CHAPTER 18
This is a story we never told to Christopher Plover.
Some days you could feel a portal coming on. To everyone else the day might be sunny and clear, but to us five the air would feel clammy and charged the way it does before a storm. You could sense the world building up to something, screwing itself to the sticking point. Then we would look at each other conspiratorially and pull our ears—that was the agreed-upon sign—and from that point on we’d be no good for anything else. The madness was on us, and we would fidget feverishly, unable to sit still or read or follow our lessons. Nothing else mattered until someone vanished and the tension finally broke.
On other days Fillory would wrong-foot everyone. You wouldn’t see it coming at all. You might not even be in the mood for it, but suddenly there it would be, and all you could do was give in to its spell as it tore you free of this world.
It was one of those days, the second kind, when it happened: a lazy Saturday when the summer sun seemed to be leaching all the energy from the world, leaving us listless and immobile. We couldn’t play, we couldn’t study, we couldn’t stop yawning. Even the effort of going outside to visit the giant, bug-eyed goldfish in the stone-rimmed pond in back of the house would have been unimaginable.
Fiona and I were in the library, which was a pleasant room, two stories high, with two movable ladders which when rolled into each other at a high rate of speed produced a very satisfying bang. But as a library it was largely useless. The books were locked away in cabinets—you could see their spines through metal grills, like a forbidden city hidden in the jungle, but you couldn’t get at them. As far as I knew no one could: the keys were lost.
There was exactly one book in the library that you could read—somehow it had escaped being incarcerated with the rest of them. It was a catalog of seashells, a huge volume I could barely lift, and its spine cracked like a pistol shot when you opened it. The photographs were black-and-white, but about one in fifty pages had been hand-tinted in full color, and those shells had a special vivid feel to them. A Fillorian feel.
That morning Fiona and I were leafing through it. The pages were thick and sticky in the heat; they were made of a special glossy paper that was almost rubbery, like the leaves of some huge tropical plant. As usual we debated the aesthetic merits of the various shells, and the possible poisonous properties of their various residents, until suddenly Fiona stopped. She’d slipped her hand under the next page, hoping it would be a colored one, but her fingers found only empty air. It was as though the book had suddenly become hollow.
She looked at me and pulled her ear. The page turned all by itself, flipped over by a gust of wind from beneath it. From Fillory.
The portal was set directly into the book’s enormous page. Appropriately enough it opened onto the seaside—I recognized it right away as the coast north of Whitespire, where there was a long, graceful bridge of living rock that led to a nearby island. We were looking straight down onto the powdery white sand from above, and the urge to clamber through immediately was almost overpowering. As I watched Fiona actually did—forgetting Martin, forgetting our pact, she stepped up onto her chair and onto the table and dropped through the page as neatly as if she were jumping off a high bank into a pond.
I didn’t. With a titanic effort I pulled myself away, feeling like I was leaving skin behind, and ran to find my brother.
He was by himself in an empty spare room. He was supposed to be working on a sketch of a vase for a drawing class, but when I came in he was just watching listlessly as the wind pushed a blind in and then sucked it out again. He stood up as soon as I entered. No words were necessary. He knew why I’d come.
I was sure the portal would be closed, but when we came pelting into the library together it was still there, waiting for us, or at any rate waiting for me. From a distance the view of the beach through the open book was a perspectival impossibility, a trompe l’oeil. It did strange things to my depth perception.
When Martin approached it the book shifted on the table and tried to shut itself—it seemed affronted, as if we’d surprised it in a state of undress. But Martin was ready for that. He pointed at it with three fingers and shouted a phrase I didn’t understand—it might have been dwarfish, it had those scraping fricatives dwarfs use. Until then I hadn’t understood that he’d been studying magic. Perhaps he hadn’t just been sulking there in the library at Whitespire after all.
The book trembled, straining now to shut itself. Martin and the book, Martin and Fillory itself, were fighting, and it was an awful sight, because I loved them both.
Martin gripped it in both hands and pulled, grunting, trying to rip it in half—I suppose he thought that then it couldn’t close at all. But it was too thick, and the binding was too strong, so instead he forced its jaws back open like a man wrestling an alligator and pinned it down. He climbed up on the table and slowly, awkwardly, he got his feet and then his legs and hips through the door in the page.
As he did it the book began to groan horribly, as if the wrongness of it, the violation, hurt it physically. When he was all the way through I thought it would snap closed but instead it fell back open again, limp and unhappy at having been force-fed a meal it didn’t want.
Ashamed, I climbed through quickly and dropped onto the beach. Looking back I saw Jane appear in the doorway of the library, and our eyes met across the gap between worlds, but it was too late for her. The book had had enough Chatwins for one day, and it closed over my head. The portal vanished.
The tide was out and the wind was slack. The sea was flat as a made bed. It looked about eleven in the morning.
Martin was halfway up the dunes already. He had had plenty of time to think through what he would do in Fillory, if he ever got the chance. He was here on borrowed time, and he wasn’t going to waste it.
“Hey!” I called after him. “Wait for us!”
Fiona was watching him too, but she wasn’t following. The joke had gone far enough for her.
“He’s not going to Whitespire,” she said quietly.
“He’s not? Martin!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
“I think you should go with him,” Fiona said. “Someone should.”
Martin had paused at the crest and was considering us.
“Well, come on then,” he said, “if you’re coming.”
I did. Fiona stayed where she was.
—
Nothing happened the way Plover said it did later. All that business with Sir Hotspots in The Flying Forest is his invention—pure fiction. In reality it was just me and Martin. I was the only witness.
Martin’s gait was a stolid, purposeful tramp, and I had to skip every few strides to keep up with him.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m not going back,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m not going back to England, Rupes. I hate it, I hate England, and everybody there hates me. You know that. And if I go home I’ll never get back here again, we both know it. You saw the book, it almost had my legs off. If the rams want me out They’ll have to throw me out, and when They try by God They’ll have a fight on Their hands.”
There was no point in arguing with him. There was a bit of our father in Martin, and just then he sounded like Father cursing the Germans, something he used to do often and at great length.
“What are you going to do?”
“Anything,” he said. “Everything. Whatever I have to.”
“But what?”
“There’s something I want to try. I had an idea about a trade.”
“A trade. With who? What have you got to trade?”
“I’ve got me!” he snarled. “For what that’s worth.” And then, less angrily, in the voice of Martin the little boy, who would exist for only an hour or so longer: “Will you come with me?”
“All right. Where are we going?”
“We’re going to see someone. Who knows, might be you could do a trade with him too.”
He looked over his shoulder, to make sure Fiona hadn’t followed us, then he quickly sketched a square in the air with his fingers. The shape became a window, looking out over a marshy landscape, and he stepped over the sill and through it. The casual speed with which he did this shocked me deeply. We’d seen magic practiced by Fillorian sorcerers, but none of us had studied it, or not as far as I knew. Martin must have been practicing secretly for months, leading an entire life that he concealed from us. A secret life within a secret life.
I followed him through.
“Where are we?”
“Northern Marsh,” he said. “Come on.”
The ground here was boggy, but Martin picked his way through it with confidence, ever the intrepid explorer. I tried to step where he stepped, but I lost my balance and put a hand down, and it came up covered with black muck. Soon our shoes were full of water, and the marsh was sucking at them as if it liked the taste. I wasn’t dressed for this; I was lucky I’d had shoes on at all.
After a quarter-hour of this I climbed up on a round rock, an oasis of solidity, and stopped. Ahead was just black puddles and reeds and more black puddles and then open water.
“Mart! Stop!”
He turned and waved at me. Then he took a last look around at the horizon, pressed his hands together in front of him, prayerfully, and dived headfirst down into a puddle.
The water barely looked deep enough to reach his ankles, but it swallowed him as completely and easily as if it were an ocean. I watched the surface settle and reseal itself behind him and turn glassy again.
Only then did I become truly afraid.
“Mart! Martin!”
I left my shoes on the rock—for all I know they’re still there—and thrashed ahead to where he’d disappeared and shoved my arm into the puddle up to the shoulder. It had no bottom. I took a deep breath and put my head under.
My inner ear spun. I tried to steady myself and instead fell forward. There was a moment of nausea and weightless confusion, then I was lying on my back on wet ground gasping like a fish. Gradually everything began to right itself.
I was lying on the underside of the swamp—the reverse side of the muddy plain I’d just been tramping through. Gravity had turned upside-down. If I looked down I was looking up through the puddles at the blue sky of Fillory. If I looked up there was only darkness overhead. It was nighttime in the world under the Northern Marsh, and before me, across a flat plain of black mud and sun-filled puddles, was a fairy castle made of black stone. Its towers pointed down instead of up, but so did everything, including me.
This was new. Martin had taken us somewhere truly strange. Fillory was a land of wonders, but this place had an uncanny quality that I can only describe as not correct. It was a place that shouldn’t have been, somewhere off the edge of the board, where you weren’t meant to put a playing piece down. This wasn’t an ordinary adventure, another legend in the making. I knew already that Plover would never hear about it. This was happening off the books.
I could have turned back, but I knew that if I did I would never have a brother again. I also knew that what was happening to him would happen to me too. I would have two more years, three at the most. I didn’t want the game to be over yet. I’ll follow behind Martin at a safe distance, I thought, and watch what he does. Maybe he’s found a way out of the maze.
I stood up, fighting vertigo. Martin was waiting for me in front of the great door to the castle. He was sopping wet and smiling, though a little sadly I thought. I picked my way toward him, avoiding the puddles.
“This is it,” he said. “Just like they said in the books, but it’s different when you really see it.”
“Like who said? Martin, what is this?”
“What does it look like?” he said grandly. “Welcome to Castle Blackspire.”
“Blackspire.”
Of course it was. It was just the same as Whitespire, stone for stone, but the stones were black, and the windows were empty and dark. It was Whitespire upside-down and backward and in the middle of the night, the way it must look when we were all asleep and dreaming. Martin pulled his sopping sweater off over his head and dropped it with a smack on the smooth stone.
“But who lives here?”
“I’m not sure. At first I thought it might be backward versions of us. You know—Nitram, Trepur, that sort of thing. What’s Fiona backward? I can’t do it in my head. And we’d have to fight our opposite numbers to the death. But I’m starting to think it’s not like that at all.”
“Well and thank God for that. What is it like?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s find out!”
He heaved on one of the big doors and it opened silently on oiled hinges. The great hall inside was lit by torchlight. Pale silent footmen in black livery stood against the walls.
“Right.” Martin seemed not at all disconcerted. I think he was past fear by then. He raised his voice—he was full of a kind of hopeless bravado. “Is your master at home?”
The footmen inclined their heads, silent as chess pieces.
“Good. Tell him the High King has arrived, and his brother. We’ll wait for him in his throne room. And light some damn fires, it’s cold in here.”
Two of them withdrew, backward, showing proper deference. Or maybe everybody walked backward at Castle Blackspire.
We were far off the track here, off the script and improvising. Everything we’d done till now in Fillory was like a game, dress-up, good fun and then laughing all the way back to the nursery. But Martin was entering into a darker kind of play. This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.
I didn’t want to follow him. I wanted to stay behind and be a child for a little while longer. But I couldn’t stand to lose him either.
He led me deeper into the castle—we both knew the way. I dragged my feet, but he strode along like he was on his way to his own birthday party. He was going to make an end of it, one way or another, and he couldn’t wait. He was so relieved he was practically glowing.
“I don’t like this, Mart. I want to go back.”
“Go then,” he said. “But there’s no going back for me. This is my last stand. I’m breaking the rules, Rupe. Either I’ll break them or they’ll break me. I don’t care anymore, not since Ember and Umber decided to punish me for nothing at all.”
“What rules?” I was on the point of tears. “I don’t understand!”
He steered us into a dressing room off to one side of the throne room, a chamber where up in Castle Whitespire, up in the world of light and air, foreign dignitaries visiting Fillory would await our pleasure. There was a fire here, and I was grateful for the warmth. There were dry clothes too, in Blackspire colors, and Martin began stripping off. I kept my wet clothes on.
“I’ll tell you how I came to it,” he said. “I was thinking, isn’t it funny that we get to be kings and queens here? We’re children. We’re not even from here. There’s nothing special about us, not that I can see. But we must have something special, mustn’t we? Something you can’t get in Fillory?”
“I suppose.”
Fully naked, unembarrassed, he warmed his bare pale skin in front of the fire. He was happier than I’d seen him in months.
“What is it? I’m damned if I know. My humanity, I suppose. But whatever it is, it means nothing to me, so I’m going to see how much it’s worth to them. I’ve put it up for sale, on the open market, and now I’ve found a taker. We’re here to see how much I can get for it.”
“I don’t understand. You’re going to buy your way back into Fillory?”
“Oh, I’m not doing it like that. I’m not asking for favors. What I want is power, enough power that even Ember and Umber won’t be able to send me home.”
“But Ember and Umber are gods.”
“Then maybe I’ll be a bit of a god too.”
“But what if—?” I swallowed, simple child that I was. “If you sell part of yourself, what if you aren’t Martin anymore?”
“What if I’m not?” he said. “What good is Martin? Everybody hates him, me included. I’d rather be somebody else. Anybody else. Even if it’s nobody.”
He picked up a dry shirt from a neat stack of clothes on a chair.
“I suppose I’m like one of those guests at Maude’s parties, the ones who won’t go home when it’s over, not even after she turns the lights on. But I’ve got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.”
The clothes looked rich, and they fit him perfectly, as I knew they would: cool, shadowy colors, black velvets and small silvery pearls like the little sugar balls they use to decorate cakes. He looked very much like a king.
“Mart, come on,” I said, even though I knew from experience that begging only made him angrier. “Leave it alone. Let it be how it was.”
“Don’t!”
He jabbed a finger at me. I felt more than two years younger than him then—somewhere he’d learned the secret of a richer, more powerful adult rage.
“It isn’t how it was! It never will be again! They changed the rules on us, so as far as I’m concerned all bets are off.” He cinched his belt tight. “If They apologized, if They showed any regret, then maybe. Maybe. If They would even say why.
“But They wouldn’t. Not Them. So I’m off to war, like Daddy. They can’t give us Fillory and then just take it away again. The rams have sunk low, but I’ll sink lower. They’re bad, I’ll be worse.”
He flung open both doors to the throne room.
“Mart, who lives here?” I asked. “Whose house is this?”
He went in; I hung back in the doorway. The walls of the throne room were lined with more footmen, still and heavy-lidded as frogs. The torches burned strangely, not warm and yellow but sparking and spitting like holiday fireworks.
“Here I am!” Martin shouted.
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the joy in his voice—he was relishing the rage and shame. I think he’d been keeping them down for a long time, trying to feel nothing at all, and after so much numbness anything felt sweet, even pain.
“Well, come on!” He spread his arms wide. “I’ve got what you want. Come on and take it!”
I think I knew then why They did it—why Ember and Umber wouldn’t let us stay in Fillory. It wasn’t that we were too old, or too sinful. It wasn’t so that we could spread Their wisdom in another world, our world. It wasn’t that being in Fillory made you happy, and in its way too much happiness was as dangerous as too much sadness. That is a lie that even Ember and Umber never told.
No, it was that Fillory was cruel, as cruel in its way as the real world was. There was no difference, though we all pretended there was. There was nothing fair about Fillory, just as there was nothing fair about people’s fathers going to war, and their mothers going mad, and the way we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would. Fillory was no better than our world. It was just prettier.
I didn’t think those things, not then, but I felt them all when I looked past Martin into the golden barbell eyes of the great ram Umber, the Shadow Ram. Castle Blackspire was His house. Umber was Martin’s buyer.
Give him credit, Martin took this in stride.
“Oh, it’s You, is it?” he said. “Well, come on, you old faker. It’s all here, and only slightly soiled. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” came the resonant reply. Not like Ember’s voice: higher, and calm and civilized, even urbane. “I am ready.”
“So go ahead. Take it. Take it all, you bloody coward, and give me what I want!”
I gave up then. I could have tried one last time to change Martin’s mind. I could have tried to drag him out of that room. I could have tried to take his place, or to fight a god, but I didn’t. I was afraid, and I fled. I ran through the empty halls of the night palace and didn’t stop till I was lying on my face in the cold mud on the edge of the Northern Marsh. I never saw my brother again.
—