Corbenic Read online

  She was the one sounding irritated now but he wanted to know so he waited till they stopped at the junction and said, “What sort of things?”

  She glanced at him. On the wheel her hands looked oddly small, the crystals on her nails glinting. She wore frail black lace gloves with no fingers. “Look, Cal, I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just say we don’t all have the cozy little setup in Otter’s Brook.”

  And then it really was hard. Not to blurt out that she’d never seen anything like Sutton Street, that he could tell from her voice that she’d been to some good school and probably had a pony and an au pair and lived in a nice little suburban place in Somerset. That she’d never had to run the house at seven years old, shopping and cleaning and holding her mother’s head while she was sick and hiding the knives and hiding the bottles and all of it from the social workers and the teachers. But he kept quiet, so that when she dropped him off she said, “See you next week?”

  “Sure.” He opened the van door, and as he got out she said, “I wish you’d tell us what makes you so unhappy.”

  He stared at her in shock. “What?”

  “Hawk thinks so. So does Arthur. And it’s not just about Corbenic, though that has something to do with it.”

  He stepped back quickly. “Don’t be daft! I’m fine.”

  For a moment she looked at him, then leaned over and pulled the door closed. Through the open window she whispered, “Merlin was right about us both hiding.” She touched the painted web on her cheek. “This isn’t permanent. It can come off. But I’m not sure if yours will.”

  On the bus, all the way home, he brooded, obsessively picking at a tiny frayed thread on his sleeve. What was he doing with these people! Getting dirty and sweaty and learning junk about medieval warfare! He must be mad! Who did they think they were, talking about him like that, behind his back, discussing him? Hot, he looked at himself in the grimy window and swore he wouldn’t go back. He’d find other friends, he thought, or do without, because they weren’t anything like him. He liked things clean, and new and expensive, and he couldn’t understand why he wanted to be part of their crazy setup. It wasn’t him. Surely.

  At the Chepstow bus station he bought some takeaway food, the cheapest he could find, as if to punish himself. While he was waiting he put the sword under one arm and stood by the window looking out into the street, ignoring the loud kids that came in, hating their tasteless clothes and filthy sneakers, hating them. Then the sword dug in his ribs, bringing him back from his annoyance.

  There was a poster on the window. It was old, and people waiting had frayed its corners, and the adhesive holding it had softened so much that he could peel it off and it lay limp in his hand.

  MISSING FROM HOME, it said, and there was a name, Sophie Lewis, believed to be in the South Gwent area, and an address in Bath, and a photograph of a girl in a smart school uniform smiling shyly, her light brown hair curly, her teeth in an ugly brace. For a whole minute Cal looked at it. Then he reached in his pocket and found a pencil; slowly he took it out and shaded the hair black and straight. The sodden paper tore softly; he held it together, coloring the lips a darker shade. Then, carefully, thoughtfully, he drew a cobweb over one side of her face.

  “Your order, mate,” the shopkeeper shouted.

  Cal squeezed the paper to a tight ball and dropped it in his pocket. Some people, he thought angrily, didn’t know they were born.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Don’t you think it right I should go and see my mother,

  whom I left on her own in the wood called the Waste Forest?

  Conte du Graal

  “What IS that?” Trevor stood in front of the mirror straightening his tie.

  “Opera,” Cal said shortly.

  Around them the music soared, deep and strange. He was getting to like it. He couldn’t stop playing it.

  “I know that! I mean which one?”

  “Parsifal. It’s by Wagner. German.”

  “Oh, the Quest for the Holy Grail. All that stuff.”

  Cal’s pen paused over the paper. “What?”

  But Trevor was absorbed in the accuracy of his tiepin. “Percival the wise fool,” he said absently.

  Cal sat rigid. “Who was Percival?” he whispered.

  “He left his mother behind and went off to be a knight.” Trevor stepped back and studied his appearance. “Does this look straight to you?”

  Cold, Cal nodded. He was doing an assignment for college, but the figures kept jumping around in his head, so he put the pen down and said, “Going out with Thérèse?”

  “Business. Round Table dinner.”

  Cal almost snorted with laughter.

  Trevor looked at him curiously. “What’s got into you? And why opera? Most kids of your age are into grunge and garage and all that claptrap.”

  “I like the finer things,” Cal said acidly.

  “Like that tie.”

  Cal frowned. Yesterday he had had his first month’s salary; he had gone into the bank and asked for the balance of his account and stared at it in delight in the porch, pushed past by irate shoppers. Then he’d deducted the rent for Trevor and it hadn’t looked so great. Food for the next month. Christmas presents. And he should send something home.

  But two shops down was the classy men’s wear window he looked in every morning on the way to work, and he’d gone in and bought the tie. Palest gray silk. Expensive. Tasteful. Designer.

  Signing the check had been a moment of real pleasure; he had taken the slim box home wrapped in tissue paper and felt buoyed up by it, happy, almost as exhilarated as when he did well in the fighting with Hawk. At last he was getting somewhere, starting to be what he wanted to be, well dressed, confident, well-off.

  Thérèse had seized on the box and opened it almost as soon as he’d got into the house. For a second he had been nervous, but she had whistled and felt the silk with her carefully manicured fingers.

  “Nice! Pricey?”

  “A bit. But it’s for work.”

  She had held it up to his neck. “It suits you. You always know what you want, Cal. You’re like your uncle.”

  But he still hadn’t sent any money home.

  Now Trevor turned from the mirror and picked up the cream coat lying over the arm of the chair. He checked the pockets absently; watching him, Cal knew he was working out how to say something, and knew only too well what it would be. It had been coming for days.

  Silver lighter, wallet, mobile phone. Trevor shrugged into the coat. Then he turned away and picked up his cashmere scarf and said it. “What are you doing about Christmas, Cal?”

  At once Cal knew his mother had phoned again. He put the pen down and stared ahead. “She’s rung then.”

  “Twice this afternoon. Look, I know how you feel.” He turned, and looked away, down at the CD player. “You don’t want to go back. I know, I’d feel just the same. But . . . well it’s Christmas. I think you should go, just for a day or so. If you’re short of the fare, I’ll pay it. She’s making a big effort. She’s desperate to see you.”

  Cal was silent. A long time.

  Trevor went awkwardly to the door. “Thérèse and I are going away on Christmas Eve, so you’d be stuck here on your own otherwise, and that’s no fun.” He turned, as if a sudden thought had struck him, and said firmly, “And I don’t want those eco-warriors round here while I’m gone. That’s totally, totally OUT, Cal. I have to say I wouldn’t have thought they were your type.”

  “They’re not,” Cal growled. “I’ve finished with them.”

  “Good. Well ring her, will you?” Trevor opened the door and paused, fussing with his scarf. His voice was a little softer when he said, “You’ll feel better when you tell her. She’s your mother, after all. You owe her that much.”

  When he’d gone and the car had roared away the music rose from its background into a great soaring crescendo of passion.

  After all, Cal thought, white with fury. After all the years of falling as
leep in class because he’d been up all night waiting for her. After all the parents’ evenings she hadn’t gone to, the school plays she hadn’t seen, all the lies, all the days she hadn’t moved from the squalid sofa while the rubbish piled up around her. All the smells, the vomit, the nights under his pillow with a chair jammed against his door and next door’s baby wailing and her voice, talking, answering, screaming at the nonexistent people to go away, to stop, all the arguments, the long tirades of abuse, the holidays he’d never been on, the birthdays he’d loathed, the kids in school he’d had to fight. Years of living with two people in one, never knowing who’d be there when he got home.

  He hated her. For a long time he hadn’t been able to think that, but he could think it now, from this distance. He hated what she’d done to his life. He wanted to love her but it was too late for that; sometime, years ago, all that had washed out of him and left a tiny hard core of bitterness and resentment and utter, cold anger. It was too late.

  And Trevor couldn’t talk, because he had walked out of it years ago, and never gone back.

  For a long time Cal didn’t move, staring ahead. Finally he looked at the phone. He ought to make the call. Tell her.

  Instead he rang Sally. Her daughter answered; there was a wait, he could hear the television blaring and a baby screeching, then Sally’s voice, sounding breathless. “Hi, Cal. Nice to hear from you.”

  “How is she, Sal?”

  Sally breathed noisily. He knew she was picking her words. “Up and down, I suppose. She’s on this program, and it was doing her good. Meetings. Social events, you know. I suppose . . . it’s hard for her to keep it up, Cal. She’s missing you, boy.”

  “But she’s okay?” he asked desperately, wishing the answer.

  “She’s got you a Christmas present. Don’t faint.”

  He closed his eyes. “That’s a change,” he whispered.

  “And she says she’s going to buy a tree.”

  “Oh God, don’t let her.”

  “I’ll check it, or Ryan will. We won’t let her burn the place down.” Then she said, “You’ll be up for Christmas, Cal? She’s banking on it.”

  And all at once he couldn’t bear it anymore; his legs felt weak and his skin was cold with sweat and he said, “Yes. Of course.”

  He heard her silent relief. “That’s great! You can come round.”

  He didn’t want to go round. Not to talk rugby with Ryan. Not to crowd into the tiny sitting room, moving the piles of ironing. He said, “Tell her I’ll ring tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Is that music? God it’s loud, Cal.” The opera. He’d forgotten it.

  “See you, Sal.” The phone went down. He stared at it, face taut, hands clenched.

  Then he went and flung the papers off the table, and the pens, and the file of accountancy notes, and the chessboard with its glass and silver pieces, flung them with a bitter fury all over Trevor’s immaculate carpet, the chorus of singers so loud the walls seemed to shake, and he laughed, because there were no neighbors and no one to care or hear.

  He threw himself down on the leather sofa. And closed his eyes.

  He was in a chair. A golden chair. He was sitting in the wreckage of the banqueting hall of Corbenic, and had been there forever. So long that the chair had grown roots into the ground; so long that the weeds had crept over it. As he sat there the weight of ivy was heavy on his lap, smothering his legs; its palest green tendrils had reached as high as his neck. Shuddering, appalled, he pulled it off, feeling the tear of its supple fringed growths velcroing away from his sweater, dragging great armfuls off his chest and shoulders, and dumping them.

  Then he tried to get up, and gasped in agony. Pain shot through him. It seared him, like a spear thrust. Like a heart attack. Tears blinded his eyes; he felt sick, and then the intensity of it ebbed and it was a dull, endless ache down every channel of his body, every vein. And looking down he saw that the chair had wheels.

  There was a mirror. Dim, green-smeared, it showed him the room and the place where the door had been, the door the Grail had passed through, the door that didn’t exist, and it showed him a man and that man was him.

  Dark-haired, dark-eyed, tangled in ivy and bindweed, the ghostly white sweet-smelling flowers of it around the wheels of the chair, a man wearing his clothes, his face.

  “Bron?” he whispered. And the lips of the man in the mirror whispered it too.

  High in the roof, the osprey screeched. It looked down on him with its pitiless yellow eyes, and he sat rigid, remembering the ferocity of its attack on the castle battlements.

  And then Leo was there, leaning against the crumbling doorway, arms folded.

  “Now you know how it feels,” he said acidly.

  Cal struggled to stand. His legs had no feeling. He collapsed back in the chair, sweating, trapped in the nightmare.

  “It’s not me,” he hissed.

  “No?”

  “NO!” Somewhere there was music; not the soft flutes and harps of the Grail procession, but a wilder music, despairing, heartbroken. It was so loud he could barely hear his own voice as he shouted again, “NO! NO!” and then he was up from the sofa and the opera was all around him like a crowd, a ring of voices, the thunder of drums, the agony of violins.

  In an instant he crossed the room and hit the off button. The music stopped; then, as he turned, it burst back on, louder, and he spun and stared at the tiny red sensor on the CD.

  “I won’t go back,” he hissed, and he turned it off again, but it was still there; relentlessly the voices sang of their pain, of the beauty of the Grail, its splendor, its agony, its high enchantments, its healing.

  “Stop it,” he muttered, and banged the button again, then went and tugged the plug out, smacking it against the wall. But the music went on, it couldn’t stop, it would never stop till it reached the thundering crescendo of its chorus, and he didn’t know anymore if it was real or if it was in him.

  He turned and stumbled outside, slamming the door. The night was frosty. Without a coat, shivering, he ran. Out of Otter’s Brook, down the dark, lamplit streets, fast, his footsteps ringing under the town arch, past the drunks on the post office steps, under the glitzy gold and red of the Christmas Santas and reindeer.

  By the church he was breathless, and held on for a second to the railings. The dark bulk of the tower blotted the stars above him; gargoyles with grotesque outlines peered down. Above them a shadow flapped. Bats? The osprey?

  But the music was gone. He had outrun it. Here he heard only his heart, thudding as if it would burst, and his footsteps, and as he swung into the castle car park and around the Dell he was praying, praying they’d be back, that someone would be there.

  He slid and scrabbled down the mud bank.

  The castle was black. But parked in front of it, with smoke coming from the jaunty tin chimney, and the sunflowers looking wan and ghostly in the starlight, was Hawk’s van.

  He caught his breath.

  He waited a long time, getting calm, getting clean, rubbing mud from his hands, letting the sweat that soaked his back turn icy, before he walked up to the door and knocked. He was shivering, but that was the cold.

  When Hawk answered he stared. “Cal. Haven’t seen you for a few days.”

  “Been busy.” He shouldered his way into the wonderfully warm interior, saw the cat on Shadow’s lap, the pieces on the chessboard, the dirty dishes in the sink, the extravaganza of fabrics. The mess that he had left at home hurt his memory.

  “Hi,” Shadow said, surprised.

  Cal turned to Hawk, urgent. “I need to train every night. I want to fight in the Christmas display. I need to, Hawk!”

  Hawk folded his arms across his dirty vest. “All right. Calm down. What brought this on?”

  Cal sank onto a chair and wiped the soaked hair from his forehead. “I need to be here over Christmas,” he whispered.

  Shadow leaned over and moved the white knight. “What he’s not telling you,” she said, “is that it’s no
t that easy. You have to challenge someone first.” She looked up at him then, serious behind the web of lines. “A real contest.”

  He shrugged, careless.

  Until Hawk said, “With real weapons.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was not a more handsome knight in all the world.

  Conte du Graal

  “Are you sure?” Arthur said quietly.

  Cal looked down at the cracked slabs of the farmhouse floor. The kettle was boiling; Arthur waited till it switched itself off, then leaned over and poured the steamy water into all the mugs. Odd herby smells mingled.

  “I’m sure,” Cal said firmly.

  “Is he ready?” The Company’s leader looked across to Hawk, who gave a short sigh.

  “Probably.”

  Arthur stirred his tea. “Yes or no, nephew mine.”

  “Yes, then. He’s fast and has good control. Thinks on his feet. Parries well. Ought to build himself up more, though.”

  A few men laughed. Through the open window the eternal thwock of arrows thudded into straw targets. One of the Sons of Caw drank noisily and muttered, “He could fight one of us. We wouldn’t hurt him too much.”

  Cal frowned. He swallowed a burning mouthful of tea. Then he said, “I want to fight Kai.”

  No one spoke. They were all staring at him. He had a sudden frisson of terror. Then Hawk said, “No way,” and Arthur, at the same time, “That won’t be necessary.”

  “And why not?” It was Kai’s voice. Even before he turned Cal knew that the fight would happen now, that he had made the challenge in front of them all and Kai could not turn it down.

  The tall man had come in through the door with Shadow and Teleri and Bedwyr.

  Arthur said, almost sharply, “No. He’s young and foolish.”

  Kai laughed, a dry chuckle. “All the more reason to teach him a lesson. You heard the challenge, brother.” He turned. “All of you heard it.” Then he looked at Cal, came up to him, close. “Why me?” he said quietly.

  Cal shrugged. He wanted to say it was because they said Kai was the best, but that wasn’t the answer. And it wasn’t even because he was handsome, and arrogant, or because of the Armani coat or the spoiled T-shirt. It was for a reason Cal didn’t want to find. Instead he said, “Worried?” It was a mistake.