Red Spikes (11 page)

Razor touched Diammid’s elbow. He was staring, caught in mid-chew, towards the far rim of the Vale.

Diammid swallowed; a big lump of fritter went down unappreciated. Here it was, then, the sight he’d come to see, the tale he’d come to fetch and take back to Grammar and widen the fellows’ eyes, and quieten Teasdale a minute.

Copper and emerald brightened in a high part of the forest thick with mist, almost boiling with it. Then the mist passed, and the copper gleamed, and the emerald turned and flashed, and there was some shape to the thing.

‘Is that the head?’ Diammid muttered. ‘That
whole
thing’s
the head? But how far away . . .’

‘Arr, gawd,’ said Razor through fritter. ‘Always when I bring you Grammar lads. I come by myself and all I see is elefumps or horned horses that stray out and wander and stray back. But that’s a full hero, that one. The real thing. Oh, my.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Might be good, if we keep very, very still. Might just look about a bit and pass on. That’s what Mr Ark’s and Mr Chauncey’s did. Set them against each other summink terrible, but it didn’t do aught itself.’

In shape and solidity the head was like a cauldron, or maybe a boat, a high-sided coracle. It looked as if it were made of iron, iron covered with a coppery skin. Its thin, shiny black hair was tied behind; one ear was clear for a moment, intricate, with coppery gleams inside. Diammid didn’t want to look at the face. He turned his own face away, but his eyes would keep on looking. The hero’s nose and mouth were small and delicate, almost pretty. But the eyes above the great broad cheeks, sitting on the cheekbones like plates propped on a mantel, were wide and indistinct. The grey irises slid and jittered, shrank and swelled on the vast, wet whites.

‘Euh,’ said Diammid.

Razor’s hand touched his arm again behind the rock. ‘Nought sudden,’ he murmured, and resumed chewing very slowly.

The hero moved, from the upper right of their view down through the trees towards the middle of the Vale.

‘Is it
just
a head, floating?’ said Diammid.

Razor swallowed. His voice came much clearer, but much quieter. ‘There’s a body. Watch. Where there’s less mist.’

The head coasted down the hillside, closing its eyes and pushing its face through branches, or looking from side to side in a slow, wavering, over-sized way.
Something
hung from its underside, some dark spindlyness, some bright metal.

Slowly, behind the rock, and with his eyes on the floating head, Diammid pulled the glass open to its full length.

‘Ooh,’ said Razor. Diammid could hardly hear him. ‘I’m not so sure about that now. With this one.’

‘Just to see that body, the nature of it.’ Slowly Diammid raised the glass to his eye.

‘Mmph.’ Razor shifted uneasily.

‘Phaugh, you should see this, Razor!’ Diammid whispered. ‘It’s just like us, only all streakly and straggly.
Weird.
Like dangling iron. But – what’s that on its back?’ He took his eye from the glass and checked, then put it back.

‘I wouldn’t be looking through that,’ whispered Razor. ‘I don’t know—’

‘Why, it’s a shield! Great long thing. And his swords! See how they flash, their curved blades? – Ooh, you should see the hilts of them. And he’s got knives at his waist, and an axe, and— What are those beady things hanging from his belt—’

‘Sh! Put it down, Master,’ Razor hissed. ‘He’s coming clearer. I’m sure you can see him just as well with your own eye now.’

Diammid took down the glass and scowled into the Vale. The hero had paused in a clearing, about to plunge into a part of the Vale where the trees grew taller than himself. His heavy head turned and nodded, choosing the way. The head moved first and the slender body swung and drifted after it, brandishing its swords.

Diammid put the glass to his eye again. ‘I just want to see—’

‘Master, I wouldn’t.’

The hero’s head swivelled dozily towards them.

‘Oh, look at the earring! It’s—’

Diammid’s eager voice switched off, as suddenly as if by electricity. Diammid was gone from beside Razor. The red leather spy-glass hung where he had held it. Comb-marks streaked the air where he had stood. Swirls at the other end showed the force with which he had been sucked through.

The glass dropped,
clink-tap-clink,
and rolled, and lay. Smoke wisped out at the top; a trickle of molten orange glass ran out the bottom, and pooled on the rock.

‘Psst! Anderson!’ said the coat-rack.

‘What?’ Diammid stared. ‘Who’s that?’

A coat kicked out with a thin bruised leg, and now he saw the eye in the shadows. ‘Rickets?’

The boy hung there like a hunchback by the collar of his blazer. ‘Can you get me down, Anderson?’

‘Yes, but they’ll—But I’ll—Is it Bully has done this, or Teasdale?’

‘Just for a piss, Anderson, and then you can hang me up again.
Please.
I’m
busting
. It won’t take a minute.’

‘Oh, all right.’ And he lifted the boy down and waited there nervously. It took more than a minute, but eventually Rickets came hurrying into sight. ‘Quickly! I can hear them coming back from Gym!’

And it was accomplished.

‘Thanks, Anderson.’ Rickets pulled the coats around himself. ‘I owe you. Go away, now – you’d best not be found here.’

Diammid went, trying to shake off the scrape of Rickets’ boot against his shin, the imprint of his bony hip as he lifted him down, the pale face with the watery greenish eyes, the smell of drains about the boy.

Bells rang above Diammid. His eyes would not open.

It seemed to him that he had only just been born. A great amber eye had brought him into being. He had started as a hot line on the air, then suddenly, violently been plumped into shape and thrown down on this grass. And now he was a dense honeycomb of pain, his every cell outlined with fire.

The hero’s towering shadow darkened Diammid’s eyelids. The black mist came and went. When it was there, it furred everything – sound and taste and skin – like iron filings on a magnet. It made the bells at the hero’s waist clank and clack; when it cleared they rang sweet and properly metal.

Diammid’s cheerful voice chimed across the supper table.

Where they come
from,
they come from other worlds. Where
they
go,
they go back to other worlds; I don’t know whether back
to those they came from, or on to fresh ones, or what.

What do you
mean
, what
other worlds
?
Teasdale scoffed.
You talk so much rot, Anderson; why don’t you run orf
and write one of your po-wems or something?

I’m telling you, I
talked
to Razor; he
told
me.

He filled your head with gumf, is what. Razor is a filthy
peasant what has et one toadstool too many. You there, pass the
bread-and-dripping.

But why don’t they come here?

What do you mean, Rickets?

When they’re in our world. Why don’t they do anything
here? Come over to Grammar and – I don’t know – flatten Raglan
for us?
Rickets finished under his breath.
Flatten that one.
He nodded faintly towards Teasdale, who was biting bread and calling up the table to someone.

Oh, they never come out of the Vale. Least, that’s what Razor
says. The sides are too steep, maybe. I don’t know; I’ve never been
there.

And you never will.
There was Teasdale again.
You piece
of slop.

Diammid’s eyelids unstuck from each other. The hero’s booted iron legs led up to the bells and blades at his waist, to his swords in their battered black sheaths, to the head that blotted out so much of the sky.

‘S-sir.’ Diammid’s whole painful body trembled.

Ah.
The hero’s head tilted, the boots stepped away, the giant eyes came down. First the painful amber eye regarded him through the mist, then the other slewed grey across the eyeball, seeming to see nothing.

The hero opened his neat mouth. Diammid sensed a much larger, rawer mouth opening somewhere nearby.

Gorwr hay sheen hee pashin drouthsh,
the hero said. Then both his eyes turned amber as the mist thickened, and he tried again:
You hay seen hee passin throok
.

The mist furred Diammid’s eyes and brain. The hero was saying several things:
You have seen me passing through
this place,
as well as
You have seen things you were not intended
to see.
But most urgently the hero wanted to know,
Have
you seen him? Which way did he pass?

‘Who, sir?’ cried Diammid, but the mist had frayed and faded, and only the grey, uncomprehending eye swerved and slid above him. Diammid felt ill watching it – at any moment he would be sick all over the hero’s boots.

But then the eye flickered, and steadied amber again. Crothel had a piece of Baltic amber in the glass case in the Science Room; there was a lacewing trapped in it, with some scraps of ancient leaf-litter. That specimen was a poor approximation of the amber world into which these eyes were windows. A dragonfly hung there, its thorax the length of Diammid’s arm; whole thorny lizards hovered, wrinkled-leather birds with tooth-edged beaks, entire mammoths – bubbles clung to their flanks and crevices, golden with the hero’s interior fire.

‘Who, sir?’ Diammid said again, to stop himself dying of the sight.

This time the hero understood.
Mine enemee.
His voice rumbled in the ground. Skulls hung on cords at his waist, skulls of wolves and of Diammid-sized people and of horned, toothed beasts Diammid did not recognise. They clacked and clinked together on many notes.
My foe!
The mist thinned, the words turned to roar, the eye dimmed and slithered, and the ground shook hard, banging against the back of Diammid’s head. The hero blurred against the clouds, and the skulls became dull metal bells, and swung and sang.

Then the amber eye burned above him.
You cain
tell me,
said the hero,
into whuchaputchatha
. . . The eye dimmed, then shone very bright and hot.
Into which
aperture did he flee?