The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

The Master moved one of the ruby pawns, and with emphasis placed it in its correct spot. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is it. Remember it. It is the key that unlocks everything.’

The door burst open. The Registrar led the way, accompanied by the Rack and the Sweeper.

‘My Apprentice will be expected at dinner,’ said the Master, with sudden and elegant composure, as he rose behind the desk. His agitation was gone. He had put on his hat.

The Sweeper made way for Fitz to go. He was halfway to the door when the Master called him.

‘Fitzroy.’ He turned. The Sweeper, the Rack and the Registrar looked from Fitz to the Master, with suspicion. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ the Master asked.

For an instant Fitz was at a loss. And then he noticed his lamp in the Master’s hand, its leather covers bound tight with cord. He had forgotten it on the rocks, amid the rising of the dawn, after that long night passed shivering at the tombs. He had forgotten it, but the Master had not. Now he tossed it across the desk in a low arc; Fitz caught it in the pit of his stomach, with both hands.

‘My lamp,’ he said, for the Rack’s frowning benefit. ‘Thanks.’

He passed out of the door and down the stairs, straining to hear what was going on in the room behind him – but there was nothing. At the bottom of the stairs he passed others – Fellows of the Heresy – going up. They were carrying large canvas bags.

Fitz crossed the empty court to his staircase, and on shaking legs climbed the steps to his room. He opened the door and stood in the doorway. It had never seemed so empty; its emptiness had never seemed so much like emptiness.

A change had happened in him, without his noticing. Playing every afternoon on the shatranj board, he had begun to feel at home in the Heresy; but not because he was at home, rather because it reminded him of home. It was all as Navy had said. He didn’t fit here, any more than the Master did; and that’s what he could do for them, for all of them. He could remind them of the thing that they had lost, the place that they had left, the home that they were missing.

He sat at the little desk. No books were piled at its edge. He opened the drawer that lay in front of him. No papers, no pens were stored inside it. He had no drawings, no stories, no keepsakes. At home he had preferred this, had begged Clare to take the furniture out of his room and allow him to keep as little as possible in his few drawers and his cupboard. At the end of the day he took pleasure in the quiet and simplicity of his meagre living. He could fall asleep happily, knowing that he shared his little room with two books, eight articles of clothing, a pen and notebook, and a pair of binoculars. His little lamp. Now, sitting alone in his tower room, waiting for the bell to peal six, for the first time he knew why.

I didn’t need anything else, because I had Clare. I didn’t want anything else.

The less clutter had lain in the way, the more easily he had heard her stories. He had seen other children’s bedrooms: piles of clothes, and toys, and even litter on the floors, old ramshackle shelves loaded with unnecessary, sometimes unwanted stuff, their chests of drawers and wardrobes and cupboards and closets crammed with clothes, some of which they had outgrown but couldn’t quite surrender, some of which they had never liked, and wouldn’t even try on. Other children had hand-me-downs and souvenirs, tat from flea markets and pound shops, old schoolwork they hadn’t enjoyed and weren’t proud of, the packaging from birthday presents, pieces of lives they hardly cared for or had forgotten – if they ever lived them at all. Fitz had never wanted any of it, because he had had Clare, and her songs, and her stories, and her pictures. Her endless capacity for making. Everything she had ever said, or sung, every odd noise she had made in her workshop or in the garden, the least tread of her careful slippers on the squeaking floorboards of the downstairs hallway, had had its own space in his notice. Each one of these sensations now hung, framed, on the clean walls of his memory.

Now the clean, clean walls of his memory were all he had left.

I don’t even have the silver jay.

The bell pealed six.

Clare. Clare. Clare. Clare. Clare. Clare. How would he make it a week. I won’t even make it a day.

Fitz pulled himself to his feet, and took up the jug of fresh water that had been left for him on the window sill. He poured some water into the laver, and dipped the edge of a cloth in it. Slowly, as if he were wiping away a stain, or clearing a canvas, he began to wash his face. He scrubbed every part of it with an even, methodical motion. In his head he heard the music of oars on the river, the over-arcing swirls of unfurled petals in the close buds of roses; like them his hand turned, holding the cloth, wiping the dirt from his face and clearing a day’s grime from his neck. After, he cleaned his hands, first the backs, then the palms, and his forearms. He poured the excess water from the laver back into the pitcher, wiped out the bowl with his cloth, and set them together back on the sill.

He knew he didn’t have long until the meal would begin, but something in the air, or in the light, held him in a kind of suspension, as if he were a fly trapped in amber, or a fish snagged in a net. His hands moved over the buttons of his felt