Chapter Three
Gadeth eventually got the last of the marler stump out of the bank, very little thanks to barrel-shaped Jule the donkey, who despite all Erry's instruction in the right way of hitting her proved thoroughly intractable. Most of it was pick work, which he hated; in fact, he didn't see any reason why the stump shouldn't just stay there, but if Dad had a bee in his bonnet about it it had to come out. If it destabilised the bank and it all slid onto the vegetable garden the next time it rained, it would just serve him right. It was late afternoon by now; he was sweaty, muddy and starving. He and Serena had missed lunch, travelling, and right now the thought of food was an almost religious experience. He wondered how she was getting on with all the women in the kitchen; he wished he could have stayed with her, but there was no way they would have let him stay. They probably all wanted to have a good look at her and interrogate her a bit. He got the worst of the mud off his face and hands under the pump in the vege garden, then headed into the house to wash up properly in the scullery, leaving his boots on the step with all the others and padding into the hall in his socks. He knew he was really home when he did that.
Serena wasn't in the kitchen; the rest of the women were sitting with their feet up drinking tea and warning children off from trying to sneak a biscuit or a sandwich from the teatowel-covered trays standing ready on every flat surface, to be carried down to the barn for the refreshments table.
'She's in the sitting-room having a little rest away from everyone,' his mother told him. 'She's a nice girl but I don't think she's used to a lot of people - she was looking a bit peaked. No, don't go off - go in there and get cleaned up before you go and see her.'
'She's an awfully nice girl,' Auntie Lil emphasised. 'She's got lovely manners, but she's not at all affected. She dropped a piece of bread butter-side down and said "Oh, poos," and I thought yes, she can get along with us.'
'Proficiency in extremely mild swearing is the first qualification for admission to the Finn family,' said Miria. 'Don't miss the back of your neck, you could grow potatoes on it. Just take your shirt off, you're never going to manage without getting it wet.'
'Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full sir,' said Gadeth, soaping his arms.
'And don't be cheeky to your sister,' they all chorused, and laughed.
He found Serena, sure enough, in the sitting-room, and she was even putting the room to its proper use by sitting. The sitting-room was the only room in the house that the family hardly ever used, mainly because it could only hold about six people at once and that was no good for their purposes. The sitting facilities consisted of a vast horsehair sofa and two matching armchairs, upholstered in butter-coloured chintz. The seats were not so much hard as very dense. The bottom had not yet been found that could put a dent in them - not by merely sitting, anyway, and bouncing would have been unthinkable.
Serena had the big play-book from the mantlepiece open on her lap, and was reading it with a frown of concentration. She didn't notice he had come in until he stepped on the squeaky board next to the fireplace; then she looked up with a little gasp, and positively beamed when she saw it was him. He sat down by her on the sofa, put an arm round her and kissed the side of her neck, just under her ear; it was a favourite place with him and part of their official shorthand for 'I love you.'
'How did you manage? They didn't drive you berserk, did they?'
'No, I don't feel berserk at all. I'm hungry, but it seemed like all the food in the house was going into the stuff for the dance and I didn't quite know how to ask for anything. Your relatives could talk the hind leg off a cat. They're very kind, though.' She looked back at the book on her knees. 'Gadeth, do you know what this book is?'
'Course. That's the play-book. I know where we got it, too, Dad found it in the river paddock, just lying there by itself. There was no-one's name in it and no-one came looking for it, so he just kept it in case, and then in winter when we were all snowed in and going insane from boredom he started reading it and it was all plays and poems. First he read them aloud to us, and I remember he did different voices for the different parts which impressed us all, and then we acted them. We just put on plays for each other until it started raining and the snow melted. I think I was about six. I didn't understand a lot of the fancy language in the plays, but Dad told me what was going on and they had great stories. My favourite was the one where the man gets turned into a donkey.' He leaned over to look at the page she had open. 'Ah, I didn't like that one. Everyone killing each other at the end really upset me - I was expecting a happy ending. I didn't know there were stories with sad endings until that one.'
'These are the plays of William Shakespeare,' Serena said. 'You're talking about A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet.'
'Right. I forgot the titles. It was a long time ago. Have you read them too?'
'Well, yes, but that's what's strange about it. You shouldn't have read them. You shouldn't ever have heard of them. I think I told you the Dragonslayers were given a lot of education, to make them perfect citizens - well, for literary studies they had these plays. Which are not from this world. They were written on the Phantom Moon hundreds of years ago in a country called England. This author, Shakespeare, is supposed to be the best writer the Phantom Moon ever had. Lord Dornkirk brought the books over - it was one of the first things he ever used a fate engine for, matter transportation to bring over the books he thought were important for the people of Zaibach to learn from. We were taught English language and history, because he was English himself so he thought it was important, and I suppose he was also thinking he might one day return to the Moon and give them the benefit of what he'd developed on Gaea. They don't call it the Phantom Moon there, of course, they call it Earth.'
'Why would they want to name their planet after dirt?' Gadeth asked.
'I don't know, they're weird. Look, that's another thing. These plays are in English - old-fashioned English, even in Lord Dornkirk's day. There's no way your father or anyone in your family should have been able to read them.'
'That's a language of the Phantom Moon?' Gadeth said, staring at the page. 'It looks just like ordinary writing to me. It always did. I mean - well, at the top of the page it says Act One Scene One. It's plain as day. And down there you've got Marcellus and the rest of them talking about seeing a ghost.'
'I don't know how you can read it,' Serena said. 'Can you understand me when I talk like this?' she said, in English, as an experiment.
'What did you say?'
'You don't understand spoken English. Somehow you're looking at written English and understanding it as our language. How the hell does that work? I remember you said to me something about 'good night, sweet prince' as a joke - well, that's a line out of Hamlet. I wondered afterwards how you knew it but I kept forgetting to ask you. How did this book even get here?'
'One time I was talking to Hitomi Kanzaki and she told me about something strange she found,' Gadeth said. 'In the Pallas bazaar, a thing called a ceedee. It's a thin silvery disc a bit bigger than the palm of your hand, and I didn't quite understand how she explained it, but I think it's part of a music box. You put different ceedees in the box and it plays different tunes. She showed me the one she had with her and let me have a listen to it - it was amazing, because it didn't just have a tune, it had the sounds of different instruments playing together, and a girl's voice singing. Hitomi said that's a common thing on the Phantom Moon, but I'd never heard of anything like it - and she found that ceedee on a market stall in Pallas. The fellow selling it didn't know what it was - he was advertising it as jewellery. So how did that get here? Would it be the same kind of thing?'
'I suppose it could be,' Serena admitted. 'In Zaibach there were discs for recording sound and other data, but they were gold-coloured, not silver, and bigger than that. Also, they were really new technology - only government agencies had them, they certainly weren't common. The disc she found must have come from somewhere else.'
'I didn't understand the language of the singing from the music box,' Gadeth went on. 'I asked Hitomi what the girl was saying and she seemed really surprised, because she said the girl was singing in the same language she spoke, Nihongo. But I could understand everything Hitomi said and she could understand me, so how does that work?'
'You seem to have spent a lot of time talking to Hitomi,' Serena said, a little stiffly. 'I'm glad you understood each other so well.'
'What do you mean?'
'She did work fast, didn't she? She was just here for a couple of months and she managed to infatuate Allen and Van Fanel, and now it looks like she had you twisted round her little finger as well.' Serena started flipping pages in the play-book, refusing to look at Gadeth.
'You're jealous of me!'
'I am not.'
'You are! You're sitting there wanting to scratch Hitomi's eyes out because you think she was too friendly with me, aren't you?' He caught her hand so she couldn't keep turning pages; she tried to pull it away. He was half-laughing, and although she was trying to suppress it her own lips were twitching.
'I do not want to scratch her eyes out.'
'Oh, come on, admit it.'
'Maybe just one eye.'
'That's my little hellcat.' He kissed her; this was far too much fun. 'Just to reassure you, I thought Hitomi was a very nice girl but no, I was never "infatuated" with her, so put your claws away, okay?'
'Stop teasing me. I don't have claws.'
'Then why do I have four long scratches on my back? I had to hide them from the female rels when I was having a wash just now. I don't want them to know what you do to me.'
'That was your own fault. Damn, this couch is slippery - I'm sliding right down.'
'Easier for me to get on top.'
'Don't be silly we can't do this here, what if someone comes in?'
'You've got a point there, my mother will kill us if we mess up her sofa.'
'Just give me a nice kiss, then.'
There was a sudden smothered giggle from under the sofa, and a fierce shushing. Gadeth just about flew to the far end of the sofa, then leapt to the floor where he crouched on hands and knees and peered fiercely underneath it.
'You and you, I don't know your names yet but get out from there! What do you think you're up to, spying on grown-ups?'
'Just give me a nice kiss, then,' said a child's voice, followed by more giggles.
'Right, that's it,' said Gadeth, reaching under the sofa and hauling out a dusty little boy and girl. He pulled them to their feet and bumped their heads together, not hard enough to really hurt but hard enough to get the message across. 'Now I don't want to catch you doing that again! Let people have some privacy. Bugger off and behave yourselves.'
'Uncle Matty's dog off,' said the little girl, and they ran out of the room laughing their heads off. Gadeth turned back to Serena, very red in the face.
'I'm sorry about that. I didn't think - I mean, I'm not used to lots of children around any more, and I forgot how people live on top of each other in this place - hey, are you all right?'
Serena had gotten the giggles as soon as Gadeth dropped on the floor, and she was almost crying with laughter by now, quite unable to answer a question sensibly.
'You were and they I wa oh God' She trailed off and buried her face in the sofa cushions, shoulders shaking.
'I'm glad you think it was funny! It took ten years off my life!' He was calming down, though, and it was hard not to laugh when she was.
'Live on top of each other,' Serena gasped. 'That was the best part. But oh, dear, it was just so funny! You're such a scary scowly uncle. Like a bear!'
'Hey, you're letting Shakespeare fall on the floor. Is that any way to treat the works of the greatest writer in the world of dirt?' He picked up the book and closed it, weighing it in his hands. 'I just can't believe Dilandau read these.'
'Well, he didn't understand them. Come on, can you imagine what Dilandau would think of Hamlet's problems? His reaction was something like "Why don't you kill them all and burn Elsinore?"' Serena sat up and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. 'Oh, gosh. You've got to have a laugh like that every once in a while.'
'What did he think of the sonnets at the back?'
'Unadulterated crap. Especially the ones about having children.'
'I always liked the one about the summer's day, and the darling buds of May. Whatever May is.'
'It's a month of the year. Late in springtime.'
'I wonder what it does mean?'
'I just told you.'
'No, I mean the book turning up, and us being able to read it.'
'Who knows? We might find out one day. Some things don't really mean anything, they just are.'
Gadeth replaced the book on the mantle, along with the postcard album and the family Tome, which he could see now had extra pages wedged in to accommodate the record of births, deaths and marriages kept in the front and back endpapers. He looked over at Serena, sitting on the indomitable sofa in his old shirt and pants - the mud had, as predicted, dried and been brushed off - and found he had nothing to say. There were times when he only wanted to look at her, and have a quiet gloat about the fact that she seemed to be his.
'What are you smiling about?'
'I just think you look nice here. And in the kitchen - well, it's just nice to see you in these surroundings.'
'It's nice to see you. You look at home here.'
'I am at home. But - sorry, mush coming up - home is where the heart is, right, and since you have my heart, I'm enjoying seeing the two homes together.'
'Sentimental fool.' She loved it when he came up with things like that; they were so corny, but so sweet. She didn't have the same gift for saying such things, and usually tried to make it up in kisses, hoping she could make him feel special in the same way, grateful and joyous and safe. And then there were funny times like now, when they were on opposite sides of the room, and everything happened in their eyes, but she felt as close to him as if he were holding her.
Mrs Finn put her head round the door. 'I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we need extra hands to get the trays over to the barn. Come on.'
'You know, if they give you work it means they like you,' Gadeth told Serena.
Back to Book One Table of Contents