Page 47 of The Salt King

“Two weeks. Before Matthew,” he said, to check, because that was new.

“Yes,” she said carefully. She was trying hard to get her English exactly correct. “I . . . have . . . no. I had . . .” She looked excruciated.

He put his hand out, full of sympathy, and just covered the pencilled notes to say, no, just talk. Hreod was complicated, but English’s endless obsession with time—I go, I went, I will go, I have gone, I will have gone, for Christ’s sake—had kept him up at night when he was young. “I understand. Just talk. Present tense is good. English is horrible.”

She smiled for the first time. “English is a disaster.”

He laughed. He wanted that to be the arrival banner at Heathrow airport.

“Before Matthew,” she agreed. “Two weeks . . . already. Two weeks since?”

“Two weeks ago,” he provided, feeling sympathy pain.

“Ago. Two weeks ago, I go in the mine.” She pointed through the windows to the high gates of the deep mine, the way down to the working pit faces, where the salt light was as bright as the dawn. “There is a tour. The . . .” She did an amazingly good mime of working with a pickaxe. “The mine-people, they take us to see. Is very dark, is very . . .” She widened her eyes and made claws of her hands.

“Scary.”

“Scary. But interesting. We see them work. They work with no lights. Only us, with lights.” She held up an imaginary lantern.

He nodded.

“The guide, he tells us—story. About Saint Hildegard. How she go down also, long . . .” She clicked her fingers and pointed at him. “Ago?”

He fist-bumped her.

“Long ago,” she said, delighted to have got it right. “Long ago, she goes down, down, down, but she is same as me, she has . . . she walks with . . .” She mimed a walking stick and looked at him for the word.

“Cane,” he said, because it was easier to remember than walking stick. “Like Cain and Abel.”

“But if you have cane you are not able.”

He coughed on the sip of coffee he’d just taken. “Stop it. Stop being funny. Tell the story.”

She grinned. “She save an angel in the mine, a sad angel.” Her hands sketched a crown. “She bring him back. Fight to bring him back.” She inclined her head slowly. “For me, this is very magical. After that I think, I will be more like Saint Hildegard. I will do anything.” The smile turned to something subtler, not happiness exactly but a kind of deep affection. “And God hears.”

By the time he had spoken to all nine of the people with cures, bar Annunciata, one pattern was clear. A halo meant a cure or, taking Annunciata into account, that one was on its way.

Apart from that though, there was an enraging absence of any other pattern at all. Most of them had been at An El for a little while before they began to experience improvements, usually at least two weeks . . . but Matthew blasted that to pieces. Matthew had been at An El for only eight days. The brightness of the halo didn’t seem to matter either. Everyone had come from different places. The only other commonality was that they had all felt the presence of God when it happened. It really was as though Heaven had shone its light on a chosen few.

Avelyn sat staring at his notes, surrounded by the happy clatter that was dinner. He wanted to talk to Jericho, not because he thought there would be any answers there, but just to run it by someone kind and sensible and who never asked him to repeat himself. He shouldn’t, though. Jericho had other patients.

15 She was at that moment by the abbey lake, trying to bribe an octopus with a silver teaspoon. There was a small population of An El cephalopods, and because their only natural predators, humans and eels, both saw salt light, they blew clouds of silver ink. They also made themselves dens out of anything silver they could find, usually coins people had thrown in the lake, but they had been known to sneak into the kitchens and steal the cutlery, and if you were in a ground floor room with the window open, you had to be careful about where you left crucifixes and St Christopher medallions, and the highest prize of all, the silver-clad cameras. For a good while, nobody had been able to work out why, in locked rooms, the cameras kept turning up wiggled free of the silver casing, and no silver casing in sight; everyone had thought someone was stealing. It was Jericho who found six of the silver cases in a rock pool, each one housing an octopus doing its best impression of a camera.

19

Ashamed, Avelyn went to the Lodge anyway, though he hesitated outside the door. He could see Jericho through the pointed window, lit up in salt light and firelight. The opinionated snail had acquired its own aquarium, an exciting moss-and-water habitat, and half a cauliflower. It was enthroned on the cauliflower, glowing regally.

“Yes,” said Jericho the second Avelyn came in, as if Avelyn weren’t just expected but late. “Good. Take a picture of the stitches and show it to me before you die of sepsis.”

“I’m pretty certain you assured me I’d be fine?”

“Well, yes, but I can always hope for something medically more interesting than a papercut,” Jericho said.

Avelyn took the silver camera into the bathroom. When he came back with the picture, he had to hold it face down so he couldn’t look at it. Of course it was much better than having to undress in front of Jericho again, but there was a dull, carbon-dioxide hollow in him that couldn’t see past how excruciating it was for a picture like that to exist. It showed the whole scar and the bruising, all the way up to his hip, and the lines of the tattoos he hadn’t burnt off, and for all it was just a medical record, he felt like he was handing over something dirty.

“Ugh,” Jericho said, disgusted. “It’s perfect. Why couldn’t you make an effort and contract some kind of interesting flesh-eating disease? I haven’t amputated anyone’s leg for ages. Do you know how bored I am?”

Then he did something that Avelyn knew, even while it was happening, he was going to remember forever as one of those tiny things that held a universe of grace.