‘You will find a seat in the corner. Bring it and sit down.’
He obeyed, and then sat silently, as instructed, while the Storyteller looked at him carefully.
‘What is your name?’ he asked eventually. His voice was quiet but hoarse from his efforts.
‘Jaramal, son of Antus and Antusa.’
The old man seemed almost annoyed by the response. He threw a piece of paper on the desk.
‘Very well,’ he said with a sort of finality.
‘Everybody calls me Jay, though.’
The Storyteller snapped round as he finished delivering this entirely useless piece of information. Jay cursed himself. Speak when you are spoken to. Answer the questions.
The Storyteller had been about to get up and let him go. Jay was sure of it. Now he was infuriated, perhaps confused.
Maybe not, though. More a look of caution, worry. Not anger. Jay longed to ask; the questions were almost bursting out of him.
‘Did you work in the fields yesterday, Jay?’
Jay nodded, and said nothing, just to be safe.
‘Did you leave the fields at any time? To get water, for example?’
Jay nodded once more, but very cautiously.
‘Describe it.’
‘I went up the hill, filled the bag and came down again.’ Jay was scared, and he knew it showed. He knew nothing about the world, or its laws. But if he could get into trouble for having asked a question, what could happen to him if he told the truth? He couldn’t lie, though. He was clever enough to know that, if he were found out, then the punishment would be severe indeed.
‘I see. Anything else?’
Jay kept silent.
‘You didn’t, for example, bathe your face in the water?’
‘I... I... yes. Maybe.’ How did he know that? He hadn’t even told his mother that.
‘It was a hot day, of course you would have done. Perhaps you heard something? You are a curious boy; everyone I have talked to in the past hour says that your nosiness knows no bounds. If you heard a noise, you would have gone to investigate, no? Don’t lie to me. I have talked to your mother, and others. Now I want to hear it from you. You alone were there.’
The old widow, Jay thought. He knew his mother would lie to save him, knew the old widow would tell the truth to get him into trouble. He was trapped. He didn’t know what to do. He stayed silent still.
‘It would be best if you told me exactly what you did. Every single thing. I am not angry, Jay. You will not be punished for telling me the truth. The truth is sacred, you know that. Even murderers have their punishment reduced if they tell the truth.’
It was strange. His tone of speaking hadn’t changed. His expression was still the same. He hadn’t moved, but something about him was reassuring. Not very; but enough. Jay began to speak. He told how he had indeed heard a noise, how he had walked round an outcrop of rock and seen a light, and then the fairy. The Storyteller listened passively, not saying anything until Jay stuttered to a halt.
‘Do you say now that it must have been an illusion? That perhaps you fell asleep and dreamed it? Are you prepared to admit that you made it all up?’
‘No,’ Jay said stoutly. ‘No. I’m not. She was there. As solid as you are.’
‘But a little thinner, I hope?’
‘Oh, yes, much.’ Jay had done it again.
The Storyteller looked at the ceiling and recited quietly, ‘“It smiled once more, a radiant, celestial smile that brought the warmth back to his body. It raised its hands in what Jay took to be a gesture of peace, then took a step back and was gone.” Would that be a reasonable account?’
Jay closed his eyes to avoid meeting the man’s gaze. ‘How do you know that?’
‘How indeed? A good question, although I am sure you were told to ask none. Obedience and silence are not your strongest characteristics. But what are we to do with you now, eh?’
‘You said I wouldn’t be punished. You promised.’
‘Did I?’ He stood up, walked to the tent entrance and summoned the soldier guarding it. ‘This boy must stay here tonight. I have to discuss matters with his family. Make sure he does not leave this tent. Oh — and could you get him some food? I imagine he is hungry.’
Jay got up, numbed and shaken. He had been lied to. He had trusted the Storyteller — trusted the sound of his voice — and had been betrayed.
‘Jay.’
He turned round. The Storyteller was standing over him, but was not frightening now. ‘Why did you interrupt me?’
‘I... I just wanted to know the answer. I had to know.’
‘You asked how something could be ice and desert at the same time?’
Jay nodded.
‘It is a good question. Do you want a correct answer or a truthful one? The two are not always the same.’
‘I want a truthful one.’
‘Then I will tell you. I do not know.’
Jay stared at him, puzzled.
‘There are many questions in this life, and few answers. Would you like to help me find some?’
The next morning, before dawn, Jay — who had slept on the ground, wrapped in a thick blanket given to him by the soldier — was roughly awoken by the toe of a boot.
‘Up. We’re leaving. So keep quiet.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘What about my mother? My family?’
‘You will not see them again. Not for many years.’
6
After he put the final full stop to his writing that evening, Lytten laid down his pen and leaned back in his chair. This he did with great ceremony; not for him a hastily scribbled note, or the vulgarities of a ballpoint pen. He used an ancient Parker with a gold nib which had belonged to his grandfather, with a peculiar purple-brown ink that he mixed himself. His handwriting was florid, almost ostentatious, the down strokes broad, the letters elegant. Each piece of paper was carefully blotted before he turned the page. In neat stacks on the leather-topped desk — his father’s, once — were his notebooks, jottings of thought and information stretching back to his youth. In them, Anterwold had formed in fragments, and now he was drawing those together into a world. He had sent Jay to Ossenfud, and brought in village life, the importance of the Story.
As he considered the visitation scene he had written a few days previously, he realised what he had done. He had taken a scene from Lewis and inverted it — presented it from the point of view of the person who sees the vision, not of the person mistaken for one. He had also disposed of Lewis’s annoying tendency to make everything so terribly suburban.
Lytten believed he had a somewhat better approach. Anyone encountering the supernatural would be terrified, aghast, awestruck. Bernadette of Lourdes reacted like that, as indeed did most people who were predisposed to believe in things they had never actually seen for themselves, be they gods or flying saucers.
The trouble was, of course, that Lewis operated in a simple world where, oddly, the supernatural was banished except for that bloody bore of a lion of his, perhaps the most humourless creation in all literature. It was all so unsatisfactory. If a rat started talking, (despite grossly inadequate vocal arrangements and brain pan which did not allow for anything other than squeaks) his characters did not seem even briefly surprised. If a beaver offered you tea, your only reaction was to specify how many lumps of sugar you wanted. Lewis tried to invent an entire world, and created only a middle-class English suburb with a few swords.