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

group hove into the children’s view, carrying a kind of mast or cross, on which hung the shape of a man – or not the shape of a man but, Fitz realized, a man. An actual man. He was tall, fair-haired, and dressed in a loose white gown. His hands and feet had been strapped to the mast on which he was carried, his arms pulled back over the crossbar and tied behind him. He looked delirious, as if he, too, were chanting in time with the monody rising from the Officers before him and the shouts and acclamations made by the rout that surrounded him.

Now for all his fear and anxiety, Fitz couldn’t help but break the silence.

‘Is that a cross?’ he asked. ‘Are they crucifying him?’

It’s revolting.

The men carried the mast into the centre of the hall, immediately adjacent to the Sad King, and set it down. There it stood, as the servers backed away like cats fought into a corner, and the Officers advanced. They circled the mast and the man, his head now down, chanting and shaking their fists in time, stepping sideways in a revolving procession, leg over leg, ever faster, ever more violent, their chanting now ringing high and low registers in call and response, while the Serfs, fought back, returned, poured round the ring of Officers circling, so forming an outer ring of heckling cacophony that sounded to Fitz like brittle sticks rattling in a tempest, or like fire ripping through a dry wood, every instant a new explosion of sound: relentless, undiminishing, eternal.

‘No,’ said Dina. She still rocked on her knees, and Fitz wasn’t sure, now, if she weren’t forcing her forehead into the iron mullion of the window before her, gently but with deliberation making that oldest motion of suffering. ‘It’s not a crucifixion. There’s an old story about sailors sailing in the Mediterranean past the island where the Sirens sing – terrifying, beautiful women, partly human, partly fish, scaled but also voluptuous, their music like the salt water from which it’s partly made – the more you drink it, the thirstier you become. It’s said these sailors coveted the song of the Sirens, yearned to hear it, to know it, to have it revealed in all its awesome clarity, while at the same time to resist and to reject it, to preserve themselves from it. So they had themselves tied to the masts of their ships, so that even if they cried to be released, to be allowed to drown and die in the throes of enchanting sea rhapsodies, the cords round their wrists and ankles would protect them. From themselves. He isn’t being crucified. He’s being pushed to the limits of his reason. He climbed that pole willingly, I promise you.’

Fitz’s attention was so fully engaged by the square of light before him, and all it contained, that he didn’t hear the tolling of the hour bell – from a belfry two courts behind – until it had stopped ringing.

Dina stopped rocking.

‘That was ten bells,’ she said. She sprang up from the bed and was across the room in what couldn’t have been more than a single step. ‘I’m late. Good thing I’m quiet on my feet.’

She stopped in the doorway, as if listening down the dark tower stairs. Then she turned, and her face, catching only the palest shadow of a light, floated in a void.

‘Little brother,’ she said. ‘Promise me that you’ll not watch any more of it. Not on your own.’

She wasn’t making an appeal; this was an instruction.

‘Promise.’

Rules. He nodded, and turned away from the window, sitting down heavily in the darkness.

And then she was gone.

Fitz lay on his bed, turned towards the bright shape of light cast on the high opposite wall. Now that he could no longer see the form and motion of the ritual below, he could barely resolve the patterns of near-inaudible music that reached him, and he wondered how much of what he had heard before he had only imagined. A low thrum or drone was all he could be certain of, a noise like cicadas that seemed to rise, perhaps, or fall – though as he listened on, the rising seemed to become the falling, and the falling the rising, until he wasn’t sure what he was hearing, or if he was hearing anything at all. In frustration he turned over, drawing the blanket round him and trying to think of some more familiar, some more empty and undisturbing thought.

He had watched spiders at rest in their webs. They were not at rest, but vigilant. No matter the hour of day or night, the size of the web, the rain, the wind – if a fly were to become entangled in the sticky cords, it could only be a matter of time before the spider scuttled to the place. The movement was mechanical and the response programmed, as regular and reliable as the shape of the web itself, spun from some plan kept in an old book on a back shelf in the dusty archive of time. But twitch the web, and the weaver could not help but answer.

Fitz got to his knees, drawing the blanket round his shoulders in the cool night. He kneeled again before the bottom pane of the leaded window, and looked.

The young man with fair hair, still dressed in his white gown, still hung from the mast in the midst of the hall. But around him the Serfs and Offs had fallen quiet or almost quiet, and were circling, two concentric rings in opposed motions. From the room a sort of murmur rose, as of a colony of birds at rest – a white or a blank sound, presaging fury.

Suddenly the revolutions stilled. The room for a long breath – Fitz held his – stood static. From the back of the hall, someone was approaching. All eyes were on him. The Serfs parted to allow this figure in, then the Offs. Dressed in a