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

shadows on this side of the island gave the cool sea wind a bitter edge, so much so that beneath his sodden wool coat Fitz shivered. He scanned the water below as they continued to come round the ledge, bearing ever right, but here, too – between the island and the mainland – the seas were resolutely empty.

Mr Ahmadi had stopped in a narrow place. Pushing fast past a spine of rock that jutted from the wall, they almost collided with him. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on the water below.

‘That’s where I would have liked to have moored, if we could,’ he said. ‘If the wind had allowed it.’

They followed his gaze. Below them the water appeared to be swirling, heaving, turning in a massive frothing spiral that seemed to flush the sea much as water swirls round the bowl of a basin when you pull out the plug.

‘Is that a whirlpool?’ asked Navy. It was clearly a whirlpool, and a powerful one. Fitz could see that Navy was already scanning the local area for clues as to what had caused it, and was no doubt formulating in her imagination a complete map of the probable bed of the ocean lying beneath.

‘Anyone coming from the coast, from the mainland –’ Mr Ahmadi was gesturing back into the evening, towards the coast from which they had sailed – ‘say, two hundred or three hundred years ago – would have rowed, or sailed. And anyone rowing would have tried to put in just here, the nearest approach, the easiest foothold on the island. They never would have seen this tidal run. That must be why –’

‘Why no one has ever discovered the Kingdom?’

Mr Ahmadi didn’t answer. Like Fitz, he was scanning the seas. His thoughts had turned somewhere else.

They carried on round the east side of the island. Here the rocky ledges opened up into a broader, scalable face, and one by one, Mr Ahmadi first and Navy bringing up the rear, they picked their way across its loose strew of shale and moss. The slope was just steep enough that a fall could be awkward, or in places dangerous, and Fitz was conscious of Navy’s hands behind his feet, of the quick reflexes she had shown on the sea, of that hidden power in her shoulders – and grateful for it all. For what seemed an hour they made slow progress up the inclined face of the cliff, skirting patches of crumbling stone, but reaching for handholds among the rough tufts of thrift and samphire that seemed to grow from every crack and crevice in the rock. In the island’s wind shadow they found themselves shielded from the worst of the gusts, but while Fitz was grateful for a respite from the wind’s prising fingers, he was – equally – impatient to get back into the open, to a vantage from which he could once more scan shorewards for any sight of the other boat.

When they reached the standing stone, Fitz’s first thought was that it seemed taller than he had expected. Seven or eight feet across, and wider at the base than at its top, it carried no mark of hammer or chisel – scoured by the sea and the rain, buffeted by winds and baked by the sun, broken here and there by ice and stained by lichen and moss and birds, it stood bare and honest, a simple table of all that had befallen the island in the years since the stone had first crowned it. Fitz had expected to find it before some ancient cave or temple, like a door that had been rolled or lifted into place, guarding the entrance; but instead the stone appeared to stand free and president, on its own, a simple and ambiguous monument to the ingenuity and strength of those who had raised it. Like a stalwart sentry or a faithful dog, notwithstanding its isolation and remoteness, it had endured.

It hasn’t been moved.

Mr Ahmadi had stopped several feet behind them. He stared at the stone, judging it, trying to make sense of the scene in front of them.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here. It doesn’t mean anything.’

Fitz felt a weight turn over in his chest, as if his blood, for some battle roused, had surrendered. He knew exactly what Mr Ahmadi meant. The stone, so visible from the sea, ought to have stood for something, or pointed their way to somewhere. It ought to have led them to something, or revealed the secret of the Kingdom. Why else was it so visible from so far?

‘Maybe it’s just a stone,’ Fitz said. ‘Maybe it’s just part of the island.’

Navy was running her hand along its surface. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Look at it. It’s obvious. The island stone is basalt, tuff, the sort of aerated igneous formation that was coughed up by volcanoes in the Ordovician. It’s everywhere on the coast around the Heresy. This is different – sandstone – and much older. It might have been deposited here during the last ice age, sure – there was a massive fast-moving ice sheet running south all along this seaboard, and it left chunks and boulders as big as this all over the place. But a glacier wouldn’t have left a menhir this size standing in this orientation. And it wouldn’t have carved it, either.’

With the sun starting to drop to the horizon behind them, Fitz could hardly make out the contours that Navy was tracing with her fingers.

‘These markings must have been deep, and they’re old. Hardly anything’s left,’ she said. ‘But if you run your fingers in it, you can feel how extensive it must have been. I think it’s writing.’

Mr Ahmadi paced from side to side of the narrow summit.

‘If the writing is illegible, it won’t be any help,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to find the tomb the old-fashioned way.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Navy. Her hands were still on the stone,