Balin and Columbine (A Children of the May Novella - Book 1.5b)

Chapter Twelve: The Procession

‘Right, so it goes like this,’ said Garnish when they had eaten hot chunks of boar, crispy on the skin, steaming within, and drank half of the wine he had brought along in a waterskin. He belched. ‘There’s the Lord Jesus, right; you’re both familiar with him, yes?’

‘Aye, we have him in the north,’ said Balin.

‘Well he’s everywhere actually, or so the Christians say.’

Balin’s eyes flickered to Columbine for the first time since their second kiss. He could see she was thinking exactly the same thing he was. It had been a mistake to tell Garnish he was clever; the compliment had gone to his head as quickly as the glugs of wine.

‘Just tell the story, Garnish,’ Columbine said. ‘We’ll ask if we have any questions.’

Garnish groaned like a sour librarian at a reader getting in the way of his day. He set himself. ‘So, Castle Spar-Longius is an amazing place to look at. It doesn’t obey any of the normal rules of architecture. It looks like something a child would make with wooden blocks. Its towers are built like shallow staircases, barely resting on the stones below them. They branch away from each other at severe angles; they seem to lack strong foundations. The whole thing slowly revolves so that King Pellam’s apartments face the sun, but there’s no obvious machinery. And they say that’s because there’s a secret at the heart of the castle, right in its foundation stone.’

‘Sounds like something to see,’ said Balin

Garnish nodded. ‘I got a bit lost when I was on the road to Camelot, and went past it. It’s an impossible place; it tricks the eye from some angles, parts of it seem to float independently from the rest. But there’s actually no trick to it.’

‘Magic?’ said Columbine.

‘Weeeeell, I don’t know if you’d call it magic, exactly. Do Christians believe in magic?’

‘We see magic,’ said Balin. ‘But we don’t practise it.’

‘So we’ll call it another miracle, shall we?’ said Garnish.

‘If we’re going to do that, we should call what the Lady of the Slates did for Balin a spell,’ said Columbine. ‘Best to be precise in the words we use.’

Garnish looked thoroughly displeased by this correction. ‘Fair point,’ he said coldly, his eyes brimming yet again, though this time with frustration at the interruptions he himself had invited. ‘Right: to the secret at the heart of the castle. They say Spar-Longius has been there for four or five hundred years in its various shapes. It’s out of living memory of course, but local folklore has it that it was first built in a single night by a man with one arm. He arrived from the sea and climbed to the top of the rock on which Spar-Longius stands. He carried a golden staff in his one hand, and when he drove that staff into the ground a small hermitage formed around him. Stones cut themselves from the mountain and just floated into place, forming a completely solid building.

‘The Romans were still in Britain at that time, and after the one-armed builder died, the Governor of Britain came to visit the rock. The hermitage had collapsed when the hermit died, but the golden staff was still stuck in the ground. When this Roman reached out to touch it, the greatest villa in all of Britain formed around him, just as the hermitage had formed around the one-armed hermit.

‘And so it went on. The locals say that the parts of Spar-Longius shift around whenever a new master takes control of the place, as if the castle is changing to reflect the character of its new owner. Now that King Pellam owns it the place looks like a trident – because of all his victories at sea  – but they say that under its previous owner it was in the shape of an inverted cross. The secret of all this is the golden staff that the one-armed hermit drove into the foundation stone. It wasn’t a staff at all, you see: it was a spear. You can’t see the tip, because that’s the part the hermit drove into the ground. But that tip is metal, sharp and stained with the blood of the Son of God, the lord whatdoyoucallhimagain.’