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

‘It can’t be,’ said Fitz.

Mr Ahmadi took him by both arms. ‘Tell me what you heard,’ he said.

‘It sounds as if she’s up there,’ said Fitz, pointing.

She’s at the top of the island.

‘That’s what I heard, as well,’ said Mr Ahmadi. The noise of the boat’s engine had cut out, or gone behind the island. They both feared what that might mean. ‘Come on.’

Side by side, hand over hand, they climbed. There were moments when Fitz thought he might tumble backwards, or lose his grip on the rocks or plants round which his fingers, perhaps too lightly, perhaps too hastily, had closed. There were moments when the pain in his thighs, which seared with hot cramps at each new push, nearly threatened to overwhelm him. There were moments when he couldn’t pant fast enough, couldn’t force his mouth and throat open wide enough, to take in the air that his body demanded in order to go on. But he did go on, hardly slipping behind Mr Ahmadi’s big lunges as he raced back up the rocky slope. In his thought, again with every step, with every handhold, was the sight of her fingers slipping from his, the sight of his joints, white and exhausted, relaxing.

When they next heard Navy’s voice, it seemed to come from beneath their hands.

‘Quickly,’ said Mr Ahmadi.

They had stopped abruptly on a rough section of tumbled and shattered stone, the debris left behind from an ancient rockfall. Above them, the clear line of the island’s summit in this place lay broken, as if a huge chunk had slid down the face of the slope. In the falling light it wasn’t easy to distinguish loose from fixed material, the basalt from the seam of sandstone that in places lay beneath it. Mr Ahmadi crammed and inveigled his fingers as deep as he could inside the complex texture of pebble, rock, boulder and slab, over and over searching for purchase before yanking with the full power of his back whatever he could release. Again and again he found himself pulling against the solid fabric of the cliff, and was forced to release it, to try again. Fitz followed him, trying to prise little, then larger pieces from the puzzled lattice of sharp and unyielding stuff. They clawed and picked, probing and catching at impossibilities. Fitz pulled with his legs, straining alike at both little and weighty things; sometimes he found his fingers locked as if in concrete, while at other times he heaved only to sprawl backwards with almost empty hands. He longed to find that stone, the one that would unlock the whole riddle of the scree, the one that, plucked from its matrix, would open the others as a key might a lock.

And then it happened on him, as an arrow long feathering the shifting air at last, somehow, hits its mark. It was the pattern of the pieces on the board, the last mansūba the Master had shown him before his arrest: the Giant’s Almanac.

Al-manac: the place where the camel kneels, and the end of the journey.

The stone that holds the others will not be a free stone. It will sit at the centre, at the base, and every other stone will weigh down on it. If I am to move that stone, it will have to be small, and very, very tightly wedged.

‘Stop,’ he said to Mr Ahmadi. ‘Stop.’

‘What is it?’ Mr Ahmadi looked up, still, sensing some danger. His eyes roved fast to the high ground above them.

‘Step back. Step to the side. I have an idea.’

Mr Ahmadi looked at him from very close. In his eyes Fitz saw the light of the setting sun, tumultuous and searing. Without a word he clambered away, and crouched half-hidden in the evening, low, furled in his cape.

Fitz closed his eyes for an instant. He pictured himself a spider, long legs and arms jointed, stable, and fast. Almost without looking, but feeling his way, he scuttled downslope, pulling his gaze back in the dim light so that it seemed to centre in him, so that he seemed to see with his touch, sensitive to the tension in the rocks beneath his hands and feet as if he were stepping not on scattered rocks, but on wound and woven threads, feeling their twist and their twining, noticing with his eyes but much more with the rippling nervous sense of his spine the story that the rocks were telling, the debts that each owed the next, their weights and angles, their manifest and hidden energies, the way they passed the rain between them and withstood the screaming winds, their basking radiance in the sun as the heat cracked through them, their gravity, their song, their silence, their cold nights and their lichen faces. He felt for the lucky place, for the navel, letting his body be the judge of their body, his centre the measure of their inwardness.

Let me be lucky.

He didn’t see the stone. He knew it, and his hands closed round it as the mind might close on an idea, or the mouth on a word, composing it even in the breath of its delivery. He pulled it, wishing and believing. He pulled it, willing the cliff to speak its mind, and in the same motion – lithe as a cat – sprang away.

A heavy stone crunched into another with a short, sharp, thud. For a brief interval, no more than a breath, nothing else happened. But then another rock turned, as if revolving in its mind with long and grating deliberation on some matter of immense weight and pressure. As it turned, the slope came alive. Fitz clambered further back as the big slabs began to shift and slip, fractured shears of stone settling old imbalances and answering questions that had long hung slung and depending between them.

It was all over in a few seconds. Mr Ahmadi had lost no time, not even seconds; the moment the stones began to move, he had