Contents
Author’s Note
MOTHER’S
1. Forget it
2. The jewel
3. Michaelmas daisies
4. The shãhanshãh
5. Dilaram
THE HERESY
6. The Heresy
7. Dina
8. The case
9. The Disillusioners
10. The Sensorium
11. Nightwalking
12. The blank eye
13. The Incoherentists
14. The Black Wedding
15. The Kingdom of Bones
THE KINGDOM
16. The Game of Kings
17. Navy
18. The Giant’s Almanac
19. The diver
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Andrew Zurcher is Bruce Cleave Fellow in English and Drama at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and he writes widely on the works of Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare. His debut novel, Twelve Nights, was published in 2018. The Giant’s Almanac is his second novel.
@andrewzurcher
Also by Andrew Zurcher:
Twelve Nights
For Davara
To the nobleman Khwaja Kalan, who held the fortress at Kabul, the emperor Babur wrote in 1528. He was on campaign far to the south, near Etawah, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, India. Dismounting in a strange land, he called for a melon, cut it, and wept as he ate it. How, he asked his friend, could one forget the pleasures of one’s home? How could one forget both melons, and grapes?
Author’s Note
Every word has a history, and most of them are ancient. Just as the water poured into a cup has reached that cup only after circling the skies in a cloud, only after raining from that cloud upon the soil, only after seeping through that soil to trickle into a river, only after running down that river to pool in some reservoir; so a word reaches your mouth, or your hand, only after thousands of years of arduous travel and continual exchange, crossing frontiers and propagating by the whispers and songs and poems and conversations of thousands on thousands of people we have never known, and can never know. At last it comes to you, a scribble on a page or a fleeting thrum sounded on the air: its being so light, and the time of its use and sense so brief! There are few lives so fragile as that of a word, and few histories so miraculous. And yet words are all around us, impossible and fecund and every one of them a marvel. Tens of thousands teem in you, only waiting to serve your need – that is, to express yourself, to say what you mean. Like pilgrims, or like birds on impossible migrations, they have reached you still on the wing, and your speech is but the flitching of their feathers as off, still flying, they pass into the future.
Among many words that I cherish, there is one I love most – perhaps because over the course of its journey it has acquired so many meanings that have to do with journeys, with the past and with the future. It is a word that has rubbed shoulders with mathematics, and with distant stars, with longing and with the seasons, with love, with generals plotting wars and with farmers planting fields. Almanac: this word came into English from the Latin spoken across Europe in the Middle Ages, and from French, but it had in turn been borrowed from Spanish, and the Spaniards had themselves had it from Arabic – that is, the Arabic spoken by the Muslim conquerors who occupied Spain between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries. In Spanish, in French, and in Latin an almanac was an astronomical calendar used for making astrological predictions; farmers turned to almanacs for advice on when to sow their seeds, or breed their livestock, and lovers, and merchants, and sailors loved, and traded, and set sail according to the almanac’s recommendations. But the Arabic word spoken in Spain, al-manak (‘the calendar’), had itself come from some other source, possibly the Syriac term lĕ-manhay, ‘the year to come’, or perhaps the Classical Arabic word al-munāk, ‘the place where the camel kneels’, thus ‘the stopping place’, or ‘the end to the day’s travel’.
I like to think of people long ago – people just like you, and me – reaching at evening the end of their day’s tiring journey, and gathering beneath the constellations and beside their kneeling camels to pass the night in talk, in song, in planning for more days yet to come. It was from these people, nestled among their tired animals with their eyes upon the stars, that this plotting and keeping of space and time, the almanac, first arose. It is the map of the heavens, the guide to life, and the end of the journey, still whispering of the desert, and of the sky, of light and of night, of setting out and – at length – of coming home.
MOTHER’S
1
Forget it
Hanging from a corner of the roof, his hands like claws all muscle strapped to the leaden drainpipe, his now aching heels ground into the old wall’s gritty mortar and still more gritty, crumbling brick, Fitz would normally have taken a wide view of the garden around him. Most days, he climbed the Old Friary half just for the privilege of this moment, the space of three or four deep, steadying breaths in which he could feel himself, though only a boy, the lord of it all. To one side, flanking his own humbler cottage, within the compass of the tall hedge, was the orchard where Clare once stole, she said, at evening for apples. To the rear of the Old Friary stretched the stately lawn, scored on either side by arcing beds of
