The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

4

The shãhanshãh

Clare put out her hand to help Fitz up. He had tripped on one of the brittle, fallen branches that the winds had shaken from the dry trees. It had been a hot summer after a warm, rainless spring, and dead limbs lay strewn over the floor of the wood. Mr Ahmadi, twenty or thirty metres ahead in the fast-gathering dusk, hadn’t broken stride; he seemed to move silently across the dense mat of leaves, sticks, parched moss and yellow grass where the others were struggling – noisily.

‘Are you all right, Jaybird?’

Fitz tried to smile.

‘Hurry.’

Clare’s eyes searched him for a moment, prising at him, but he hardly noticed. As he tumbled forward, the crescent lamp clutched hard in his palm and its strap wound round his fingers, Fitz kept his own eyes on Mr Ahmadi. The gusts blasting through the dense wood – even here – swayed the tall trunks, which seemed to sing in deep moans with the motion, and in fretful, alarming cracks. Ahead, the gusts of wind played tricks with the ruffling cut of Mr Ahmadi’s heavy cape, swirling through it as if, having made the trees their orchestra, they would have Mr Ahmadi for their dancer. The even glide of his hat through the leaning trees Fitz found mesmerizing, and on and on, pace after pace, he followed him as if drawn by a thread, or upon a track.

They called this the Bellman’s Wood. Fitz knew every stump of it. Long after it had become his favourite haunt, long after he had learned to recognize its spring flowers by their January leaves, its secret mosses and lichens in their hundreds, and its occasional, spectacular summer ferns – long after all that, an older girl from the village had told him that it was named for the old undertaker, hundreds of years dead, who still stalked it. She told Fitz she had seen him: a figure with a cape and a tall hat, who floated through the trees searching for dead men to drag off to their graves. Fitz had scoffed and told the girl he didn’t believe a word of it; but he never lingered in the wood, after, in the way that once he had.

Now, following Mr Ahmadi, he wasn’t sure if he believed her or not. After fifteen or twenty minutes of plunging through sometimes thick growth, the air up ahead seemed to lighten, and Mr Ahmadi began to dip out of sight, then disappeared altogether. Fitz knew that they were coming to the edge of the wood, to a gully where the train ran north and east towards London. He had watched it sometimes at the place where it vanished from view, into a long, dark tunnel. He had never seen this tunnel’s other side, and regarded its brick arch with respect and suspicion, as if perhaps it were not only the entrance to a tunnel, but to something stranger, and more permanent.

Clare caught him up, latching on to his shoulder. Ned was just behind her, heaving a little with the difficulty of walking so far, so fast, with so little falling over.

From behind them, very far off, came the sound of sirens.

‘Where is he going?’ Clare asked.

‘To the train, I think,’ said Fitz. ‘There’s a tunnel just up to the right, past that big oak.’

At the edge of the wood a single, massive oak stood sentry on an embankment above the railway line. A little group of yews around it gave off a sticky resin as they pushed through the low boughs.

Mr Ahmadi was standing down the line and just out of earshot, beside the entrance to the tunnel. His face bore no expression at all. Haggard and stubbled, his cheeks would, had they been fuller, have sagged; his eyes looked as remote as the moon, and as baleful, as if they had gazed on a secret so sad that no common sight could ever content them again. But as the three of them broke out on to the embankment, and began to run towards him, his face changed.

‘Come quickly,’ he called, and beckoned to them with animated urgency. ‘The next train is due in less than twenty minutes,’ he said, as they reached him, heaving for breath. ‘We may not have time.’

‘Time for what?’ Ned asked.

Mr Ahmadi looked at him with incomprehension. ‘Time to get through the tunnel.’ And then he turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness.

Fitz didn’t wait for permission, and once in the tunnel, he could hardly have turned back. Violent in the gully outside, the wind was amplified by the constricted space, and it drove him on, fast, as his eyes adjusted to the near darkness. The vault above was punctuated at regular intervals by weak lamps, the light from which seemed to dissipate or hang in the gloom, and hardly reached the single track below. Fitz rushed along the verge where the way was clear, the tough but regular gravel a relief to his feet after the sharp, uneven ground of the wood. Mr Ahmadi, ahead, drifted in and out of visibility like a day-thought glimpsed in a dream, occasional streaking flashes of his white cuffs the only marker of his black figure in a deeper shade.

When Fitz finally caught up, he nearly collided with him. Judging from the distant, pale glow hanging beyond a bend ahead, they hadn’t come halfway. Mr Ahmadi had stopped before a place in the tunnel wall where even in the low light the bricks looked fresher, the mortar whiter. He had an iron stake in his hand, thick and pointed, with which he had begun to batter the bricks. To Fitz’s surprise, they seemed to crumble easily, and in only a few moments he had opened a generous hole.

‘Help me,’ he said.

Together they pulled the bricks from the wall, leaving an opening as broad as a