Watson, Ian - Novel 08 by The Gardens of Delight (v1.1) Page A

overwhelmed him
momentarily—the great sadness of the clown.
                 Tall
thistles surrounded most of the base of the cromlech, forming a barrier
impenetrable to naked flesh. Robins and sparrows cheeped simple-mindedly among
the thistletops. Pulling out tufts of fluff, they fluttered off with this
gossamer bounty to feather their nests elsewhere. Goldfinches as large as
cassowaries thrust their bulk through the spiky thicket, their beaks probing
for prizes more substantial than fluff— without, however, effectively stamping
out paths.
                 As
the travelers approached, a flock of chattering blackbirds streamed out of a
cave in one of the stone legs. The birds swooped around and into the grotto
between the legs, swerving above the one clear route that led through the
thistles as though mapping it out for them: a narrow winding path where
unaccountably no thistles grew. Following this path, the four of them presently
entered the grotto.
                 They
found a phosphorescent pool—and saw, on the other side, a second pathway
snaking out through the thistles beyond, by way of more greensward into a
flower-wood of laburnums trailing crocus-yellow tails, walls of white
magnolias, flame trees, tulip trees. A few monkey-puzzle trees towered above
the rest like eerie watchtowers made of thousands of bent knives, many rusty
but mostly patina- green.
                 Crystal tubes grew down like stalactites from the
roof of the grotto into the greenly glowing pool. Most of these tubes entered
the water at a variety of angles, shallow or acute. Some ended above the water
level or over the stone shore, clean-edged and hollow. Some were thin, some
vast; but all were hollow, even though in some cases the hole inside was large
enough to crawl into while in others there was only the thinnest capillary
bore. Most were single tubes, though some bulged into flasks and funnels, or
branched into one another. Up and down all those that touched or entered the
pool, water was pumping. The whole crystalline ensemble looked like a distorted
church organ made from laboratory equipment, an organ which had sprouted out
of the stone roof as an apparatus for recycling the glowing water of the pool.
                 A
blackbird was flapping inside one of the larger open tubes. The rest of the
flock must already have swept smoothly up the tube and through the roof to
emerge above the stone table-top; but this one was confused. Its wings battered
the glassy walls. Exhausting itself, it crumpled up and slid back down the tube
with a scrabbling of claws and flapping of feathers and fell into the pool. It
burst free in a shower of spray, offended and bedraggled, and flapped away out
of the grotto by the ordinary route.
                 “Hauptwerk,” said Jeremy proudly. “The
Great Organ— the Chief Work. If only you had wings too!”
                 Sean
squinted up the broadest and least sharply inclined of the tubes, which looked
marginally negotiable on all fours. And a face peered down at him from above: a
face with a long, slightly bulbous nose, and a mouth downtumed at the
corners—more meditative than lugubrious, with a widow’s peak of brown hair on
the brow. Sean caught sight of clothes: the neck of a brown tunic.
                 “ Knossos ? Is that you?” he shouted up the speaking
tube. “Hey, wait!”
                 A
magpie ducked into view beside the man’s head. It perched upon his shoulder: a
second, beady, sleek-feathered head. The bird eyed Sean and cawed, but Knossos didn’t say a word—unless the bird was
speaking for him. The man’s face drew back and disappeared.
                 “Damn!”
swore Sean. “Well, he’s up there and he can’t get away.”
                 “He
could come down through the caves,” said Muthoni. “He’s got clothes on, hasn’t
he? The thistles wouldn’t bother