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

his feet. But when he was old, my father, his son, spent his wealth, scattering it upon the winds and dropping it into the secret places of the earth. Where it came to rest, it was hidden, and a thousand thousand hands, taking and receiving it from him carelessly, like squirrels buried it where it could not be seen. My father turned his face against his father’s friends, and made his way in his own life as a sailor upon a sea at night, alone amidst the black vast of a doubled deep. My father, born in riches, had no use for them; his life consumed them. But I, born in the long exhalation of my father’s poverty, yearn to draw in the world again. I will become my grandfather, little brother, and my child will become my father.’

Fitz was always hungry in the Registry. It seemed always to be nearly time for his next meal, though that meal never seemed, quite, to come. Always Dina had another story before they should leave.

‘I have been told a tale, little brother, of a king who was a great warrior, and conquered many lands. These lands were rich: from many mines lying deep in the mountains, from many fields and orchards thick with grain, and fruit, and timber, from many forests stored with beasts of all kinds, the people of these lands had gathered a harvest of gold and silver, bone and wood, of jewels and pelts, and from their plenty had risen works of rare and magnificent artistry. Nor did these peoples, in the luxury of their affluent peace, neglect to compose rousing and exquisite songs, poems extolling their gods and their heroes. Great gilt statues adorned their temples, and their cities sprawled without walls in towers and in tenements. When the conqueror came he gathered up the best of all of this spoil, as a farmer strips the grain from the husk, and he took it with him to his granary of war, home to his halls, there to store and revel in it – that the world might witness how triumphant was his hand, how glorious his battalions, keen and thirsty as the edge of their swords! But when this conqueror had lived out the length of his days, arriving at his last age he would not be parted from his wealth; and so he commanded his armies to march into the desert once more, there to construct for him a tomb as sumptuous as any of the cities he had in his youth subdued. Now under the ground, like a tree that sinks its strength into its roots, he built his last towers, and the craftsmen from exotic lands whom his armies had enslaved, whose unparalleled workmanship had once adorned the air and glittered in the skies, now carved and painted, tiled and enamelled, sang songs and wrote their epics down, down within the dark and airless bowels of the sands. And when the king died, his riches were buried with him, and the jewelled and metalled glories that had years before been fetched from foreign mines, and coaxed up to grow and flourish upon the earth, once more were laid abed in the thick womb of their mother and of time.’

‘Dina,’ said Fitz. ‘I am hungry.’

‘That is because it is time for us to leave,’ said Dina, ‘and join the others in the hall to eat.’

‘Will you tell me another story?’ asked Fitz.

‘A time will come when you will understand that there is only one story, and that it has a beginning, and a middle, and an end,’ she said.

‘I will want to hear you tell it again and again,’ said Fitz. He was ready to leave.

‘Another time will come when you will see that the middle is not real, and that every story closes in its beginning.’

‘Because the game is already ended,’ said Fitz.

‘The game is already ended,’ Dina agreed.

At lunch, every day, the children of the Heresy greeted one another as if for the first time, or else as old friends with whom they were being reunited after a long journey into a forgotten distance. Their faces, fresh as if from sleep, wore none of the jaded fatigue with which they might be dressed by evening; even Fingal, who as a rule ended each day in despair, at the midday meal had not yet remembered his failures, and greeted the other Prents easily.

Navy was always the first to speak, and she always said the same thing.

‘Fellow toilers in the great work of every day, let’s eat! For the lunch is already ended!’

They took bread from the basket as if in a daze – a happy one – and while they chewed, the time seemed to dawn on them, as if the seconds were fragments, or shards, and they didn’t manage to catch them all. Fitz became accustomed, as the days stretched into weeks, to the sense of embarrassment he often felt at lunch, a feeling that he had been sleepwalking and had both done and said things in a stupor. But mingled with this feeling of shame, he also noticed growing in himself a swelling emotion, something like pride, recalling over the brief flashes of lunch chatter the skills he had acquired and the perceptions he had begun to reach in his morning lessons. Nothing seemed to change; and yet he had a strong sense that he was changing very quickly, that he knew himself better every day, and that the self he knew was faster, more knowledgeable, less naïve than ever before.

‘Be wary,’ said the Jack when he met Fitz and Dina after lunch one day, ‘of this pride of yours. It’s an inevitable consequence of the stacking, a side effect of your training.’

Even after the midday meal, when the other Prents seemed to have recovered their composure and self-command, Fitz still felt the effects of his disordered morning.

‘It’s only because you’re new,’ said Dina, who seemed even in the afternoons to hear his