LITMIR.BIZ

       3 The Asklepian

      Who can say just when the warping of the world began? We are never free of miracles, of strange devotions, of cures that seem impossible. Our life is a nursery of wonder.

      In the Caucasus an earthquake splits a mountain in two and reveals a hidden city carved from quartz. Its chairs and doorways are made for giants and the skeletons in the great sarcophagi, torqued and braceleted in gold, are more than seven feet long. An ancient man is discovered in an Appalachian valley, still in breeches and hose and talking, verily, in the speech of his fathers. On the high fells some say it is a lynx they have seen, lolloping through the bracken: some a leopard; others keep their counsel and will not venture beyond the town lights. All over the world sleeping powers begin to stir: old beliefs find willing minds to lodge in. Dabblers in magic are shocked to find their spells taking hold with a new and horrifying potency. Unheard-of diseases spring up, insidious and always deforming. As if in recompense, certain people discover gifts of healing in themselves: the Order of Asklepius is formed. But the Healers are few in number and their powers are not infallible. Even Dominic Fowey would admit as much.

      Sitting in his converted ambulance, Dominic smiled. After the car with its inquisitive driver and lifetime of luggage had disappeared over the hill’s crest up to the moor, he had tried the ignition once again. The engine had cut in with insolent promptness. She’s playing with me, he thought to himself.

      He eased the van back on to the road. Slowly, he chuttered uphill till the gradient flattened out and he saw the island’s one metalled road snaking westward to the Tor. On his right a drystone wall ran for some distance, beyond which he sensed the presence of buildings, farm machinery perhaps. And a distant roaring, not of the sea.

      He had one picture of Sophie, taped to the inside of his sunshield. She was not with Calypso. That would have been dangerous for everyone, a hostage to fortune. He smiled again, this time at himself. How superstitious the last few years had made him! Or just careful, perhaps – hard to know.

      Now the ambulance was on the open moor, thin soil with gorse and heather, and sheep gathered in the shelter of the outcrop rocks that broke like little waves over the copper earth. He had not expected the wind up here, but it came in sudden buffets, knocking his van to the edge of the roadside ditches. Not welcome, he thought. She doesn’t want me here at all. Ah, but she’s too young to understand.

      Glancing in the mirror, he caught a glimpse of a young girl as she moved about the tiny kitchen behind him. A coffee jar was knocked mischievously to the floor and a pair of near-lidless eyes stared back in challenge. The road ahead curved slightly. When he looked again, the girl was gone.

      Her appearance had not fooled Dominic. Calypso would be dreaming now. The apparition in the van behind him had been a projection from her sleeping mind, no more. Probably the girl was just protecting Sophie.

      All the same, these were warnings. He was being told to stay away.

      He passed one of the small farms. They were all the same: the makeshift repairs, a yard in which a dog barked incessantly, the tractor’s harvest of rust. A last half-generation was sticking to the old ways here. Their children were off to the mainland: they couldn’t get out quick enough. Dominic followed this dispiriting road to its end, to the Tor’s foot, and his destination.

      The Manor was different. The blessing of money was obvious in its weed-free walls and wrought-iron gate. Here the roadside ditch became nothing less than a dry moat, suggesting a past still more grandiose. On top of the barn (in which he spotted a brand-new four-by-four) a weathercock shone like burnished gold. A radio mast reared yet higher. This was the home of Gerard Winstanley, philanthropist and sometime tycoon. Dominic, who took little interest in such things, had nevertheless heard of him – even before events brought him to Sweetholm.

      Ten years earlier, Winstanley had quit his very public life in disgust and withdrawn to the island, where he had declared himself reborn. By now the Manor had evolved into a retreat for social misfits, a commune, even a kind of cult – depending on one’s choice of newspaper. Two summers ago, Sal Renshaw had arrived with her son Harper. A year later Sal’s friend Sophie – Dominic’s only sister – had brought her infant daughter there.

      Dominic, with a quarantine authority from the Commander of his Order in his pocket, was wondering whether he would have to take them all away again.

      Sal sat cross-legged on the bed, with the crocheted blanket pulled over her shoulders. The blanket hung down and gathered on the floor in a dark blue pool, in the middle of which Calypso lay half-submerged. Calypso was asleep, or seemed to be. Her eyes were closed, so far as those eyes could ever be said to close. Her chest moved a little with her breathing, but her fingers worked the blanket ceaselessly. Sal watched them sift the wool, stab and pluck and skein it. Sal too was drifting toward slumber.

      Sophie and Calypso. Last summer had made them in love with Sweetholm. How fearless Calypso had been of the bees as they gathered honey! Winstanley had been intrigued by her even then. They lived in a golden cage of memories: the harvest of wild flowers; the mead they brewed in huge glass jars, wafting with heather and thyme; Harper’s wood and weed drift from the beach. Calypso’s fingers, usually clumsy, had yet proved so clever at tweaking out a thread to just the right thickness, then letting the spindle weight twist down. Although she could not hold the needles properly, she loved the Jacobs’ wool, losing her hand in the thickness of the new fleece.

      At that time she

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