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

side, never near enough to capsize him, never near enough even to shake him. And still, he dropped.

The Rack and Fingal had disappeared. Fitz saw that the passage must have cleared again, or that some new hole had opened in the island’s face. Cool air was flooding the dark chamber, and the dust like genies swirled in the planes of light cast from the lanterns.

‘Fitz,’ called Clare. ‘We have to go.’

She leaned over the railing and put her arms down to Navy, pulling her up from the landing. The stairs, impassable, had been crushed by falling rocks. When Navy had scrambled to safety, Clare leaned back down for Ned. He was heavier. She almost couldn’t bear his weight.

‘There is one word more,’ said Fitz to Dina, ‘one that I missed out.’

‘Say it,’ she said. Her eyes were locked on his.

‘Albatross,’ he answered, and the breath flooded from him like centuries, like the vast swells of ocean and its roaring tempests as they subside beneath wings alighting. ‘The diver,’ he whispered. She took his hands.

‘Oh, little brother,’ she said.

There are holes worlds deeper than those dug in the earth.

The foaming water had disappeared entirely, and with it Mr Ahmadi. From the western end of the chamber, where the light of the dying sun had collapsed to a purple bruise, a char-crusted ember, through the open gap in the wall came a hideous shriek – and, behind it, the king of the albatrosses. With a balletic swiftness marked by no one, coasting on its broad wings it covered the length of the chamber in an instant, turned on a pin, and – gathering its wings around it – plummeted after Mr Ahmadi into the empty hole in the sea, and was gone.

Now the whole of the island of the tomb seemed to sway, and whatever the pillar or foundation on which it stood, it toppled. The tomb leaned across the void, moving very slowly, and with a heavy, seismic crunch crashed into the wall at the chamber’s side. From above, rocks tumbled down upon them – huge, shifting slabs and boulders of basalt. Fitz and Dina, thrown back against the wall but still on their feet, found themselves holding hands. As the dust settled in the light of the Rack’s two lanterns, they could see the dark night sky above them.

‘Fitz,’ called Clare from somewhere above. ‘I can get to you.’

He looked for her, through the swirls and rockfall. For a moment, no longer than a moment, the swirls of dust parted. Like a sea before a prophet they parted, and in that parting his eyes met Clare’s. Don’t you understand, said his eyes, that they will always come for me, and that as long as they are coming for me, you will never be safe? That you will never be safe from the loss of my love? Don’t you understand, said his eyes, that the kindest thing I can do is to leave you to think that I chose this?

He looked at Dina.

I will always love you anyway.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ she asked. ‘All this time.’

She brushed the skin around his neck. Fitz felt for the strap. But where he thought his fingers would close on the jaybird, they closed on something else.

He had forgotten. He had forgotten all this time.

It was a little bell. The little bell from the boat. It had always been there, from the beginning.

How did I forget? How did I forget all this time?

Dina reached behind his neck with both hands. She untied the knot.

‘The bell I gave you, that day. From the boat. That day when I found you hiding behind the broken mast, that day when our mother died, that day, little brother, when we made it to the shore alive. When we survived.’

She placed the little bell in his hands, and his palm closed round it.

‘And I tied it round your neck, so that I would never lose you again.’

Fitz looked at Dina through the dark swirling of dust, through the night and its thousands of years, through the tangled limbs of the living and the dead, and he saw the far blue of her eyes, that it was the blue of the horizon, the blue of the edge where the air and the water join.

‘Yes, I remember,’ he said. ‘I remember it all now.’

Love is a fact of the blood.

‘No,’ said Clare, as Fitz and Dina began to climb. Phantastes put his arms round her, and gently began to draw her from the cavern, up the tunnel to safety.

‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Clare’s voice – flat and refusing – fell among the stones falling across the cavern, thudding into rock, vanishing into the void of the fathomless tomb.

‘Let him go,’ Phantastes said, as he pulled and guided Clare through the debris, out towards the cool clarity of the evening, and to Ned and the boat already half-rigged. ‘This is the end of his story.’

The two children climbed through the dust and confusion, setting their feet carefully among the fallen slabs. As they scrambled together into the clear night air, Fitz opened his hand, and the little bell fell between the stones.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my agent at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, Adam Gauntlett, and to my editor at Penguin Random House, Ruth Knowles, for their patience, their support, and above all their guidance; although it must be said it’s not their fault that things turned out this way. To the skill, forbearance and good humour of Stephanie Barrett I owe the catching of many slips. The Mughal emperor Babur, Sinbad the Sailor, H. J. R. Murray, Ibn Sina, Emily Dickinson and Anne Carson were my constant companions in the writing of this book, and I thank them, too, for their words’ company. My colleague Andrew Marsham on several occasions gave me expert advice, which I have sought to follow, along with much indispensable information on bandits and