The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

In the third of the Castle novels, Steph Swainston takes the reader ever deeper into a world of beauty and terror. . .

The endless war for survival against the merciless Insects has reached yet another stalemate for the Circle, the immortals who serve the Emperor of the Fourlands. The building of a massive dam has driven the Insects back, but it's only a matter of time before they find another way to advance.

Jant, the Emperor's winged Messenger, is called away from battle to find the daughter of fellow immortal, Lightning. Cyan has gone missing in the city of Hacilith, and Lightning wants him to bring her back. But Jant knows better than anyone just how much trouble a teenager can get into in Hacilith's underworld . . .

So begins a hectic quest. A quest that will take Jant back to his past, back to the bizarre world of the Shift and, eventually, back to the Fourlands. Just as it faces a terrifying new threat.

Release date: December 23, 2010

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

I wake, and lie motionless on my camp bed in the dark tent, listening. The wind roars down the gaps between my pavilion and the next, hisses over the guy ropes. Outside, heavy canvas cracks and flaps. The lantern outside my tent door vibrates on its iron stake and sets up a loud humming. When the gust dies back it unmasks the din that woke me. Soldiers are screaming. Men are shouting to each other in the absolute darkness outside. The gale gusts again so loud I can’t distinguish anything at all. I have been asleep for only a couple of hours; it must be one or two in the morning.

I throw my blankets aside and leap off the bed. As my bare feet touch the damp grass the ground shakes so violently I fall to my knees. My bed and the low cane table next to it collapse, spilling my letters and clothes onto the sparse grass. Is it an earthquake?

The tremor surges strongly, a guy rope snaps and in the gloom I see the poles of my fyrd-issue pavilion start to lean to the right. The walls begin to droop, gathering creases.

There is a constant banging, the lantern flame wavers. Its light blows out: suddenly everything is totally black. Its pole hits the ground with a thump.

Wind puffs out the walls then sucks them hollow, drawing in the far-off sound of a desperate, unearthly shrieking, urgent hammering and splintering wood. That isn’t human. What’s going on? What’s happening? I fumble around trying to find my matches, before I realise what it is. Animals are making that noise. Horses. What the fuck would make them scream like that? They’re in their stalls at the top of camp; the smashing is their hooves beating the gates where they’re trapped. Their noise is solid panic but I can’t hear anything else. In a second the power of their agony winds me so tightly on edge that I whimper. I grab my combat trousers off the grass, hop about on a bare foot shoving one leg into them, then the other, pull them up to my waist, button them.

The gale swells and punches the tent walls. The horses’ screams die out, one by one. Now I can hear men and women yelling, their shouts come from both sides and from the row of pavilions in front of mine.

‘Help!’ A man’s cry fragments in the wind. Footsteps thump on the duckboard track outside, resounding in both directions. People are running to and from the centre of camp; I can’t tell what they’re trying to do. Lamps flare outside, far on the other side of the pavilion lines, towards the gate. Their light shines through my walls as yellow dots with fuzzy haloes, outlining the ridges of the surrounding tents.

I thrust my toes without socks into clammy leather boots, shoving them right down to the hard sole and drawing the bucket tops over my knees. I pick up my scale-mail hauberk, hold it up, jangling, over my head and struggle into it as if it is a jumper, leaving the bottom straps loose. Its freezing scales slap against my bare skin but I have no time to put on the undershirt.

I fumble my left arm into my round shield’s leather loops. I can’t see anything but blackness at ground level. I feel for my ice axe, snatch it up and wriggle its webbing strap over my hand, around my wrist. The canvas ceiling sags down to my head. Its rear wall billows in on a cold blast, carrying the smell of tough grass and wet moss. The ropes stretch to breaking strain, then yank thick pegs out of the ground.

I dart to the entrance, unlacing the flaps from each other with my long, white fingers up in front of my face. A silhouette stumbles past outside, running for its life, then back again in the direction it came. He falters one way then the other, incapable of making a decision, swiping at the air with a broadsword clutched in one muddy hand.

I scrabble out under the cloudy starless sky, onto the planks that serve row fifty-one. I tread on something lumpy and yielding, and look down. It is a severed right hand. I lift my boot toe off its palm and its curled fingers relax slightly.

Abruptly a tremendous noise like a tree trunk breaking crashes through the gale, followed by a running series of snaps starting deep in the night in front of me. It sounds like sailcloth ripping, or a hunter stripping the ribs off a carcass. It approaches louder and closer, peels past me on my right, and ends far behind me with a ear-splitting crack. I crouch wondering what the fuck it was. The wind exalts with twice the strength and splatters water drops from the tent canvas across my face. The palisade must have gone down. Three sides of our square encampment are wide open. The wind roars straight from the high moor with no shelter to break it up and searches out the tiny gaps in my mail shirt. I have a sudden impression of the vast, empty hills. It is five kilometres to our reinforcements at Slake Cross, three to the nearest fortified farm.

This must really be an earthquake if it’s strong enough to rip down the palisade. The ground shakes in short spasms. Behind me my whole pavilion collapses with a sigh, blowing air past me. The wind tugs at it, twisting it into a rustling, living form. Torn strips flap past, writhing as they ascend. They fly like flags from the tent next to mine; it has been shredded. Tangled bloodstained clothes roll and wrap themselves around the base of its pole. To my right, towards the centre of camp, the neighbouring tents in the line lie collapsed in the same direction, like trees in a blasted forest. There are more lamps along the track but the ones that aren’t dead gutter feebly. I stare into the roaring night but I can’t see any further.

A dark-haired man sprints along the duckboard, clutching his crumpled, padded undershirt to his naked chest, the greaves on his otherwise bare legs flashing.

‘Stop! What’s out there?’

He just disappears against the moors’ lightless bulk.

I sense rather than see movement on my right towards the fallen palisade. Maybe men, heading away from the tents. They seem to thin out, are gone. I hear clicking and swing round with a breath to my left. Did something scuttle behind the canvas wreckage? My hand is so tight around my axe haft I feel its tally notches pressing into my palm. I bring it up into guard.

A soldier is squatting to shit in front of the next tent. The tent’s walls are patched with blood and it emits a warm cloying smell of viscera. The soldier is looking away from me, so terrified that his bowels let go and he’s getting it over with as fast as possible.

Another man runs past, wearing nothing but a coat and pants, his ponytail whisking. I don’t know how to stop them fleeing so I yell the rallying cry, ‘To me! To me! Minsourai! … Wake up! … Wake …’ But there is no one to wake. I can’t see inside the laced tents and even if I could I don’t want to. I back away; I might be safer at a distance from them.

These are the advance guard, only five thousand men but still too many to rally. Where’s Hayl? These pavilions are for his minsourai, mounted scouts who reconnoitre and find routes for the fyrd, locate and mark positions to camp.

I begin to pick my way in the opposite direction towards the centre and the Castle’s field headquarters. If we can possibly regroup, the Sun Pavilion will be the best place.

I follow the duckboard raised above the grass that’s bruised and pasted down into the mud. The mud is becoming more slimy with blood. Under the boards I see a boot with a lower leg protruding. No sign of the rest of the body. Further on, dismembered limbs scatter the tussocks and track.

The wind batters against me and, somewhere within it, I catch the rasp of an Insect’s leg against its shell. I shrink back and stare around. I can’t see anything!

Behind me, something the size of a pony but with thin long legs skitters across the track. I glimpse a flash of red-brown shell. They’re everywhere! My scalp tingles: at any moment one will lunge out of the night and grab me before I even see it.

Far on the other side of camp, lights are clustering and moving away. I’ll try to reach them. If I can trust what I’ve heard, the palisade’s still upright over there.

The wind gusts from every direction carrying the brief sound of mandibles chopping closed, like a whetstone on a scythe blade. Closer to the centre now, the tents on either side are nothing but shreds. Inside one, I hear the sound of bone splintering. In each pavilion, ten men are dispatched by bites before they wake up, their bodies twisted into different postures. Ten men fused together into a slaughterhouse heap so unrecognisable I’ll have to use their dog tags to identify them.

The next tent stores the armour consignment that arrived yesterday. I hear crashes as clawed feet skid over the steel, knocking against piles of plate, jostling sheaves of pikes. I smell whiffs and hear scraping from the latrine shack. Insects are in there too, turning over the earth and eating the shit.

The path begins to zigzag. The earthquake has shaken some of its joined sections apart. Then I see it folded into peaks; the boards are still connected but standing on their ends.

Grey eye facets glitter. I glimpse an Insect face-on. It pulls back into the darkness between two pavilions. Its triangular antlike head moves up and down; it is tangled among crossed tent ropes, severing them with bites. Pieces of paper and torn pennons fly through the night, brushing the ground and catching against buckled ridge poles.

I see angular shapes of Insects standing, feeding on the corpses. A brush of air, something rears. Instantly I see jaws like stag beetle mandibles, then it crashes into the shield. Its jaws slide off the curved edge. I yell and swing my axe, feel it connect. I free the axe and bring it down again. It’s dead. It’s dead! Calm down! Short breaths rush in and out as I feel not think – how many more? I have to get away. I plunge down the track, running blindly. I’m on the verge of completely losing control, then I stop.

The track has ended. There are no more planks.

At the same moment a heavy gust blusters against my face carrying the unmistakable firm burnt copper scent of Insects. When as a child I lost my milk teeth, pulling at a tooth and turning it rushed a salty blood taste into my mouth, and I had a strange sore pleasure from turning a tooth on a flesh thread or biting down the sharp underside onto my gum. That’s what Insects smell like, and it’s so intense there must be hundreds. How have they appeared inside the camp? My jaw prickles as if I’m about to vomit. I gulp down saliva and I let out a scream to release the fear.

‘Jant!’ a voice answers, faint on the wind. It is Tornado, bellowing but I think I hear an edge to it as if he’s in pain. ‘Jant, where are you? Hayl, is that you?’

‘Tornado!’ I yell with all my strength.

‘Jant! Jant!’ Tornado sounds desperate. ‘Fuck –’

The wind’s noise rises higher and higher. If I open my wings, it will smash me into the ground.

Something whizzes past my face, with the gale, and thuds into the duckboard behind me. I crouch down to investigate. An arrow is sticking in the plank at a steep angle, its bodkin point embedded deeply. Its shaft and white fletchings are still quivering. I start to hear, but not see, more arrows hissing down. They pelt from the sky, from somewhere ahead of me, not spent, striking with force.

I raise my shield in front of my face and feel it jar. Arrows come down like hailstones sweeping across the track, thudding into the corpses, into the soldiers who are still alive but wounded, lying on the ground sweating and twitching. All the ground I can see is filling with arrows. Our archers must be a couple of hundred metres away. Why are they shooting at us?

I yell into the night, ‘Stop!’ and the wind tatters my voice.

Invisible arrows strike the board in front of my toes; one deflects off my shield and drops at my side. They catch in tent fabric. I hear them tap on an Insect shell and the clicking of articulated claws as it scuffles under fallen canvas.

The arrows buzz in well-timed flights, but I can’t hear any voice ordering the loosing. Who’s out there? Lightning – if it is Lightning – must have concluded that everybody is dead or beyond help. The archers will be terrified. They’re protecting themselves and they’re never going to stop. I hurry away from them, stumble over a shaft embedded in the track, and break it.

I catch a glimpse of a single flickering light ahead. It illuminates a white tent from inside. All around is dark so the tent, rectangular because it’s side-on to me, looks as if it is hanging in the air. The light moves slowly, in jerks, along at floor level. It inches towards the entrance; closer and closer. A sense of dread weighs on me because I know what I am going to witness next will be even worse. Whatever comes out of that tent is the last thing alive this side of camp and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to have to deal with wounds so awful. It will be mutilated and driven so insane by agony it won’t even be human any more. I fervently hope that it dies before it emerges.

A lean hand clutching a lantern pushes out from the flap and Laverock crawls out on his hands and knees – head, shoulders, chest. I know him as a minsourai captain, a local with vital knowledge of Lowespass. Digging ramparts made him sinewy, with shorn hair and a face like a weathered leather bag. He was raised with the constant pressures of the Insect threat and Awian ambition.

An arrow snicks into the grass beside him, its flights upright.

‘Laverock!’ I cry.

He looks in my direction, not recognising me. As he draws his legs from the tent flap I see he doesn’t have feet. His feet have been bitten off above the ankle, though not cleanly because sharp tubes of white bone stick out from the severed ends: they look like uncooked macaroni.

Insect antennae flicker after him. Bulbous, faceted eyes follow and the thing strikes forward. Laverock’s eyes widen in terror. He pushes himself upright and tries to run on the stumps but his bones sink into the ground like hollow pegs. The Insect seizes his hips low down; its jaws saw over his belly. Laverock knows this is his last second. He snarls in fury as he falls and swings round the iron lantern dangling from his hand. He smashes it over the Insect’s head. Yellow-flaming liquid spreads over its brown carapace. I smell scorching chitin, then Laverock’s shirt and wings catch fire. His long primary feathers drip and shrink as they burn, as if they’re drawing back into his wings. The Insect bites through his body and with a shake of its head throws the top half towards me. The Insect and Laverock’s remains sink to the ground, welded together in the fire, vivid against the line of wrecked tents.

By their light I can suddenly see I’m standing at the edge of a vast pit. The flames jump up and shadow its far side, twenty metres away. I stare at it, uncomprehending: this should be the centre of camp. The conical hole gradually, steadily, widens. Turf breaks off under my feet and rolls into it. I step back, seeing that the slope is covered with debris. On the other side, the Sun Pavilion, collapsed down the incline, lies plastered to it like a gigantic wet sheet, trailing ropes still attached at their ends to dirty uprooted pegs. The brass sun bosses that top its main poles glint among its folds. Dead men are splayed out around and underneath it, pale and naked or half-dressed, some still in sleeping bags. As soil rolls down, they slide towards the base of the cone. Their limbs shift position with jerky marionette motions – they look as if they’re waving. Swords and broken camp bed frames rattle off stones in the soil as they slide; kitbags spill their contents.

Tornado’s voice peals out again, ‘Jant!’ I look up to see the giant man standing on the far bank beset by seven Insects, five on the slope in front of him and one on his either side. Yet more Insects are running up out of the crater. Tornado backs himself against an empty ambulance cart. It has 1ST DIVISION LOWESPASS SELECT roughly stencilled on the side, and its spoked wheels have curved boards nailed to the rims, to widen them and prevent them sinking in the mud.

Tornado’s breeches are slashed and blood wells up from red cuts underneath. It flows down his leg from a deep wound in his thigh. His denim shirt is unbuttoned; his big hands curl around the shaft of his double-headed axe. Every second he is taking wounds that would kill me outright.

An Insect below him darts forward but Tornado swings the axe under its mandibles with such force that he decapitates it. He hews down the ones on left and right with a fluid movement. At his feet a mound of carcasses bleeds thick pale yellow haemolymph down the widening pit. Two more Insects run up the slope and over its rim. He deals one a massive blow, cleaving its thorax through. The other seems to brush past him with a movement of its head but it opens a huge streaming gash in the roll of fat over his unfastened belt buckle. Tornado bellows.

He starts to droop forward. He clutches at the cart for support; it rocks on its curved boards. His knees sag and his skin is pallid. He kneels, one knee then the other, head bowed. I can’t see his face.

I watch as an Insect climbs the cart from behind, crests the top, appears above Tornado’s head as a spiked silhouette, with actions like a jointed puppet. It reaches down to Tornado’s rounded shoulders. It starts to feed.

Under their weight, the edge of the pit gives way and they tumble. Tornado rolls, unconscious and arms loose, down the slope. He hits the edge of the mass of debris and lies still, near the bottom. Soil continues to crumble away; the cart’s front wheels jolt over the edge. It teeters and then runs straight down the slope. Its wheels’ boards slap and leave footprints, its dragging hafts plough furrows. It runs over Tornado’s outstretched arm and fractures it, impacts into the duckboards and broken tents, and comes to rest upright on top of him, its four wheels caging him in.

Tornado’s down. What chance do I have? The oil is burning off Laverock’s Insect and its light is dying down. The shadows shift and I see the base of the pit, where soil has been swept aside from the pale grey bedrock. It has been brushed clean. A wide crack runs across it, separating it into two slabs like deeply buried gravestones. The gap transfixes me – it is pure black – so black that as an illusion it seems to jump and shimmer. I stare at it as arrows still whicker and thud around my feet.

A flash of movement on my left, and an Insect’s head with open mandibles lunges at my waist. My elbow’s levered up, and before I can stop it, the head is under my shield. I flinch away inside its jaws, with a fast reaction but I can’t dodge far enough: it turns and plunges its open left mandible into my stomach like a dagger. I go rigid with the shock of it penetrating. It tosses its head like a bull goring and I feel the razor mandible gouge upwards. My skin parts before it. My loose hauberk rucks up over its head with a metallic rasp. Its cold jaw slits all the way up and hooks under my lowest rib. It tries to continue its carving slice and pulls me onto the tips of my toes. By luck, I stumble backwards and slip off the point.

With my hand clawed I rake over the bastard thing’s eye but my nails have no effect and I hate myself for reverting to act like a Rhydanne and scratching, while my ice axe drags on the ground.

My strength fails quickly. I raise the axe and bring it down between its eyes, into its forehead plate studded with three smaller eyes and dimpled antennae sockets. The frons plate cracks across like a nutshell and one side lifts up: I glimpse the base of its compound eye rooted in a damp membrane underneath.

The Insect rears up and shoves me. I topple backwards and fall. I brace myself but I’m surprised to find I’m still falling. My wings open instinctively. The pit’s edge tilts up into the sky above me. I hit the slope hard with my left wing under me and – crack! – its bone breaks.

This isn’t my camp bed. Where the fuck –? No: I’m lying on my back on the slope with my wing buckled underneath me and I had better not faint again. My right arm is outstretched, the strap around my wrist is holding me attached to the axe pick still embedded in the Insect’s head.

It lies flat; its head moving left and right in its death throes tugs at my arm. Its mandibles open and close. Its flattened forelegs kick back and forth, scooping soil off the top of the slope. Turf chunks and grainy dirt sift down on top of me, covering me lightly all over.

I clutch one hand instinctively across my stomach but the gash is too long to hold together and my fingers sink under the edge of the flap of skin. It is warm and very slick. I feel a loop of gut spill out over my arm. I look down and see it adhering to the ground, picking up pieces of soil and grass blades. Unable to stop it, I watch it uncoil out of my midriff from under the mail shirt. The guts slither over each other; they are different shades of grey and firm to the touch.

All I can see of my wing is the bicep and a sharp shard of broken bone sticking out of the muscle close to my body between the black feathers. As I breathe out, air rushes out of the hollow bone. The air sac inside it inflates slightly out of its pointed end. It is a very thin, moist and silvery membrane. I know that Awians have two air sacs deep in their backs and in their limbs’ long bones nearest the body; humerus and femur, but I’d never seen one balloon out before. I breathe in, dizzy from shock and lack of air, and it inflates. I exhale and it flutters where it’s ruptured and the air flutes out. Under the feathery skin around it, a blister starts to grow as escaping air is trapped there. Oh, fuck. That’s me fucked then if I’m breathing through the bone.

The ground shakes but I don’t roll further down the slope because I’m anchored to the dead Insect at the top. I can’t muster the energy to turn myself over and crawl. I can’t move. I’m going to die here. I have to do something, anything, not just give up. The wind gets under my broken wing and blows it around, grinding as it twirls on the bone. Between gusts it settles down slowly on top of me, then the wind picks it up again. I take my hand from my ripped stomach and reach out to flatten it against the ground but the feather tips still curl up.

The agony begins. It is fiery and sharp, a white-hot blade the length of my side. I lie with my cheek in the cold, uneven soil like a toad’s back and scream. Mud grains get into my mouth and coat the back of my tongue. I grit my teeth and they grate against the surfaces. I feel soil filling my nostrils, I retch with the earthworm smell of loam and cut roots. I scream wordlessly with all my strength, trying to relieve the pain. A human or Awian would scream for help, but Rhydanne don’t because Rhydanne know there is no help to be had.

I can feel the sweat trickling out of my hairline and a stream of blood running freely out of my side, into the ground. I didn’t know I had this much blood.

The uneven piles of dirt close beside me, that I know are tiny, now seem as impassable as mountain ranges, and dark with the organic matter of rotting soldiers … whom I will soon join.

The black sky rains arrows. The wind’s noise is a great distance above me; it doesn’t affect me any more. I feel a warm patch spreading between my legs: I have wet myself. I begin to suffer from an overbearing sense of shame. What will people say when they find out I’ve wet myself and my trousers are sticking to my crotch? But I will be long dead by the time they find me, if they find me at all.

I take another mouthful of dirt and scream again, petrified by the thought of leaving the world for ever. I’m twenty-three; I don’t want to die. I’m one hundred and thirty years old, I don’t want to die. I can’t feel my toes or fingers, then feet or hands, then legs or arms. The cold clings to my skin like wet cloth. It permeates my bones and my muscles ache with tension. I can’t curl up against it. I am shivering from the freezing air in the wound, it reaches inside my body until I feel as if I am more naked than naked.

I quickly run out of energy and lie exhausted, with my throat raw. The damp ground at last feels comfortable against my cheek. I am as cold as the soil, throughout my body, as if I am already part of it. I start to forget how to breathe. How still I am. I can hear an Insect’s claws scraping underground as it pulls itself through the crevice in the rock.

I sink into fatigue and start slipping into warm sleep despite the pain. I am dimly aware of my body shutting down. I fight to stay awake, in furious denial, but why bother? No one is left to help me. Sleep tempts me. I scream at myself – if you sleep you die! Stay awake! The numbness seeps deeper and I have no choice. It steals up inside my core. While my consciousness fights fiercely to stay awake, a part of my mind falls asleep, then another, blocking it in. I can’t revive my memory. I can’t wake my sense of hearing … touch … vision … I am surrounded by sleeping mind; I die.

I woke. I tried to sit up and banged my head hard on a wooden plank above me. Shit, had they put me in a coffin already?

I was curled up tightly in a tiny space, tense with suppressed panic. I calmed down, relaxed and remembered where I was. It isn’t 1925, it is the year 2025, and we are six kilometres south of the Wall in Slake Cross town. I had been sleeping folded up on the lowest shelf of an enormous bookcase. My wings extended, half-spread, taking up metres of the paved stone floor.

Frost, the Architect and owner of the bookcase, was sitting behind her table a few metres away. She glanced down. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock, Jant. We only have an hour until the meeting, remember?’

I unpacked my long legs, stood and stretched, attempting to tie my hair back so I could see her.

Frost sounded curious: ‘Did you have bad dreams again? Was it the nineteen twenty-five massacre?’

‘Yes. I have flashbacks every time I come here. God, I hate this place.’

‘I’m not surprised you have bad dreams if you sleep on a shelf. Sometimes I forget you’re a Rhydanne but then you do something really bizarre. Tornado and Lightning haven’t been bothered by nightmares.’

‘They weren’t eviscerated, and besides, they remember worse disasters.’ I hooked my thumb in the pocket of my jeans and pulled the waistband down to show the old knotty scar that curved up the left side of my stomach.

‘Yeuch. Still, you should have got over it by now. Have you been under the influence?’

‘No.’ Not since that last handful of mushrooms anyway, and whatever I’d washed them down with. ‘I’m clean.’

‘Well, being “clean” seems to have done wonders for your vanity.’

I had unfolded a little mirror to check the kohl around my eyes. My irises were dark green like bottle glass, the pupils vertical like a cat’s, backed with a light-reflecting membrane. It’s a Rhydanne trait. So are my silver bangles and a brightly coloured serape shawl wound around my waist, its indigo tassels hanging down. But I am half Awian and at the moment my clothes are too; well-tailored boot-cut riding trousers. The faience beads and broken buzzard feathers in my black hair. Then there was the natty slashed shirt I picked up in Wrought, through which I was windburnt, so now with the sleeves rolled, my arms were brindled and spotted. I had spent the last six months carrying messages for Frost and constant flying had honed me down to bone and muscle. I feel so much better these days and everyone can see how much better I look.

I stretched my wings and Frost watched the workings of the joints, unfortunately not with the eye of a woman who finds them attractive, but as a fascinated engineer. Frost, through and through a Plainslander, was a human without wings. She looked to where the limbs, as thick as thighs, joined to me above the small of my back. The muscles around my sides, attached to the tops of my hips, drive them.

I folded them both neatly so the quills lined up, like organ pipes emerging from delicate, corrugated skin. The limey Lowespass water had dulled my feathers.

Frost sat behind a rough table in the middle of the hall, with a large brass coffee pot at hand. Propped up against it was her small and extremely threadbare soft toy rabbit with one eye. It had been a present from her husband more than three hundred years before. The coffee pot and the rabbit weighted down a stack of papers, a mound of dog-eared textbooks and notes, all in Frost’s handwriting but some of the paper was ancient. An enormous chart of the Oriole River valley curled off the table at either end. Fiendish equations were pencilled across it; underscoring, memos and neat, blocky doodles. Her genius calculations were written in lines; tiny numbers and letters. There were all sorts of little triangles there too. I appreciated the little triangles.

Frost presided over this orderly mess, a double-handled glazed mug cradled in her square palms. Her round face was slightly blotchy without any trace of make-up and her nose was red. Dryness lines bunched together around her eyes and two vertical creases between them made her look fearsome, but they were caused by peering into windswept trenches, not by scowling. She had a bulky brown ponytail with a few grey hairs twisted and tethered behind her head with a clip. Wiry strands fizzed out of it, around her broad forehead and the pencil wedged behind her ear.

The arms of Frost’s chunky cardiga