‘“At last, after many years of fruitless searching, the king found that all of the joy of his heart had dried and was consumed, like water in the desert, leaving only the salt trace of his tears. On that day, from the desert, came the thousand kings who had become his slaves, each still chained to the other, to say that his tomb had been completed. Then the king ordered that his treasury, containing all his gold and silver, the fine cut jewels as numberless as the stars in the night sky, the rich hoard of metalwork, of carving, of stuff in horn, and leather, and coral, or worked from the bones of great whales and from rocks fallen from the sky – all this, that was to be the inheritance of the beggar boy, he caused instead to be borne into the desert by the kings who had betrayed him, and buried in his tomb. And it is said that the slaves who buried the king’s hoard in the desert also buried themselves with it, in shame at the lives that they had lived, and at their faithless hearts, so that no man knew where the king’s treasury lay concealed, not even the king himself.”’
The old man’s voice had dwindled, in this telling of this story, to almost a whisper. Now, with a shaking hand, he held out his cup to the boy, who took it to the pitcher and filled it. When the old man had drunk again, he set the cup down on a little table that stood by, and closed his eyes for a while.
‘It is very important to me, my eyes, that I should tell you this story, which the merchant told me in my youth, and which I have always carried with me, through all of my life after. I would like you to remember it, and think of it, as I have done. But I am very tired, and I cannot go on today. Come again tomorrow, and when we have played a little of our game, I will tell you more.’
The boy stood, and closed the shutters against the light so that the old man could sleep. He raked up the glowing embers in the hearth, so that they should keep their warmth for many hours after, and he pulled the table, with its great chessboard still open, carefully into the corner. Around him, a thousand ancient books stood on a hundred wooden shelves, their covers closed, all dark, all quiet. He pulled the door closed behind him, and made his way silently down the great staircase, across the hall, and out of the house.
2
The jewel
Fitz woke in the night. At first he wasn’t sure where he was; then he recollected this was a sensation he often had, when he woke in the night – in his own bed. He fanned his arm beneath his pillow, feeling for the book he had earlier stowed there. The Giant’s Almanac. Taking it between his thumb and fingers, he squeezed its covers hard.
I know where I am.
He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, before the light had faded – what light there was, under the heavy black anvil of clouds striking northwards at dusk from the sea. Clare had been tidying his clothes away into his little chest while he read his book, a book nothing like the old books he usually read. Mr Ahmadi’s tall, Victorian volumes were not so much covered as cased in leather, their spines ribbed and tooled with gold, books with two or three title pages framed by elaborate and ornamental architectural designs, hand-coloured like the illustrated plates tipped in at regular intervals between their stately laid sheets. These books he carried back to the cottage not as a conqueror might in triumph his captive, not as a pirate spoil, but like lamps digesting genies. Sacred, splendid, solid, they asked reverence, and Fitz read them with devotion. This book was different. Light, slender and shabby, to its narrow spine a slip of paper had been glued where the title, scrawled in pen, was almost illegible. Inside the covers, if anything, matters were worse – and better. It wasn’t a book at all, but a kind of manuscript or journal, every chapter drafted in the same loose, sloping hand. While Clare arranged his few clothes, Fitz hadn’t hesitated to take the book to his bed and slide it under his pillow.
‘Mr Ahmadi Junior was very angry with me today,’ he had told her. He was impatient to tell her everything about what he had heard – or thought he’d heard – and about the man in the woods, and the whispering and –
‘Nonsense,’ she had answered, her hands full of his three shirts. ‘Mr Ahmadi loves you, Jaybird. He’s just a little fussy about his father’s books.’
‘I know. I think he was cross because I saw him at his telescope again.’ Mr Ahmadi had a habit of allowing his antique spyglass to drift towards the cottage next door, and Fitz liked to make mischief by implying that the man in the grand house was deeply in love with
