annie laid her head against Michael’s shoulder, and wept herself to a standstill.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Can I help?’

‘No. Thanks. It’s just … something a long time ago, something I never understood … never realized till now.’

‘Can you tell me?’

‘No. Sorry. It’s too …’

‘Too private?’ he suggested.

‘Too difficult.’ She looked up at him, red-eyed, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand, like a child. ‘Excuse me. I need a tissue. Possibly several.’

‘I’ll get them.’ He got up. ‘Where –’

‘Loo paper. In the bathroom. Upstairs on your left. But you shouldn’t …’

He ran upstairs, returning presently with a skein of toilet paper.

‘Thank you,’ Annie said again, feeling helpless and rather foolish. She blew her nose vigorously, wondering what she could say, unwilling to lie when he was being so kind.