An Introduction to The Whistle Carver

Chapter Of Inklings

Time took a minute. It was to be the most dangerous breather set down.

(i)

(What would I do with such freedom?)

Here, it was pellucid; the day. One that smelt of snow and set about talking the leaves off o' the trees.
This in itself was a confusion to most creatures. These creatures, most, were tussling with concepts beyond their usual problems. What season was it, exactly? (Truthfully, what season was it? they called, she called).
Summer had passed, without question. Summernights were no more. Colder times must have been approaching; an unknown to the people. The quails had started to launch themselves south for the winter. Very few ever made it, becoming lost over the Sahara. Mountains of sand, dunes of delicate birdbone.
Bright, then, and a day clear enough in which to learn. Brighter skies shone only brightness upon earthed knowledge.
Here, there would be learning, inchoate and budding, a stem to be pulled painfully from the ground. Some plants were loathe to grow. This was the same all over the world, tho' in other parts of the world, mentoring was at a minimum. There were whole races of people who had stoppered their ears up. Bavin March, a man who had worked his whole, drudging life scrubbing the decks of boats ready for the grinder, was ignoring three sisters, who at that moment stood quayside with their mouths open and words mysterious. Stood in a wood alone, bereft of company that could speak, a man with differing eyes chose to listen to the birds and nothing else. Somewhere, an Empress told a joke, oblivious that her court-clown was making a decision, of the ilk that would prove fatal.
Here, jokes were in thin supply. Regardless, decisions had been made.
Father-of-the house (... father ...) was in an unearthing sort of mood.
Magnus was the Whistle Carver of the village that lay north-of-Here and he had decided to teach his daughter how to carve a whistle. The inkling had been seeded years back, with some strained foresight on the Carver's part. Those had been the days of skin yet to crease, when the Sun had brandished a temper fierier than she does now, when she'd held more fire to burn. A biding had begun, until the moment in which to act had been sought.
That bright, sharp, clear moment had come, even if the season hadn't.
The Carver saw a life for his daughter, of craft and commerce. The world saw through a very different pair of eyes. This was a daughter whose time would come, just as time would come for her.

(ii)

Magnus didn’t carve whistles strictly in the village, for that was a vague, disorganised collective. He was a haughtily removed man, as his forebears had been. Enough to distinguish social class but not so much that hostility was aroused. To an untrained, unclassified eye, it may only have been a smidgeon above and apart, but it was all the difference. The Carver and his daughter lived in a building referred to as the Chapel. It wasn't the highest point of the Region, but it was a lofty settlement, one that visitors saw and that saw visitors (few). It had long been suspected that there were others living beyond the Higher Ground, surviving mountainous winters and chilly summers. No-one looked up that far, though; it was a key to unlock fears that slept. The Chapel became the resting spot for gazes wishing to remain within safe boundaries. There was no higher, no life being lived further beyond, the gazes spoke. The Carver household felt justified in snubbing its ragstone nose up at the end.
As well as carving, Magnus was possessed that skill: how to look down upon those lesser in status and bearing.
Magnus had started learning the trade from his mother on the day he had turned thirteen. It was a skill that passed from woman to man and back again.
Whilst it was true that Iona, his beloved, taciturn daughter, had already aged well past seventeen, Magnus felt no panic at the delay. Iona had never been a fast learner, not that Magnus had been witness to. If pushed by discipline and starved of a good meal she could be surprisingly studious. Iona had a way of concentrating upon tasks in her own inimitable manner. The minutiae, the small parts that led to greater things, hypnotised her. And though she never performed with any alacrity, that performance was always thorough.
Her actions throughout the day reflected this.
After the meagre, rustic meals they shared, she would wash each chipped barbotine plate by wiping a circle clean around its rim. Then a smaller concentric circle inside that. Smaller and smaller still. All the way in, circular movements, towards the little plum tree in the middle of each dish, a delicate rendition which had been painted on by Ingrid, the Crockery Embosser who plied her trade in the market-town south-of-Here.
Magnus would watch his daughter, smiling at her measured diligence. The small quivers of worry that nestled between his lips were barely discernible. Regular scouring would wear away those expertly illustrated trees one day. The work of Ingrid would be no more, all thanks to a child's perfectionism.
When Iona wanted to wash her hands, she would draw water up from the outdoor well by turning the handle methodically; it creaked as the foxes did at night, a sound that gnawed at bone. A single rotation at a time. After each rotation Iona would lean over the range of small boulders to gauge how much further the pail had ascended. She would wait, a breath held, and wait; until the water had time to gather itself and still. The bucket ceased its wobble and the water became blackened glass. It was a loud stillness. Iona would turn the winch once more. One more turn of the handle.
Magnus would watch her at this and wonder. What could she be deducing? What held her interest?
She was an easy girl to watch. Hair that demanded its own Greek chorus, never a still shade. Mostly blonde, whitening, it crackled at the edge with an incendiary. A clash in the eyes, eyes that were now black. No chorus would speak of those eyes! To look at them was to look into a deathly future. She pulled anything bold enough to stare down into fearful uncertainty. Her face drew its expressions inward. Her body was as plain as any young girl's gearing up to rough-and-tumble into womanhood. A dark, purple bruise wound its way down from her left ear to her right clavicle; it grew and faded with age. She looked forward to the day it would become indistinct. The rest of her pale skin stayed under-wraps, to be revealed in parts as her story progressed.
Her hands were equally pale, veneered tough. She was a feeler, whether it was feeling the sky (warmed), the future (dull, uncertain), her father's footsteps (dull and deep) or the well's produce (depth, only).
After the silty water of subterranea had been brought to the light-of-day, Iona would stand and turn - always with the breeze, never against it - and carry it into the kitchen, a factotum of a room, acting also as washroom. This was a rare layout in those days and something Magnus was often derided for. He could not act the haughty one, then. The newer dwellings in the growing cities thiside-of-the-Water all had corridors stretched between the kitchen and the washroom. Daily activities were being forced into separation, lives becoming ever-more dissected; partitions irreducible. Still, Here, there were a great many villagers who crammed a whole family into one room, so Magnus had as many admirers as he did toity who sniffed at him.
Placing the pail by the empty doorframe, Iona would move to the basin. Even after the relatively taintless act of drawing water, she'd still scour her hands. Each digit on her left hand would be scrubbed separately before moving onto the next. The right hand always came second, as Iona was a sinister child. Whether she wrote, or held a racquet when playing pelota, or darned frayed stockings: it was always with her left. It collected the dirt and calluses of a hard life more readily. The veneer was that lil' bit tougher.
Magnus had been watching her in the task of needlework on that bright, clean day when the decision had been ratified. The air was like diamonds in his nostrils and the decision felt like a gem from unpolished rock. Seeing how deftly she handled a needle - a titan with an epee - Magnus knew instinctively that it was time for his child to bear the mantle of craftmanship. He was not a poetic man, not even an academic one, but he occasionally ascribed to the sentiments sang by that errant troubadour Yeats. It was a chief courtesy to have her learned. He would bestow his gift on Iona, as a father had the right to do.

On those afternoons when Iona would turn the handle of the well outdoors, it would be the creaking of the rope that drew her attention, the wooden joints struggling against the weight. The twine gritted as it stretched. She admired the effort and the strain upon the fibre. To achieve one's intention, she knew such effort had to be endured. Leaning over the lip of the well, she wondered how far into the earth the water went. The smell was of washed clay. The water, still darker than night even when captured in the pail, held her interest as it sang whilst gathering together, calming itself. Its song was a lap on shores she couldn't see. She longed to visit those depths from where the water originated, a world down there that she could only imagine. Children were told tales of hermits who crawled the caves and ate the blind salamanders. Babes had lullabies sung of soft notes but bloody imagery. Giant worms that could swallow a herd of cattle and the field on which they stood. Tiny poisonous 'pedes that sprang out at night and spat gossip around susceptible towns. The babes listened in awe as their mothers spoke, mothers who hoped sons wouldn't grow up into those mud-covered men who dug for precious materials. Fathers feared that their daughters would become the supper of underground horrors.
Iona could only ponder and try to imagine hermits, worms, 'pedes and whatever else may live under the earth, under the Chapel and under the carpet-sized rhubarb leaves out back. She would dream of brave men who spent months underground, coming out into the day with something more luminous than any sun or moon in their hands. Hellish corners held great prizes. Sometimes, she lay under the overgrown leaves of the rhubarb patch and scraped her nails through the soil, touching for something. Glittering universes lived in the depths where the Chapel's water was drawn from. The depths spoke a beckoning to Iona precisely because they were deathly silent. For the moment.
As quiet as blotches of colour on a map. As hard to hear as another's dreams.
All places Iona desired to know. She craved a new type of silence.
She was done with the stillness of the surroundings in which she lived. Everything was static.
What else would it be, littered with the morbid souvenirs of a disused cemetery?

Magnus often took the air in the graveyard that formed his acreage. He would walk with his nose in the air, his sense of smell as sharp as a ball. He could conjure up olfactory tunes, though they were the imaginings of a senseless man. He looked around at the trees, clouds and rustlings as if he had purchased them. He was a landlord, proud, even if only over sleeping inhabitants.
The house in which he lived with Iona, and carved for a livelihood, was called the Chapel because it had once been a chapel. The light here was never a demanding one; it never asked to reveal anything. It was a bashful entity, made of reluctant waves. It seemed self-conscious of the fact that it was required to illumine objects and their attendant embarrassments. So it was only the corner of a headstone, the pollen-furred anther of a lily, the twisted peak of a molehill. Magnus positively tried to glow in the weak rays, his only moment to shine.
The Chapel had once been a central beacon of security to the villagers of Twotrees. The village was north-of-Here and thus spent most of its time lost from thought. It was generally believed that Here was a border, where history and the now wove together. The village north-of-Here was an outpost and its citizens spent a lifetime fighting befuddlement whilst welcoming the privacy.
The Chapel may have been the highest dwelling (that people knew of) but it stood on the Region's second highest point. Only Two Tree Hill, further north, was marginally more impressive. In the same way a hunchback is impressive when stood next to a dwarfman. Two Tree Hill was, after all, a bastard that had been raised as something between hillock and runt mountain. The general belief amongst the villagers was that if Two Tree Hill had sunk back into the ground before the first settlers had attempted to draw Twotrees together, then their growing hamlet would have been named Chapelmound. Or Church-Hill. Or Mount Prayer. They may only have been villagers, but they kept a healthy sense of possibility.
As it was, the many trees of Two Tree Hill stood over the Chapel, bastions of calm, inspiring a similar restraint in the environs around.
Certainly, the chapel-grounds were quiet, inviolate from mourners. Everything was in prayer; pensive and somewhat suspicious. Not of itself, but containing a suspicion that radiated outward. The birds feared the musteline shadows, the birdhunters feared the Men, the stones feared the years. The present was acutely fearful of the past. This was not a place for life.
Yet here father and daughter lived. Here, people had laid down their packs and picked up their tools. Birds had nested. Rodents had arrived to pout below the nests. All manner of creatures immune to the oppression of realising an end, all settling down amongst a dolorous landscape. Where the amelanchier bloomed in June. Staying in loose clumps, fluttering their white petals, which in bountiful summers were streaked with menstrual red, doll's-dress pink. Where Iona would caress the gray bark, especially that of the elder amelanchier, who were fissured in the skin. Cracked trunks and fruit almost-black, succulent with the wisdom of seasons. The berries of the younger trees were a gorgeous claret in appearance, but tasted like someone spitting in your mouth. Still, both were popular with the squirrels. Once upon a year, so far back the date was black, Iona had even seen a small muntjack nibbling away, not knowing what a care-in-the-world was. It had obviously gotten in through one of the cemetery's twin gates, those husband-and-wife guardians renowned to the villagers and even a few people beyond.
Magnus had spotted the deer too, which ended its life half on the dinner table, half in the workshop.
This was why animals were advised to keep to the obscurity.
Where the trees linked arms for warmth; the cypress, the sugarplums, the caeser-conifers. An orgy of leaf protecting the asphodel that neither Magnus or his daughter had seen. Both had unwittingly smelt them, thinking it was the evaporation of history into the air. This is where the willow grew, an apt place for it to weep, though it was a relatively dry ground.

Iona's first memory of the cemetery was a noise. It was the hush. The overwhelming fear to raise a voice. She couldn't have said how old she was then, when the lack-of-sound became a pressing sensation. Anjela was still alive, so not more than thirteen. There were images from before these times. They were all orphaned sights, no part of a family chain.
Sleeping in a large bed with a grown-up either side, kicking one and receiving a tickle. Kicking the other a receiving a rebuke. There had been a baby in the house, though whether it was of Iona's blood or not she'd never known. Burying a dog under the rhubarb. The feel of the muslin wrappings stayed with Iona, a coarse fabric to spend eternity in. The pet had been given the prosaic name of Joshua. It had all been set-up with delusional intent. Parents, baby, canine.
Magnus had tried to create the idyll.
His work and his failure saw otherwise.

There was a woman lying in the bed painfully; even being supine was an effort, but she could sink no further without letting go entirely. There was still some struggle left within her, though the exertion of it brought forth tears, a shaking rattle of the windpipe, the clawing at the bedsheets. It was a mystery what was consuming her. The look in her eyes was desperate so Iona could only concentrate on smoothing the skin on this lady's stomach, or wiping sweat off of the multiple places it gushed from. The smell of the room was the same as the unseen asphodels outside.

As the years, the sights and recollections retreated from Iona, so did Magnus. He could be sensed in the Chapel, carving away. He materialised for their timetabled repasts, barely hanging around to offer up any gratitude. Never wishing to deny Iona any of her usual distaff. He was simply another ghost amongst a congregation.
Magnus liked to think he often took the air around these parts. Habit showed different, as he was a man happiest inside.
It was Iona who wandered their gardens, if they could be so-called, and the miles beyond, known collectively as the Higher Ground. Whole afternoons were spent trekking up to Two Tree Hill, to sit and rub her ankle-blisters until the pain subsided. Ice had lain over this ground, not a few ages back.
She had yet to risk an afternoon further afield, to the Upper Highland-Uppers. They were beyond-the-Region. That was where the arbor-vitae grew; the hemlocks and spruce and firs. There the summers were snow-bound. Hearts stopped in the winter. These Highland-Uppers seemed to Iona to be grander even than Two Tree Hill, but perspective was a difficult thing to get from any standing-point around Here.
A lack of adventurous spirit within the community was partly to blame. The Region was considered enough for any one man and Iona knew of some villagers who considered a trek to the market-town the event of a lifetime. This meant that it was unusual for one to look to the horizon or the skies. Down to one's footing was the norm. It was an original mind that arched the neck. Locals would advise that the scree on the Region's slopes was challenge enough. Quite how the trees held their roots sturdily was no little mystery to Iona. Wandering outside of the cemetery's woods, the dearth of interred bodies caused an equal loss in verdancy. Pebble and mauve rock took over swiftly and there was little to keep a boot from slipping. One day the two trees - Where were the first two that had become namesake? - and all others, would surely slide, just as Magnus did on his falsely habitual walks.
At times Iona would have to use her hands on the scree, grabbing the dandruff rock and scruffy grasses. All fours employed, she was required to adopt a beastly gait. The Chapel was adamant, the cemetery stuck-in-its-way, but at times the landscape without felt like it was shifting into a new age underfoot. The kidskin soles of Iona's boots would struggle to grip as her lungs sucked in any available air.
Hikes up to Two Tree Hill were not really that necessary. The cemetery itself was over a mile wide in any direction, the Chapel a spectral bull's-eye in the centre. There had been a millennia of citizens dying and killing each other for the graveyard to have stained the Region the way it did. Even though she was well past seventeen, Iona had been given only so much time to read only a fraction of the tombstones that were legible. These themselves were only a fraction of the total graves that leaned in toward the Chapel, singing of lost lives and forgotten promises. Their dirge was the imperceivable clack of stone and wend of ivy.
She would get up early, when the sky was showing the dark lilac dents that would pale into blue a few hours hence. Trees appeared only as calligraphy marks. It was all dark to her. Nature was still asleep. So was Magnus, who over the years woke later and later.
When Iona had been a child, she would be woken up by the sounds of some atonal rendition. For a man who carved whistles, Magnus could barely purse his lips together and blow in tune. Siúil a Rúin, The Rose Of Mooncoin, A Man Of Forever Joy And Sorrow. He massacred them all, despite being able to speak the Old-Tongue. These days, though, the homestead was peaceful in the nascent hours. Her own house, she considered the Chapel a lonely abode and it was a moment of pleasure. The dim of the waking day never caused a shiver.
In the shade, however, it was always cool, even at the height of the flowering months. The unvisited cemetery brought its own chill. Death watching from behind a yew leaf, hiding under the safety of a toadstool.
It took more than that to scare Iona.
In here, was the silence of a world away, a world receding into the dark distance. History set a hand-palm over its mouth and spoke rarely. A single noise was a ruffian's invasion, and terrifying because of its daring. Sometimes one heard a croaking bird, as if a frog had grown wings and hopped up into the branches. A deep, threatening noise, something instrumental in its larynx. A persuasive warning.

Stepping south, one moved down a path away from the Chapel, through the decedent wood and towards those twin gates (renowned remember!). It was wide, wide enough for two tumbrel abreast. The only things that moved up and down this path nowadays, walked on legs. And those things on legs passed a memorial menagerie.
Low to the ground were stoneworked bowls and wide-brimmed chalices that collected fallen seeds and bird cack. There were ewers, with real-life plants growing out of them, making the most of the receptacle conveniently placed. Scrolls were frozen in marbled time, some with an archaic braille on them, as if the dead had also lost their sight. They could read only through their fingertips, scraping over the etchings with worn phalanges.
An audience of obelisks stood either side of the descending path, competing with the larch and sparkleberry in stature. Most of them, especially close to the Chapel, were still standing, most from a time before Iona's family had even thought about settling here.
The Chapel and the obelisks took on the fable of the chicken and its eggs. Which had been put up first?
It was hard to equate the beginnings of one with the other. History was mostly an oral tradition in these parts and stories were saved for special occasions. There were books, largely thought to be penned by opiumolics, those who lived on a diet of coquelicot and connivance. They wrote stories and gave them no anchor. Read only by the curious and bored, who spoke rarely of them. That gave them a lot of time to be forgotten. The nearest library wasn't to be found until one reached the city to the east-of-Here. No-one in the village knew what was written in There about Here.
There were clues within the Chapel-ground, given out freely. Atop those needling monuments were crosses; of Peter, of Calvary, from Loraigne. Christian and coptic iconography in the multitude. And figures, figures from every walk of life and death. A gray Knights Templar was a particularly proud individual, chest out, sword hanging down in its limp grip. No more fight left: and who could tussle with Death himself? The weapon touching the point at which the Templar stood had been carved as a flame, now extinguished at its tip by creeping moss. The face was weather-worn, but Iona empathised with a defiance in what was left of the visage. There was a smile of sepulchral amusement. It could have been a man or a woman and naturally Iona leaned towards thinking it was the latter. This was a face, half a face, that Iona had known since she was a little girl. She saw it as she fell asleep, sometimes. An original adventuress. Wearing her erosion injuries with high self-esteem.
The monuments played hide-and-seek amongst the trees. On discovering them, Iona would sit upon the lower ones, lean against the larger importunately. The families were no longer around to grumble. Flowers were no longer laid, only sprouting from underneath. Like the Templar, similar casualties could be seen elsewhere. A monkish figurine with its cloak coming down from the poll and covering it almost completely. Iona remembered, she knew, that it looked like a Musselman she'd once been told of, peoples of the mid-East who hid behind sheet-and-shawl. Across the path, an angel in flowing nightgown, one wing clipped at the shoulderblade.
There was a nephew of this single-winged angel nearby, even worse off. Headless, arms stretched out but cut off at the elbow. The rest of the limbs long since taken away or buried by sod. It had a cherub's body and the grave below must have housed a young male. This boy, only partly protected by a disabled statue, had at least been old enough to have been given a name. Scellon Eldew. The surname rang a soft, tiny bell. The first name was unheard of to Iona. In fact she wasn't even sure how to pronounce it. She always meant to ask somebody older and wiser about it (so not her father), but the minute Scellon Eldew and his crippled angel were left behind, she forgot about them. No wonder posterity was for the few. The masses came to spend their eternities here; mourning. Noon and night. The world was growing beyond, whilst their immortality shrank fast within. Rent with root.
When the day peaked, even at full stretch, it did little to take away the sense of the crowd within. A legion of epitaphs, their names were many. Not families, or scions, but a whole empire of the dead buried around the Chapel and down the slopes. They rippled out in circles of rest-in-peace. They made Iona think of the barbotine plates her and Magnus ate off. The Chapel was like that little painted plum-tree in the middle. Colourful life in amongst greying, eaten-up remnants. If she could clean a plate, could she clean a cemetery? To dig up the scraps. If only to find out their stories and converse with these forgotten souls.
That was death. To be relinquished to history without a marker, a tag to say: I lived, I loved. I fought a stigma, I discovered a theorem. I washed clean a devil, I simulated a fire.
Throughout the cemetery, Iona knew none of these families. There were days, once breakfast had been consumed, that Magnus would carve right through 'til the night did the same to the day. The daughter would roam, picking a new path, trampling down a new patch. Names came from out of the dirt. She didn't know if any of their members had cleansed a demon or fought with many-headed theorems or kissed goodbye to a long-held stigma. None of the encrusted names had descendants she could eavesdrop onto in a crowd on market day, in the market-town south-of-Here. She stroked the lead letterings and only then felt a pulse in the name.
The Thomases, Kerseys, Dales. A couple and their child called Cantis. There lay a gentlewoman of nearby extraction: Eli__to__na Seakins-Fitter, a name that could have been indicative of a trade. She had passed within the veil in the year 1__7; the date as eroded as her first name. Whoever she was (and with a shiver Iona realised she could spell out her own name from within this lady's) she had passed within a veil and that didn't sound too painful a curtaincall.
These dynasties had long given up the race to be remembered, having run out of the enthusiasm to carve out another generation.
Names -
Decorated with browning leaves and bones of mice.
Maria Ann Proom. She had been '...of the Limes'.
Iona knew, from those earlier days of schooling, that the Limes were the fortified borders raised by the Roman Empire. They had been elasticised across the mainland; but out Here? Over-the-Water, within-the-Region, in the vicinity of Old Cross Cullis? Had the legionnaires fought hard and bloody and loose even here? Had Maria Ann been a hopeless defender of her turf, fighting with whatever she could lay her hands on? A sickle, a skillet, her babe's rattle?
These figures dug their way up and out of the cemetery's maquis and into her dreams. Dreams that were always recalled with cloudless clarity.
Her dreams always began in the woods. Always with her, wandering without a sense of urgency. Her face would feel tight, though neither wind nor anxiety blew through her. Her costume was never recognisable. It was different each time and, as ever, each time she remembered it. She simply had nothing to compare it to. Her actions started off trivial. The water was brought up from the well. One of the plates, so carefully painted by Ingrid the Crockery Embosser, was smashed against a tombstone made of velvet. A muntjack walked into the kitchen and sniffed at the air and Iona would stand there, smiling at it.
Then, as the night hurried the dream along, an infiltration began. The outside world attempted to join. It was a futile attempt, as so little of the outside world was really known to Iona. Whatever lay beyond the market-town to the south-of-Here only reached her ears as diluted tittle-tattle. Magnus would add his own prejudiced angle to this hearsay, so by the time the occurrences of the wider world were imparted, Iona had to guess what was real, what was false. What was happening now, what had gone before.
Present or past, the villagers nattered eagerly about it all when they came to visit Magnus, either to wag chin or order an instrument; neither very often. Word took a long time to reach Here, hazily, so when an old queen died or a new prince was born, it was wise to take the news with a pinch of sal. These outside tales may not have been steeped in veracity, but Iona couldn't prevent them from taking part in the events of her sleeptime.
She dreamed of Lud, humming away over-the-Water.
A Lud that was straining under the bloody effort of religious disagreement. Catholiks and Oranges were fighting in the churches, pitchforking at each other's viscera. A Pope had sent battalions in to help, but the Anglian king had laughed them off. Lud's four immense gates had proved too resilient. It was told that each gate had a Queen Consort as a commander, and that these wily women were seen as rallying figures of encouragement. In her dreams, Iona took one of these Consorts down and replaced her with Maria Ann Proom. Waving the Anglian flag incitingly, shouting abuse at the Vatican troops which turned the air blue and their cheeks red. She threw babes' rattles covered in hot tar and murderous thorns.
This was not a nightmare for Iona.
Lud became the market-town, Westminster became the Chapel. The Chapel regained its pure white brilliance and was swamped in a blanket of snow. Her dreams had moved to the New World, to the Columbian States of the Americas. Lud was now Fort Vancouver, a city of timber and glass, a younger brother to Lud. The type that incited envy. The American continent was facing off against a combined Scandinavian Federation, but the citizens of these United Lands had larger worries. Their Presidential Minister Jimmy A Garfield was fighting for his life. A bullet had been popped into his gut at lightning speed and was now spending each day hiding behind a different major organ. Jimmy was hiding himself in Glen Brae House, a non-descript suburban fortress. No amount of great minds - Bell, Edison, Lady White Linka, the rakish stranger Il Salaino - could find it.
Iona found herself leaning over his sleeping body, prodding at his abdomen with the fingers of her left hand. She started employing more and more graphic tools, many from her father's workshop. A boy named Scellon Eldew handed them to her, an assistant with no face but a remarkably servile demeanour and the smell of lichen.
Jimmy always died in her dreams. Scellon left her. The lichen became overpowering and suddenly covered an Olympian wall. Knocking on it impatiently was ?gedei Khan, son of Chingis, son of Kublai. This child of barbarity had nearly given up getting into the City-State of Hēunggóng. Iona was watching him from atop the wall. His army was not made of men and mustangs, rather row after row of headless angels and seraphim with clipped wings.
When she turned her head, the mossy damp smell disappeared. Blossom and plum wafted over her, but so sweet she had to close her eyes lest they become gummed up with particles of sugar. Hēunggóng vanished along with the persistent Khan and it was the neighbouring Empire of Angkor that she could see. Golden rooftops winked in the daylight, like huge coins scattered over a thick, treacherous lawn. In these sleeping images, she could see gold.
Iona had heard her father's paranoid ravings. She knew about Angkor. Magnus would talk with as much animation as he could muster. Angkor was swelling, to never-before-seen proportions. It had consumed south Asia like some biblical plague, chomping through anything alive to leave bare stalks and desperate harvests. India had fallen. As too had the archipelagos to the south. The rulers of Angkor had mastered the waves in simple boats, the kind that would have embarrassed any proud navy but which were doing the job for Angkor just fine. There was no telling how far away the empire was, how close it had gotten. How long before it reached Here?
In Iona's dreams, it had arrived, appearing silently.
The kingdom was deserted. It spanned for miles, but only history lived there now. The Chapel was its centre. Even the dead had moved out and Angkor - huge, infinite Angkor - had only Iona's hopes and fantasies to house.
These were the snippets her dreams were caught up in. Standing on the wall where Khan knocked, or in Hēunggóng, or atop a Luddite gate. Iona would pat her body to see what she had brought with her. A small pail of water was always hanging from her belt. She would scoop some water out, splashing her face. There was a part of her trying to wake the other up.
That was the greatest terror; waking brusquely to these dreams. One of the few times she could admit to being afraid, to be nearly afraid. She slept in a dark part of the Chapel with only slivers of light touching her. It was a needling touch. Frequently she had a few seconds where she felt like she was waking up in a crypt. Her room had been built up around her whilst she lay. Nobody would come and lay a dusty wreath around this vault. She imagined the outside of this structure easily, as there were vaults hulking around her real world.

Vaults -
A little north, the first thing behind the Chapel, almost at an equal level to it, were vaults. Peppered heavily on the ground. Like many of the tombstones she uncovered with a left palm, they also came from times that Iona had trouble imagining. They congregated on the small plateau in which the Chapel held court. The top of Two Tree Hill was just visible to the North. With the Chapel behind her, Iona could face the hybrid valley between (half cemetery, half pebbled scree). It was a mouth in the act of eating. Dry at the top, full of leaf at the bottom half near to her feet. That's how she remembered it, too.
Most of the vaults were sealed tight by tendril and time. One or two were relatively untouched, as if toxic and too horrific to approach.
There was a redbrick villa, just the right size for a faerie or undernourished child to call a mansion. It had no obvious gap in its black, metal gates. The horizontal bars had fused into each other. Which meant the dusty rock shelves inside were a mystery, being empty. They held nothing but the grime of ages and the splayed footprints of investigating scuttlers. The tracks all led into the depths of the vault, but never returned.
It took a lot to scare Iona. A sudden awakening to her heaving room was one. These tracks were another. They had been there since she was young. Across her memory, they trod. Tracks that had entered and kept on going. Walking around to the back, the younger Iona had never found a corresponding exit. It frightened her that small, non-thinking animals had found an escape route. She had, as yet, not. It frightened her that the other possibility might be true. That they had been absorbed into the dust and shade and become a very part of that heavy shelving.
Also around the back was a stone mural, and here there were more names. In amongst a tableau of warriors, wheels and alto-relief escapades. Spears poked out, where a passing lumberer hadn't broken them off. Flags were held in a rocky breeze. The breeze caressed a roll-call of names, though one was grander and more-alto than the others.
Harrison Chillingworth.
'A man of St John's Chateau (now, where was that?), born in Leadenhall, Midshire. Late Colonel of the Royal Lud's Militia (meaning he was never on time?). Suddenly departed this life 1__5. Life from the dead is in that word, 'tis immortality.'
Find it hard to agree with that...
Was the figure standing under this information, a central and orotund individual, intended to represent Chillingworth himself?
He had a comic air about him. Laughter at his own lateness, or shame at his lack of staying power.
Above the mural, a high dado of creatures, mostly lions. The standard regal and ostentatious symbol. Man as conqueror. Prowling 'round to the front of the vault, these creatures (gryphons and gilas joining the pride) eventually took to the air as they approached the archway above the black gates (gate, singular, now that it was one entity). Dragons and doves flew back and forth on the arch, an odd coupling, especially as the doves seemed to be doing all the pursuing.
There was another vault which Iona did not loiter near. For a different reason than Chillingworth's redbrick vault. That crypt scared Iona because it should have housed Harrison's bones, yet remained empty. This other, was a bastion. A fortress against the living world. It was uniform it colour, a light ashen. It had been sculpted from marble, primarily, and its gleam in the day made it appear uncomfortably new. Springtime, the bank on which it sat was covered in buttercups. Trying to concentrate on a single one amidst the green always hurt Magnus' eyes.
Iona was perplexed at the lack of an entrance, or a door. There was a metal grill at the base, covered with a repetitive pattern, like some clown's bowtie turned ninety-degrees. Despite this humorous comparison, she never held her face up to the grill. Whatever was in the depository, lay behind there, in the pitch. Iona was happy for it to remain undisturbed.
Either side of the grill, were two small trios of stone steps that led to the plinth on which the house of the mausoleum stood. It had little in the way of decoration, not extravagantly embossed in the way its neighbours were. A single dove had been placed above where a door should be. It was a brother to the ones that were chasing dragons on Chillingworth's mansion. This lone bird was king though. It had an angry countenance - if a mindless pigeon could muster such rage - and its wings were fanned upwards, ready to swat away intruders. A lone relief, in the place of that missing door, was below. An oblong with three figures, it was one of the few parts of the structure which had not weathered well. The figures were experiments gone wrong, the creations of an insane doctor. Despite their decay, parts could be made out: woman, serpent, bat, bird.
Beneath this fresco, were two hands, clasped together in the making of an agreement. Agreed: it would be death. A done deal.
Down each length of the sepulchre were four marmoreal pillars, not much shorter than Iona and about the same width. They were perfectly smooth, and remained cool when stroked. They appeared to have been manufactured only yesterday. Lions and lanterns were the only other adornments. The feline beasts, four of them, crouched on the four corners of the roof. These were the truly fearsome aspect of the vault. The muscles worked-in-stone had the look of life about them. Ready to pounce, just as the eyes looked for prey, even now. They gazed in two directions only, however. A pair to the east of the vault, and a pair to the west.
The lanterns had also numbered four once, but one had been lost. They had an Ottoman look about them and were shaped with a fiery curve to their bodies, like lamps that housed djinns. The one that had been on the front eastern corner had seemingly been snapped off. The djinn released. A jagged piece of plinth was left behind, a murderous edge on which only unlawful wishes could be granted.
Above the grill, above that conduit to the uncertainty inside, had been a name. This had almost entirely eroded. The bases of letters could be picked out (L? An E, or B?) and the pinnacles of others too (L again, an H?). Tiny holes dotted the surface where parts of a name had fallen off. Iona felt that the absence of this name suggested some family of parvenues lay inside. When alive, they had risen, swiftly and successfully. But now that they had met their end, the eternal host of the graveyard - proud and stuck in their ways - had decided between them, no. You are not good enough to swell our ranks.
Apart from this name, lost and crumbled, and the serpentine womanly figures, and the missing djinn-lamp; the crib stood relatively intact. When it rained, it glistened. When the Sun licked it, it shone, even through the dark pressing of the amelanchier. A determined eye would see, between the grill and the right-flanking steps, a hairline crack, as if whatever was inside had given one last kick before giving up. The done deal.
Could this be a Carver tomb?

Words underneath the absent name offered no help: God Is Love.
God may be love, but evidently not here. Or a love that was being shared around too sparsely.
Just a forgotten family now, a group of melting letters, with just the hint of a story.

(iii)

Night-time can be imagined. Any sounds braving-up and letting-loose immediately lose their place in comprehensible space.
Iona wasn't made to jump or gasp at these detached noises. Rather she enjoyed the challenge of placing them in their rightful location. If the Moon was loud, the challenge was made all that more difficult. She could snap a twig underfoot, smiling at the cliché of it giving her away to the forest. The sudden cracking would come from a few metres in one direction. She would stop, still like the owlets or implings who watched her at these guessing-games. One foot would move slowly, rolling the branch underneath to see if it were broken.
If not, Iona would repeat with the other foot. Rolling it forward, backward, trying to feel if it was one piece, two pieces.
Sometimes, neither experiment gave an answer. So the sound had originated elsewhere.
Shadows moved as she moved into them. Animals and statues and statues of animals held their breath.
The conundrum was pondered over. Iona became a painted figurine of onyx and streaked moonlight. Her hair absorbed the white glare and intensified it. She could hear the cemetery's fellow inhabitants talking about her.
" .... which tree holds the answer ...." said a nearby dryad.
" .... she seems certain it was a tree ...." hinted a cat from Cheshire, smirking. Its teeth glowed just a few inches behind Iona.
" .... stone can be split too ...." added Jean-Jack Proom, who had also lost his life in the Limes.
"Come back to the trunk right this instant!" a panicking Mama Nightjar trilled, giving the nocturnal game away.
There are times when life sounds like a branch snapping in the midnight woods, when in fact it's merely a frightened mother chiding her wayward chicks.
As Iona had no-one to call her back in a voice cracking with worry, she was free to roam, day or night. The night journeys were a rarity, mainly because the number of chores set to her were enough in the day that as the Sun sank, so her head wanted to. Every now and then she conserved herself. A stroll in the cemetery was a stroll wherever she wanted. The world could be anything. It was not merely an auditorium of graves. If she wished it, it was Troy. It was Anuradhapura. It could be Lud, and she could lift the images directly from her dreams and drop them between the derelict vaults. She could walk on the south Strand and watch the theatre-goers on the northbank. Climb to the top of the Monument and see where the demonic fires had crept in from different compass-points to congregate on that point, some of the lanes and churches still smoking nostalgically in wistful recollection. Yes, these were all playful imaginings of a girl looking beyond her living, but no-one took offense. Not defensive Maria Ann, comedic Chillingworth, not Scellon Eldew who was as comfortable here in her waking dreams as he was in her sleeping ones.

Deeper into the woods, headed north, the ground sloped down to meet the scrabbly floor where Two Tree Hill began proper. This was where one of Iona's favourite graves lay, before the greenery ran out. A resting spot. The headstone barely came out of the ground, which itself had sunken in the shape of the coffin underneath. It didn't look like a recent burial, certainly not hidden amongst the undergrowth, and it was a comfortable place to lie down. Iona would lay her head against the soft stone. Very little was distinct on it. Juliette Mothersole, killed in action.
That was why Iona was so at peace here. A woman of doing, losing her life whilst attempting to achieve.
In summer, next to Juliette, there grew an offense of colour off to the left, that would clash with the earth-black and jade-greys. Pink lillies, seedily pungent and artifical in appearance. They looked like

glass, something Mr Laliq would have crafted*.
A family of shadows. Iona's Mother. Juliette Mothersole, Harrison Chillingworth, Maria Ann Proom, Scellon.
Corpses that knew of times transpired.
She didn't want to rest her bones here. She wanted them to be scattered, far and wide. Break her up and turn her into reliquaries. A church in her name, a psalm of her deeds.