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

Fitz found it completely engrossing. He looked at it for hours, and memorized every surface of the cliff, understood the paths taken by sea-surge and storm’s rain, when they crashed and ran down its face, saw how the cliff’s geology had exposed soft and porous rock to the elements, so that it broke and fell away over time, leaving the veins and shafts of harder, more durable stone to stand like pillars, or sinews, running up and binding the land together. He saw where at the summit of the cliff the topsoil had accumulated over a vulnerable spit of earth, a place that would soon collapse and thunder into the sea below, and be scattered on the low rocks and foam.

‘The effect of the stack is to disorder your sense of narrative. Things that happen before other things instead seem later, as if they have happened after other things. The present appears to be one, an unbroken continuity that stretches impossibly far back into the past. This is what we call “stacking” – it’s as if your brain gathers up all the different pieces of your life that form part of this logical or experiential “set” – all the things, say, that happen to you in this room with me – and treats them as if they are all happening in one, unbroken, coherent experience.’

Fitz took a deep breath. He knew he should be upset, that he should feel anxious or undermined. This was a terrible thing – wasn’t it? But instead he felt a deep sense of peace, as if he were in an abundant and perfectly tranquil garden.

‘Will it ever end?’ he asked Dina.

‘Yes, little brother,’ she said. ‘You metabolize the stack root during the course of the day, and as you digest it, it circulates in your bloodstream; by evening, when we sit down to dinner, it will have dissipated completely, and you will experience everything in the normal way.’

‘And that’s real?’

‘It’s all real – this is real, that’s real – whatever “real” is. The Disillusioners give us stack not because they want us to understand that it – the stack – isn’t real. It’s because they want us to understand that everything is like the stack. Everything, stack or no stack, is equally illusory, equally real. You’re always in the grip of something. Do you love me?’

Fitz realized that he loved Dina more than he loved the air he was breathing. He hadn’t thought of it, until she asked him. Or maybe she didn’t ask him until he thought of it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can we stay like this forever?’

‘I feel the same,’ she answered. ‘But it will wear off, mostly, by the time we finish lessons for the day.’

‘I won’t love you then?’ Fitz began to cry. The tears, hot and sincere, fell like lumps from his cheeks, and fouled the corner of his painting – a huge canvas on which he had painted trunk after trunk of beech, lime, ash, hazel and oak. He felt like his body, everything that he was in heart and in soul, was a great trunk that had opened, splitting from its roots into a cleft that ran sap in torrents.

‘Don’t cry. You’ll remember that you loved me, that you felt at peace and as if time spent with me was as long and as perfect as eternity, and – as difficult as that is to imagine now – you’ll probably think it was all just an illusion.’

Everything but this – the world and all it contains – is the illusion.

Fitz carried on painting. That’s all there was to do. He completed several more canvases before he dared to speak again; he was nervous that he might do something to upset the sun where it floated in the window.

‘Dina, I have to leave this place. The Master will come for me.’

‘I know, little brother,’ she said. She was painting a gorgeously detailed vision of a low building perched on a cliff’s edge. It had been constructed out of rough stones, without windows. The roof the cliff itself had provided; an overhanging crag dipping down to a point just at the right height, just in the right place, had offered shelter to which the builder had needed to supply only walls. Fitz watched Dina’s hand and arm fly around the canvas, making minute adjustments to a scene almost entirely composed of grey, green and blue slashes, each one a stone, each one a glancing of the light against the eye, each one a piece of air between now and now. Fitz had the sense that this scene, this house, had been waiting in this place since the earth itself was, and the sea, and the sky.

‘How do you make something so that it seems it has been there forever?’ asked Fitz. His eyes were full of wonder.

‘It’s just an illusion,’ Dina answered. ‘You want to see something fixed, something eternal, and so you find that in the painting. Really it’s the opposite.’ And she showed him how she had painted the little precarious house in the moment before the cliff’s collapse, how the whole structure of the land and sea was about to change, how everything she had pictured was on the verge of its own ruin. ‘Nothing endures, little brother,’ she said.

Fitz looked at the sun in the window, but it had not moved.

‘Know this,’ murmured the Keeper, who was passing. ‘Every painting destroys the thing it shows you.’

Dina was telling him a story. The tall windows of the Registry, painted white and divided into twenty panes, had iron latches at the base. The Registrar had pushed them open, because in the late-morning sun the room could become hot, and heat wasn’t good for the books and papers stored on the vast, open shelves that filled the archive. The breezes that swept through the windows ruffled the little hairs on the back of Dina’s neck while she spoke. Fitz always liked to watch them while he listened to her.

‘Do you