“Yow’m my brother,” he declared flatly to the woman, shaking his head, gasping to catch his breath. “Gagoga maga medu,” he said. His eyes were wet with tears. He nearly comprehended, in his rough way, that this constable, the utter stranger, wasn’t the boy who had died so many, many years ago, but it was hard for him to accept that it wasn’t somehow a kind of Drystan—changed, yes, hidden in the shape of a beautiful woman—but Drystan.
“Are yow ’im? Dryst?”
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” she said. She felt tears slipping down her face. “But if you want to call me that, you should. I work for the Royal Parks. The constabulary. I’m a special sort of officer.”
“If I say something to yow,” he asked her, “does he hear me? Does the Christ of Otters? Are yow ‘possessed’ by ’im, loik, as it were?”
“I don’t know—Cuthbert. I don’t know if it works like that,” said the woman. “But I’m very interested to hear about all this. Are you hurt?”
“T’snothing,” he said. “But you must leave me now and get down to Grosvenor Square, if you’re the Christ of Otters.”
With that, St. Cuthbert pulled the remake Undley Bracteate from his pocket, the talisman he had tried years ago to give to his cousin Rebekka. He placed it into Astrid’s hand and closed her fingers on it.
“Treasure it,” he said to her. “The animals tell me I’ve become a kind of saint. St. Cuthbert. I don’t know ’bout that. But this talisman, it will keep you safe, Drystan—or whoever you are.”
She looked at the medallion, long broken from its key chain. It showed the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, drinking from the teats of a wolflike creature. There was the inscription, in ancient Frisian runes, g?gog? m?g? medu, and Astrid rubbed her thumb over the ancient incantation, and smiled gently at the man.
She reached then into her own pocket, and pulled out her old pearl rosary. It was her own most precious possession, and she hung it around St. Cuthbert’s neck.
“There,” she said. “Now you’re a proper apostle, aren’t you?”
She wanted now, dreadfully, to believe this homeless man might somehow be connected to her in a more direct way. And if she couldn’t be “Drystan” or an Otter Messiah, couldn’t she, perhaps, be the lonely granddaughter of the poetical drunkard who had spent a night with her grandmother, and vanished from her and her mother’s lives, so long ago? Could that not be what drew her toward him tonight? Might this peculiar ancient sot not be her grandfather? Was it so impossible? In his state of inebriation and need, she observed, he seemed content to let such questions live in golden unanswerability. But she reckoned she would need more of an answer.
“Why did yow come here?” he asked her.
“To help you, I suppose,” said Astrid. “And maybe for another reason. I don’t know. You have caused an awful load of worry for many people, you know, Mr. Handley.” She put her arm over his shoulder to steady him, and unusually for him, he didn’t fight it. “Do you understand that . . . Cuthbert?”
Just as the old man seemed poised to answer, an orange-freq unexpectedly flashed across Astrid’s corneas, its flames whipping up in the purple-yellows of a gas fire.
Eep, eep, eep, eep! Zunga-gunga-gunga!
“Fuck!” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.
Astrid read the text. Special notice: Detention and suspension order. RPC Inspector Astrid Sullivan, white female, aged 32, 5'10". Please detain. Considered armed and possibly dangerous. Caution. Possible tie to terrorists.
It felt like a punch in the stomach. Her career, now, was ruined. The orange-freq would have been seen by every law enforcement officer in Greater London.
“Am I . . . in trouble?” asked Cuthbert. “For trespass? And . . . quite a few other . . . things?”
Astrid touched her eyebrows and switched off all freqs.
“Let’s not worry about any of that for now, Cuthbert.”
“But I’m not finished here. Nor are you. Really, you must get down to Grosvenor. Are you nicking me then?”
“Well, no,” she said. “I don’t think that’s quite appropriate.”
At that, the lion Arfur growled with approval.
“We need to get you to a safe place,” she said.
“A’am safe,” said St. Cuthbert. “Yow’ve come. But the animals of the world are not. Please—go to Grosvenor Square. I don’t need yow—thay do.”
There was some movement in the same spot in the hedges where Astrid had come through, and a new figure came strolling from the shrubbery. He wore a dark orange dashar* on his head. He ducked through the branches, lifting them very high, and looking back a few times as he walked toward them, as if trying to verify that he had indeed just crossed the zoo’s fence. He grimaced at St. Cuthbert and Astrid. It was none other than Dr. Sarbjinder Bajwa.
“Cuthbert!” he called. “You . . . it’s you!”