Arcana Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Marmor

  Quadesh’s Mercy

  The Kindly Ones

  Pet Food

  A Wedding

  Tools

  Insulating Roll

  Above My Station

  A Queer Trade

  The Mill Pond

  Quality Time

  Major Arcana

  Inner Hull

  Skyfire

  Three Visits to the House Viridian

  A Frozen Fairytale

  Something More

  Higher Ground

  The Reckoning

  Vizier

  Money Sex Magic

  Front cover: detail from a photo by Nicolas Raymond licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.

  Copyright © 2016 Edward Cooke. All rights reserved.

  In memory of

  Tim Auton

  Marmor

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was a foolish fond old man. His imprecations and stick-shaking meant less than nothing.

  ‘Revenge, what revenge?’ I remarked to myself as I cantered home with his head in my saddlebag.

  I delivered my grisly burden to the King, who was pleased. He made me a marquis. I went home to my gorgeous wife and we romped until sleep overwhelmed us.

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was a foolish fond old man. His imprecations and stick-shaking meant less than nothing.

  ‘Revenge, what revenge?’ I remarked to myself as I walked home with his head in my rucksack.

  I delivered my grisly burden to the Chairman, who was satisfied. He awarded me an extra ration of beans. I went home to my wife, who was already asleep.

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was a foolish fond old man. His imprecations and stick-shaking meant less than nothing.

  ‘Revenge, what revenge?’ I remarked to myself as I limped home with his head in my rucksack.

  I delivered my grisly burden to the local warlord, who had been holding my wife hostage. He told me she had displeased him and he had been obliged to kill her. I went home to find our house had been burned down. That night I slept on the street.

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was a foolish fond old man. His imprecations and stick-shaking meant less than nothing.

  ‘Revenge, what revenge?’ I remarked to myself as Clothildo carried me home, slung over one shoulder. Over the other was our rucksack, containing Marmor’s head.

  En route we had to cross a rope bridge. Clothildo dropped the rucksack. I dared not complain because it was the head or me, but when we got back to our village no-one would believe we had actually slain the sorcerer. When the crops failed yet again, they sent us both into exile.

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was a foolish fond old man. His imprecations and stick-shaking meant less than nothing.

  ‘Revenge, what revenge?’ I remarked to myself on a bubble of blood. Though I died, at least he died with me.

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was too strong an opponent. I should never have come on this godforsaken quest.

  Marmor the so-called sorcerer was the Devil himself.

  Marmor

  Marmor

  Marmor

  Quadesh’s Mercy

  Ixtli named me as the officiant for our next ceremony. Then, under Any Other Business, she announced she was going to appoint a human sacrifice.

  The other six of us on the committee must have regarded this as an unwelcome development. Hitherto, Merciful Quadesh had expressed himself satisfied with a chicken or a pigeon. Once in a pinch we made do with a fairground goldfish, a whole lot of extra gashing and chanting, and the promise of a goat next time, which we did not keep owing to an unforeseen fall in our revenue from membership fees. Perhaps Quadesh was not as tolerant as some of my favourite chants made out.

  Ixtli, our high priestess, looked at each of us around the table. I had been at school with her; her real name was Sharon. She used to largely ignore me, because she was popular and I and my few friends were not. She ignored me now, for which I was most grateful.

  Her stare, basilisk behind her Buddy Holly glasses, settled on Lambert. He seemed a fair and just choice: he had arrived late to the meeting, and the minutes clearly showed he had been absent from the last one without sending apologies. Also, Ixtli had let him officiate at three ceremonies in a row.

  Lambert said, ‘Are you having a giraffe?’

  ‘A giraffe is an unclean animal, as all true followers of Quadesh know,’ I pointed out.

  Lambert ignored me. ‘Why me? Pick somebody else.’

  ‘It is the will of Quadesh,’ Ixtli said.

  ‘Cobblers.’

  ‘Date of next meeting,’ Ixtli said.

  ‘Walpurgisnacht,’ Unsworth suggested.

  ‘Not a date sacred to Quadesh,’ I pointed out, ‘as all his true followers are aware.’

  ‘There you are,’ Lambert said. ‘He’s not a true follower. Sacrifice him instead.’

  ‘As I was saying: Walpurgisnacht won’t do because it isn’t sacred. How about the following week?’

  ‘Let’s close in prayer,’ Ixtli said.

  ‘Listen,’ Lambert said, ‘about this sacrifice. I won’t do. Quadesh wouldn’t like it. I only joined because I thought it might be fun, and the Freemasons wouldn’t have me.’

  ‘We could make a whole day of it,’ I suggested. ‘Unsworth could—’

  ‘Tlaloc.’

  ‘Tlaloc, sorry, could compose a new chant for the occasion. We could do the rite several times, taking turns to officiate. There could be feasting—I’ll go into Morrisons last thing and buy up all the yellow stickers. What do you say?’

  ‘I say you can stuff it.’ Lambert got to his feet and headed for the door. ‘You’re all barking mad.’ He left.

  Ixtli looked around at us who remained. She cocked an eyebrow at me.

  ‘I’m officiating,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Oh yes. Chalchiuhtlicue, you’re up.’

  ‘Fine,’ my old schoolfriend Longbottom said. I knew it was fine for him as it would be for me when my turn came. We all loved Ixtli as much as we loved Quadesh.

  The Kindly Ones

  If Letitia’s aunt expected three months at Bad Wohlfahrtsbach merely to cure her, she expected even greater works of Letitia.

  They had not been residents a week before some visiting doctor prescribed as a panacea rising at five in the morning. ‘It did great things for Herr Professor Kant.’

  Letitia, rising at half-past four to have any hope of getting her aunt out of bed by five, had read of the late great Kant that he had been a capricious fellow who beat his servant for wearing a yellow coat.

  It took her nowhere near as long to get dressed as at home, where she could not even accomplish it without her mother’s help. Decency was effectively banished from the sanatorium: the staff doctors, dirty old men one and all, bickered openly and agreed on nothing save their low opinion of modest feminine dress. Undergarments were barely tolerated: even though Letitia was well within her rights to insist on retaining hers, since she was not a patient and there was no salubrious reason why she should ever have to make herself available for immediate invidious inspection, the medicine men made no secret of their preference that visitors, in the interests of being bonny and buxom, ought to disport themselves like a Venus in furs. Letitia’s abiding impression was that the old lechers regarded her as a spoonful of sugar to help them swallow their daily dose of the once- and the never-beautiful.

  Feeling as good as naked in her loose robe, Letitia left her room and set off on the long journey to Aunt Octavia’s.

  The old sages were thrifty as well as lewd. Upon arrival, Letitia had been downcast to learn she would not be allowed to share a suite with Aunt Octavia, nor even to res
ide on the same floor. The building was heated by something like a hypocaust, at any rate located in the basement, which doubled as a bath house, so that the higher one climbed the colder the building became. It was out of the question to expect paying customers to suffer the extremes of the German climate. The sanatorium charged Letitia nothing for bed and board.

  Letitia’s mother had called this a perfectly divine deal. Letitia, dubious from the first, found herself proved right that very first breakfast-time. The sanatorium exacted further economy by employing only a skeleton staff and supplementing their derisory attempts at labour with the efforts of patients’ companions. Letitia wound up in the kitchen, actually scrubbing pots and pans with wire wool. This was no easy task: she had no way of knowing how much of the obsidian terrain at the base of every pot had been there since time out of mind. The water, though it was more than hot enough to conjure the blood to her delicate skin, had no effect at all on the ancient receptacles.

  Almost in tears, Letitia made up her mind to write to her mother and demand the fare for her return journey forthwith. She was composing the letter in her head while she scraped away at the indomitable blackness, scrabbling for words that could hope to convey even a fraction of the humiliation she was being put to: that she, of all people, should be treated like a servant, and that Aunt Octavia should permit indignity to be piled carelessly upon indignity like so much cordwood.

  Her aunt pleaded ignorance of the sanatorium’s finer details, but Letitia was not convinced. Had not her aunt, she demanded as soon as they were alone together, visited the clinic before? Aunt Octavia pursed her lips momentarily before answering, which alone told Letitia, from long experience and close observation, that she was about to loosen the belt of truth a notch or two.

  ‘My dear, it pains me to see you even the slightest little bit distressed. The last time I came to take the cure, I made my arrangements much earlier in the year and had my choice of the institutions. This time I was not so fortunate: I deliberated long and hard whether I could afford to come again. The prices all over town have inflated in the last twelve months: Wohlfahrtsbach is quite le dernier cri, and I thought seriously about accepting an invitation to America, where I am told there have been remarkable advances in healthcare for those who can afford them. Please believe me when I say the last thing on my mind was any intent to inconvenience you.’

  Letitia must not have looked terribly convinced. She certainly had not felt it, had not felt anything but the smarting of her hands and the tiny pulsing bites of what she was quite certain were bedbugs. Otherwise Aunt Octavia might have left it at that, but something ignoble made her continue.

  ‘Letitia, please don’t look at me like that. I am perfectly well aware—it did not require that I be closeted with Augusta for nearly as long as she thought appropriate for me to grasp that you have lately been disappointed. I was young once, difficult as that may be for you to conceive. You are not the first girl to be denied an opportunity to prosecute her hopes of snaring a man. You will not be the last. Think of it like this: if it be necessary to spend so much money on travel, purely for the sake of staying in sight of a young fellow, no matter how handsome, what would happen if you did affiance yourself, and even if you married him? Do you suppose for one instant he would give up his Wanderlust in favour of the sort of steady domesticity that every right-thinking woman demands? Such fellows are ever afterwards the slaves of those habits of spending and sightseeing they learned early in life.

  ‘A little self-sacrifice will do you the world of good.’

  Letitia made no reply, knowing in this as in all things what was expected of her. Perhaps Aunt Octavia was right to draw her attention to the untamed side of Stephen’s character. Letitia had heard a rumour, which she both hoped and feared true, that he went in for boxing. She excused herself as soon as she felt able; she feared, if she made further complaint, that Aunt Octavia might be moved to remind her of past kindnesses Octavia had shown her widowed sister and defenderless niece.

  Letitia’s letter to her mother was never written and never sent.

  It was just as well: when she took the time to think less hectically, Letitia realised how heavily she and her mother depended on Aunt Octavia. Augusta was the younger sister, a fact that eluded most commentators: though she had given a deal of thought to the thorny issue of remarriage, such efforts as Augusta made in that direction invariably foundered. Letitia herself had entertained high hopes that Mr. Gumbold, the latest postulant, might become her stepfather: his personal wealth was more than sufficient to enable her to cling to the hem of Stephen Critchley’s set. More than loiter she need not do, for surely Stephen would divine her true feelings, given enough time.

  Time harmed Augusta as much as it promised to heal. Since the house belonged to Aunt Octavia, it was inevitable she should often be present when Mr. Gumbold came to pay his respects to her sister. Perhaps that lively presence was enough to make Mr. Gumbold hesitate, and his hesitation drained the heat out of his veins.

  Letitia forgot skittish Mr. Gumbold, lost him along with herself in pleasant piquant speculation about Stephen’s current whereabouts.

  It was Stephen’s imagined daily routine, rather than the shortening and lengthening of life’s pale shadow at the sanatorium, around which Letitia built her own days. Though she knew little enough about him, she could be quite certain he would still be abed as she hastened down three flights of stairs, clinging for dear life to the slim copper pipes that doubled as handrails.

  She tapped at the door. Aunt Octavia shouted, ‘Come!’ as if she expected the advent of a servant. It could have been no-one but Letitia, who entered the room docilely and closed the door behind her.

  Her aunt was in a foul mood. ‘I wonder when that fool of a quack will pass by here again and revoke his risible edict.’

  ‘He said it did Kant no end of good.’

  ‘Kant died a virgin in the town where he was born.’ Ignoring Letitia’s gasp, Aunt Octavia went on, ‘It is quite perverse to suggest civilised people ought to get up at this hour. Whatever is there for us to do?’

  ‘We might go into town.’ Until that moment, Letitia had not felt the need for any companion besides her warm memory of Stephen. She had grown so close to him that she was just beginning, however gingerly, to refer to him in her own mind as ‘Ste.’ Daring though she felt in doing so, she found it difficult to abandon the practice. If only she had adopted it in a more experimental spirit, perhaps for a trial period…

  ‘Why not?’ Aunt Octavia said. Letitia could not have been more surprised if Ste himself had appeared at the door bearing cooked breakfast.

  Of course there was still the hurdle of breakfast to overcome. They made their slow way downstairs, Aunt Octavia leaning heavily on Letitia. Something about the sanatorium brought out the hypochondriac in Aunt Octavia. Back home she would breeze about the house like a girl of Letitia’s years. Perhaps it was the unusual hour that undid her, but she made heavy weather of the trip to the ground floor breakfast room.

  Aunt Octavia offered the usual criticism that the bacon was overdone. In her first weeks as impromptu skivvy, Letitia had tried to console herself with the thought that she might one day cook bacon for Ste and amaze him with her prowess. More recently, it had occurred to her that the talent would go to waste: as Ste’s wife, she would never need to lift a finger. Biting her tongue, Letitia expedited the offending rasher out of Aunt Octavia’s sight. There was no question of the quartermaster providing another: Letitia would have to eat it herself if it was not to go to waste, and sure enough:

  ‘You did that on purpose,’ Aunt Octavia said. There was no real malice in her complaint: it was more like she was staking a claim to be genuinely angry in the future. The prospect of a trip into town appeared to have lightened even her spirits.

  Letitia had not the faintest idea how they were to accomplish their mission. While the patients were not compelled to remain on the premises for the duration of their cure, the doctors provided
no advice on what to see nor how to navigate the locality. Aunt Octavia had at one time been in the habit of engaging a car and driver, but Letitia supposed she had moderated her other expenditure to meet the rising cost of the clinic.

  So it was that the two women found themselves standing on the front steps when a great black car like a hearse pulled up. The fellow in the back looked as though he could not be long for this world: he was haggard and completely bald. Yet he looked spangle-eyed enough and the smile on his face was a vigorous one, full of splendid teeth.

  From between the teeth came the offer of a lift into town.

  The fellow’s lively presence wrought a swifter change in Aunt Octavia than these last weeks of medical attention. She fairly cantered down the worn stone steps into the car, the door of which the man was holding gallantly open himself.

  Letitia sat in the front bench, beside the young chauffeur. She recognised him as a fellow pressganged scullion, but did not dare make mention of their common suffering. Besides, he was acceptable enough in his person, but he was a far cry from Ste. Letitia took monstrous umbrage for that unwitting crime alone, and stared through the windscreen for the entire journey.

  She would have expected the two patients behind her to have exchanged notes on all they had in common: the doctors, their techniques. In her experience, old people were much given to finding fault. Instead they talked of trifles as gaily and carelessly as Letitia’s few friends. Letitia felt cross. There was something deeply unbecoming about Aunt Octavia giggling girlishly in the sunlight, while her own sister sat at home and embroidered away the last of her middle years.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Aunt Octavia asked, at the sight of the first Gasthof.

  ‘No,’ Letitia said. She couldn’t eat another thing so soon after breakfast.

  ‘I was asking Hendrik.’

  ‘I am even more famished than I look.’

  ‘You look athletic. So many men run to fat, and a fat man is as bad as an ugly one.’