Edie Investigates by Nick Harkaway Page B

of Harold Godwinson and announced the success of the Norman Conquest—but five hundred years before a young bisexual man obsessed with witches and demons acceded to the thrones of England and Scotland and commissioned a bible which (all evidence to the contrary) many still insist is theunaltered word of God—a hunter named Simon Sharrow was struck by a bolt of lightning and rendered unconscious for nine days.
    Three being God’s number, symbolising the Trinity, and nine being three times three and thus a number of enormous holiness—superseded in contemporary Christian numerological significance only by twenty-seven (three times three times three) and nineteen-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty-three (the cube of twenty-seven) and a series of numbers whose nature will already be clear but which at that time escaped the realm of most mortal mathematicians—Simon Sharrow was closely watched and well-tended in his convalescence. It may have helped that he was a youth of striking countenance, and the son of a local landowner whose decision to wed a Norman bride had closed a certain unpleasant chapter in local ethnic politics.
    In whatever case, though Simon Sharrow healed and grew strong again, he did not speak. He made himself understood in signs, and gave every indication of comprehending all that was said to him, and from time to time he drew breath or cleared his throat, and his father and mother and their servants and serfs waited for him to say “Hullo,” or “I need to pee,” or even “What happened?”
    But Simon Sharrow said nothing, and the whispers began: that he was made an idiot or possessed by a devil; that he had died and was a walking corpse and dared not speak lest his soul escape; that the man who returned from the hunt was not Simon Sharrow but an escaped knave from the stocks of Cirencester. The feeling was very strong that Cedric Sharrow must look to his bride for another heir. Cedric Sharrow (who greatly loved his foreign invader wife, and knew too well the chancy business of childbirth) grew frantic to provide a cure. Simon was bled, heated, chilled, exorcised, surrounded by magicians, baptised, touched with holy relics and with talismans more dubious, and even treated by an actual doctor in the modern sense whose reasoned approach was quite enlightened but who alas lacked the necessary diagnostic framework or tools to be of any concrete use. And still Simon Sharrow said nothing, until one morning a stable boy, touched by the sun and fresh with simple, unconsidered pleasure in the fine horse he was brushing and the love of a girl in the local inn, sang a song in a high, confident voice beneath the window where Simon Sharrow gazed silently out upon the world.
    Simon Sharrow opened his mouth (the monks who were with him recorded that he “ope’d” it, in line with monkish grammar) and began a counterpoint. His voice rippled and frisked around the melody, dived deep into a mournful minor, and when the stable boy stopped out of sheer amazement, emerged full-throated and triumphant like a trumpet, a glorious halloo of love over all. There were no words—Simon Sharrow never spoke another actual word in all his life—but that was quite irrelevant. The music was clearer than words ever are, a statement of the moment and the soul, and the monks fell over on their faces to worship the angelic presence among them, and Simon Sharrow was deemed blessed among men. This lightning, heretofore thought a great misfortune, wasnow understood to be the arrival on Earth of a quintessential being, an angel of God. The seraph (which might arguably be a Prince, Potentate, Throne, Dominion, or perhaps a more lowly cherub) rightly concerned at the horrid effect of matter on its sublime personage, had taken shelter within Simon Sharrow, and in a Godly mirror of more dread possessions, made of his body a redoubt against the crass elements of the material world.
    Simon Sharrow was an intelligent man, and the people of his