She counted out the seconds, then silently set about cranking the handle, and turning the great cheese. After she had turned the tiny sample Sturton too by hand, she grinned to herself as she tried out her brand-new and unfamiliar sense of self-satisfaction.
There was no point in trying to sleep until exhaustion kicked in once again, and Neverfell set about groggily preparing other orders, the dainties for the market gala, the camel cheese for the eminent chocolatier and the delivery for Madame Appeline.
Ten minutes before she was due to turn the Sturton again, the bells rang at Grandible’s front door. Neverfell tied her mask on crooked and ran to answer it, almost falling foul of Grandible’s various lethal traps in her hurry. Peering through the spy-hole she saw a footman displaying a leanness and angularity of jaw usually reserved for lizards.
‘Your business?’ Neverfell tried to imitate Grandible’s brusque tone.
The footman’s smile was instantly charming, whilst suggesting an awareness of his own dignity. His consonants all had a damp sound.
‘If you would be so kind, there is a package reserved for Madame Appeline. If it is ready—’
The idea hit Neverfell like a fist. It hit her so hard that she actually rocked back on to her heels, then stood trembling and trying to decide whether to cry. It was a good idea, a brilliant idea, perhaps the best she had ever had, better than the mangle-cheese-turner. But it seemed unfair that it should have occurred to her now, just when she was enjoying the thought of Master Grandible being pleased with her. She deserved to feel that happiness a little longer. But no, now she had the idea and it had her. She gnawed her fingers, and the idea gnawed her, and she knew she was going to do what it wanted.
‘One moment!’ she squeaked, then sprinted back towards the room where the Stackfalter Sturton lay in state.
At the door she halted, then edged slowly into the room, softening her steps as best she could to avoid waking her master. Not two feet from the great sleeping Sturton nestled the baby sample Sturton, ragged with its feathery white mosses. At Neverfell’s belt hung a circular steel cutter, designed so that you could push it in through the rind of a cheese and pull out a tiny cylindrical sample. Hardly daring breathe, Neverfell reached out and picked up the sample Sturton between finger and thumb, wincing as she felt the tender mosses crush beneath her touch like loose snow.
She pushed her cutter into the base of the little cheese and felt a tingle of fear and excitement as the rind gave way. When she pulled it out with a small round of ripe cheese within it, the exposed paste filled the room with the scent of wildflowers and wet dogs, and for a moment she was afraid that it would tickle Grandible’s well-trained nose and wake him. He snored on, however, and she carefully returned the sample to its place, the new hole flush against the shelf so as to conceal her crime and stop the spread of the smell.
She was partly doing this for him, she reminded herself. He needed friends in the Court, and soon he would have Madame Appeline.
Back in the packing room she found the box put aside for Madame Appeline’s order, the pearl-grey round of Zephurta’s Whim already nestling within in its bed of olive leaves. Neverfell quickly removed the stolen cheese from her cutter and wrapped it in muslin. In a moment of inspiration, she tied the muslin bundle with a piece of black velvet ribbon, so that Madame Appeline would remember the black velvet mask and realize who was responsible.
Out, out, out, said her heart with every beat. Doing this will get me out of here. Madame Appeline will make me a new Face, and I can go out.
Grandible had hidden away the front-door keys once again, but there was a small much-bolted hatch beside the door for receiving small deliveries, and Madame Appeline’s box was narrow enough to fit through it.
‘Here – sign this!’ She unbolted the hatch and pushed a receipt through it. Once the footman had signed it, Neverfell thrust the box through the hatch, and bolted it again. ‘There! Take it!’ She watched him depart through the spyhole, then leaned gasping against the door.
I can sleep now, I can . . . no, wait! The next Sturton turning!
She sprinted down the corridors to the Sturton room, and flung open the door. One sniff of the air told her that she was almost too late. The fumes from the unturned cheese were starting to turn poisonous, and her eyes stung as she staggered forward towards the crank. Grandible was already crawling his way across the floor, jowls shaking as he choked on the now overpowering smell of wildflowers. Holding her breath and closing her eyes, Neverfell cranked the handle and slowly inverted the Sturton. At last it found itself standing on its head, and began to settle.
‘Master Grandible!’ Neverfell ran to his side, all forgotten in her concern. It took a while for his breaths to steady.
‘Child . . . I shall forgive you your wakefulness. If I had slept on . . . the cheese would have been ruined.’ This was clearly of far greater horror to him than the prospect of his own demise. ‘Good . . . good work, Neverfell.’ His eyes rose to her face. ‘Why . . . why are you wearing your mask?’
‘Oh.’ Neverfell felt her skin tingle and grow hot as she removed the mask. ‘I . . . I . . . A footman came for a delivery . . . Madame Appeline . . .’
And, looking into her master’s eyes, Neverfell was suddenly sure that he knew absolutely the reason for her stammer and the greasy cutter at her belt. Somehow he could see right through her.
‘I wanted to protect you!’ she squeaked, giving up all hope of pretence.
‘Death’s gate,’ whispered Grandible. His expression was grim and dogged as ever, but suddenly he was ashen pale.
Spyders
‘What have I done? What have I done? I have done something terrible – what is it? I just wanted to help! I thought if I sent Madame Appeline what she wanted it would make friends for you in the Court . . . I just wanted to keep you safe!’
‘Safe?’ Grandible’s face was still that of a statue, frozen and greyish with suppressed emotion. ‘Safe?’ His voice rose to a roar, tiny flecks of Stackfalter Sturton falling out of his eyebrows. Neverfell gave a wordless squeak of apology as she was shaken like a doll and then abruptly thrust away.
Master Grandible stared at her, one hand raised as if he were considering striking her. Then he reached out unsteadily and shoved at her shoulder with the flat of his hand. Neverfell quivered and went nowhere, uncertain whether he wanted her to leave, unsure whether the gesture had been angry or affectionate.
‘A person I could trust,’ was all he said, and gave a small choking sound that she did not immediately recognize as a laugh. ‘That was what I thought. When I pulled you out of the whey. You were so . . .’ He sighed and cupped his hands as if a small, damp kitten were resting its paws on his palms. ‘What more could I do? I boarded my doors against every betrayal I could imagine. But there was one I never expected.’ He rasped his yellowing fingernails through his beard with a sound like a toothbrush war. ‘Ha. Betrayal for my own good.’
‘What . . . what does it mean? What have I done?’
‘You have woken the spiders.’
Master Grandible sometimes had an odd, unbalanced way of saying words that gave them new meanings. When he talked of ordinary spiders of the spindle-legged and spinning variety the word had its usual ring. But here there was a greater weight on the first syllable, and second dusty and dead, almost inaudible. Spy . . . der.
‘Go and fetch the prune gin. Bring it to the reception room.’
Neverfell ran off to fetch the bottle, her face burning and her stomach acid. She had gone so fast from lifesaver to betrayer that all her words seemed to have fallen out of her. When she reached the reception room, Master Grandible had dropped into his chair, eyes bloodshot and breath still wheezing. She carried in her tiny tapestry-seat stool and hunched on it at his feet, her knees pulled up to her nose. He took the bottle, sipped, then stared down the neck.
‘Neverfell – what do you think the Court is?’
Neverfell could not even shape a sentence. The Court was gold
en, the Court was glory. It was fair maidens and a thousand new faces and her heart beating fast. It was the world. It was everything that was not here.
‘I know you hate it,’ she said.
Master Grandible leaned forward, and dropped his broad chin down to rest on his fists.
‘It is a giant web, Neverfell, full of bright-winged, glistening insects. All of them full of their own poison, all entangled, all struggling to live and to kill. All of them pull the web this way and that to favour themselves or throttle each other. And every motion that one of them makes is felt by all the others.’
‘But Madame Appeline . . .’
Madame Appeline is different, Neverfell wanted to say. I saw it in her Face. But she could hear how foolish it would sound, so she let the sentence drop.
‘It sickens me now to say it,’ Grandible went on, ‘but as a young man I had a notable place at Court.’
‘Did you?’ Neverfell could not help leaning forward in excitement, even though she knew it was not how her master wanted her to react.
‘Nobody else had successfully ripened a Wanepilch Milchmaid in this city without their eyes falling out,’ Grandible explained, ‘so, when I succeeded, a round of it was sent to the Grand Steward himself. And . . . they say that when he placed the first sliver of it into his mouth, he actually tasted it.’
‘So . . . it is all true what they say of him, then? That he would be blind, deaf and numb without the very finest luxuries?’
‘Not quite. There is nothing wrong with his eyes, ears, nose, skin or tongue, only the parley they hold with his soul. He can look at a flower and tell you it is blue, but blue means nothing to him. You can put a forkful of meat on his tongue and he will be able to tell you that it is roast beef, the age and stock of the cow, exactly how long it has been cooked and which type of tree gave the wood for the fire, but it might as well be a pebble for all the flavour means to him. He can analyse it, but he no longer feels it.
‘But what is to be expected of a man five hundred years old? They say he remembers the days when there was an overground city up on the mountainside, and no Caverna, just a set of caves and cellars where the city stored its luxuries. He has outlived that city, seen it fall into ruin beneath the ravages of war and weather, while its citizens gradually retreated beneath the earth and dug downwards.
‘For four hundred and twenty of those five hundred years his body has been trying to die. He has sustained himself on every liquor, spice and unguent known to hold back death, but there is only so long you can drag a bow against a string before it starts to creak. The colours in his soul are fading, and his passions are going out one by one, like stars. That is why the Craftsmen of the City strive, night and day, century in and century out, to steal, create or invent something that he can feel.’
‘And you succeeded!’
‘Yes. I won the Grand Steward’s favour.’
There was something in his dark tone that curbed Neverfell’s burning desire to know about the benefits of the favour of the Grand Steward. Did he give you a hat made of gold and a monkey is that where your clock came from did he knight you did you drink pearls dissolved in coffee . . . These were all questions that Neverfell managed not to ask.
‘Some say the favour of the Grand Steward is double-edged. They are wrong. It is all edge and everybody knows it, and still all the courtiers spend their every waking moment clutching at it and bleeding. The moment you rise to favour, you gain a hundred unseen and envious enemies.
‘I was stung too often. No favour was worth it. I decided to pull myself out of the web, and buried myself in these tunnels so that I could not find myself playing the Court games even by accident. Leaving the Court is no easy matter, for one finds oneself entangled – debts, threats, secrets shared, people who know your weaknesses and people whose weaknesses you know. When I left, many whispered that this was just another move in a more complicated game, one that required me to be out of sight. There were four assassination attempts against me in the first month.’
The many locks, the precautions taken for every visitor . . . all of these began to make more sense.
‘Eventually they left me alone,’ continued the cheesemaker, ‘but only because, year in and year out, I took every care to be completely neutral. No games, no alliances, no biases. I used the same rules for everybody. No exceptions.’
‘Oh . . .’ Neverfell hugged her knees as clarity dawned. ‘So that’s why you didn’t want to give Madame Appeline the Sturton when she asked for it? Because that would be making an exception?’
‘Yes,’ Grandible muttered hollowly. ‘And now everybody will think that I have done so knowingly. At the grand banquet the Sturton will make its debut, and Madame Appeline’s client will already have a Face tailor-made to respond to it. It will be obvious that it could not have been prepared without prior knowledge of the cheese. Everybody will see the Face and know.’
‘What . . . what can I do? Can I make it better?’
‘No.’
There it was. Neverfell felt her stomach turn over. For the hundredth time one of her wild gestures had knocked something over and broken it beyond mending. This time, however, she knew that she had broken something far larger, something that could not be replaced. Her soul burned with self-hate, and she wished that she could break herself into a thousand pieces like a china pot. She buried her nose between her knees and snuffled.
‘No,’ her master repeated. ‘There is nothing we can do. I shall send a man to try to retrieve the delivery, but I think it is too late.’
‘But . . . you could tell everybody it was my fault, and that you did nothing wrong! I could tell them what happened! Or maybe you could send me to talk to Madame Appeline! I could explain, and ask her to give us back the Stackfalter Sturton—’
‘NO!’ For the first time Grandible sounded truly and ferociously angry. Neverfell leaped to her feet and fled.
It was all very well being told that she could do nothing to make things better. Neverfell did not have the kind of mind that could take that quietly. She did not have the kind of mind that could be quiet at all.
In many respects, poor Neverfell’s overactive mind had coped with her lonely and cloistered life in the only way it could. It had gone a little mad to avoid going wholly mad. To break up the dreary repetition of the day it had learned to skip unpredictably, to invent and half-believe, to shuffle thoughts until they were surprising and unrecognizable.
Small wonder that when she did find somebody to talk with they barely understood her. She was like a playing piece making ‘knight moves’ when everybody else was obeying draughts rules. Half the time her mind was visiting squares where nobody else ever landed and, even when people understood the position her mind had reached, they could never work out how she had got there.
At the moment, her mind was throwing up ideas and thoughts the way a fountain throws up water drops, most of them foolish on second glance, losing their glitter as they fell.
We can give Stackfalter Sturton samples to everybody! Everybody in the entire Court! Then it’ll be fair!
We can swap the big banquet Sturton for another giant cheese that looks exactly the same but tastes a bit different, so that the Face Madame Appeline creates won’t match the taste!
We can send an extra cheese to the banquet, one that will split and fill the whole room with stinging steam! That way everybody will have to run away and nobody will see the Face Madame Appeline has prepared!
Fortunately she had just enough common sense to see the flaws in these plans before presenting them to Cheesemaster Grandible. There was not enough Sturton to give to everybody without breaking into the big truckle, there was not enough time to make and ripen a suitable ‘decoy cheese’, and it was just possible that blinding the Grand Steward and his privileged nobles with poison cheese steam would not greatly improve Master Grandible’s position.
In among the flood of ideas and imaginings, however, a couple of thoughts bubbled and bobbed to the surface
again and again. Why had Master Grandible been so angry at her suggestion that she talk to people and take the blame? He had been frightened at the idea of her speaking with Madame Appeline from the start. Was there some secret that her careless words might give away?
By the time she dared to reappear, Master Grandible had staggered back to tend to the Sturton once more, his racking coughs just audible in the distance, and Neverfell was reluctant to disturb him. To judge from the papers on his desk, however, he was translating all his fears into action. The traps and precautions he had already laid in place were nothing compared to those he now seemed to be preparing. To judge by the scrawled maps on his desk, he was planning a series of heavy doors sub-dividing his district, so that if he found himself under siege he could fall back and fall back, forcing his imagined enemies to break in through door after door.
The door that stood between his tunnels and the rest of Caverna was now covered with new padlocks in addition to the original locks, and as usual there was no sign of the keys. Are those locks to keep enemies out, thought Neverfell, or me in?
She also found a list of new duties with her name at the top, and gawped in alarm as her eye ran down it. Evidently the fortification project was taking all Grandible’s time, so he had passed most of his customary tasks on to her. The scrawled entry ‘Stckftr brush rabbt milk once daily’ was explained when a small crate arrived at the appointed time containing one quivering, wild-eyed rabbit, not best pleased by Neverfell’s inquisitive but innocent decision to shake the box before opening it.
The rabbit’s pale coat was patchy as though it had been pulling out its own fur through nerves or boredom. But when it twitched its buttonhole nostrils at Neverfell she felt a surge of love for it in the way that only the lonely can. To judge by the long scratches its hind claws left on her forearms when she tried to hug it, however, the feeling was not mutual.