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.He thought, Is this the effect of my own country? Or is it something else? Then he made himself get up slowly and go into the church.He was no longer the great one, the lord Rigel.He would go on foot and unaided by magic, and he would find them both and find Aldebaran’s last descendant.He would go as the boy who dreamed of magic once, as Richard Delmar.* * *Anna threw her keys on the table without turning on the lights.She stood and looked out at the sleet-washed darkness.It was almost Christmas.A few lights flashed gaudily at the window of the house opposite, a plastic silhouette of Father Christmas and his sleigh taking off into the stars.Anna had stopped on the way back and gone into a public phone box and thought about calling the police.Her fingers moved from key to key for what felt like several hours.Ashley was missing, and this man, this friend of her great-uncle’s, seemed no hope at all.But what could she say? How could she start to say it? Because if people don’t believe you, you can’t tell them, she thought.That is the loneliest thing in the world.Not to be understood.Bradley came in and put his arm about her shoulders and said, ‘Anna, any news?’‘There will be,’ she said.She found a book and wrote in it, trying to concentrate her mind.It was something R yan had told her about, in passing, years ago.‘Any news?’ she wrote, over and over again.Eventually she heard on the still night air, ‘It will be all right.’ Then it vanished, and she thought perhaps it was a mistake.But its stillness stayed with her.That night, things became clear.If there were other people like her, her heart would not be at rest until she found them.She had left it too long.When Anna slept, she dreamed about her grandmother and thought she was a child again.And then she saw Ashley, in an empty house with a blonde-haired girl, sitting close to the fire.She woke up and thought about the man called Richard, and R yan, and her son.Maybe there was a silence constraining everyone, but those with powers understood each other.Their hearts were connected, and their minds reached out across the miles, across the years.And if you listened and had the willpower, you could hear them speak to you.JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHTTHE TENTH OF JANUARYAfter I finished that story, the bells of the last ships were already clanging.‘You had better go,’ I told Mr Hardy.‘If you miss it, you will be waiting until tomorrow evening.’‘Yes,’ he said.‘Yes, I suppose I had.’I walked with him to the harbour.He gripped my hands and went, with his few belongings in his hand.I watched him go slowly along the gangplank.People who passed him did not glance up; no one knew that he once had been a famous man.I thought that perhaps no one would ever know, except our family.He did not have many years left.At the lighted door of the ship, he turned and waved.He looked like a saint already, on the path to some better place.I raised my hand to him.Then he disappeared from view, and the ship was moving out across the harbour.I watched its lights until they began to fade.Then I turned and walked away.I slept in the front room of a charitable innkeeper, and when it grew light, I went out and boarded the ship to Arkavitz.On the way, to pass the silent hours, I finished the story for my brother.NIGHTFALL,THE LAST DAY OF MARCHARKAVITZArkavitz, Northern Passes, is a drab, grey place.It is just a few streets in the shelter of a church, the final outpost before the first pass north.The Alcyrian army took hold of it long before I arrived.And I did not find my real father’s grave.There is a graveyard, but no Jean-Cristophe Ahira de Fiore lies buried there.The factory makes tin plates and saucepans.I work all the hours of daylight, and then I sit awake and think.Sometimes in my sleep, my arms move by themselves and try to carry on working, rearranging something on a production line or checking the rivets on a saucepan over and over, until I wake up confused and uncertain of where I am.It is the kind of work that dulls your mind.Already things are changing.Two months ago, the gleaming machines of the factory made me wonder, and its noise was deafening.Now I am used to it all.Nearly all communications are severed.But in the old newspapers that reach this place, the king’s disappearance is reported again and again.KING CASSIUS FEARED DEAD, say some, or KING CASSIUS IN HIDING, or NO NEWS OF THE KING.I study all those newspapers without hope of finding out the truth.Sometimes I dream that I am my father.It probably sounds strange to you, but it is true.I can feel the scar across the right-hand side of my face and the emptiness of the socket where my eye once was.My skin feels older, as if it has been eighteen years longer in the world.And the strangest thing about this is that my soul is different.A different man, older and tougher and less sure of the rights and wrongs of life.I cannot explain it.But when I wake, just for a moment, I cannot separate myself from him.My father’s letter was lost in the fire, but I know it anyway.Sentences repeat themselves in my mind.‘My Son.I see such visions.I want to die condemned, and stand condemned for ever.’ In spite of the absence of any gravestone, I have found his spirit here.Just after I arrived, I went to the graveyard and laid down a sprig of holly, the closest thing to flowers I could find.I laid it on the corner of the wall, where no graves were.Then I stood there a long time thinking of him, when he was a boy like me in this town, before he ever knew Malonia City.I disobeyed his last wish and forgave him.Because I can’t live here in this grey abandoned town for ever.I can’t live without all that my life used to be.Love never lets you go, my brother.It never lets you lie down and rest.But someday I will come back and find you all.Just not yet.Parts of the story come back to me, and they are a kind of consolation.‘He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.’ I suppose too many of us would stand condemned for ever.At the inn in the town, the Prince and Beggar, people talk about the gangs of revolutionaries who are hiding in the hills.They are forming a resistance movement already.They come down to the farms and demand food, and people give it to them.I asked if anyone had seen a boy with untidy black hair and grey eyes and a hat with a feather.Someone said, ‘Maybe,’ someone else shook their head.I can send word with one of them when they next come down into the village.It is a faint hope.They all know of each other, and I believe Michael is with them somewhere.He never wanted to keep his head down.If I can’t find him, I don’t know what I will do next.Sometimes I think about everyone back in the city, Father Dunstan and Sister Theresa and Mr Pascal.I wonder where they are and whether our paths will cross again.I understand that it will be a difficult task, and exhausting, to rebuild what we have lost.But what else can we do? I am too young to lie down and give up the fight.I was trying to explain this story to you, my brother.I have written the rest of it now.Between telling it to Mr Hardy and travelling north on my own, the pages are completed.But in truth, I don’t think it is right.In telling it to Mr Hardy, I have lost it.I will never write it as truthfully again.Maybe it is better not to give this to you, my brother.Your life will be hard enough already without other people’s guilt to bear.Just after I arrived, Harold North sent me a letter [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]